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that are comparable to Buffalo. Day two, you do a first estimate of their valuations. Sunday morning, you’ll refine it. By Sunday noon, you’ll have a first cut of the valuation grid for Buffalo. Sunday afternoon, you refine it again. Sunday night, it’s ready to go.”
    Rob smiled. Yeah, he thought, and I might just solve world poverty and end global warming while I’m at it.
    Sammy stared right back at him. Deadpan.
    “How many comparable companies?” said Rob.
    “I like to have twenty,” replied Sammy.
    Twenty? Rob still wasn’t sure if Sammy was kidding.
    “But this is a little rushed. Ten should do it for the first cut.” Sammy grabbed a piece of paper, flipped it horizontally, and ruled up a chart. Across the top he wrote the headings for a series of columns, saying the titles out loud as he wrote them: “Country, market share, market capitalization, earnings, employees, divisions, assets…” Sammy flipped it across to Rob when he was done. “Get that information, we’ll rank them, pick the ten most comparable.”
    “So I should start with BritEnergy?”
    “Buffalo,” Sammy corrected him. “We use the code names. And yes, you’re right, you should. Buffalo first. You need to know what you’re comparing with. Then go to the major stock indexes here, in Europe and Australasia, look at the electricity sectors, pick the names, and start working through them.” He pushed the ranking chart across the desk to Rob. “Remember what I said yesterday. If you’ve got a question, ask.” He turned to his own computer and began to scan whatever it was that was on his screen. “This isn’t an MBA case study. This is for real.”
    By the time they sent out for pizza that night, Rob had a ranking chart of sorts for a list of companies, with a bunch of gaps. By the time Sammy called a halt at midnight, some of the gaps were filled.
    “You’ve got enough,” said Sammy.
    “But there’s all kinds of—”
    “Eighty-twenty,” said Sammy. “Twenty percent of the effort gets you eighty percent of the way. You’ve heard of that, right?”
    “Eighty-twenty,” said Cynthia mechanically from her desk. She turned around, weary, hollow-eyed. “Around here, you live or die by that.”
    “Let’s look at what you’ve got,” said Sammy to Rob. “Print me out a copy.”
    Sammy took the chart off the printer and glanced at it with an expert eye. “Not bad.” He picked up his pen. “We’ll take this one,” he said, circling the name of a German electricity supplier called ERON. “This one in Britain. This one.” He circled more names. “This one. This one. This one. This one. These. This one. These two.” He paused, surveying the data. “And this one here, in Australia.” He pushed the chart back to Rob.
    Rob counted the circles. Fourteen. That morning, Sammy had said he only wanted ten.
    He looked up. Sammy was watching him. Rob didn’t say anything.
    After he left, he got a cab to Emmy’s apartment.
    He was exhausted. Dead beat. He sprawled in the back of the cab, watching the buildings going by outside. He thought about the names on the ranking chart he had produced. He had been so caught up in the work, he hadn’t had time to think. But suddenly it struck him that it was an incredible amount of information, an incredible amount of stuff he’d learned. A lot of it was a blur, but through the blur were some definite shapes, definite areas of knowledge. He knew about the industry, the whole global industry. And it wasn’t just the information he’d gathered, but how he’d done it, how he’d managed to get coverage of the industry so quickly. The sheer pace of it was the biggest learning experience of all. Only now, comparing what he knew when he walked into the war room that morning with what he knew when he walked out, did he understand how much he had actually covered in a single day. If someone had asked him before he started, he probably would have said it would take a week.
    He smiled.