Jazzing up boardroom chats: Insights from a 1960s espionage thriller

SUMMARY: Compressed character development, clever raising of stakes, and tossing in dilemmas might be the key to revving up boardroom conversations.

For authoring business fiction, developing captivating scenes set in boardrooms can be challenging. First, having too many named characters overwhelms readers. Second, characters aren’t expected to make cameo appearances for a single scene, nor are they expected to be bland and purely functional. Third, though boardroom settings have multi-dimensional dynamics and potential subplots, there is often a need to pick a particular character’s limited point of view for the narration. Head-hopping can be jarring for readers.

Above all, and particularly challenging is that, unlike action scenes, car chases, or physical battles, trying to enthrall audiences via verbal jousts on whether to allocate dosh to widget A as opposed to widget B can be a thankless task. Hence, across some books, for the high-stakes denouement, authors resort to credulity-stretching, attention-grabbing devices, including fist fights in the boardroom, or having a main character sprinting through busy city streets to meet the clock. The latter occurred in one of the episodes of the TV series Succession, when a no-confidence vote orchestrated by the main character was in motion.

Relatedly, as an avid fan of the James Bond movies, I’ve read several of Ian Fleming’s novels. The first half of From Russia with Love, one of my favorites of the pack, consists of several chapters with scenes in the boardroom. These chapters are rife with introspection, extensive dialogue among a bunch of apparatchiks in smoke-filled rooms, and the much-maligned information dumps. Yet they were gripping to the utmost. In particular, two chapters, Konspiratsia and Death Warrant, are a study in compressed character development, the clever raising of stakes, the tossing in of dilemmas, and the art of pushing the plot forward at a high pace. The physical absence of the protagonist and the lack of stimulating action in these chapters didn’t matter a jot.

For those writing about boardrooms, there are lessons to be drawn from these early chapters of From Russia with Love.