Thankfully I hadn’t mentioned my name on the recording and no one knew whom the voice belonged to.

Then they had a telephonic interview with a partner at House, Wilson and Co., a public relations firm, who said that the voicemail would cause tremendous damage to the public reputation of both Dufresne and Lederman and the person behind the recording would be ‘lucky to escape with just one multi-million dollar defamation law suit’.

Jignesh came over and gave me a hug.

When I switched on my phone I had dozens of missed calls, half of them from Gouri. I called her up knowing that she would scream and whine.

Instead she told me that she knew what had happened. That as soon as she heard the recording on her roommate’s mobile phone caller tune she knew that something terrible had happened to me. (WTF!) She told me that rather than running away from it, which would make me look like a criminal, I should go to office and own up the mistake.

Just as we were done talking Prasad’s driver rang the doorbell and asked me to accompany him to the Dufresne office immediately. I quickly changed and went to office. By now, of course, I was too numb to feel anything.

When I entered the office the mood was very downbeat. All the partners were huddled in the video conference room and Anandakumari was handling all the calls from the press. The phones kept ringing. There were even reporters hanging around outside the office but the security guards kept them from entering. Vineet gave me a thumbs-up as I walked past everyone and into the conference room.

They looked at me silently and Prasad asked me to sit down. Everyone was watching CNBC where the anchors said that the CEO of Lederman would appear on air shortly to discuss the voicemail controversy. I took a deep breath, and prepared for the worst. Of course, in a situation such as this there is really no point in thinking or worrying about the worst. Whatever happened would be a thousand times worse than what I imagined.

Finally the CEO, Thomas B. Pastrami III, came on air and the anchor asked him what he thought of the scandal. Pastrami first admitted that the leak was a breach of privacy and that no self-respecting management consulting firm should let data or opinion leave its premises in this fashion.

But what he said next stunned everyone.

He said that the person behind the voicemail had pinpointed everything that was wrong with Lederman. He admitted that the firm needed a huge kick in the backside to clean up its strategy and this voicemail was just what would make the bank sit up and take notice. Sometimes, he said, companies don’t listen when you tell them nicely. Sometimes you need to call them total idiots. He said that this was exactly what the consultant at Dufresne had done. Now employees at Lederman all over the world knew exactly what was wrong and would join in the process of improving things. He also said that it was not his job to comment on the anti-Dufresne statements in the recording, but he hoped that more companies had such honest young employees. Young men and women who cared so much for their companies that they would put their careers on the line and give direct feedback.