The driving macguffin of The Hudsucker Proxy is the notion that the Hudsucker Board desperately wish to retain control of their company after the company’s namesake and de facto owner dies. People fear change in general, and the Hudsucker board with Senior Vice President Sidney Mussburger find themselves facing serious change on December 1, 1958 as the company they were used to leading suddenly becomes rudderless, open to being purchased by someone who could conceivably would want to introduce serious changes to the company, maybe making the place somewhere one might not want to work, or outright firing its top executives*. It’s tough to imagine a worse work environment than Hudsucker Industries, considering the profoundly unfriendly onboarding Norville encounters as he takes his job in the mail room, but who knows, maybe a future owner of Hudsucker would make the board profoundly unhappy by becoming a company that treats its employees as human beings.