Naked Emperors
I left a job involving New Media in comics this past year. I wasn’t laid off, I chose to leave as the environment of the company got worse under the CEO the parent company had installed late the year before. Though the parent company seemed to have a policy in place of saying they supported New Media efforts and expanding their demographics beyond the 60 year-old plus newspaper reading set, they didn’t really at all. I had spent much of the last year and half there thinking about leaving, but was proud of things we were accomplishing with or without the support of the family that ran the business.
Things that kept me there for so long are summarized here on my resume:
I have been responsible for launching titles including Jeff Smith’s Bone and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the mobile content space.
In my position as Mobile Product Manager, I designed mobile interfaces and marketing web sites, worked with the developers on user experience issues and facilitated the working relationship between license holders and xxxxx.
Then in June of 2008, our company was afflicted by new “leadership.”
The thing that killed this publishing initiative more than anything else was the fact the then-CEO killed the successful mobile platforms that operated on the majority of US handsets at this time. He chose instead to focus solely on the iPhone as a publishing platform. This drove a publishing line that had hundreds of possible handsets as a platform at 2.99-3.99 a month as subscription revenue to one publishing platform where the price point was set at 99 cents for one download.
The then-CEO also laid-off all of the games staff - even though this was the true cash-cow of the entire business. The great and mighty OZ didn’t understand games and clearing away more headcount allow him to hire more senior staff from his last job. The real joke is as he brought in more of these type people the company’s product output has dropped to almost zero as he left no one on staff that could actually produce or release product.
The more I hear in the news about the country being in “turnaround” the less I see in the “lessons learned” column. Here is a guy that came to an existing business and devastated it. In fact this division no longer exists in his wake. Instead of being fired or somehow else held responsible for this - he was allowed to resign and his daughter that he hired directly out of college was allowed to keep her job.
Those of us in the field that are tasked with actually performing are held accountable for our actions and output. What has happened over time is that corporate America has developed into this kinda of Feudal system - where the top of this chain move of job to job with no real accomplishment and pillage as much as possible before being allowed to do it again by what I am coming to think of as the ruling “management class” in this society.
To add insult to injury - this jackass actually tried to add me to his email newsletter and on Facebook. This is the sort of crap we have to deal with in 2009, have a misguided egomaniac destroy your livelihood and then have to pretend to be friends via social networking. Well, I refused. I sent the this guy a Facebook response that some of you have seen and I keep getting requests from many who this “executive” has wronged or has in other ways hurt their careers. So I am now making this an open letter of sorts - an open letter to the naked and foolish “emperor”
“XXXXX,
I find it to be the culture of corporate America that failure and incompetence are not acknowledged. Often they are glossed over in false platitudes and then are later ignored out a sense of keeping a veneer of social pleasantry. Honestly, I would have been very happy never to encounter you again in any form, but as you have attempted to enlist my facebook “friendship” I thought I would take the opportunity to be pretty clear on the utter and complete contempt I have for you as both co-worker and a human being.
I have had the opportunity to work with many talented and driven firms in my career and have never seen arrogant failure on the scope you visited upon xxxxx. You are so utterly self-involved and obsessed that you refused to acknowledge that you knew nothing of the content and entertainment business. Rather than try and learn the business, to take a business a lot of people had worked very hard to bring to profitability, you loaded the deck with ineffectual, overpaid sycophants that knew even less than you about the tasks at hand and lacked any drive or work ethic. You had taken a 10 year-old business that overcame huge adversity and was finding it’s way and single-handedly killed it within a year. If this was your goal, then to be congratulated in the single-minded push which you pursued this goal. If not, I would invite you to revisit the last year and consider the outcome.
This would only earn you the status of being considered incompetent. The contempt I hold for you comes from having to suffer through working under you for six months until I elected to leave. You are a liar, you treat people poorly (this being an understatement) and you have become so enamored of a vision of yourself as a Steve Jobs-type character that I personally witnessed you discard good business decisions because that did not spring from you: The Great and Mighty OZ. You trashed relationships that it took many of us years to build and left xxxxx with a toxic reputation in your wake. You removed professionals that understood the business and had built everything you were just handed and in some cases removed them to replace with your own children, being allowed to do this earned the management at xxxxx similar ire. I also believe you to be guilty of purposeful age discrimination. This based on your pattern of lay-offs, the people hired to fill those roles (an aside: the point of downsizing is to reduce staff and overhead – I am not sure you understand that concept, but thought I would clue you into it as I am wasting enough of my time responding to you), and statements I witnessed you make in the course of having to work with you.
I am writing this to let you know: I don’t want to be your friend on Facebook. I don’t want to be on your self-aggrandizing email newsletter. I am sure given your massive ego you will feel compelled to respond, just know I have no intent of reading your response or any other attempts at contact. I want you to go away.
-Harold”
