How to lose friends and alienate employees
A magazine publishing house are making some money, and, according to their founder, quite a lot of money - “the same as Facebook’s”, he says of their net profit margin. His bragging is a problem, for several reasons.
- He isn’t paying the writers enough. In fact, some of them aren’t even paid at all! Isn’t that wonderful. Well, I’m glad that while he’s expanding his little empire of sites, apps and print magazines, it’s arguable that at least some of the people producing the content that’s making the company so rich are not living the life they’d like to lead. Funnily enough, you can’t pay your rent with the odd bit of praise from the big man up top.
- He has no concept of how different Facebook and his business are. Seriously - they’re not even the same kind of business. Facebook is a social networking platform with its fingers in various related pies, and Imagine is pushing journalism and similar media onto apps, print pub, and the web. It’s like comparing a taxi service and a hot dog stand. We can conclude from this that his understanding of basic business concepts, such as identify the industry and sector a business operates within, may be somewhat limited.
- It shows no interest in the issues surrounding his company. If people within journalism but outside your company are publicly addressing your failings in a manner you should be addressing immediately and following up on with a formal statement, yet you cannot muster a response (and frankly, so few tweets and followers for the head of a media empire is ridiculous), you are damaging your reputation, and the reputation of your company.
- He has become an island. By constantly being positive and arrogant about the successes of his business, he is simply alienating those within the company who may have issues with the way it is run, from how much they’re paid, to how he is presenting Imagine as a whole. By repeatedly excluding himself from the PR-unfriendly matter of low-or-no pay for many writers, he is not integrating himself into the network of people slaving under him - something that should be one of his top priorities.
If Facebook is indeed his ideal success story - and I think we can take from his comment about net profit margins that it is - then it might be worth considering that Mark Zuckerberg, aloof though he may appear through the media, sits at a randomly placed desk in the middle of their offices. There’s no wood-panelled office, no “hey, I’m mister corporate” attitude, because for all the profits, it’s arguable that Facebook cares about its staff and he happens to be just that - one of its staff.
If you’ve got profit to invest (and you should be investing it), then put it into the people generating the product you’re pushing. Sir, you look foolish, and it’s making a mockery of your company and its sites, apps and magazines. Not to the readers - but to the industry itself, and when the time comes to replace people who might just end up leaving out of sheer frustration, you won’t have anyone worth the salary left to choose from.
