[This relates to the June 1 entry on Lavon Smith.]
Subsections in this entry:
Various measures by a range of people
An editorial of Cam’s gets parodied by several editors
A few, more sober criticisms of Cam
What allowed Cam to flourish: the general phenomenon of wagon-wheel management
Here is a rundown of different views of, and reactions to, “Cam,” the editorial director in the long blog entry on Lavon Smith. In case you wonder why this special collection of observations is needed—for instance, it may seem surprisingly bilious—it’s for a couple reasons.
First, while Cam seems now to have been in my life many years ago—and indeed, I last worked with her over 20 years ago; and in some narrow, general sense, I hope she is doing well health-wise (she is probably about 65 now); and she left the company in question, All American Crafts, some years ago—the notable feature of such supervisors is how they leave you with unanswered questions of a certain type that adults square with. Chief among them is: “Why is it necessary for a boss to insult underworkers, as if that is a main, if not the main, feature of his or her job description?”
Whenever I’ve encountered versions of this personality since (one that seems to have no real talent other than for insulting people), I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to it. We are all in the office to work. We all have career goals. Not all of our personal goals complement each other 100 percent. But why the stark and profound insults? Why acting as if others’ rights don’t count?
Another dimension here, that could cause unappreciative outsiders to object to the analysis I do here, is that of Cam being a female manager. I would strongly say that my criticisms of Cam, and those of many others who worked with her at AAC, do not reflect sexist attitudes. One reason is that many of her sharpest critics were other women, especially age peers. In general, throughout the media world, women are the toughest critics of other women who in some way seem to go consistently beyond the bounds—in arrogance, some expression of mental illness, or such. The likely reason behind this is that women know they are held to a higher standard in the workplace (and even then may encounter a “glass ceiling”), so when they see one of their own consistently going beyond the pale (and bringing possibly ill repute to their gender), they are quite ready—with a sort of unanimity in being witting to what’s going on—to call them down for it.
Also, when it comes to bullying of younger women in media workplaces, it seems to me it is usually older women (not least a type like Cam) who do this (as we will see a minor example of below). Lastly, AAC was very unusual in my experience in that I was discriminated against as a male, partly because of the huge majority of females being employer there (they comprised 90 percent of the staff). My being in a minority wasn’t a bother to me so much as how crudely and stupidly Cam handled the issue, in ways that this blog entry and the one on Lavon Smith only begin to hint at. Suffice it to say that any company—in whatever industry—that comes close to being weirdly sexist in the way that this company was (I’m referring to the early 1990s) is unambiguously and incontrovertibly a problematic, or sick, company, in a way that, with all else, does no good service to the aims of women in general.
It helps to understand that AAC was not structured in such a way—I emphasize that this was how it was then; I don’t want to imply it is necessarily this way now—as to work toward excellence in its products or to honestly provide opportunity for career growth for its craft-level workers (e.g., editors who put the magazines together). In a fairly obvious sense (when you worked there for some time), and in ways that many there could appreciate (not least its longer-term workers), it was, roughly speaking, more of a tax-write-off affair than a company interested in making magazines that were among the best (or even second-best) in their genre. What evidence for this I can offer, and how exactly I understand this to have operated, I can’t provide here—it would take too long. But suffice it to say that Cam was hired NOT to be aimed to guiding people to product excellence or opportunity for their careers, but to be a sort of higher-level manager that kept the company within the bounds of the partly disingenuous affair it was. As one of the workers there said to me, Cam was hired despite her stupidity because, as the owner seemed to want, a stupid person would be less likely to get away with too much.
If this seems hard to believe or unfair to say, the following—some of which is simply fun—will convey how Cam was (and, as a corollary, how the company was structured).
Various measures by a range of people
1. As I said in the entry on Lavon Smith, an art director had been at AAC in about 1988-89, Bill M., whom I met in 1997 when he was a staffer (and I was a sort of temporary in-house editor) of a travel/lifestyle magazine produced in South Orange, N.J. He was several years older than I, a Jewish baby boomer, and I think he was originally from West Orange, N.J.; and his career route ended up taking him to a stint at Reed Elsevier in New Providence by about 2000. We were obviously quite different in some ways (and our ways of approaching our respective careers were different), but when we found we both had known Cam, it was an amazing piece of common ground that had us talking almost like long-lost soul mates. He was the first person I had found with whom I could trade notes like that, who had worked in association with Cam, but whom I had not actually worked with, since I had left AAC in late 1991.
One or two others in the office of the South Orange magazine company couldn’t believe that Cam could be really the way we suggested, as Bill and I talked animatedly about her. Bill nicknamed Cam “Chameleon” and referred to her as a “snake.” At one point he said “Her husband was a salesman for Topps [the old appliance store],” which I thought was a great way to sum how she was (when, as men sometimes do, they [rather disrespectfully] define a woman’s standing in terms of her husband’s career). If this sounds cynical, consider the following.
2. The company moved into a new office building, a converted barn, in spring/summer 1991. You could presume coworkers there were in a new mood to make use of local amenities, and, so to speak, turn a new leaf as weather warmed, etc. At one point early in our time there, Cam remarked that she was surprised no one else would go to lunch with her (meaning, mainly among the female coworkers). This was not a surprise…to one coworker who, I think, relayed this story to me.
3. Cam was known—I forget whether she conveyed this to me in a self-aware statement, or it was said by someone else—for having trouble in relating to men. In some broad sense, this was true and obvious enough. One specific way it showed was, when I was made full-time in July 1991, after I had been there about 11 months, her advising me that I could not require any of the women there to do typing for me. I was shocked at this. Not only was this NOT my type of attitude, but I had routinely doing my own typing there as part of my job for many months.
4. One item of evidence of her subtlety as a manager involved a young woman, Mary Beth Alnor, whom I mention by name because—though I never knew her well—she had been a student at Vernon Township High School, about three years behind me. I had never had reason to significantly cross paths with her until AAC. She had previously worked for a publication, Sussex County Voice, that abruptly went out of business in about 1989 (and in which I had had a letter to the editor published in 1986). She told me the story how, when the company folded, a big group of employees at Sussex County Voice, maybe everyone except the owner, was suddenly released from their jobs, and pay for the last period (or items) of work never came. So she knew how tenuous jobs at publishers can be. At AAC, where she was Matt Jones’ main assistant on the flagship magazines Craftsworks for the Home for about one and a half years, there was a point when, as she was about to leave for another job, she apparently did something that was cause for Cam to want to put her in her place. I heard Cam say to Matt, after whatever managerial response she had wanted him to make to Mary Beth, “Did she turn red?,” as if this was the main desideratum. I seem to recall Mary Beth looking ashen or shaken or saddened somewhere amid that short period. But she was also re-composed and positive in talking about AAC with some collected distance—with comfortable irony about the place, of course—when I had my first extensive conversation with her, just days before she left. “Did she turn red?”—a good badge of what Cam was about.
An editorial of Cam’s gets parodied by several editors
5. The following is interesting, and funny. When we moved into the barn office building, Cam opted to write an editorial column to run in an issue of all the magazine titles that rhapsodized about our new location—as a sort of promotional tool for the company, you could say. The column was rather goofy, and a version of it was taken and made into a parody of itself. I forget who started this, but it was passed around to many of the editors, who added touches to it. In those days, there was no e-mail or company “Intranet,” so the file was passed around on a floppy disk—in those days, a floppy really was floppy, a disk inside a pouch about five or six inches wide, and somewhat flexible. It was passed around with, I think, a paper printout of the joke column, and eventually it ended up as below. The last hard-copy version ended up in a wastebasket; I saved it, and later typed it, in the 1990s, as part of a long account of my AAC experience. Voila:
Move On Up in New Jersey
After years and month and weeks and days of growing and creating have you finally reached the outer limits of space? Are you ultimately spilling out into hallway areas? Are movable fabric-covered partitions wrapping you into tiny spaces that include files, typewriters and PCs? Are your pathways so narrowed that they trip hastening feet scurrying to meet the never-ending deadlines?
Then move to a colonial-style house in charming downtown Sparta , New Jersey
How about a lofty red barn with white shutters and Dutch colonial slate roof boasting a real silo, accessible halfway up the stairs between the two floors? This octagonal room with a knightly round table would be ideal for a conference center, just right for cozy meetings and brainstorming (or barnstorming!) sessions. Add the appropriate floor and wall covering and presto! your own padded cell. Downstairs on the first floor...is a phony slate hearth fireplace, mantled with a venerable oak timber. Other hefty beams support the walls and ceilings. Renovations include French-paned doors, sidelights, and windows that open!
What more could you ask for? How about two or more acres of woodlands
abounding with wildlife including deer and even deer ticks? In this natural setting, you are beckoned to leisurely summer lunches with the ants, an occasional rap session, or a private conversation between friends. Mosquito concerts nightly.
The rural suburbs of northwest New Jersey
In this setting, like the poison-ivy draped ancient oak trees towering high above a silo in back of your barn, you can spread your roots and rejuvenate your parched being with the all-saving elixir of that golden oasis, Mother Nature! Within 50 miles of New York City , enjoy access to museums, theatres, zoos, etc.! Here you can procreate with abandon and welcome the birth of a new generation--experience pleasure and refreshment in a high-tech, 21st century America New Jersey
A few, more sober criticisms of Cam
6. Cam was criticized—not to her face, of course—even by the company receptionist, Eve, who I believe had previously worked at a law firm in a sort of secretarial role. Whatever her background was, she was astute, not a merely keep-your-head-down secretary. She lamented the “conniving” that went on, essentially with Cam. At another point, she remarked how Cam’s sentences—such as in her typed memos she sometimes circulated—could be ambiguous (in a way that, if you gave your writing some thought, wouldn’t happen).
7. There is also a list of one-liners I wrote about Cam, probably starting in early 1991, that I later collected and put into the 1990s manuscript, as a sort of end note. I won’t reproduce them here, except for two:
There was no system for people fulfilling functions at the company--so there was no problem-solving by management. There was just people shouldering work--and there was management conniving
It was hard to know what [Cam] did—then when she huffed and puffed about her authority's being circumvented, you felt that most of her job was huffing and puffing about her authority being circumvented.
What allowed Cam to flourish: the general phenomenon of wagon-wheel management
8. More fully, I will note below a feature of the management at AAC that I call “wagon-wheel management,” which I’ve seen several times over the years and which AAC offered probably the worst (“best”) example of. It was worst because Cam did her thing at the center of it. This is gleaned from the 1990s manuscript:
The situation at this company could be analyzed … as an unusually virulent example of what I call a "wagon wheel" power structure. [When you compare] all the publishing companies I've worked at, what was peculiar to this company was that there was a huge number of magazine titles, mandating one or two editorial staffers to a title, making for a gaggle of editors who were overseen by one not-fully-competent manager who tended to overreach--Cam . …
The following is how I described the “wagon-wheel” style of management in a document I posted on Google Docs in 2011 (which more generally described the nature of a “trash publisher”):
A “wagon wheel” style of management. One key operative feature of trash publishers may be the most essential—that is, if a publisher doesn’t have this in some form, it may not be a trash publisher. And that is the phenomenon of “wagon wheel management.” I have seen this at work several times. It essentially means that the company favors lines of transmission of power over technical proficiency for the sake of the quality of the product. The metaphor implies that the power structure favored by the management is that all lower-level employees depend on one manager for their instructions, etc., and the lower-level (peer) employees are isolated from each other—they are like spokes radiating from the axle of a wooden wagon wheel. And they have a stiffness [or brittleness, or defensiveness toward peers] about them. If the manager finds that two lower-level workers are operating as an ad hoc team, with some level of spirit or toward an unexpected passing, genuine objective in doing the work, regardless of whether this conduces to the quality of the product, the manager destroys or undercuts the temporary alliance. [boldface added] This can often happen when one of the partner workers makes a (highly unexpected) complaint about the other partner. The manager rather fiercely vitiates the partnership, almost as if jealous of the relationship. Another way to describe this is a “work triangle”—the relationship of the two underling partners with the manager relating to them: obvious or reasonably hypothetical jealousy from the manager causes him or her to destroy the underling partnership, somewhat as in a love triangle.
[paragraph redacted]
A company using the wagon-wheel form of power transmission has a top-down sort of power structure. This structure may not be conspicuous all the time, but when the company is under stress, the structure suddenly may become evident when a manager passionately enforces some “rule” that lower-level workers can’t blah, blah, blah—and the end result is isolating underworkers to the detriment of product quality. (This sort of power structure, incidentally, is seen in totalitarian governments, particular when they are in their movement form or are under stress from social crisis or war.)
