As the entire universe apparently now knows, NBC bungled it big time when it came to letting Jay Leno retire and hand the reins of The Tonight Show over to Conan O’Brien. In addition to the obvious lessons we can learn from this disaster, such as “Jay Leno sucks” and “Conan O’Brien is hilarious,” FedLine (aka the Federal Times’ blog) points out some management lessons that we can learn from the mishandling of the whole situation. Let’s hope some TV executives take these tips to heart.
Lesson #1: Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent.
In other words, if your most talented people know they’ll be stuck in their jobs a long time because there’s nowhere for them to go internally, they will leave. And it will be your fault for not providing enough incentives.
Lesson #3: If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already.
One of the most embarrassing parts of the whole late night fiasco was the way that it was handled so publicly and that it took seemingly forever to resolve. That worked out nicely for Conan’s audience, who got to enjoy weeks’ worth of him taking potshots at NBC and putting together hilarious skits about wasting the network’s money, but it only protracted the whole situation. Good for viewers, not so good for NBC.
And while we’re on the subject of the lovely Mr. O’Brien, let’s all take his incredibly classy goodbye speech advice to heart:
I’ve heard a lot of stories of weird, hyper-demanding bosses with very specific rules before. (Hell, I’ve also worked for a boss like that.) But this sweet story from author Joanna Smith Rakoff, while about working for someone with a very specific demand, is also really heartwarming. When Rakoff was starting out as an assistant in the NYC publishing world, she was given a very unusual task: keeping Catcher in the Rye author (and notorious recluse) J.D. Salinger’s home address and phone number a closely guarded secret. You see, she worked for Salinger’s literary agent, and while they had direct contact with the author, people would often call the office under all kinds of pretenses trying to get Salinger’s contact information. Young Joanna was warned never, ever, for ANY reason, to let the information get out. Previous assistants had been fired for not hewing to this rule.
In addition to the boring admin work that is de rigeur for assistants, Joanna also got to have the pretty cool task of answering Salinger’s fan mail. I highly recommend checking out the whole article, which is as much a remembrance of Salinger and a celebration of his work as it is a personal reflection, here. Also, I’m biased, because I worked with Joanna on a coupleof pieces for the website where I used to work and found her to be lovely, smart, and a great writer. I wonder who would answer it if I sent her fan mail.
I really love this “Hitler freaks out about something” video meme that’s been going around YouTube for awhile. The footage, taken from the movie Downfall and starring Bruno Ganz as Der Fuhrer (a role he also played brilliantly in Inglorious Basterds), is in German and different people have added unrelated English subtitles in order to make Hitler mad about everything from the Nintento Wii to the Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno fiasco. In this one, Hitler plays his greatest role yet: a teaching assistant.
Have you ever flipped through a magazine and felt like they were missing your perspective on something? One girl, Ashley Falcon, felt like she and other plus-size women weren’t getting enough advice and support from fashion magazines. Rather than just complain, Ashley got going - she joined Marie Claire magazine as an intern, and soon she was penning her very own column for the publication. How did she make the leap from unpaid intern to full-time writer? One day, Ashley was sharing a cab with a Marie Claire editor. She mentioned that she had to work much harder than her more slender coworkers to find cute, appropriate work attire. The editor thought Ashley made a great point, and before long she was winning a huge following with her honest yet funny takes on plus-size shopping. The column, “Big Girl in a Skinny World,” is a hit.
Her first column addressed the gruelling quest for the perfect pair of jeans. She included three of her favourites that work for up to a size 24. That’s probably the first time those digits have appeared on one of the magazine’s fashion spreads unless it mentioned the model’s age.
The article is surprisingly and admirably frank. Ashley doesn’t just claim to be an expert, she offers her testimonial as an unashamed size 18: “I go through at least a few pairs of jeans every year, routinely wearing holes in the area where my thighs rub together.”
Ashley wrote that “It’s not easy being chic, but it’s an epic struggle when you’re a big girl.”
I’ve heard a lot of stories of weird, hyper-demanding bosses with very specific rules before. (Hell, I’ve also worked for a boss like that.) But this sweet story from author Joanna Smith Rakoff, while about working for someone with a very specific demand, is also really heartwarming. When Rakoff was starting out as an assistant in the NYC publishing world, she was given a very unusual task: keeping Catcher in the Rye author (and notorious recluse) J.D. Salinger’s home address and phone number a closely guarded secret. You see, she worked for Salinger’s literary agent, and while they had direct contact with the author, people would often call the office under all kinds of pretenses trying to get Salinger’s contact information. Young Joanna was warned never, ever, for ANY reason, to let the information get out. Previous assistants had been fired for not hewing to this rule.