Old Style.

I had a call on the weekend from an old partner, current friend. We worked at O together on IBM and over the three or four years we were attached at the hip, we turned out a fair amount of good work, or a good amount of fair work, depending on your mood and current level of cynicism.

S is a Brit, and about a year before I was fired, S transferred back to O in London. He lasted about a year there before they decided to cut him loose. Though S had spent almost 30 years at the place and was one of the essential ingredients of a lot of O's great work, someone who didn't know S, or even what makes O money and what attracted clients to O, looked at an Excel spread sheet.

They said, "Here's where you're trouble is. You're paying S too much money. You can find someone to do the same job for half the price."

So, all at once, S was gone. With about as much severance as a guillotine. (Packages are for holding company executives. Not the people doing the work.)

That happened about 500 times over. 

It happened to me. Probably to you.
It happens thousands of times a day.
It happens so you have no help at the hardware store.
You have to scan your own groceries at the Shop Rite.
You can't find what you're looking for anywhere.
No one picks up a phone.
Words like "please," "thank you," and "can I help you," are as dated and quaint as "23-skidoo."
And no one cares.

The people "running" the agency no longer saw people or talents or odd skills or the ability to add flavor to something dull, they saw this and made their decisions accordingly.

Next month or sooner, they won't even see this. They'll just say, "AI can do it." They change the blade, the axe stays the same.

This sort of management style is rarely blamed for the demise of the modern ad industry. (Or modern amerika.) There's no investigative journalism watching the industry, so there's no one to look at the addition of holding company overhead and how to accommodate that overhead the actual agencies the overhead over-heads must be squozen parasitically.

When Martin Sorrell took home $100,000,000 while he was still at the helm of WPP, no one said, "wait, that's 1000 people making $100,000. That's a lot of copywriters and art directors and planners and account people. What's he doing to be worth all that money?"

When a tick sucks blood we don't ask how he benefits the host. We kill it. In corporatist amerika, we promote it.

They wrote the checks. They piled on bonuses. They made it all in perpetuity. Then they said: "the business model is broken."

Senior Management titles from IPG.
What could these people possibly do for 40 hours/week
to earn their seven-figure grift?

Nobody asks what the C-suite does. How they fill 1875 hours a year. Why they get offices and perks and travel and compensation and black cars and laundry allowances and assistants and more. Nobody asks why there are so many of them. Or if the 20 or so who show up on the leadership pages of holding company websites in reality make more money that the 300 or so people who make up what used to be big agencies and do the work the holding company nominally charges for.

When I was a boy, I worked in a liquor store in a touristy but burly part of Chicago. I worked the night-shift, from 4PM to midnight, and got the job, I suppose because I stood 6'2" in my stocking feet and weighed a solid 210, dripping wet. And I was seldom dripping wet, which made me all the more employable.

At around six most evenings a similarly sized cop in plain clothes would enter the store. He sat in the back at Jalal's desk. Jalal was the manager. The Bragno brother's owned the place, but Jalal made it run. He was a kind and decorous man who could upsell a better wine or vodka or brandy to anyone who came in the joint.

The cop would sit in the back and read the Sun-Times with his feet up on the desk. One of the brothers might gab with him until they walked over to their large apartments over-looking the lake. Lorenzo Jeffries, my best friend at the place and the stock man would sit with the cop and jawbone for an hour, mostly about the Cubs or the ChiSox, or some scandal that inked up the tabloids and came off on your hands.

I sat in the front behind the counter, alongside the cash-register, in front of a thousand miniatures and five-hundred packs of cigarettes. I had a paperback with me, that was allowed, and a buzzer near me to call the fuzz if there was a problem, but there never was. Anyone who was going to be a problem knew there was a cop in the store. At least until about 10:30 when the cop would leave, usually with a case of cold Old Style underneath his arm.

When he left, I was allowed to pull the steel gratings down, at least three-quarters of the way. That was preparatory to closing and warned the whores who plied the Tip-Top Tap across the street that closing time was nigh and it was time to refill whatever their clientele had drained.

I suppose none of this was strictly kosher. 

The cop with his feet up. 

The pay-off.

Even me as cashier--I wasn't even legal drinking age. (I got the job using my brother's social security number. He's two-years older than I.)

But it all worked.

The place ran like a top. The customers got served. I was never robbed. The Bragno's had a nice business--enough so that each brother had a nice Lake Shore Drive apartment.

Of course there was corruption.

There's always corruption.

But there's no corruption like the corruption that manages a people business according to the cells on a spreadsheet. And then blames those very people when the place goes belly-up.