Oh man I remember the story of the JC Penny CEO. We have a CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corp.) podcast here called “Under the Influence” which is hosted by a retired ad guy. It’s fascinating. That CEO did everything I wished all retail would do: cut the crap, charge what you need to, make the prices clear and simple. I don’t want 300 different sales a year with BOGO and save the tax and “usually 14.99 on sale for 9.99 with the purchase of this thing I don’t want”. Just lower the damn prices to the average of what you charge over a year and stop messing around. And make it $10, not $9.99 you aren’t fooling anyone.
And wow. He did all of that. And nearly sunk the company.
I mean, sometimes your ideas are wrong, but usually you don’t get to see how wrong. You just wonder why no one does it your way. I’m glad he learned how wrong I was so I didn’t have to. 😜
It seemed revolutionary at the time. “Take away the carnival and just hand out cheap prizes.” It didn’t work. People wanted the carnival. In our area, a store called Kohls loved that CEO. Their sales dramatically increased.
I managed a shoe store many years ago. (This would have been shortly after the invention of shoes.) The store was one of 52 scattered across the Northeast. Ours was the last stop when the General Manager conducted a chain-wide inspection tour. He finished and declared ours the "number one store in the chain."
Silly me thought, "pay increases."
Reality: he cut my store payroll by 5 hours per week AND increased our business hours by 5 per week.
They never think of money as a reward for a job well done, which has always made me think the reward system of their brain must be askew. They never think of money without a threat.
At the last major corporation I worked for that wasn't retail, about once a month the CEO would call me directly on my desk phone. The first time he did it, I shouted at the phone "Dammit, Gary, quit PRANKING me!" and hung up.
About five minutes later, I got an email from the CEO.
"Dear John, PLEASE pick up the phone next time I call. I'm not pranking you."
The phone rang, and it was Himself. I apologized, he laughed, and then he went on buttering me up with praise. Then he dropped the bomb.
"You know that new software package you proposed and submitted a requisition for? You've done so well with the old software that we've decided not to acquire the new software. In fact, we want you to develop a training package explaining how to use the software package."
He laughed when I told him it would cost him money for me to do that, because I had my plate full doing the job with obsolete software (I was using software developed in 1988 in 2012, FFS). Then he said, "Well, do what you can."
After that, he'd call me once a month, and on his semi-annual visits, he'd take me and my immediate boss out to lunch. My immediate boss, who KNEW I didn't want his job, was very happy about it. And when the CEO retired in 2017, so did I. And we were still using the software developed in 1988.
In the 80's I had a similar phone experience. Our desk phones didn't display the caller number, my phone rang and assuming it was a friend of mine I answered "Yeah!" Short pause, then the local VP said "How did you know it was me?" and proceeded to laugh his ass off. That may have been the first time that anyone in the 200+ person office ever spoke to him like a regular person. Turned out to be a pretty decent guy for an executive, too.
“ultimately fired by the City Council. He recovered quickly, became the CEO of another major library system in the middle of the country, and then he was fired again.”
Failing upward is how CEOs and head coaches keep making bank.
*eyetwitch* I haven't been in a position requiring me to model how perfectly my abusive manager manages me to a district manager/coordinator/whatever in decades, and I am exceedingly happy about that. My hair even stopped falling out!
"I decided that most CEOs have some sort of untreated mental illness. Leadership draws the power hungry, and power hungry is a symptom."
One of the other symptoms is to see everything as a number.
You haven't reduced corporate overhead by 20%, you put 40% of your staff (who were worth hiring at one or another) out of a job.
Your company is not "the heart and soul" of the towns where it operates, you've driven everyone else out of business. And now you're a local monopoly, for both consumers and employment ..
I worked at a Legal Service Office that was attached to a Naval Training Center. The NTC's commander was a one star admiral. I had observed that the Navy treats its senior officers like faded curtains; every couple of years, the Navy swaps out their commanders for newer models. There was some buzz around the new admiral. He was the first African American commander in the base's history, and determined to start a "conspiracy of excellence" among his personnel. I don't know how that philosophy would have played in today's military. Mostly I remember his admonition to young sailors: if you don't know your limit, don't drink. I used to think about that when my depression was bad and I was downing a pint of bourbon in thirty-five minutes.
An aside, for one moment. In boot camp, we spent our time folding our underwear, standing in front of our bunks at attention, and doing pushups. When I first arrived at the office, I was handed stacks of documents and told to file them. I did as my Pavlovian boot camp conditioning mandated and folded every document as if it were my underwear before cramming them into file folders that I had also folded like my underwear. These went into the file cabinet, awaiting the fateful hour when LT. Traut, Judge Advocate General Corps, USN, opened it to retrieve a file for review. If you recall the tired gag of opening a peanut jar and having spring loaded snakes pop out, you know what happened next. Except there was a lot more confetti than I expected, which I never understood. There wasn't anything sharp in there, unless you count the staples I was supposed to remove and didn't. As proper Naval officers do, he started screaming. This triggered another Pavlovian response, and he found me standing at attention in front of my bunk at the barracks half a mile away. The instant I saw the look on his face, I started doing pushups, completing the Holy Trinity of my boot camp conditioning. At that point, he told me to take the rest of the day off while he conferred with the executive officer.
It seems that I was scheduled to be on duty at the front desk the day the new admiral would be visiting the office. I was the first person the new admiral would be interacting with, and that interaction would mold the new admiral's opinion of the Legal Service Office forever. The place was filled with lawyers, so that was two strikes against them right there. Throw me into the mix and they were nervous.
They locked me in the law library and had someone else take my watch. I spent the day reorganizing the books by case number, but in the order they would appear in the Fibonacci sequence. When LT. Traut saw what I had done, he tried to strangle me, giving up in disgust after twenty minutes had passed and I was still alive. Oxygen flows so slowly into my brain damage that I can go a good twelve hours without air. Traut ended up in the same locked ward where I had "relaxed" previously. As for the admiral's visit, the admiral never showed. It seems that when he was reminded that the office was filled with lawyers, he decided to inspect the grease pit at the Recruit Training Command's galley instead.
Even though the setting is retail, the situations and themes here apply to every workplace in every industry there is. I’m so glad I found this and look forward to it every week.
I remember the days when the big cheeses came to visit. We spiffed everything up and when the cheeses walked through then factory all of us were diligently working and then the boss wanted to show off an automatic drilling machine that I was running. The drilling machine needed some maintenance and wasn’t at its best and the boss didn’t know it. The boss asked me to start the machine to show it off to a big cheese and when I did the machine didn’t run smoothly like the boss thought it would. The boss was embarrassed and angry. Luckily I kept my job and the boss didn’t show off the drilling machine anymore.
As a worker for the largest retailer, I feel all of this sooooo hard. I used to work for the HO and was exposed to many many bigwigs, they were all the same ideas in a different suit lol. Im now back at the local retail level and everything here is accurate. Thanks for the great laughs. My store in fact has an inspection at the end of the month amd we are all running around making sure none of the normal things are being overlooked. It makes me laugh, just like your articles. Thanks!
In the second half of the nineties I was working at Microsoft in Ireland, so technically my CEO was Bill Gates. I never met him, but he read my email once and after that he had some questions for my department manager. He won't remember, but I do (now that you bring it up).
For whatever reason we had a picture of Bill Gates’ 1970s mugshot hanging behind our counter. I forget what he was arrested for, but an elderly customer thought it was me. Everyone continues to assure me that we look nothing alike, but I was hoping for a Prince and the Pauper scenario.
During our courtship, my wife once told me that I looked like a cross between Bill Gates and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I wasn't sure how to take this, because both are considerable older than me...
My father worked for the FW Woolworth Co. He began in the 1920s as a stock boy and work for them his entire life, eventually getting a nice office on the top floor of the Woolworth Building in New York. He had a nice view. I remember the fact that he was always getting Christmas cards from people that he had worked with over the years. they loved him. He was fair, he was honest, he was demanding, they loved him for it.
Every one of those scenarios, including the CEO being wrong as to the identity of a member of the local management team, happened at least once during my decades of big financial services employment.
I worked for 37 years at the same place. I could outwork most of our people. I remember a time when we were starting up a new piece of equipment. Boss came in shut my office door and wanted me to help him. Granted I'm not an engineer but I had worked with them for a long time so he got what I knew about the system.
A few years later, a guy who had only been with the company a couple of years decided to make a big change. Well after I found out how he wanted to do something we had done years before that didn't work. I retired!!!😃
I have a ton of bigwig visit stories, my favorite is when I asked one to help me with a customer. We were out of an item and I was going to go online to see if another store had it, or order it. I acted like I was having trouble and asked the corporate "guru" to help me. After a few minutes, he remembered a phone call that he had to make and left. The customer was confused and looked at me. I said don't worry I can figure it out. We ordered the item and as a thank you I upgraded shipping to express next day free of charge. ( my thank you for playing along with me) The higher up you are, the less knowledge you have.
Oh man I remember the story of the JC Penny CEO. We have a CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corp.) podcast here called “Under the Influence” which is hosted by a retired ad guy. It’s fascinating. That CEO did everything I wished all retail would do: cut the crap, charge what you need to, make the prices clear and simple. I don’t want 300 different sales a year with BOGO and save the tax and “usually 14.99 on sale for 9.99 with the purchase of this thing I don’t want”. Just lower the damn prices to the average of what you charge over a year and stop messing around. And make it $10, not $9.99 you aren’t fooling anyone.
And wow. He did all of that. And nearly sunk the company.
I mean, sometimes your ideas are wrong, but usually you don’t get to see how wrong. You just wonder why no one does it your way. I’m glad he learned how wrong I was so I didn’t have to. 😜
It seemed revolutionary at the time. “Take away the carnival and just hand out cheap prizes.” It didn’t work. People wanted the carnival. In our area, a store called Kohls loved that CEO. Their sales dramatically increased.
Now I have to find that podcast.
I managed a shoe store many years ago. (This would have been shortly after the invention of shoes.) The store was one of 52 scattered across the Northeast. Ours was the last stop when the General Manager conducted a chain-wide inspection tour. He finished and declared ours the "number one store in the chain."
Silly me thought, "pay increases."
Reality: he cut my store payroll by 5 hours per week AND increased our business hours by 5 per week.
Not much has changed in the decades since.
They never think of money as a reward for a job well done, which has always made me think the reward system of their brain must be askew. They never think of money without a threat.
I told them at the time that they had a strange incentive system.
"You've done great with what we allotted to you. Now let's see if you can do as much - or even more - with less."
Instead, I gave them my two weeks' notice. They seemed shocked.
So began my "career" in locating and going to work for the absolute worst employers wherever I happened to be.
At the last major corporation I worked for that wasn't retail, about once a month the CEO would call me directly on my desk phone. The first time he did it, I shouted at the phone "Dammit, Gary, quit PRANKING me!" and hung up.
About five minutes later, I got an email from the CEO.
"Dear John, PLEASE pick up the phone next time I call. I'm not pranking you."
The phone rang, and it was Himself. I apologized, he laughed, and then he went on buttering me up with praise. Then he dropped the bomb.
"You know that new software package you proposed and submitted a requisition for? You've done so well with the old software that we've decided not to acquire the new software. In fact, we want you to develop a training package explaining how to use the software package."
He laughed when I told him it would cost him money for me to do that, because I had my plate full doing the job with obsolete software (I was using software developed in 1988 in 2012, FFS). Then he said, "Well, do what you can."
After that, he'd call me once a month, and on his semi-annual visits, he'd take me and my immediate boss out to lunch. My immediate boss, who KNEW I didn't want his job, was very happy about it. And when the CEO retired in 2017, so did I. And we were still using the software developed in 1988.
I was a victim of my own success.
In the 80's I had a similar phone experience. Our desk phones didn't display the caller number, my phone rang and assuming it was a friend of mine I answered "Yeah!" Short pause, then the local VP said "How did you know it was me?" and proceeded to laugh his ass off. That may have been the first time that anyone in the 200+ person office ever spoke to him like a regular person. Turned out to be a pretty decent guy for an executive, too.
The decent ones are out there. Somewhere.
Hilarious!!
“ultimately fired by the City Council. He recovered quickly, became the CEO of another major library system in the middle of the country, and then he was fired again.”
Failing upward is how CEOs and head coaches keep making bank.
*eyetwitch* I haven't been in a position requiring me to model how perfectly my abusive manager manages me to a district manager/coordinator/whatever in decades, and I am exceedingly happy about that. My hair even stopped falling out!
"I decided that most CEOs have some sort of untreated mental illness. Leadership draws the power hungry, and power hungry is a symptom."
One of the other symptoms is to see everything as a number.
You haven't reduced corporate overhead by 20%, you put 40% of your staff (who were worth hiring at one or another) out of a job.
Your company is not "the heart and soul" of the towns where it operates, you've driven everyone else out of business. And now you're a local monopoly, for both consumers and employment ..
I can go on, but you get the picture.
FWIW, my last employment was for a small company, where the CEO did in fact know your name. I'd still be there if it wasnt for cancer.
I always liked smaller companies better, I just wish our health insurance wasn’t tied to our employers.
I worked at a Legal Service Office that was attached to a Naval Training Center. The NTC's commander was a one star admiral. I had observed that the Navy treats its senior officers like faded curtains; every couple of years, the Navy swaps out their commanders for newer models. There was some buzz around the new admiral. He was the first African American commander in the base's history, and determined to start a "conspiracy of excellence" among his personnel. I don't know how that philosophy would have played in today's military. Mostly I remember his admonition to young sailors: if you don't know your limit, don't drink. I used to think about that when my depression was bad and I was downing a pint of bourbon in thirty-five minutes.
An aside, for one moment. In boot camp, we spent our time folding our underwear, standing in front of our bunks at attention, and doing pushups. When I first arrived at the office, I was handed stacks of documents and told to file them. I did as my Pavlovian boot camp conditioning mandated and folded every document as if it were my underwear before cramming them into file folders that I had also folded like my underwear. These went into the file cabinet, awaiting the fateful hour when LT. Traut, Judge Advocate General Corps, USN, opened it to retrieve a file for review. If you recall the tired gag of opening a peanut jar and having spring loaded snakes pop out, you know what happened next. Except there was a lot more confetti than I expected, which I never understood. There wasn't anything sharp in there, unless you count the staples I was supposed to remove and didn't. As proper Naval officers do, he started screaming. This triggered another Pavlovian response, and he found me standing at attention in front of my bunk at the barracks half a mile away. The instant I saw the look on his face, I started doing pushups, completing the Holy Trinity of my boot camp conditioning. At that point, he told me to take the rest of the day off while he conferred with the executive officer.
It seems that I was scheduled to be on duty at the front desk the day the new admiral would be visiting the office. I was the first person the new admiral would be interacting with, and that interaction would mold the new admiral's opinion of the Legal Service Office forever. The place was filled with lawyers, so that was two strikes against them right there. Throw me into the mix and they were nervous.
They locked me in the law library and had someone else take my watch. I spent the day reorganizing the books by case number, but in the order they would appear in the Fibonacci sequence. When LT. Traut saw what I had done, he tried to strangle me, giving up in disgust after twenty minutes had passed and I was still alive. Oxygen flows so slowly into my brain damage that I can go a good twelve hours without air. Traut ended up in the same locked ward where I had "relaxed" previously. As for the admiral's visit, the admiral never showed. It seems that when he was reminded that the office was filled with lawyers, he decided to inspect the grease pit at the Recruit Training Command's galley instead.
Even though the setting is retail, the situations and themes here apply to every workplace in every industry there is. I’m so glad I found this and look forward to it every week.
Thank you, I’m so glad that you do.
I remember the days when the big cheeses came to visit. We spiffed everything up and when the cheeses walked through then factory all of us were diligently working and then the boss wanted to show off an automatic drilling machine that I was running. The drilling machine needed some maintenance and wasn’t at its best and the boss didn’t know it. The boss asked me to start the machine to show it off to a big cheese and when I did the machine didn’t run smoothly like the boss thought it would. The boss was embarrassed and angry. Luckily I kept my job and the boss didn’t show off the drilling machine anymore.
As a worker for the largest retailer, I feel all of this sooooo hard. I used to work for the HO and was exposed to many many bigwigs, they were all the same ideas in a different suit lol. Im now back at the local retail level and everything here is accurate. Thanks for the great laughs. My store in fact has an inspection at the end of the month amd we are all running around making sure none of the normal things are being overlooked. It makes me laugh, just like your articles. Thanks!
Don’t worry, they will find something that needs to be improved.
In the second half of the nineties I was working at Microsoft in Ireland, so technically my CEO was Bill Gates. I never met him, but he read my email once and after that he had some questions for my department manager. He won't remember, but I do (now that you bring it up).
For whatever reason we had a picture of Bill Gates’ 1970s mugshot hanging behind our counter. I forget what he was arrested for, but an elderly customer thought it was me. Everyone continues to assure me that we look nothing alike, but I was hoping for a Prince and the Pauper scenario.
During our courtship, my wife once told me that I looked like a cross between Bill Gates and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I wasn't sure how to take this, because both are considerable older than me...
At least you were compared to successful people.
My father worked for the FW Woolworth Co. He began in the 1920s as a stock boy and work for them his entire life, eventually getting a nice office on the top floor of the Woolworth Building in New York. He had a nice view. I remember the fact that he was always getting Christmas cards from people that he had worked with over the years. they loved him. He was fair, he was honest, he was demanding, they loved him for it.
Everyone I’ve known who remembers Woolworth speaks about it with a magical gleam in their eye. I think we all missed out.
Every one of those scenarios, including the CEO being wrong as to the identity of a member of the local management team, happened at least once during my decades of big financial services employment.
Wonderful as always 😂😂
I worked for 37 years at the same place. I could outwork most of our people. I remember a time when we were starting up a new piece of equipment. Boss came in shut my office door and wanted me to help him. Granted I'm not an engineer but I had worked with them for a long time so he got what I knew about the system.
A few years later, a guy who had only been with the company a couple of years decided to make a big change. Well after I found out how he wanted to do something we had done years before that didn't work. I retired!!!😃
Good call.
I have a ton of bigwig visit stories, my favorite is when I asked one to help me with a customer. We were out of an item and I was going to go online to see if another store had it, or order it. I acted like I was having trouble and asked the corporate "guru" to help me. After a few minutes, he remembered a phone call that he had to make and left. The customer was confused and looked at me. I said don't worry I can figure it out. We ordered the item and as a thank you I upgraded shipping to express next day free of charge. ( my thank you for playing along with me) The higher up you are, the less knowledge you have.
They always get a phone in the middle of actually helping a customer. I don’t know what magic spell they cast to make that happen.