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The article is a reminder that groups of people make decisions like primates, even the most intellectual people. The criticisms are purely subjective (slashes m

The article is a reminder that groups of people make decisions like primates, even the most intellectual people. The criticisms are purely subjective (slashes mine): - "To some staffers, /it felt as if/ Hughes had sent Vidra to scare them into writing more, buzzier Web items" - "Vidra made his first appearance...It was /just terrifying rhetoric/ about change without any substance to back it up." However the author couldn't come up with any specific examples where Hughes or Vidra are unreasonable people: - Hughes removed "Attack of the Crybabies:" from an article title "Why Hedge Fund Honchos Turned Against Obama” (Hughes was going for /less/ "buzzy"). - Foer wanted to make Amazon’s suspension of advertising public, but Hughes insisted that he not. (Again, Hughes is the one avoiding "buzziness") - Hughes asks questions like, "Has anyone, including this article, said what they did was illegal?" (a reasonable question about objectivity) - “The only compliment [Hughes] or [Vidra] ever said about a piece was that it ‘did well,’ or it ‘travelled well,’ ” Just about the only useful takeaway from this article is: don't try to manage a politically sensitive situation by video conference.

afro88 12y ago
I'm not sure if the question is if they're unreasonable people. I think it's more where they want to take the publication: “vertically integrated digital-media company” and “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter ... about how we use social media.” That's completely at odds with what the publication was, and with the reasons long term staffers worked for it. If I was working for a digital media company and it suddenly wanted to be a print only magazine, I'd look for work at another digital media company. Or, if I'm a die hard low level C++ coder with a deep understanding of the language working at the same company for 20 years, and now suddenly that company wants me to write html templates and javascript glue code for web framework x. > Just about the only useful takeaway from this article is: don't try to manage a politically sensitive situation by video conference. More like don't expect your staff to stick around if you shift your company into something that they hold disdain for, have not much experience in and have no desire to have experience in. A bunch of people leaving at once looks similar to groupthink, but in this case I think it's only correlation, not causation.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> However the author couldn't come up with any specific examples where Hughes or Vidra are unreasonable people I would say the key point of the lines you quote isn't that they were unreasonable people, but that they catastrophically failed to understand the staff -- resulting in them being seen as unreasonable. Though, there's plenty of specific examples -- most of the article, in fact -- of specific events that contributed to this feeling, and specific warnings that Hughes received that should not have made the mass exodus a surprise.

afro88 12y ago

I'm not sure if the question is if they're unreasonable people. I think it's more where they want to take the publication: “vertically integrated digital-media company” and “We also have to do videos. We also have to do interactive graphics. We also have to be increasingly smarter ... about how we use social media.” That's completely at odds with what the publication was, and with the reasons long term staffers worked for it. If I was working for a digital media company and it suddenly wanted to be a print only magazine, I'd look for work at another digital media company. Or, if I'm a die hard low level C++ coder with a deep understanding of the language working at the same company for 20 years, and now suddenly that company wants me to write html templates and javascript glue code for web framework x. > Just about the only useful takeaway from this article is: don't try to manage a politically sensitive situation by video conference. More like don't expect your staff to stick around if you shift your company into something that they hold disdain for, have not much experience in and have no desire to have experience in. A bunch of people leaving at once looks similar to groupthink, but in this case I think it's only correlation, not causation.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> However the author couldn't come up with any specific examples where Hughes or Vidra are unreasonable people I would say the key point of the lines you quote isn't that they were unreasonable people, but that they catastrophically failed to understand the staff -- resulting in them being seen as unreasonable. Though, there's plenty of specific examples -- most of the article, in fact -- of specific events that contributed to this feeling, and specific warnings that Hughes received that should not have made the mass exodus a surprise.