From Julian Simpson’s email newsletter

Writing Julian Simpson has a great email newsletter called INFODUMP. This bit of text was in the most recent edition of that.

The more you watch Hollywood, the more it seems like they spend a lot of their time re-enacting scenes from The Godfather to make themselves feel cool. There’s a story from a few years back of one of the major agencies, which was moving offices. They told the staff to go over to the new place and check it out; there would be a floor-plan laid out in the lobby showing everyone where their new desks/offices would be. A whole chunk of the agency dutifully wandered over to see where they would be sitting, only to find their names absent from the new plan. When they went back across the road to the old place, they found their belongings in the lobby and security ready to escort them out of the building. They had been fired without warning and this is how the news was broken to them. This story is told like it’s something from The Knights Of The Round Table. What it actually is, is a tale of weak management; people too cowardly to fire someone in the room and who instead enact this ludicrous, and cruel, pageant in a pathetic attempt to deify themselves. It’s Succession for dummies.

Well said.