Date of publication: April 9, 1999
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Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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Comments on this column:
What's remarkable is that this collection of manifestos about the new age a'dawning contains proclamations by Tony Blair, Al Gore, Charles Handy, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Alvin Toffler ... and me.
![[IMAGE]](http://mfinley.com/gif/finley.gif)
A Master of the Wired World?
I just got my author's copies of a new book from Financial Times Management (London), MASTERS OF THE WIRED WORLD: Cyberspace Speaks Out.Anne C. Leer, editor
To order, click here. Discounted price is $18.87 from Amazon.
Dear Mike:
I'd like to ask you to please stop mischaracterizing our decision to stop using your column last year. You were not ``fired for being too independent.'' In fact, you were not ``fired'' at all. As you know, you were not our employee. We, along with other newspapers, just purchased the right to print your column.
As I believe I explained to you as nicely as possible, we wanted to do other things with that space and use the money we were spending for your column in other ways. You may not have agreed with that decision, as I know you have indicated several times in your column, in messages you have sent to other syndicated writers who happen to appear on that page, etc. But people, and companies, make buying decisions all the time. We change supermarkets, service stations, tax preparers, etc. There is rarely any grand, cinematic good-versus-evil theme behind those decisions. Instead, it's usually just a matter of preferences and a desire for change. That's what this was. Can't you accept that? Please, it's time to move on.
Jeff Kummer
Tech Section, Saint Paul Pioneer Press
Jeff, I had to stop and think what you were referring to -- it was last week's column, about the Rolling Stones and my MRI report. All I can tell you is that few people reading the column would see it as dwelling on the past. To me it is rapturously happy about the present. "Please move on," you say. I got a second lease on life that day -- that was the main thing -- not my memory of being fired twice 25 years apart! That was just gingerbread, an interesting bookending of experiences.
I'm sorry if my using the word "fired" irritated you. I have been speaking very freely since my diagnosis. Heck, I spoke pretty freely even before, and I have not been shy about characterizing the "discontinuance," or "cancellation," or whatever it was.
To say I was not your employee, and therefore I could not be fired, is probably an accurate reflection of your experience, but it is not* an accurate reflection of mine!
I'm not sure how much you have free-lanced in your day, but any time you work for one client for six years, that's a big hairy deal. It's longer than I ever worked in any job anywhere. I hated to lose the gig, as I hope my last column for the paper expressed.
I don't blame you for wanting to minimize it. But to me it was a drag. It hurt like rejection and it stung like an insult.
Yes, I do think I was too independent, and I believe that was a factor in your not wanting to continue with me. I'm sure I was a major loose cannon to you, showing up every week with something a little out of the ordinary, and you having to shoehorn it into a conventional tech page.
You never asked for me or hired me -- firing me allowed you to put your stamp on the page. I was an eccentric freelancer and a temperamental one -- the one time we met I was in a lather about being excluded from syndication efforts for two years, and I know you didn't enjoy dealing with that. You broadly suggested at the Broiler that maybe we should throw in the towel right then and there. It would have simplied your plans for the section. But I loved doing the column, so I ignored your suggestion.
I never considered myself a "computer generalist," as you described me in our farewell conversation. I always considered myself as covering the right-brain side of computing and Internet. Creativity, emotion, culture, technophobia, all that stuff. When Ken Doctor hired me, that was on the plate: "A cultured guy writing about PCs -- neat!" That's what he said.
I tell people that firing me and hiring Kim Komando was a bum decision because I delivered readers no one else, including Kim Komando, can deliver. The line I use is, "I'm twice the woman Kim Komando ever was." (Meaning: I added more of the emotive and conversational and social element than she can.)
I haven't tried to imply that you were impolite or unkind or dishonorable. I do hold one thing against you. You told me that the firing was a decision you arrived at in the previous 48 hours -- but when the paper came out the very next day, there was an exhaustive, well-planned reader survey asking readers what they thought of every feature in the section ... but no mention of mine.
That told me you had deliberately excluded me, long before the 48 hour period you described. That wasn't customer feedback, it was a stacked deck.
When we ended our relationship I sincerely wished you the best, and was happy to see your column continuing in other newspapers (at least two of those you list are, like the Pioneer Press, owned by Knight-Ridder.). But I wonder. If at some point those editors decide to stop using your column will they also be accused of ``firing'' you.
Well, Jeff, this is where I get to be thick-skinned. I've been turned down more times than you could be in ten lifetimes. I could paper my house three sheets deep with rejection slips.
It doesn't bother me that the Akron and Duluth papers never paid me for the columns they used. They never meant anything to me. I'm tough as nails about that part of the business.
It did bother me getting sacked from my hometown paper after 6 years.
You say it's just a sale of rights, "wham bam thank you ma'am," but it was a sweet thing for me.
Now ... I sent you my book on teams because it seemed to me, from my part of the team, that the tech section violates every possible rule of teamwork. One secret to successful taming is making people on the team feel they are involved, valued, and rewarded.
But I never felt included in promotions, or had an inside column hyped from the section front. Peluso and Fryxell always did that. They treated me like I was somebody, and I felt loyal to them as a result. I could talk to Peluso and Fryxell. We had collegial relationships, and as a result I think they got the best out of me -- we got to know one another, getting to understand one another's agendas, and we worked together to make as many come true as possible.
It's a good story of team failure, one I use in the talk I give to business groups. Left brain editor inherits right brain writer, and they never, despite okay intentions, quite get on the same wavelength. It's a very common story.
And you know what -- when you say, "You were never an employee!" you're reaching beyond the grave to continue the insult. There should be a statute of limitations on deflating people after you fire them! (Or whatever you want to call it.)
Anyway, you tell me to get over it. But you know, you can't say that to a memoirist. Our job is to not get over it -- but to understand things that happened and put them in perspective. I think that is what my column last week did. Look at me -- fired twice, tumor in the head, but still standing, and still digging the Stones.
You know, Jeff, I write for the love and joy of writing. The money sometimes follows, and sometimes doesn't.
One lesson I've learned from the experience is to follow what you enjoy. I burn to get through to readers, to communicate -- which is why I was so upset when we met. But I love it even when readers are few, as they are now (340 subscribers).
A second is that I'm not a supermarket or gas station. I'm a human being, as are you. The corporate SPPP "we" did not fire me, as your syntax suggests -- you did! Business is still people.
A third is that a friend understands you better the minute you meet than a nonfriend will figure in two years.
Please, accept my apologies. I really didn't tell my story for the purpose of annoying you, and I have no special thing about you. I value my ties to the Pioneer Press and I still hope to place a column every now and then, if not in your section, then elsewhere.
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Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover! A fully revised second edition of this award-winning classic by Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley Paperback
Winner, Financial Times/Booz Allen & Hamilton Global Business Book Award, Best Management Book - The Americas, 1995
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