http://finance.yahoo.com/news/liste...ee-in-front-of-1-000-coworkers-140600015.html Below, we've linked to probably the most intense moment you'll ever hear during a workplace conference call. It's from a call AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hosted Friday morning. In the recording, obtained by media business blog Romenesko, Armstrong is speaking to the 1,000 or so employees of AOL's local news network, Patch. Listen here: https://soundcloud.com/jim-romenesko/aol-ceo-tim-armstrong-8-9-2013 To set the scene… The day before the call, during AOL's Q2 earnings call, Armstrong told Wall Street analysts that Patch would shrink from 900 to 600 websites. Patch employees took Armstrong's comments to mean that hundreds of them would soon lose their jobs. Obviously, this sent morale plummeting. The call was supposed to be Armstrong's attempt to rally the troops. During the first minute or so of the recording, Armstrong says things like: "If you don't believe what I'm about to say, I'm going to ask you to leave Patch…We have to get Patch into a place where it's going to be successful." But then things go suddenly awry. At exactly two minutes into the recording, Armstrong addresses someone in the room with him. He says, "Abel, put that camera down, now." Then, without taking a breath, Armstrong says, "Abel, you're fired. Out." It's pretty shocking stuff. The person Armstrong is talking to in the recording is Abel Lenz, Patch's Creative Director. Obviously, Lenz is no longer with the company. Armstrong picked an odd reason to fire him. We hear that Lenz, based in New York, would always take pictures of people talking on company-wide conference calls so that he could post them on Patch's internal news site.
Tim Armstrong is the CEO of AOL? I don't know anyone under the age of 60 who uses AOL, but making the lead singer of Rancid your CEO is screams you are trying to get younger customers.
It's amazing AOL has lasted this long. As the older generation fades away, their userbase will fade away as well.
Well they have acquired media companies and evolved with the times. I mean they own the huffington post. I miss leading meetings. Such a power trip.
Assholes like Tim Armstrong are the reason I left corporate America 4 years ago and started contract work. The older I got, the less interested I became in corporate politics, and middle management is basically the grooming ground to find the next sociopath to move up the chain. Most of the CEOs are the extreme .001% of Type A personalities, and many seem to have at least some sociopathic/psychopathic/narcissistic traits. I believe in corporations, but at the board level, you're either born into it, or you leave a lot of figurative bodies in your wake getting there. The odd thing is that of the very successful CEO/owner type people I know, the few I actually get along with inherited their position via familial succession, and are the most adjusted socially.
If you think you need to be more Type A, you're not Type A, at least in terms of corporate America. I'm not a "corporate" Type A. and it took until my mid-30s to realize it. I actually enjoy things like my family, friends, and not working 24 hours a day.
You guys are submerged in this corporate america phoniness. You guys should join unions and learn to despise those fire breathers.
Union employees arent "the common folk". Statistically, more of the "common folk" are the middle class college graduates who now struggle to find a job after graduation. It's two-sides of the same coin. I have no issue with the Teamsters, fwiw. Private union and private company. It's the SEIU and other donation scams that go right back to Democrats without hitting the private sector that bother many Americans. You're actually in a decent union, and UPS is a great company. What tends to happen is that private unions start to support public unions, and it's not at all the same thing. The public unions are existing because of your dues, which are donated in part to the SEIU and other public unions, as well as your taxes, which are recycled.
