Publishing Layoffs Hit Random House and Simon & Schuster

"Yes, Virginia, book publishing is NOT recession proof," said Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive officer of the Association of American Publishers. "It's sad day." Read the entire article here.

No, the important issue is not that Pat Schroeder managed to string together words that make sense for the first time since childhood. (I will never forget reading a review of her autobiography that included this description: "Now I know what history looks like through the eyes of an idiot." But I digress.

The elephant in the room is about quality, flexibility, and treating people right. You can run a big company for a long time, and even find and put out a mega bestseller like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and still lose your job.

Why?

Well, let's use a phrase my grandfather often muttered when he took me somewhere for lunch or dinner and was disgusted by the service, the setting, or the meal. "Teddy," he would say, shaking his head slowly as he withdrew his unlit cigar from his mouth, turned it over, and waved it around to make his point. "The people who are running this business today are not the people who built the business yesterday."

Think about it.

--tps