St. Paul Pioneer Press union chairman issued this note today regarding ex-publisher Par Ridder’s system for squeezing ad execs. Obviously Ridder’s successor, Fred Mott, was willing to play along.
21-year veteran terminated after two years on so-called ‘PIP’
Fri, April 13, 2007 at 12:56
Longtime advertising account executive Larry Olson was fired today — after 21 years of service to the Pioneer Press.
Few things could be more wrong for this business.
Olson is well-respected by his former clients and has tremendous institutional knowledge. But he sold ads in the auto sector — one of the sectors that have been hammered nationally, at every newspaper, as that industry pulls its money from print.
For the last two years, Olson was on multiple “performance improvement plans” — the mechanism used in the advertising department to impose unreasonable sales targets onto individual account executives. This is not Guild hyperbole; these targets are divvied out to salespeople with no consideration of what is going in the industries in which their customers operate.
It’s like a reporter being disciplined because an official who never talks to the media won’t call her back. Nonsense. And unfair.
But the so-called PIPs were apparently an important part of how Advertising Director Greg Mazanec decided to pass down Par Ridder’s supposed goal of “accountability.” Ridder says to his department heads: We need a certain amount of revenue. That target gets divided, divided again and divided again — and then imposed on salespeople, no matter how realistic, given their customers’ business environments.
Olson met his January goal. But he was given targets for February and March and terminated today.
He says he was preparing for this, and he wasn’t the first salesperson to be dismissed in the same way. His colleagues were not necessarily shocked — despite the disappointment and anger they may feel.
Over the 21 years he gave to the Pioneer Press, Olson volunteered a lot of his time to his colleagues in the Guild. Among the jobs he took on: steward, Representative Assembly member and, currently, co-chairperson of the joint union-management committee that oversees the pension fund. (The other co-chairperson? Marilyn Clements, who the company laid off in January.)
— Jack Sullivan, Washington County team leader, unit chairman
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