Horror Writer Thomas Ligotti on Company Managers Who Get Promoted Through Destroying the Company

I’ve been watching videos by the Outlaw Bookseller recently. He’s a retired bookshop manager, now living in Bath, who talks about literature and book collecting, and particularly Science Fiction and Horror. In one of his videos he discusses Horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s novel, My Work Is Not Yet Done. This differs from much horror literature in not being set in Gothic castles and catacombs, but instead in the corporate work place. One of the characters is a manager, who comes along with flip charts and checklists purporting to improve productivity and employee performance. As the story goes on, the characters realise that all his management strategies are rubbish. They don’t actually work, and instead make the situation work. At which point, the manager gets promoted to another position.

Ligotti’s been going for decades now. He was published in a variety of British small press horror, SF and fantasy magazines in the ’80s and ’90s and is very much respected as one of the great writers of the genre. I’m not a big fan of ‘Orror. I’ve read Dracula, some of Brian Lumley’s grim tales, H.P. Lovecraft and a few others, but it’s not a genre that really appeals to me. But that description of the manager seems very well observed. Way back in the ’80s and ’90s Private Eye used to cover various big businessmen, who were recruited to head blue chip companies like ICI with very generous salaries. These men then proceeded to wreck these companies so that their share prices plummeted, at which point they were released. Again, with obscenely generous severance packages. The same people would then go on to be recruited by another, previously successful company or organisation and then proceed to do the same again. And I’ve met people who’ve experienced this in real life. I was talking about it to a taxi driver, who told me that it happened to a company he had worked for. The company recruited a manager at an expensive pay package, who then proceeded to run it into the ground, before being given the heave-ho with another massively generous pay package. Who then went off to do it to some other company.

No wonder British industry’s in a state. It’s full of the incompetent and greedy running companies into the ground, while being massively rewarded for their greed and incompetence. And I dare say that if anyone says anything about their grossly inflated pay, they’ll get the usual nonsense about market rates and having to pay large amounts to recruit talent.

Even when the people recruited are massively untalented and a real destructive force with their incompetence. But no doubt they went to the right schools and know the right people, so they carry on in their mission to wreck western business in order to get themselves bigger and more lucrative promotions.

Tags: Big Business, Brian Lumley, Dracula, Fantasy, Fanzines, H.P. Lovecraft, Horror, ICI, Management, Outlaw Bookseller, Private Eye, Science Fiction, Shares, Small Press, Thomas Ligotti