The Day I Didn't Become CEO

"I don't know about terrible days, I've never really had one of those," Richard Charkin said to me over the phone. He was in France, at his family's summer home, making eggs and toast for his grandchildren. I was in New York, and as usual on long phone calls, pacing about my small kitchen.

Richard is a Director of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, which everyone knows because they were the first to publish the Harry Potter books, but he likes to remind me that they have a wide variety of wonderful authors that he is honored to represent, including not just J.K. Rowling, but also Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Ben Schott (Schott's Original Miscellany), Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns), Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) and Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential).

I'd first met him electronically. He was the CEO of Macmillan Publishers at the time and was writing a blog that was daring for two notable features. First, he wrote about hijacking a laptop from a Google booth at a trade show in order to demonstrate his feelings about how Google was lifting book content and making it freely available. Second, he wrote every day. I still don't know how he managed that.

When he was 39, he was up for consideration for the "best publishing job in the world" - CEO of Oxford University Press Worldwide. Richard had the credentials, having been involved in the development of the first electronic version of the legendary Oxford English Dictionary and thirteen years of loyal and successful service in various parts of the Press, but he was worried that there might be concern that his relative youth would allow him to stay in the job for up to 25 years, thus blocking career development for others.

The head of the CEO search committee was a professor of physics from the university itself [Sir Roger Elliott - see comment below]. He didn't know very much about publishing, but was reckoned to be "a clever committee man" and "a safe pair of hands." So Richard called up the professor and said: "I don't want to cause other people's careers to be stuck. If I were to get the job and a ten-year contract, I'd happily leave at the end and make room for someone else."

Soon afterwards the decision was made, and the only person who could possibly run Oxford University Press was... the professor of physics himself, who said he was as surprised as everyone else to have unearthed this fact. Later, he visited Richard to "cheer me up and to make sure I understood his reasoning for not selecting me." "You see, you would be in the position too long," he said. "You'd block off everyone else from advancement." Richard was confused and explained that was why he had called to say that he was okay with a ten-year contract. "Ten year? I thought you said tenure. We don't give tenure to anyone who isn't an academic." He looked at Richard in a puzzled manner, as if Richard were the one who'd just said something nonsensical. And with that, he left.

Richard was, in the Queen's English, "put out, to say the least." He decided he wanted out. He called up the Chairman of another publishing company [Octopus] to see if he could get a job there. That Chairman [Paul Hamlyn] told Richard that he couldn't guarantee anything because his firm had just been bought and his role was more advisory than executive, but that Richard had his promise that he'd call back on Monday "with something." It was a Friday and Richard realized he had two choices: "sulk or exit, and I preferred the latter. I would resign - and not because I had a new job, but because I'd been wronged."

He went to find his boss [Robin Denniston - the Oxford Publisher], but he had gone to the country for the weekend. So he went looking for his boss's boss [George Richardson - the Secretary to the Delegates, or CEO, who was about retire]. He would "set him straight." Except that he'd left as well. Richard was "full of conviction with no one to convince." Ultimately, he located the Personnel Director [Clive Moody], who happened to be interviewing someone for a job. Richard burst in and said, "Clive, I want to resign." To which the also implacably British Clive responded: "But I'm junior to you. You'll have to find someone senior if you want to resign." (I like to imagine what the interviewee made of this exchange.)

At that point Richard remembered there was someone still likely to be available: his boss's boss's boss, the Vice Chancellor of The University of Oxford, Sir Patrick Neill. Immediately, he bounded across the city streets of Oxford for Wellington Square and the big man's office. In Richard's words: "Despite my resolve, upon arrival at his door, I knocked timidly because the Vice Chancellor was very tall, very patrician, and very scary." When the intimidating don opened his door, Richard launched into his resignation speech to avoid having his nerves stop him.

"Hold on, hold on," the Vice Chancellor said, sitting down and motioning him to do so as well. "Do you have another job you're leaving for?"
"No, although I have had one half-promised," he said, remaining standing. "And I want to be clear that I'm resigning because of the way the search was conducted, not because I have a new position."
"But you've got three children and a mortgage. Maybe you should just stay with us until you've found a new job? I mean, are you sure you'll be okay?"
"I trust my friend to be a man of his word."
"Richard, we are academics here, this is where you can rely on a person's word. Can you really trust a businessman?"
"Strangely, I find it easier to trust him than you. After all, he hasn't let me down - and the University has."

The warmth left the Sir Patrick's expression, and it was at that moment that it became clear to Richard that he had truly resigned. Some days later, Richard sent him a letter in which he wondered if he could apply for the chair of theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, as he had passed S-level physics at school. After all, if heading a search committee at a publishing company qualified one to be a publisher, then he was equally qualified to be a physicist.

It was a bridge well burnt, and Richard doesn't regret any of it. True to his word, the Chairman [of Octopus] hired him, and his career has prospered ever since. The lesson learned: quitting is extremely enjoyable and not always a bad choice, but winning is better, so put important communications in writing, lest you have your own "ten-year/tenure" surprise.

Comments by Andrew Malcolm

Apart from the general and obvious stretchings of credibility, there are several clear omissions and surprises here, not the least of which is that wiseguy Charkin seems to be admitting to buying the dons' ten-year/tenure taunt, the kind of dessicated academic joke that in Oxford passes for wit. (One can just imagine the behind-the-hand chortlings in the SCRs that evening: "surely he didn't fall for that old gag did he?!")

And maybe his French fry-up was putting him in a benign mood, but there is the omission of the explanation for his unexpected overlooking which Charkin, who is jewish, proposed at the time (rf The Remedy, page 72). To be explicit, it was reported to me by an OUP insider that during the farewell speech to OUP executives which Charkin made in June 1988, he publicly accused the Delegates of being anti-semitic.

Also, there is the absence of any reference to any role my lawsuit, then in full spate, may have played in the affair. Without wishing to exaggerate its possible importance, it does seem noteworthy that just two months before Oxford made the surprise announcement that Sir Roger Elliott (the physics professor anonymised in the above, subsequently cross-examined by me in court in March 1990, and thereafter known as "Lord Otiose"), not Charkin (also cross-examined), had been chosen to replace George Richardson as OUP's new CEO, all fifteen OUP Delegates had received a troubling letter from me about the case and about Charkin's hand in it.

One of the questions asked in this letter arose from the revelation, passed on to me and my solicitor by Chancery Master Barratt, that Oxford and Charkin's solicitor, presumably under their instruction, had told the Court that the OUP Delegates were "a body of distinguished old gentlemen who meet only once a year." We knew that in term-time they in fact meet fortnightly and we wanted the Delegates' confirmation of this. Not one of the fifteen senior dons stepped forward to nail the lie, making a neat mockery of Sir Patrick Neill's above-reported assertion of academic probity. Richard Charkin's departure from Oxford shortly afterwards though was, naturally, a pure coincidence.

For more detail on this aspect, scholars should now click for Dogwag & Ratify

Abyssinian Footnote