The Day I Didn’t Become CEO | by David Silverman

This is the first in a series of stories from CEOs of their most
life-changing day in their careers. Sometimes the result was promotion
to the upper reaches of business, and sometimes a steep fall from grace.
But good or bad, the events of these days represent defining moments in
their lives and characters and serve as lessons to the rest of us who
rarely, if ever, get to see what the view is like from the top.

“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. He didn’t know very much about publishing, but he
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 after, 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.

Afterwards, he visited Richard to “cheer me up and to make sure I
understood his reasoning for not selecting me.”

Cont. >>>