Circles of failure (2019)

I started working at Houghton Mifflin the month Suzanne became pregnant with Isabelle. I was thirty three. It was my first office job. Working in an office felt so public and exposed, after years of thinking alone in a room. And the experience began to reshape me. Commuting on the train, I fought a phobia about turnstiles—particularly those full-height, exit-only turnstiles with tines that passed through each other like the rotating knives of some industrial-sized meat slicer.

I never expected to stay at that company. But starting and finishing complicated projects, being dependent on others for months at a time, developed a sense of community I never expected. It became my village. After ten years, the department took me to lunch with other people who were celebrating anniversaries. Someone else had fifteen years at the company and the rest twenty or twenty five or thirty. Everyone received different gifts. Mine was a ten-year commemorative glass, which still sits all mixed up with the other glasses in our kitchen.

I chose this career because it used the skills I had—writing and editing—and because I wanted to spend my working day doing something good for someone. As time went on, though, it became harder to do anything well at Houghton Mifflin. Fierce competition forced the company to add more books to their product until a reading program for Kindergarten through Grade 5 filled twelve shipping pallets—about the length of three parked cars. But the price we charged didn’t increase, at least not by much. Neither did the time we had. With less time and less money to develop more books, the materials we delivered provided less help to teachers and children. I didn’t believe a company would remain viable if it couldn’t deliver reliable products, and I worried about my ability to support my family.

Then the company started getting sold and resold. First, a French media conglomerate bought it as part of an aggressive series of leveraged buyouts. On the verge of bankruptcy a year later, the conglomerate sold Houghton Mifflin to a private equity investment firm, which resold it four years later to an Irish software company. Servicing the debt from all these transactions increased the pressure to cut costs and made it even harder to invest in developing books that really worked for teachers and children. The Irish software company completed their purchase in December 2006. In January 2007, facing delivery dates for a new Reading program (on twelve shipping pallets) in eighteen months, the company announced a round of layoffs. This included most of the people I had hired and trained in the previous two years. New marketing and sales leadership dominated our meetings. They sneered at everything we had done before, dismissing the whole idea of learning from the people who would be using our books and impatient with incorporating research about how teachers taught and children learned.

In the spring of that year, we hired two branding consultants to help us find a name for our new program. Managers from several departments gathered in a room in Boston, including about thirty sales people from across the country. When they came to the home office, sales people in those days dressed like they were going to church. And because they did, so did we. The brand consultants arrived dressed for the golf course. They gave a start of surprise at the door. Then they stood up front in their pastel polo shirts and khaki pants and loafers and started asking questions.

At one point the consultants asked, “What do your customers like about your product after they buy it?”

Silence fell. Then the new head of marketing drawled in her Georgia accent, “I don’t care what they like as long they buy it.”

I remember the two of them standing side by side. Their eyes widened at the same instant and their jaws dropped for only a moment. Then their surprise disappeared behind their consultant masks, and I decided to find a new job.

When I told the head of my department, he stood up, walked around his desk, and hugged me. “You are doing the right thing,” he said. He told me that he was retiring. Then I talked to his boss, the Vice President and Publisher. She was also retiring.

I brought Isabelle to help pack my belongings because she had spent so much time there. She was almost twelve. “I remember you when you were this small,” people kept telling her, holding their hands not very apart. She closed the door to my office, put her head down on the table, and sobbed.

I left a company of three thousand and joined a company of thirty, which felt like stepping off an ocean liner into a canoe. As all the major publishers produced more books in less time for less money, they outsourced much of the work, and Baseline sold publishing services—editorial, design, and typesetting. I led the editorial team. I trained the editors I found there. I recruited others, all friends, from Houghton Mifflin. Instead of layers of management, I had two people above me—the general manager and the owner. At every meeting, we each carried a calculator and a calendar. Everything we did was about delivering more content for less money in less time. Not better content. Not more effective or engaging content.

What made it feel most like a canoe was this sense that I could capsize the company myself. We didn’t sell any products that generated revenue. We just sold our time, so we only made money if we had work. In the middle of huge projects, I had to worry both about our deadlines and where the money would come from when we met them. Whether we secured more work depended on doing a good job now, but publishers squeezed so hard on time and price that we never had what we needed to do a good job now. Conditions were worsening across the industry.

The Irish software company that bought Houghton Mifflin in 2006 then bought Harcourt, their closest competitor, and merged the two companies without any business rationale that I ever understood. At the end of summer 2008, we contracted with the combined company to deliver 10,000 pages of student and teacher content by the middle of January. But Houghton Mifflin Harcourt first had to make a series of decisions about what they wanted the content to be, and so we waited. We also had to develop the pages using a particular publishing software that required some proprietary code which they promised to deliver by September.

Could we write and edit 10,000 pages of content between September and mid-January? In four and a half months? Not delivering all those pages could destroy our reputation. Delivering them could bankrupt us. September came and went without the software. October passed in the same way. Now we had two and half months. We scrambled to find all the freelance staff we would need, but our budget was too tight to pay them until the work started. As the delays mounted, we scrambled to convince them to wait and then scrambled to replace those who couldn’t. We did as much curriculum planning as possible and kept revising the schedule and the budget. Even as we waited for the software, even as we tried to plan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt kept increasing the scope of what we had agreed to do without changing the price, but it was too late now to find other work.

Our offices were in the North End in Boston, just past the last block of the Greenway. The train took me into South Station. I walked a mile north up the Greenway in the morning and a mile back down it in the evening, worrying. I worried about everything that could go wrong on this project and how unlikely we were to succeed. I worried about all the people already on payroll in our little company and all the people we were about to hire. What kind of content would we be providing to schools? How was I doing any good for anybody anymore? Caleb had started kindergarten, and the kids no longer traveled with me into Boston. Work was too tense and too complicated to have them in the office very often, and most of my time awake and at home I sat hunched in a chair, almost motionless except for my fingers on a keyboard.

Throughout 2008, I watched a building rise across the Greenway. Construction elevators moved up and down the sides, cranes swung steel girders to the top, and workmen walked through the open floors. By fall, there were at least a hundred people working inside and outside that building. A large sign with a drawing of the building hung on a fence. Lehman Brothers provided the financing. One morning in September, I watched all the workers gather on a dirt plot beside the building. Someone spoke through a megaphone. The crowd listened. Then they all left and never came back. Two weeks later the stock market crashed. I stared at that frame of a building—the crane gone, the elevators locked above street level, and the floors entirely empty—while we waited for our project to start.

Even if we delivered those 10,000 pages this winter, would our offices be empty in spring? The recession was going to reduce tax revenue and drive budget cuts in education which would ravage our industry. And falling across the future was the shadow of digital disruption. When would elementary education move online? When would schools stop purchasing books? Everyone knew something was about to change. We just didn’t know what or how much or when. And it felt like I was racing—that all of us were racing—full speed toward the edge of a cliff.

The publishing software arrived in November. Then everyone who had been waiting to start we could suddenly pay, and the company doubled in size, and there was an enormous rush forward like the beginning of a road race and gridlock every time a problem arose. I worked twelve to fourteen hours a day Monday to Friday and a solid eight hours if not more each weekend. Ahead of us lay that impossible deadline, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt refused to move but continued to sabotage at every turn. Often they demanded changes that required us to redo work we had already finished or that raised problems with consistency or coherence which took days to resolve. Any attempt at a frank and honest conversation, any effort to reason with them ended in a long, fingers-drumming-on-the-desk silence as they waited for us to agree to do what they asked, exactly as they asked us to do it.

The week before Thanksgiving we joined a remote status meeting with a project manager who never worked in publishing before. He had prepared slides to measure our progress. After dismissing the pressing problems that we still needed his help to solve, he showed a blank graph with pages up the vertical axis and weeks across the horizontal axis. “Here are the pages you have delivered,” he said. On the graph appeared this tiny green triangle showing the few pages we had been able to complete stretched out over all the months we had been waiting. It was about the height of an ant. “And these are the pages you are under contract to finish by January sixteenth.” On the graph appeared this Mt. Everest of a bright red triangle, obliterating the green triangle, and he asked whether we had any concerns about meeting this date. I dived for mute on the speaker phone before he heard the roar of angry, incredulous laughter from the team assembled in the room.

We had no future there. None of us around that table. These were friends that I had recruited or people who had become my friends. They trusted me. I was failing them. No matter how hard I worked nothing would be enough to hold our business together. I was failing the teachers and students who depended on us. Frequently not home and thoroughly distracted when I was and constantly struggling to separate the emotions and confusions of my professional future from the demands of being a husband and a father, I was failing my family. I had to last another sixteen years in this industry before my children finished college. I wasn’t sure I could last until January.

“Don’t take your glasses off and rub your eyes during a meeting,” someone on my team told me once. “It makes us lose confidence.” I went off mute to say goodbye to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and then tried not to touch my glasses. Everyone planned to work through the holiday weekend, but they could only make progress until Monday, when another series of changes from the client would bring work to a halt. We had to redo our guidelines and our curriculum planning before then. I told them I would take all of this work home myself. Except I wouldn’t be home. I would be at the farm with my family.

On any given summer afternoon at the farm my family can all be scattered around the front of the house—Suzanne, my sisters, and my brothers-in-law. Six adults. A few of us might be sitting on the porch and others lying on the lawn nearby or leaning against the post outside the kitchen door. My mother will walk past everyone to tell me about a bag of grain she needs carried from her truck out to the barn. If I am sitting in a rocking chair, she sits on the railing in front of me to talk about any tasks that need to be done as though the two of us were alone. In colder weather, we might all be crowded into the kitchen or reading in the living room or eating at the dining room table, but she and I have the same conversation.

As a teenager, I heard so loudly her anxiety about all the work we needed to do at the farm and saw how deserted she felt. In almost every aspect of our lives, I couldn’t fill the hole my father left behind. But I could always help her there. And so his half of their partnership of projects fell to me. I accepted the obligation and I fiercely fought it but even when I fought it I knew what I should be doing. What he would have done. That was success. That would ease the raw pain of widowhood, the bitterness and anger behind her question, Where the hell have you have been? I have worked there since in the same way he did, alternating between the sensible tasks on her list and those questionably necessary, more adventurous projects. Whichever I did, as long as I did one of these two, has comforted her for all of these years and comforted me.

I did neither that Thanksgiving weekend. Thursday to Sunday, I sat in a chair by the stove with my laptop. Waking up long before dawn, I tried to get as much done as I could while everyone else slept. But I came back to the laptop after breakfast, and again after lunch. With the lid open, I felt like I was failing everyone there, particularly my mother. But when the lid closed, I was failing my team.

By the time my mother woke up at 7:30, I had already been sitting in the glow of the screen for two hours. She would stand next to the stove and ask me what I was doing. And then she would tell me about something that needed to be done. “Did you see that cherry tree?”

“Which cherry tree?” I replied, still typing.

“The one in the upper pasture. I need someone to cut it up before I have to mow. It’s good firewood.”

“I can do nothing about firewood this weekend, Mom.” My voice shook with angry tension. “I can do nothing but what I am doing right now.”

“I realize that.”

“Then why are you telling me this?”

“Because I wanted to be sure you knew.”

“I knew.” I was typing again. “You won’t mow up there until June or July. Which is seven or eight months from now. I am sure I will get to it before then.”

Throughout the day, she continually came inside and told me about more work that needed to be done. I snapped and snarled at her every time. I told her, as I often did, how many other adults were there that weekend and how Isabelle was old enough to help as well if she asked, but she kept coming back to talk to me. “Someone has to help me carry the garbage cans out of the cellar and put them in the truck.”

“Are you asking me to do it?” I demanded.

“Not necessarily.”

“It sounds like you are asking me to do it.”

“I am not asking you do it.”

“That isn’t how I hear it, Mom.”

“Well, that isn’t my intention.”

What she really missed, what she came repeatedly seeking, was contact. Tasks and projects made me feel present and available to her. If I couldn’t do them, she could still talk to me about them. But my mother has never understood her power over me, in part because I never admit it. Every one of these conversations made me feel I was disappointing her, and I had no strength that weekend for one more circle of failure.

By Sunday, when Monday was less than twenty four hours away, I had finished only half of what I had promised the team I would do. We cut some Christmas trees at a farm up the road and brought them back in the bed of my mother’s truck. One of those trees was for a friend of hers, who came to get it as we loaded our car to go home. Her friend asked me to tie her tree on her car. I did it the same way I tied on ours.

Her friend didn’t like what I did, but instead of saying so she followed me into the house and asked questions until I came back out and redid it. And that wasn’t right either. So I redid it again. And then redid it a third time. I kept telling her that more rope wasn’t necessary, that this was as much as I used on our car, but she kept following me around and asking me to add more until the rope was all gone and she had to be satisfied.

When I went inside to say goodbye to my mother, my family was waiting in the car and my sisters already gone. She was cleaning the stove. Angry at me for being so angry all weekend, she put down the sponge and demanded, “When were you going to tell me that you used all my rope?”

And that remark made feel utterly betrayed, as if she only saw me in terms of what I should be doing for her and lacked any sympathy or even consciousness of how miserable I felt. It wasn’t true. She did understand. She did sympathize. She was just no better at expressing it than she had been in those first years after my father died. But struggling with the onset of a recession, the collapse of an industry, the transition to digital, and the viability of my career, her remark about a roll of thin rope, hardly thicker than string, made me feel that I hadn’t become the person she expected me to be. And I detonated.

Halfway out the door, I turned back and said, “I don’t want you at my house for Christmas.”

“What?” She looked astonished.

“I don’t want you to come to my house for Christmas.” My sisters weren’t able to host her. One would be in New Mexico, the other in upstate New York. “Find somewhere else to go.”

In the weeks that followed, while we drew closer to January and then passed it, this sense of infuriated shame about myself increased, as if those circles of failure had caught fire. My mother did spend Christmas with us. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt did extend the deadline. We met the deadline. Then our company went bankrupt and our offices were empty by spring except for the owner, who continued unlocking the door and turning on the lights until the landlord evicted him. Throughout all this, I felt like I was grieving. And I wasn’t grieving for my father. I was grieving about myself and the direction my life had taken.