| > I wanted an anecdote to open the essay with, so I asked Gemini to find one in my reading highlights. It came up with something perfect: Can someone verify that anecdote is true? Here is what the image contains: > From The Publisher: In the early days of Time magazine, co-founder Henry Luce was responsible for both the editorial and business sides of the operation. He was a brilliant editor, but he had little experience or interest in business. As a result, he often found himself overwhelmed with work. One day, his colleague Briton Hadden said to him, "Harry, you're trying to do everything yourself. You need to delegate more." Luce replied, "But I can do it all myself, and I can do it better than anyone else." Hadden shook his head and said, "That's not the point. The point is to build an organization that can do things without you. You're not going to be able to run this magazine forever." That citation appears to be "The Publisher : Henry Luce and his American century". The book is available at archive.org as searchable text returning snippets, at https://archive.org/details/publisherhenrylu0000brin_o9p4/ Search is unable to find the word "delegate" in the book. The six matches for "forever" are not relevant. The matches for "overwhelmed" are not relevant. A search for Hadden finds no anecdote like the above. The closest are on page 104, https://archive.org/details/publisherhenrylu0000brin_o9p4/pa... : """For Harry the last weeks of 1922 were doubly stressful. Not only was he working with Hadden to shape the content of the magazine, he was also working more or less alone to ensure that Time would be able to function as a business. This was an area of the enterprise in which Hadden took almost no interest and for which he had little talent. Luce, however, proved to be a very good businessman, somewhat to his dismay—since, like Brit, his original interest in “the paper” had been primarily editorial. (“Now the Bratch is really the editor of TIME,” he wrote, “and I, alas, alas, alas, am business manager. . .. Of course no one but Brit and I know this!”) He negotiated contracts with paper suppliers and printers. He contracted out the advertising. He supervised the budget. He set salaries and terms for employees. He supervised the setting up of the office. And whenever he could, he sat with Brit and marked up copy or discussed plans for the next issue.""" That sounds like delegation to me and decent at business and not doing much work as an editor. There's also the anecdote on page 141 at https://archive.org/details/publisherhenrylu0000brin_o9p4/pa... : """In the meantime Luce threw himself into the editing of Time. He was a more efficient and organized editor than Hadden. He created a schedule for writers and editors, held regular meetings, had an organized staff critique of each issue every week. (“Don’t hesitate to flay a fellow-worker’s work. Occasionally submit an idea,” he wrote.) He was also calmer and less erratic. Despite the intense loyalty Hadden inspired among members of his staff, some editors and writers apparently preferred Luce to his explosive partner; others missed the energy and inspiration that Hadden had brought to the newsroom. In any case the magazine itself—whose staff was so firmly molded by Hadden’s style and tastes—was not noticeably different under Luce’s editorship than it had been under Hadden’s. And just as Hadden, the publisher, moonlighted as an editor, so Luce, now the editor, found himself moonlighting as publisher, both because he was so invested in the business operations of the company that he could not easily give them up, and also because he felt it necessary to compensate for Hadden’s inattention.”""" Again, it doesn't seem to match the summary from Gemini. Does someone here have better luck than I on verifying the accuracy of the anecdote? Because so far it does not seem valid. |
He confirms that the anecdote was confabulated by Gemini, was based on the pg141 story, and he's edited OP to note the error: https://twitter.com/danshipper/status/1761135157036097608