Internetnews.com: “This week’s restructuring of AOL’s ad sales division appears to have been engineered at least in part by enraged staff members who forwarded audiotapes of abrasive meetings with staffers and outside vendors to senior AOL brass in September.”
A memo reportedly sent by some of her (unnamed) senior staff to AOL HR and executive management reads in part “The general tenor of her behavior is filtering throughout the company. She… makes working within IM [interactive marketing] a nightmare for so many people it really needs to be dealt with…. If we lose the very fine talents of the currently exasperated, it will be a damn shame.”
One wonders if some of the currently exasperated (and presumably abused) were contemplating legal action because they were bedeviled on tape. After all, Brown may have only been in her current position for six months, but she joined the company as a senior sales executive soon after former colleague Jon Miller became head of AOL. Was this (yet another) example of an abusive exec only dealt with when exposure was threatened?
No one knows.
Final words from one staffer: “Let’s face it, this company is an old-boys network. Things will be a lot smoother with the old boys in charge.”