The Superfluous Position

He was an editor. That's how it started. I worked at a small multimedia company that publishes tourism guides. Six months after I started, this editor was given a new role: creative manager of content. No one knew what this job meant--or what he would be required to do. But we all knew he thought he was better than us, more creative than us. His new job, he thought, was to teach us to be more creative.

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Not long after that, we had a meeting so he could introduce something he called the Idea Lab. To him, the Idea Lab was a magical place where you could read magazines and tour books and just get away to do some brainstorming. In reality, it was a cubicle across the hall with a stack of old magazines where you got some serious personal reflection done. In one of his first meetings as the creative manager of content, he used the time to display a flowchart depicting what the Idea Lab was and how to use it. We were stumped. When he instituted a monthly two-hour show-and-tell at a local coffee shop, we made excuses why we couldn't attend.