Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger RIP (Marketing Lessons From My Bosses, Part 6)

One of my old bosses died on Sat­ur­day. He was world-famous, and had thou­sands of employ­ees. When I worked for him (for over five years) I was surely one of the least of those employ­ees. He was a man who con­sorted with Pres­i­dents, and yet he often gave me his time and attention.

His name was Arthur Ochs (“Punch”) Sulzberger and he was the pub­lisher of The New York Times. He was also the Chair­man of the The New York Times Com­pany, which is where I worked from 1980 to 1986.

The Times Com­pany owned a whole bunch of prop­er­ties, mostly because of Punch Sulzberger’s vision. They owned 6–7 TV sta­tions, the clas­si­cal radio sta­tion WQXR, Golf Digest mag­a­zine, and another dozen (more?) regional news­pa­pers, mostly in the south.

I was a reporter, then an edi­tor, then the pub­lisher (!) of one of those news­pa­pers, the small­est and the newest, The Golden Gate Eagle, near Naples, Florida.

I went to quar­terly publisher’s meet­ings at the Ritz-Carlton in the Buck­head sec­tion of Atlanta. It was a series of eye-opening lessons in busi­ness for a then-32-year-old with a back­ground in jour­nal­ism. I got my “MBA” right there. I won’t try to recount all that I learned, but I do want to say that Punch Sulzberger was always kind to me and always — astound­ingly — inter­ested in me. I was at a cross­roads. Was I going to con­tinue in jour­nal­ism with ambi­tions of being a reporter or edi­tor at The New York Times? Or was I going to con­tinue as a pub­lisher and devote myself to busi­ness? Punch (I feel very odd call­ing him that. I want to say Mr. Sulzberger, because that’s how I thought of him, but he always insisted I call him Punch) did not try to push me one way or the other. He flew me to New York to inter­view for the news side. The then-managing edi­tor seemed bemused. He rec­og­nized my abil­i­ties as a gen­eral assign­ment reporter, a police beat reporter, but told me “We haven’t hired any­one around here in years that wasn’t a rocket sci­en­tist (lit­er­ally) or didn’t have a PhD in eco­nom­ics or wasn’t a spe­cial­ist of some kind.”

I chose the busi­ness side (as I think Punch had hoped) and started on the path that brought me to where I am today, as a business-owner. Punch was always inter­ested in me and what I was doing, was always sup­port­ive of the youngest mem­ber of his man­age­ment team. He was a great man with a com­mon touch, and I have never forgotten.

Which brings me to the mar­ket­ing les­son (and busi­ness les­son) that I learned from him.

On the day he left my office, with me newly installed as a pub­lisher in the The New York Times Com­pany fam­ily of pub­li­ca­tions, he left a piece of paper on my desk with big block let­ters on it — no note, no sig­na­ture. It said:

REVENUES — DRIVE

PEOPLE — TAKE CARE OF

Two imper­a­tives I try to fol­low to this day.