A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders

you had a choice.’
    That was why we liked Olive.
    ‘As you know, we’ve had a hard year.’ Smiles vanished. ‘Our investors, however, are behind us. Profits, while they have dropped, are carrying us through. We have plans for new markets’ – she looked over at the digital media team, who, I noted unkindly, were sitting with the nerds – ‘and we have some very promising projects in the pipeline.’
    We began to relax, even as we knew that we shouldn’t.If everything was so perfect, why were we there, and who were these people?
    ‘However.’ There it was. ‘However, it has been a hard year. To try and forestall more hard years, we have been looking at our structural organisation.’
    I looked around the room and nearly laughed. Everyone over the age of thirty-five had clenched their teeth. It is impossible to work in publishing for more than five years without the company that employs you undertaking a restructure. It’s one of those things you just live through, like chickenpox. Or maybe something a little more serious, like shingles. It’s not as bad as the Black Death: it only kills a few. But when times are hard, managers decide to reorganise how the company is run, and who reports to whom.
    Normally, within each company, there are a bunch of mini-publishers, called imprints. Timmins & Ross published about half its books with T&R on the spine. For the rest, ten years ago they’d bought out a publisher of craft books that was going bust, and so our craft books were still published under the old name. Then there were our sports books, our literary fiction, our business list – each of them was published under a different imprint. Each imprint had it own editors, its own reporting structures and bosses. Apart from editorial, where an in-depth knowledge of the subject was essential – it doesn’t take a genius to understand that the sports editor shouldn’t acquire books on economics – other departments, like design, marketing and publicity, were pooled. Most companies are organised like this, and departments and reporting lines are, for the most part, a mixture of history, organic development,company takeovers, and changes in structure to give people you wanted to hire a job they were suited for. And then there was that other ingredient, the pragmatic ‘it works better this way’.
    But because it was hard to give one reason why any imprint or department was structured the way it was, it was also the standard jumping-off point for anyone who wanted to ‘fix’ things. If Bob didn’t, or did, report to Accounting, or sales didn’t have oversight of promotional material, all would be well, and we’d make a billion pounds a minute. That was always the standard explanation, and it was the reason, too, that we were clenching our teeth. Another restructure, with the expense, time, energy and upheaval that that entailed, and then in a few months we’d end up just where we’d been before. I’m not being cynical. Before I worked at T&R, after a restructuring at my old company that took months, and cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds, my boss was shocked when I pointed out that the shiny new job he was offering me covered half of what I was already doing, and it came with a higher salary. That was a fun day.
    Except that it hadn’t been, and this wasn’t going to be either. I refocused on Olive. She was introducing the two strangers who were – oh joy – management consultants. They would, she assured us brightly, be working their way through the company over the next few weeks, meeting staff, individually and in groups, to discuss what we did, and come up with new and thrilling ways of doing it in half the time for a tenth of the money.
    A few people stopped pretending, and as Olive painted this rosy image of our gloriously efficient and financiallyprosperous future, sighs could be heard. By the time she’d finished, the gloves were off, and arms were crossing across bodies around the