Our good buddies at Columbia Sussex, who still maintain toeholds in the Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe markets, continue to make friends in time-honored fashion. For instance, with dicta like:
“Fire the old lady in sales.” (A more detailed version of the story is here.)
Yup, sounds like the ColSux we know and love. No matter how outstanding Charlotte Thomas‘ performance was, she committed the unspeakable crimes of earning a living wage and, worse still, being old. Now, it’s a well-established fact that ColSux owner and CEO William J. Yung III is no spring chicken himself. I wonder how he’d feel if the bankers who underwrote his multibillion-dollar buying spree in 2006 said, “Fire the old duffer in the executive suite”?
Companies that fire talented people — like a woman of a certain age who doubled sales — just to save a few grand on the bottom line and have some more-nubile faces around the office deserve to fail. And, with that kind of thinking, they inevitably will.
(If nothing else, this saga will give one a renewed appreciation of why Faust, given the choice of sundry temptations, chose to be young again. Bill Yung probably had his name on a “cut sheet.”)
