D&D General WotC Founder Peter Adkison On Hasbro's Layoffs

Peter Adkison, who owned Wizards of the Coast until it was sold to Hasbro in 1999, oversaw the relaunch of Dungeons & Dragons with D&D 3rd Edition. Today, he commented on this week's round of Hasbro layoffs, which have ripped through WotC. Adkison left WotC in 2000 and currently runs a production company called Hostile Work Environment.

Like many of you, I'm saddened to learn about the layoffs at Hasbro.

Caveat: I have no idea of what’s happening behind the scenes at WotC. If you’re asking who’s at fault, or to what extent it was or was not justified, that’s outside the scope of my knowledge. This post is about my own reflections.

When I read about the layoffs at Hasbro my immediate feeling was shame. Shame for when I did the same thing, at the same company (WotC, before we sold it to Hasbro).

I have made lots of mistakes, tons of them, more than I can even remember. And while I regret those mistakes, and I’m sad for those hurt, I realize it’s part of learning and it’s part of being human.

But layoffs, when handed poorly, or when they are unnecessary, aren’t just mistakes. They are failings of character. Those times when I had a failure of character, those are the moments that haunt me.

 

[Von Ether]

Investment has been accessible to millions more people as technology and information sharing has become more available.

And it's been rigged from day one that if you are not part of the "club" you are never going to get the same amount of ROI for your investment. Did I ever tell you how much I got off that Facebook IPO? Nothing because it was never open to the actual public to buy.

I'd agree with you more if all the opportunities to invest were even across the board.

It’s not pretty but I guess you get out what you put in.

No, you don't. Unless you are lucky to land with the right team, companies will let you do all the extra, uncompensated work they can get out of you and then let you go. Or if you are a contract worker, keep dangling the promise of permanent employment that never comes.

If we want to laud the bright minds of Wall Street, those make money regardless if stock rises or falls, then evidently they are smart enough to set up the pensioners' lifestyle to make more money for them. I am sure there are more ways to make soften that "blow." I opine the reason it hasn't been done yet is because it's a tougher problem and Wall Street always go for the low hanging fruit first.

As an example, I know the company I work for gets taste for sending internal emails about all the great discounts s for computers, car loans, and stock options.

 

[Von Ether]

The company funds it’s in entire business simply from its own profit? Never took a bank loan, or an overdraft. Never sold shares? Makes you wonder how they got started.

Good for them though. They’re a rare beast. Masters of their own destiny. Imagine what they could have achieved with more resources?

They are also not in a position to be targeted due to their debts being leveraged or taken over by group that will saddle the company with very loan used to do a hostile take over. There's pros and cons to both strategies.

It's not a sexy but slow, steady growth is nothing to be ashamed of.

 

[Von Ether]

The simplest example of this is capital gains. If you have an asset that gains in value, you get a lower tax rate, and you only pay taxes on it when you convert it to cash. You can even borrow against its current value and spend that money without paying taxes on its gain in value.

This is my bugaboo. Capital gain tax is tiny for two reasons. The popular reason is "The stock market is volatile (that gambling thing again) and I could lose my shirt." The unspoken version is the very reason NotAYakk spoke of.

Yet a creative on a 1099 is heavily taxed because living by one's art and from gig to gig is more reliable than the stock market?? Sadly if you lighten up on taxing creatives in our culture, you'd get a lot of oddly wealthy "creatives."

 

[Von Ether]

double post

 

[TheSword]

And it's been rigged from day one that if you are not part of the "club" you are never going to get the same amount of ROI for your investment. Did I ever tell you how much I got off that Facebook IPO? Nothing because it was never open to the actual public to buy.

I'd agree with you more if all the opportunities to invest were even across the board.
No, you don't. Unless you are lucky to land with the right team, companies will let you do all the extra, uncompensated work they can get out of you and then let you go. Or if you are a contract worker, keep dangling the promise of permanent employment that never comes.

If we want to laud the bright minds of Wall Street, those make money regardless if stock rises or falls, then evidently they are smart enough to set up the pensioners' lifestyle to make more money for them. I am sure there are more ways to make soften that "blow." I opine the reason it hasn't been done yet is because it's a tougher problem and Wall Street always go for the low hanging fruit first.

As an example, I know the company I work for gets taste for sending internal emails about all the great discounts s for computers, car loans, and stock options.

I didn’t laud anyone. I don’t think the top 1% of investors that are shorting positions and performing hostile takeovers is representive of the vast majority of shareholders. But instead we get a reductive - anti-capitalist ideology spouted across the boards that just makes me want to go out and buy some shares.

There are many many millions companies that don’t operate the way they are described here. No-one even knows if Hasbro operate that way. We have the viewpoint of some folks that were just let go - which is a pretty touchy situation to be in. So I’ll reserve judgement.

 

[occam]

No. Did you not see me talking about the difference in print ad revenue and online ad revenue?

I did. But your claim was that a "mindset" (that "layoffs are actually considered good management because they increase shareholder wealth") was "killing multiple industries". You're getting cause and effect reversed. Layoffs (shareholder-driven or otherwise) didn't cause the newspaper business to decline; they're a result of the decline. Just as these layoffs didn't somehow retroactively cause the financial damage that Hasbro has been suffering.

 

[Von Ether]

I didn’t laud anyone. I don’t think the top 1% of investors that are shorting positions and performing hostile takeovers is representive of the vast majority of shareholders. But instead we get a reductive - anti-capitalist ideology spouted across the boards that just makes me want to go out and buy some shares.

There are many many millions companies that don’t operate the way they are described here. No-one even knows if Hasbro operate that way. We have the viewpoint of some folks that were just let go - which is a pretty touchy situation to be in. So I’ll reserve judgement.

I'd say less "reductive anti-cap" and more when our current version of it doesn't work, it projected that the little guy was at fault/foolishness, never the investors. And again, I'd be more excited if it was a level playing field for all investors.

And while these 1% may not be representative, their effects are outsized.

 

[Umbran]

No, you don't. Unless you are lucky to land with the right team, companies will let you do all the extra, uncompensated work they can get out of you and then let you go. Or if you are a contract worker, keep dangling the promise of permanent employment that never comes.

One thing we need to be aware of with companies is that the organization overall, and the people you work with, are not the same thing. As in, your manager may entirely desire and intend to convert you from a contracting to permanent role, but if the division head doesn't allocate the funds to the FTE bucket, they can't.

Not that this happened to me at one of the better jobs I've had. No, not at all. :/

 

[NotAYakk]

I didn’t laud anyone. I don’t think the top 1% of investors that are shorting positions and performing hostile takeovers is representive of the vast majority of shareholders. But instead we get a reductive - anti-capitalist ideology spouted across the boards that just makes me want to go out and buy some shares.

There are many many millions companies that don’t operate the way they are described here. No-one even knows if Hasbro operate that way. We have the viewpoint of some folks that were just let go - which is a pretty touchy situation to be in. So I’ll reserve judgement.

80% of all trades are done by institutions, not individual investors making trades. And 50% of stock is owned by under 1% of the population in the USA.

This isn't democracy. In the stock market, dollars vote, not people. The vast majority of trades are done by professional traders, and the vast majority of owned shares are managed by professional traders.

Corporate Governance isn't determined by who owns the stock, it is determined by who controls how the stock votes. And that is institutional professionals for the most part, with a dash of a few hyper-rich. Even if the stock is majority owned by relatively poor (99%) individuals who all agree on one thing, the organizational cost of getting them to coordinate is too high for it to matter.

And the culture of those investors really matters. They both decide who picks the CEO (the board) and they collectively decide what the price of the stock should be. If they have a collective bias, they can make the market behave irrationally; in order to profit from that irrationality, you either need really long-term patience or a huge amount of capital.

Individual investors collectively demonstrated this with Gamestop. They "irrationally" propped up the price, and no set of institutional investors could bring it back down, causing a bunch of professional traders to lose their shirt on options. In the long term, Gamestop might be doomed, but irrational retail investors having fun where able to move its price 10x higher than it "should" be (according to professional shorts) for months.

In any case, the top 1% of investors by any measure own more than half of the stock.

 

[MGibster]

One thing we need to be aware of with companies is that the organization overall, and the people you work with, are not the same thing. As in, your manager may entirely desire and intend to convert you from a contracting to permanent role, but if the division head doesn't allocate the funds to the FTE bucket, they can't.

Not that this happened to me at one of the better jobs I've had. No, not at all. :/

My IT department is loathed to hire someone outright as they would rather keep someone as a contractor for a while and then decide. A few years back, they had an intern, someone I recruited, and when the internship was coming to an end I called the hiring manager and asked, "Do you think you might have an open position Jerry can apply to?" His response was, "I don't know if I've observed Jerry long enough to determine if I'd want to hire him permanently." Jerry had been an intern for three months, and if he couldn't figure it out by then it's because he didn't want to figure it out. Another problem we have is the funds for contractors and employees come from different buckets. Even when they're spending more money on a contractor than they would an employee, because they're dipping into a different bucket everything looks fine on their end.

It's taken about five years for this behavior to change. It's really, really hard to change company culture.