Go Ahead Cry at Work

I was a 37-year-old senior vice president in charge of the consumer-products-and-publishing division at Nickelodeon, the children's cable channel, in my office celebrating with a few colleagues the announcement of a huge, groundbreaking deal with Sony to create and market home videos of our hit shows, such as Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy.

The phone rang.

My assistant shouted, "Oh, man — it's Sumner! On Line 1!" Sumner Redstone, that is, then as now the chairman and majority owner of Viacom Inc., the parent company of Nickelodeon. During my three years at the company, Redstone had rarely spoken to me and had never phoned. How generous of him, I thought, to take the time and make the effort to thank me personally. Now that's a good boss. This was it: my moment of glory.

I picked up the phone, anticipating a congratulatory exchange about what a great job my team had done. Instead, Redstone, then nine days shy of 70, started screaming at me. "Do you know what you've done?" he raged. I was absolutely blindsided. I hunched over the telephone and turned away from my colleagues.

In spite of healthy media coverage, including a positive article in the Wall Street Journal, the public announcement of the Sony deal had failed to move Viacom's stock price — and Redstone was livid about it. I could practically几乎feel his spittle唾沫frothing起泡 out of my telephone receiver. I sat there, crushed at being so undervalued for my many months of hard work, mortified to feel tears welling up涌了上来while co-workers were in my office and angry at the injustice of being singled out for abuse. But I couldn't express what I was feeling. I believed that to do so would have been professional suicide. Ninety seconds after I'd picked up the phone, Redstone, without a goodbye, hung up.

The tears that had welled up during the call began spilling out as I tried to process the information. Fearing a total meltdown崩溃, I avoided saying anything about what had just happened, managing, perhaps, to force out an...