The Portfolio.com staff has posted a number of comments from American City Business Journals staff members about former chairman Ray Shaw, who died Sunday from a bee sting.
Here are some examples:
Despite his many business achievements, I always thought of Ray as a journalist first. A note from him congratulating our team on some great coverage meant more to me, and to our newsroom, than just about anything else. The fact that he took the time to send those notes speaks volumes about his passion for the work we do and his commitment to all of us.
— Lauren Lawley Head, editor, Pittsburgh Business Times.
Ray Shaw is the type of executive you rarely hear about. He pushed himself and those around him to achieve, improv and innovate. Certainly he wanted ACBJ to grow, but he made it clear that he wanted each person within the company to grow as a professional and as an individual. He showed that success can be achieved with honor, with ideals, with compassion. And he showed that shared success was exponentially more fulfilling than individual honors.
—Brian Kaberline, editor, Kansas City Business Journal
In my 13 years with ACBJ, I’ve always been proud to work for Ray. As an editor, I often pointed out to potential recruits Ray’s background in business journalism, his ethical principles and the way those principles are maintained at our business journal and throughout the company. As he presided over the annual editors’ conferences, there was no doubt that high-quality journalism and breaking news were his top priorities.
–-Dirk DeYoung, editor, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal
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Ray sounds like a great guy -- I only met him once while working at ACBJ and, not to speak ill, he seemed determined to intimidate those of use in the trenches during his visits. It is disappointing to read about how much people loved working for him, and the broad, deep gap that existed between the treatment he gave others and the way he allowed his local publishers to abuse his editors and staff.
It's lovely that Ray made family come first and treated people so well in Charlotte -- many, many ACBJ publishers certainly didn't in their local offices. Ray tolerated one publisher for a dozen years, allowing this bully and coward to threaten the job of anyone who disagreed with him or whom he simply didn't like, cutting corners in all his business dealings, alienating community groups and knowingly trampling ethical boundaries. Ray seemed to allow his local publishers -- mostly ad hustlers -- to run their operations like private kingdoms -- as long as they kept the money flowing.
I would hope his sons build on the considerable accomplishments of their father and extend the kind of humane and respectful working conditions that the headquarters staff in Charlotte enjoyed with Ray to all the front-line workers who actually make the company work.
I would have liked to have known the Ray Shaw I read about here -- and wish he'd modeled more of his organization around his own approach to people.