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Yes, management committee of the corporation--that's about what it is. And it requires an awful lot of homework. So I thought I had to think about it for quite a while. And then I decided--well, I had the management succession situation at Time Inc., I thought, pretty well in hand, and that maybe the wisest thing to do was to distance myself a little bit so as to let my successors learn the trade while I was still around. And I agreed to go on the Corporation.

I had sort of become accustomed to the fact that, when I got on to the Board of Overseers, that was a pretty messed up situation. I couldn't believe it when I got on to the Corporation, to discover that the agenda for the Corporation was slapped together by the relatively few administrators that were around there, and they would just put together stacks of paper, incredible amount of reading, about various problems, mostly of recent date. Things that hadn't been thought through, hadn't been studied, hadn't been considered. And then this was plunked at you on Friday, so that when you got up on Sunday night, you were supposed to be able to be intelligent about this. And then the meeting would start with whatever crisis had occurred practically yesterday.

So I achieved a certain amount of fame at the Corporation when after about a year, I finally said: “I'm sick and tired of being tossed a bowl full of untreated sewage to consider for the next meeting.” At that everybody stopped. At last I got my point across, when I said “untreated sewage.” Which is rather true--you can express a view in ten different ways, and it will have no effect, but