Time Inc. CEO Jack Griffin was dismissed after less than six months atop the world’s No. 1 magazine publisher after a furious run-in with General Counsel Maurice Edelson on the 34th floor of Time Inc. headquarters earlier this week, insiders tell The Post.
Edelson was irate and confronted his boss demanding to know why he, Editor-in-Chief John Huey and Chief Financial Officer Howard Averill were excluded from an executive meeting scheduled for next month at the Time Warner Center, these insiders said.
Griffin called the meeting of leaders of the revenue generators such as Chief Revenue Officer Paul Caine and Executive Vice President and Sports Illustrated boss Mark Ford. He felt there was no need for Averill, Huey or Edelson to attend.
However, the three felt slighted by the omission. It was Edelson who took the message to Griffin — which resulted in the confrontation on Wednesday.
One source said that the blow-up was emblematic of the problems Griffin, just months into his leadership at Time, which owns titles such as People, Sports Illustrated and InStyle, had been encountering. The source said the CEO was not communicating to his top executives but was relying more on hand-picked consultants.
A source said the seeds of discontent were planted at a quarterly management meeting back on Jan. 20.
At the meeting, 300 top managers and executives from across the globe were in attendance, and Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, and Griffin were both speakers. Griffin, more a strategist than public speaker, was said to be visibly nervous at the podium.
He introduced most of his top management but nearly forgot to mention two key insiders — Averill and Edelson.
Edelson and Averill, along with Huey, now make up the three-person interim management committee running the company while Bewkes seeks a successor.
Griffin and Edelson could not be reached.
The blow-up, in which Edelson did most of the shouting, appears to have been the final straw. Less than 24 hours later, Griffin was gone.
In the exit memo that went out to Time Inc. employees, Bewkes made clear he had bounced the executive that he had personally recruited only six months earlier to shake things up and set a new course for the digital future.
“Although Jack is an extremely accomplished executive, I concluded that his leadership style and approach did not mesh with Time Inc. and Time Warner,” Bewkes wrote.
Griffin shot back at Bewkes the next morning.
In a statement, he said: “My exit was clearly not about management style or results.”
Many insiders said that Griffin’s management style was brusque and they felt he had a low opinion of many of the executives whom he inherited from the era of his predecessor, Ann Moore.
“I was recruited and hired by Time Warner to lead the business transformation of Time Inc., based on my clear record of success and results in the industry,” Griffin said in his retort to Bewkes. “This continued at Time Inc., with the consistent and documented acclaim of Time Warner’s senior management.”