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Bloomberg BusinessweekLifestyle
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/where-have-all-the-secretaries-gone
Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?By Sheelah KolhatkarApril 04, 2013
He may act like he wants a secretary, but most of the time theyre looking for something between amother and a waitress, says office manager Joan Holloway to new recruit Peggy Olson in SeasonOne ofMad Men. The show, which returns to AMC for its sixth season on April 7, revels in theghosts of offices past: drinking on the job, racist jokes, typewriters.Mad Mens Sterling CooperDraper Pryce agency is built around a charmingly retro (if gallingly sexist) division of labor.Secretaries screen calls, arrange meetings, manage calendarsand often make great wivesallowingtheir bosses to create life-changing ad campaigns and go out for boozy client lunches. Tellingly,
everyones desk looks fastidiously neat. Those were the days.
Fifty years later, as a result of changing technology and cost-cutting, assistants are disappearing fromcorporate life, along with their cousins, executive assistants, office managers, and clerks. Theresabsolutely no question that fewer people have secretaries now, says Pat Cook, a corporate recruiterwho places executives at blue chip companies. People at the C level, the chief marketing level, andso on, probably still do have an assistant. But when you get below that level, its free fall. This doesreduce head count, but, she adds, everybody agrees that they could be so much more productive ifthey did have an assistant.
A 2011 article in theHarvard Business Review, The Case for Executive Assistants, points out that
surfing Expedia (EXPE) to book business trips and itemizing expense reports is hardly an efficientuse of a senior executives time. For someone earning close to $1 million a year, an $80,000-a-yearassistant needs to help the boss become only 8 percent more productive for the company to breakeven. When workers see the boss loading paper into the copy machine, the theory goes, a were allin this together spirit is created, writes the articles author, Melba Duncan. But as a managementpractice, the structure rarely makes economic sense. Generally speaking, work should be delegated tothe lowest-cost employee who can do it well.
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Jeff Minton for Bloomberg
Businessweek; Prop styling: Patrick Muller; Wardrobe stylist: Anna Roth Milner
Many assistants do their work very well. Im a people person, so the job fit my personality, saysKeri Crump, who was an executive assistant at Bank of America and Calvin Klein. Id take all of thelittle stuff off of my bosss hands so she could deal with the big stuff. And I enjoyed doing it. TedChilds Jr., a former top executive in IBMs (IBM) human resources department, describes theawkward transition that followed when he lost his assistant and began to share an admin with hisentire team. My assistant used to screen my e-mailI probably got 200 or 300 messages a day.Without that, I had to read them all myself and sort out the garbage from the important people, hesays. I had to set aside time in the evenings to do it, because I had meetings during the day.
Childss situation is now the norm. In Women Laid Off, Workers Sped Up, a paper for the RooseveltInstitute, authors Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal note that women lost 925,000 jobs in office andadministrative support occupations between 2009 and 2011. And they point out that the continuingspeedup within the economy has workers taking on ever-increasing burdens, often without extracompensation. In a 2011 survey by the International Association of Administrative Professionals,52 percent of assistants said they supported three or more people, and they reported a median salary of$45,000. This trend has been going on over the last 20 or so years, says Childs. Theres been asteady change in culture and management practice and a need to reduce costs, he says. A gatekeeperis nice. I dont know if a gatekeeper is affordable.

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In addition to having gainful employment, some of those gatekeepers found fulfillment. I lovedbeing an executive assistant, says Victoria Prestia, who worked at the Sears corporate headquartersbefore getting laid off in 2007. Wed free up our bosss time. Now theyre doing their own travel,their own scheduling, their own spreadsheets. I feel like I really helped my boss with hisproductivity, she says. Assistants reduce office chaos. (Setting aside that notableMad Menincidentinvolving a secretary, a lawn mower, and a severed foot.) A great executive assistant is someonewho can manage the scheduling insanity and keep the wheels turning, says Kim Kelleher, president
of Say Media, an Internet marketing firm. An excellent executive assistant is someone who can doall of those things and get you home on time to see your family, she says. Im thankful every dayfor Melissa Jimenez, my excellent executive assistant.
In industries where assistant jobs often had functioned as apprenticeships, younger workers have seenentryways into careers shut down. Rachel Hooper, now an analytic consultant at Truven HealthAnalytics, started out as a secretary for the Tennessee Department of Health. I used my downtimethere to learn about databases, and when one of my colleagues left for another company, she knew myskills and essentially took me with her, Hooper says. My secretary job allowed me to network andlearn new skills for climbing the ladder.
The assistant-free mentality is especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, where part of the high-tech CEOmachismo entails bragging about flat organizations and self-reliance. This has spawned an onlinecottage industry of experts trying to teach the masses how to better manage their time. A particularlyabsurd entry on the Lifehacker blog, titled How to Turn Your Phone Into a Mind-Reading PersonalAssistant, lists more than a dozen apps and tricks to help stay on top of e-mails, flight delays, and to-do lists. At least one former assistant is trying to remake herself for the new era60-year-old Jo AnnPlante held administrative positions at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island and Citizens Bankand eventually became an office manager for a financial planner. She left her job in 2009 to care forher ailing mother but couldnt find a full-time position when she tried to return to the workforce twoyears later. She recently launched a virtual personal assistant business, Virtual Colleague, out of herhome. My selling point to potential clients is that they dont have to pay benefits, and they dontneed to provide a computer, a desk, and a telephone for someone, says Plante.
A Jan. 4 blog post by Chad Dickerson, the chief executive officer of online retailer Etsy, suggests abacklash against the assistant-purge in corporate America may be imminent. Titled Im Hiring anExecutive Assistant, it included a lively section about the jobs duties. You will keep my calendarin order when sometimes the time slots move so fast it feels more like a video game than a calendar,read one bullet point, along with others such as Organize travel and make sure all aspects of tripswork seamlessly from start to finish and Schedule board and investor meetings amongst some of thebusiest people in the world, then make them seamless technically, logistically, and culinarily. Hisoutgoing assistant, Jen McKaig, piped in, I like to think of it as a bodyguard position, and the bodiesyoure guarding are Chads time and the companys momentum.
Dickerson included one final disclaimer: Earlier in my career, I thought having an executive assistant
was a bit vain, but now I know that most companies would fall apart without them. As Don Draperputs it, Id have my secretary do it, but shes dead.

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Photograph by Jeff Minton forBloomberg Businessweek
Kolhatkaris a features editor and national correspondent forBloomberg Businessweek
. Follow her onTwitter @Sheelahk.
2013 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved. Made in NYC
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