Today is the 100th birthday of guitar god Les Paul, whose innovations helped to make Gibson one of the world’s most famous guitar makers. Speaking of that—how is Gibson doing, these days?

In May 2011, Tim Armstrong spent a day at work barefoot to raise awareness about barefoot children, instead of just donating money to barefoot children to buy them shoes. This is the kind of boss Tim Armstrong is: ineffectual, vapid and stupid.

Gibson is not just a great American guitar company; it is also a hard to place to work, run by a CEO notorious for micromanagement and general bad temper. Would you like a day off for the holidays? "NO."

When I graduated college I moved to a new city and wanted a low-stress job that would allow me time to focus on creative projects. I knew people who had worked for American Apparel in the past, both in sales and at the LA headquarters, so I decided to interview for a part-time position.

New bosses often mean change. We here at Gawker would not know this, because all our managers die in their chairs, but we have heard from industry professionals that when there's a transition of a power at a company, the change often augurs new protocols, shifting job descriptions, the ominous possibility of layoffs, and, say, far worse, the loss of telecommuting. The immediate aftermath can be nerve-wracking—especially when the position at stake is CEO.

The memos of CEO Edward Davis: "There will be no more... levity... within the office."

To make the point that he is not the asshole that his Glengarry Glenn Ross-ish email made him sound like ("you bunch of fucking children"), restaurant owner Vadim Ponorovsky called to scream at us.

The St. Petersburg Times - who we last heard from when publishing a report on scary Scientology leader David Miscavige - are at it again. They're moving forward with more reporting on accounts from Scientology defectors, basically waging war.

When times are tough, bad bosses lash out. After John Soden III, a managing director at Thomas Weisel Partners in San Francisco, sent a hectoring email ordering employees into the office, his underlings struck back.

Time to hear more about Peter Arnell! Turns out the pistol-packing 'branding' wizard truly screwed Tropicana with his (momentary) redesign of their juice cartons. He's also traumatized his employees, we hear (again):

You may not know Peter Arnell, but you know his work. The crazy Pepsi-is-the-center-of-the-universe logo design! The awful failure of the new Tropicana design! But what's the man himself like? Massively insecure, of course:

If you're working for a client-service business that's facing serious uncertainty because of the crumbling economy, the last thing you want is a stressed-out CEO. So you'd be grateful for a boss like Kevin Roberts, the CEO of massive global ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who's written a long blog post about his recent refreshing five-day luxury vacation at Elizabeth Hurley's favorite Thai spa. The Classic Cleansing diet and daily massages really helped him get some perspective on his employees' crumbling 401(k) plans:

The employees of Tribune Co. have plenty of reasons to be infuriated today—they're the ones who own the company through their Employee Stock Ownership Plan, not Sam Zell, who put just $315 million of his own money into last year's $8 billion deal that gave him control of the company. But the bankruptcy filing contains one detail that stands out as the unkindest cut of all: Tribune still owes $11.2 million to the former CEO of Times-Mirror (which Tribune bought in 2000) Mark Willes—a man most famous for massive layoffs and an ethical scandal of historic proportions:

Martha Stewart, a lady who made billions of dollars talking about stuff for your house and dinner parties and things like that and also went to jail once, is already feuding with her company's new co-CEO, Wendy Harris Millard. Recall that, just this past summer, Stewart's company pushed out Susan Lyne, the former CEO. Now even Millard (Lyne's replacement) herself acknowledges there's been "healthy debate," which means the shit must have been too bad to even try to deny. The "differences" are attributed to different "personalities." For example, Martha Stewart's personality is that of a tyrant. [NYP via Cityfile]

It's a scenario as disturbing as it is common: Your boss becomes your virtual pal on online social network Facebook. There are defensive tactics you can adopt as soon as you get the initial request. "It's like an unwritten rule that your boss shouldn't add you, or, if he does, than you have the right to slap privacy restrics on his ass," says a young magazine writer who's been "befriended" by several of his superiors. But some employees still wonder how to handle the finer niceties of such a fraught relationship—like, for instance, when your boss sends you a $1 imaginary gift to compensate for a real-world slight or oversight.

Ricki Lake's documentary The Business of Being Born, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival, features footage of the sometimes-pudgy former talk show host birthing it up in her bathtub at home. Fine! But the reason she opted for home birth is that "some New York hospitals' Cesarean-section rate tops 40 percent." Huh? Not according to a 2005 report by NYC public advocate Betsy Gotbaum, whose research puts the city's overall Cesarean rate at a still-high 26.4%, with New York Hospital boasting the city's highest cesarean rate at 37.3%. But that's not the only aspect of Ricki's recent chat with NY mag that we're hoping is a bit of an exaggeration: "'To this day,' says Lake, 'my assistant talks about how she had to clean up my bathtub afterward.'" All together now: ewwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Talk-Show Host Gives Birth [NYM]
[Image via HuffPo]