Ex-CEO Characterizes Corporate Communication as a ‘Fake Bit of Work’

No one is less useful to listen to than an ex-CEO. Every morning’s a Monday, and he’s always the quarterback.

But let’s make a brief exception for Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and ex-CEO of Slack. On a podcast last year that Fortune reported on this week for some reason, Butterfield inadvertently revealed a valuable insight for communicators—not just about how ex-CEOs think, but how some acting CEOs sometimes think. (And their communicators sometimes feed into it.)

Butterfield believes that communicators do what he calls “hyper-realistic worklike activity,” as opposed to “known valuable work,” which is done by engineers and accountants and others directly involved in manufacturing, supply chains, sales and other demonstrably, immediately vital logistical operations of the organization.

Sez Butterfield: “Here’s my grand theory: Hyper-realistic worklike activity goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do. Hyper-realistic worklike activity is superficially identical to work … But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle.”

Butterfield says this fake work crops up at some point after the founding of the organization. “The problem with almost every organization [is] at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it’s going to be valuable,” Butterfield explains. “Everyone’s going to work in the morning like, ‘I have 10 things to do and every single one of them is like something I know how to do, and it’s definitely going to be valuable.’”

But as the company grows, Butterfield laments,

People are calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting, to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides. We are sitting in a conference room, and there’s something being projected up there, and we’re all talking about it, and that’s exactly what work is.

I’ll do it, our board members will do it, every exec will do it. The further you are from having all of the contacts, and all the information, and the decision-making authority, the easier it is to get trapped in that stuff, and people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper-realistic worklike activities, and have no idea that that’s what they’re doing.

Butterfield concluded with an admonishment to leaders, “It’s actually your responsibility to make sure that there’s sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying ‘no’ to things upfront, rather than words like, ‘Hey you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn’t matter.'”

I think I know what Butterfield is talking about here, though he might have spent a little time doing some hyperrealistic work-like activity with a communication pro, who might have helped him be more clear, and who might have asked him a question, like: Do you think when an organization gets large, it inevitably becomes increasingly difficult, and in fact impossible, to assign absolutely certain usefulness to every last activity? And pointing out that digging a hole is a fundamentally different job than running a publicly traded international underground construction company. And that the leader of that company who insists that every minute of his or her day be spent on something that directly affects the top or bottom line would be an insane menace.

Maybe, as a result of such hyperrealistic work-like activity with a hyperrealistic communication professional, Butterfield would come to realize that all he’s demonstrating with his “grand theory” is a magnificent grasp of the obvious—like most ex-CEOs gassing on to everybody else in their Florida condo association, who struggle to drink enough gin and tonics to make it bearable.

But since he’s an ex-CEO, he doesn’t have a communicator in his ear, or anybody else with an attachment to real life.

We can only hope that working CEOs remember that large organizations, like the societies they exist in, require culture-building activities that are too abstract to be quantified, but real, nevertheless. We can also hope that the communicators who work for them have the courage and sense to remind them of same.