Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

One provocative opinion, one urgent fact, one bit of good news

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Provocative opinion: If you have a few minutes to rub together, please read my speech from the RonCon 2010 conference last week, in which I claim that employee communication is as important to democracy as public education (and go about trying to tell employee communicators what to do about it). I'd be happy to get your reaction.

Urgent fact: Friday is the deadline for entering the E2E Communication Awards, for excellence in the communication discipline no democracy can do without. There's a late deadline of April 9, but you have to pay extra and, even worse, you make the awards chairman's life more difficult. So enter this week!

The good news: Entering E2E is so easy you can do it in the time it would have taken you to read my speech.

Disappearing into the Calgary fog ….

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Sometimes it feels like a psychic encounter group—there has been lots of crying, as I predicted—and other times an intimate, moveable Woodstock festival—and rarely a business conference—but RonCon 2010 doesn't translate well to blogging.

As we say in Canada: Sorry boot that. 

(Okay, just a taste.)

Come to RonCon 2011, and join us in this weird, humble and, wild and wonderful Northern heaven.

Only crap organizations use “secret shoppers”

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I'm mad, because somebody whose life-earned craftsmanship I admire—and whether you're a car mechanic or a mob hit man or a cod fishmerman, I admire lifelong craftsmanship over most other things—was spied upon in a kind of "secret shopper" program.

And, by this hired minderbinder with boxes to check and letters to circle, found wanting.

And the thing is, my friend knew it was a secret shopper all along.

How?

Didn't I just tell you this person was a lifelong craftsman?

(Not to mention an all-out hustler and getter of results.)

Yet, my friend's art didn't match the minderbinder's boxes and the letters.

So the score came back, 55/100.

What does that score mean, you ask?

Nothing, of course!

I've always casually loathed the idea of secret shoppers—in general, spying is only slightly more morally cool than torture—but it took until now for me to form the following angry thesis:

If your organization is so shoddily managed that it can't  trust its managers to know whether or not the employees are doing good work … and can't find civilized, honest ways to do intelligent spot-checks … then your organization desperately deserves to be toppled by a competitor who can figure out how to profit from truly skilled human beings.

I realize we live in a country full of such organizations. But just because they're common, doesn't mean they're not crap.

Somebody, tell me I'm wrong about this.