Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

HR jargon: chilly but refreshing

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Heard a new term at a conference session last week by Henkel Consumer Goods CEO Brad Casper. He was talking about strides the company has made in employee retention and he used a term I've never heard before.

He said Henkel had significantly reduced its rate of "regretted turnover."

Of course it makes perfect sense to delineate between overall turnover, some of which is a healthy exodus of malcontents and mopes, and only a percentage of which is truly damaging.

The term is probably old hat in HR circles, but it was a new one on me.

“Undercover Boss”: a despicable show, but what are we going to do about it?

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Have you seen "Undercover Boss," the new reality show where CEOs take off their suits and don coveralls for a week, to find out what really goes on in their companies?

I read some reviews of the first episode, about Waste Management, and Sunday night I saw the second show, about the Hooters restaurant chain.

It's taken me until today to quite believe what I saw.

Let me sum up Sunday's show in case you didn't see: Coby Brooks, the ineffectual son of the charismatic late founder of the Hooters, shaves his cheesy goatee and poses as a new employee in several stores and a sauce factory. During the week, "discovers"—at times, to his genuine surprise—that some people think Hooters is degrading to women, that "Hooters girls" are actually real people with real problems and that employees at the sauce factory don't think much of him, since he hasn't visited the facility since he was in sixth grade.

At several points in the show, Brooks finds himself so newly awash in the meaning and consequence of his job as the CEO of Hooters, that he begins to cry. It turns out that the head of Hooters is no more a hedonistic nihilist than you or me. He wants nothing more than to make his dead daddy proud.

At the end of the show—and this appears to be the formula for the series—Brooks donates $50K to a charity of a manager he liked, gives a fun marketing assignment to two Hooters girls he also liked and sends a stressed-out single-mom store manager into sobs of gratitude and relief by sending her and her children on a two-week expenses-paid vacation.

And then there's "Jimbo," a sociopathic mysogenist manager Brooks should have fired (or shot). We watched this guy force his staff of Hooters girls to compete in what he called "reindeer games" to get off work early. The game we watched, they ate baked beans off a plate with no hands. At the end of the show, Brooks simply orders to apologize to the women and change his management style. Uh-huh.

Even less convincing were the promises Brooks made to change the Hooters culture to make it more attractive to customers and a better workplace for employees.

I've read reviews of Undercover Boss from some communicators, who boldly declare they wouldn't recommend that their client or company participate in it, because good TV doesn't equal good management. And yes, someone should contact the PR people, employee communicators and HR execs at the participating companies and ask them what (in God's name) they were thinking.

But the show does reveal truth:

The CEO is genuinely startled by a lot of what he sees, he is gobsmacked by some basic realities of the company he runs … and rather than become engage in a farcical effort to introduce dignity to the Hooters culture, he will undoubtedly return to his less spiritually rich but more psychologically sustainable world of spread sheets and earnings reports.

And Jimbo, meanwhile, will go on being Jimbo.

Honestly, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

But it seems that I, and others who care about the relationship between employees and management, ought to do something.

Guessers gather at Davos to guess together

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Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay not long before he died in which he called the world's leaders what they are: the "guessers," on whose grand public hunches rest the fate of us all. Aristotle, Ivan the Terrible and Hitler were three of the variously successful guessers from history that Vonnegut named.

But the guessing goes on, wrote Vonnegut, even after the information revolution:

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long—for all of human experience so far—that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

I thought of that essay as I read a Huffington Post piece called "Davos Confidential," written by Eric Schmidt, simultaneously a direct supervisor of the information revolution and the guesser-in-chief at Google.

He's at Davos right now.

He starts out on a somewhat defensive note:

It's easy to sneer at Davos as a place where the rich, powerful and famous come to talk to each other and arrogantly put the world to rights. But there has been little sign of arrogance at recent gatherings. Nor any settled view of how to overcome the challenges our world faces. If there is a global conspiracy underway at Davos, no one has yet let me in on the secret.

Instead Davos mirrors the uncertainty in the world in general. The real story this year was not arrogance but anxiety over how we could channel turbulent global forces in a more positive direction so that everyone gains.

Oh, no. So these days our guess is as good as the guessers'?

Back to Vonnegut, who listed some of the influential guesses we've been laboring under in recent years.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences. 

That's correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

And back to Schmidt, who concludes his essay by talking about the "principles central to Davos," which sound familiar:

Principles such as the benefits of free trade, free societies and free speech and, above all, open collaboration between business people and politicians who recognize that with freedom should come responsibility. Yes, the world has critical challenges, especially in 2010, but I believe that in these Davos values lie our solutions. It's this hope and optimism that will ensure I keep coming back as long as I am invited.

Davos values? Hope? Optimism?

You know what it sounds like?

It sounds like he's guessing.