CEOs and Spaghetti Westerns

As I write, the spread of the Covid-19 virus might be slowing in the US (but the government will probably conclude too soon that the danger is over and reopen things prematurely, causing a second wave.)  I thank my lucky stars every day that I have a job that lends itself to working at home and I’m still employed.  I even feel kinda guilty about it.

Nevertheless, one gets a mite cranky being cooped up, so I’ve decided to write a cranky dis piece.  I’m worried that expressing negativity about anything will result in a karmic boomerang blast back at me. Nonetheless, I’ll be dissing a group that (in my humble opinion) doesn’t get enough dissing: CEOs. Now, Lord knows that there a lot of thing that these folks do that’s annoying, but I’m going for the low-hanging fruit – CEO e-mails (and posts by others about the CEO.)

I wish CEOs would understand that the last thing that we, the peons that work under them want to do is read their lengthy e-mails or posts. I used to work at Engulf and Devour until they spun off our division to More of the Same, Inc. The E&D PR machine was always putting out updates about the great things that the CEO was doing, the conferences she attended, and her “Q and A”s consisting of softball questions from fawning underlings. I don’t know who read these –  I just skipped past ’em on the company Web Site as I searched for information that I really needed.

The More of the Same’s CEO is in his way even worse with his rambling weekly e-mails.  The collective click he hears weekly is the sound of a thousand employees deleting unopened the malarkey he puts out. (He even has a site where he keeps the past malarkey that he put out.)

The 3 types of CEOs

 

Here are a few guidelines, CEOs:

1. Never put out an email longer that a few lines. Don’t hold forth about the symposium you attended, the wise insight you had, or the amusing anecdote about what happened when you were in Europe. We peons don’t care – we’re going to drop it in the bit bucket. (Of course, an uncomfortable corollary might be: Never put out a lengthy blog post about lengthy CEO posts.)
2. The only two things we do care about are
   a.) We’re all getting fat bonuses
   b.) we’re all being sacked.
   Nothing in between remotely interests us.
3. Don’t bother with corporate “jam sessions” or “focus groups”, where you ask for employee feedback unless you’re prepared to actually listen to your employees. I participated in one where the consistent feedback was that we employees lacked fundamental resources to do our jobs – we had to support our product’s interoperability with 3rd party software without having those software products on the premises. The company’s report about the “jam session” bore little resemblance to the actual feedback. Do that only if you want your employees to conclude that you’re disinterested in what’s really going on.
4. Don’t tell us how hard Phil Jones and Sue Smith worked on the Acme deal. We don’t know who they are and we don’t care.  Ditto Acme.
5. OK., this one’s not a CEO thing, but I’ll toss it in: Get rid of the corporate swag page on the company web site (the one hawking T-shirts, duffel bags, coffee mugs and the like.) If you give us a company t-shirt for free we might wear it to paint a wall or mow the lawn, but we’re not about to plunk down good money for stuff with the company logo on it.  We’re offended that you think we would.

Well, there you have it CEOs.  Though I doubt any of you read this blog, you can’t say that no one told you. And by the way, our lack of interest in this material actually has a silver lining – we’re reading the e-mails that we need to read to in order to do our jobs – anything else is nice, but ultimately fluff.

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I had never seen “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” in its entirety until recently, and I must say I enjoyed it.  For no particular reason, this film is 3 hours long.  Its principals display a level of marksmanship that isn’t humanly possible (who could consistently hit a rope with a bullet from a hundred yards away?) and Eli Wallach’s over-the-top performance is fun to watch. Wallach’s “Tuco” continually refers to Clint Eastwood as “Blondie”, though no one in makeup seems to have got around to dyeing Eastwood’s hair.

Sure, it’s violent, but it manages to be entertaining.