Hypocrisy

Can Walmart Earn the Girl Scouts’ Good Citizenship Award?

August 14, 2009

You don’t earn a merit badge for Good Citizenship by picking on the Girl Scouts. But what if Wal-mart wanted to? Commenters here and on other blogs that picked up my story that Wal-mart has chosen to compete with the Girl Scouts by knocking off the Girls Scouts’ two most popular cookies have criticized Wal-mart [...]

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Which is preferable, Layoffs or Alternatives to Layoffs?

May 4, 2009

My esteemed colleague and fellow Michigan PhD alum, Aneil Mishra, is a well-known expert on the ‘softer’ organizational affects of downsizing and layoffs: morale, commitment and trust. Writing today about furloughs at GM on his blog Total Trust, Aneil mentions that "In our research on downsizing, we’ve found that across-the-board cost cutting like this (specifically, [...]

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Which is worse: Being “Authentic & Bad” or being “Bad for Being InAuthentic”?

April 30, 2009

Before reading any further, let’s take a poll: How do our results compare to the findings of a more comprehensive annual survey of the reputations of US corporations? "America’s Most Least Reputable Companies" Reputation Institute just released its annual survey that determines the nation’s most respected companies. (The survey is summarized on Forbes.com.) Of the [...]

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The Titanic’s Band: Responsibility at the Rocky Mountain News

March 4, 2009

The Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver, Colorado’s two daily newspapers, closed on Feb 27 after nearly 150 years of operation. While the print edition is completely gone, and the signs were removed from the building just two days after the closing was announced, the Rocky Mountain News online edition is (still) up, running many [...]

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Are Apologists for Layoffs Actually Just Bad Economists?

February 26, 2009

Here’s a post in honor of my friend Ian Ayres, a law & economics scholar who celebrates a big birthday today. Ian is constantly challenging academics of all stripes to stretch their thinking by asking themselves hypothetical questions. His favorite rhetorical tactic always seems to include two words: Why Not? Ian eschews any line of [...]

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$819 Billion to show us that transparency is not enough

February 12, 2009

Earlier today I was mulling over a post by Rachel Happe at The Social Organization, arguing for more transparency about organizational budgets and compensation plans. Rachel asserts that “accounting is really an exercise about setting our priorities and ensuring that we are acting on and accounting for those priorities. ” Thus, Rachel recommends that organizations [...]

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Wearing the Brand: Good idea, bad execution by Thai Highway Police

February 10, 2009

Employees are often asked to wear clothing and accessories that visually reflect how their organization wants others to see it. Anyone who’s seen a Southwest Airlines employee in shorts and a polo shirt, a New York Symphony Orchestra violinist in his tuxedo, or Jennifer Aniston sporting some "flair" has seen employee branding in action, in [...]

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Alternatives to Layoffs: One Truth and Three Lies that keep organizations from trying

December 21, 2008

After weeks of reports of one organization’s layoffs after another (leaving me to wonder who in corporate America still has a secure job) comes a brighter bit of news – some organizations are trying to find alternatives to layoffs to manage the downturn in their economic prospects, according to The New York Times today and [...]

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“What if you could buy social justice?” or Does ‘values shopping’ really make a difference?

December 15, 2008

Can for-profit, for-purpose organizations make a difference, if we patronize them? Thinking about an organization’s authenticity invites us to examine simultaneously what the organization does and how it does it. When we think about organizations being authentic, we assume that organizations have their business purpose — the thing that they’re out there to "do", and [...]

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If Stephen Colbert were the CEO of Zappos: Explaining a layoff to your employees

November 13, 2008

On The Colbert Report , it’s called "The Word".  In Web 2.0, it’s called "transparency ". Historically, it’s called "telling the truth". As I was working on a more serious post about Zappos , I could not push aside my annoyance at the contradiction between the way the Zappos layoff has been discussed in the [...]

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