In the interest of my research, a friend who shall remain anonymous passed along an email that had been passed to my friend, from a company CEO to all his managers, asking if anyone was aware of any "blogs" (sic) written by their employees. If so, the quote blog unquote should be brought to the head honcho's attention immediately. One wag from the company in question made the observation that in order to appropriately burn witches, one first needed a source thereof.
Not only does this show tremendous distrust of employees (as opposed to, say, reminding people about the sensitivity of proprietary information), it also goes a long way to promoting distrust of management among employees, as well as fostering cynicism, resistance, and feelings of disempowerment (yeah, yeah, I'm reading from the various empowerment literature at the moment). Does the CEO want engaged, motivated, creative and innovative workers? Apparently not, since such an action runs counter to creating an environment that would foster the best in competitive creativity and innovation. (And if you don't believe me, you can check out Chris Argyris's article from 1998 [HBR 76(3)], Empowerment: The emperor's new clothes?)
[Technorati tags: corporate | blogging | empowerment | chris argyris]
1 comment:
whenever i see this, i always think "go ahead, make your mistakes. there are companies behind you very willing to hire the employees who 'get it' that you're throwing away." it almost makes me glad.
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