Simon Says

Ethics is not a game

Remember the kid’s game Simon Says? The idea was to get the players to respond to a command, but only if the command was preceded by the phrase, “Simon Says.” If you goofed you were out. A fun game and a good way for kids to develop disciplined response skills. It is not, however, a game that belongs in business.

According to media reports it appears that Spherion, the temporary staffing company, acted within the law in denying the widow of one of their employees the benefits she –and her late husband– believed she was due. When Thomas Amschwand was dying of cancer he was naturally concerned that the life insurance benefits that he had been paying for were in order. He dotted all the “i’s” and crossed all the “t’s”. At least those he knew about.

But when his widow tried to collect the $426,000 Amschwand believed he had when he died at 30, she discovered that there was a “Simon Says” that nobody had told them about. It seems that Spherion had switched insurance companies while Amschwand was fighting cancer, and for his insurance to be valid, he had to come into the office for at least one day. Sick as he was he would certainly have met that requirement, ridiculous as it appears.

Seven years later his widow’s options were used up when the Supreme Court refused to review the lower courts who had followed the law and denied her claim. Actually there was nothing the courts could do. Spherion had every legal right to do what they did.

Reading their brief code of ethics it becomes clear that they have no understanding of the meaning of the word. It was obviously drawn up by their legal minions who are trained to look for the edge of the law. Doing the right thing never crosses their minds. So far as they are concerned anything you can get away with is OK. While that’s fine in fulfilling their responsibility to provide counsel to even the worst criminal, it has no place in the world of ethics.

It is perfectly legal but totally unconscionable to throw this kind of Simon Says requirement into the last days of a colleague. Adding insult to injury, Spherion gave back the premiums paid prior to his death. My guess is that by the time they paid their legal bills to take this case all the way up to the Supreme Court, Spherion didn’t save much.

But that isn’t all they will pay. Who would want to work for a smarmy company like that? I would lay odds that all of their best people are on the hunt for a job. The cost in productivity and efficiency for a company of their size will be in the tens of millions of dollars. What customer would want to deal with someone who might be looking for a way to rip you off within the law?

Simon Says, ethics pays off on the bottom line. Anybody should jump at that.

BullDog Reporter OPED

From time to time I submit an OPED to the Public Relations Journal, the Bull Dog Reporter . The latest was published June 24.

I Don’t Want A Seat At The Table!

Too often we communications types are the last to get involved in corporate ethics issues. Crisis management too often is a case of too little and way too late. When the wheels are falling off they call us in and expect us to make it go away. Even then we are fed bits and pieces of the mess in some vain hope that keeping us in the dark will keep the lid on the problem.

Some feel that what we need is a seat at the table. That somehow if we are in the room when the flames erupt, we will be better able to put out the fire. In truth that’s not much better than sitting in our cubical tapping out crisis plans or press releases and wondering when the fire alarm will go off.

The hell with a seat at the table. I want “the” seat at the table at the right hand of the CEO as a trusted advisor. I want to be in a position to quietly kill it when a harebrained idea pops out of somebody’s mouth. I want to be the first one the CEO calls when an issue arises. I want to be there and have a voice in the plans and policies. I don’t want the legal types making decisions on anything. If what you can get away with is to be the norm, then all the crisis management in the world won’t help.

Corporate Communications is the canary in the coalmine. We are the ones who need to be in a position to sniff out the first whiff of anything that can damage corporate reputation. Unless we are at the top of the ethics food chain helping to form the policies that guide the organization, we are not going to be able to deal with problems that occur. And in the best of companies problems occur. Sometimes circumstances that we cannot control envelop us. That happened to Jet Blue when an ice storm grounded their planes at JFK. Candor, humility, a great communications team and their reputation for doing the right thing saved them.

Sometimes an employee does something really dumb. That happened to Whole Foods when their CEO stupidly blogged under a pseudonym. Usually, it’s some less responsible individual or group of individuals. If policies and guidelines are clear it’s not hard to show these instances in their true light even when the CEO does something incredibly stupid.

Those who rely on walking the edge of the law or depend on the bottom feeding spin merchants in our discipline eventually get what they deserve. Those who rely on transparency, candor, and a dedication to doing the right thing, build the kind of trust that grows and sustains great organizations. Unfortunately some really good companies still aren’t ready to take that final step and open themselves up to all their publics, all the publics they should be relating to. That’s what Public Relations really means, relating to your publics.

I didn’t plan to write about Tim Russert. While I met this favorite son of his hometown where I have lived for more than four decades, I certainly can’t say that I knew him more than any of those who watched him and read his work.

Nothing gives me an insight missed in the coverage that followed his death. Including the story in the current People Magazine that tells of his wife Maureen’s feeling that she might lose him. As he was leaving her and their son Luke in Italy to return to the United States last week she told People, “I said to him, ‘I want to give you a hug; maybe I’ll never see you again.”’

I don’t envy NBC News President, Steve Capus, who now has to find a replacement for Tim as head of their Washington news operation as well as a moderator of Meet the Press. No one will ever “replace” Tim Russert. I imagine they have a number of people who could step up and take over the DC news bureau.

Meet the Press is another matter. The only player in their stable that seems close to having the skills to follow Tim on Meet the Press is Ann Curry. She is tough, she is fair, and she is willing to do the homework it takes. She could continue as anchor of Dateline NBC, in fact it would enhance her ability to make Dateline an even more significant primetime information source.

I have nothing to add, but what Tim packed into his life following his graduation from high school forty years ago this weekend, merits comparison with some of those who share a place in the world he loved and served. His ability to stay focused and fair never ceased to amaze me.

The major contributing factor in forging Meet the Press into the most influential public policy element in our nation was Russert’s role as an unbiased moderator. He never took sides. That crucial factor is what’s missing in much of today’s “talk” on radio and television.

I am almost hesitant to say that I helped to create this genre. I put one of the first all news and talk radio stations on the air in the 60s. WGR Radio in Buffalo, NY may have been the first to embrace all talk, 24/7. It was not the result of any eureka moment. There were many stations doing talk to some degree and I took ideas from them all and just plunged into the deep end of the pool.

We ran news from 6-9 AM, 12-1 PM, 3-7 PM and every hour. In between we ran three party talk. One hour shows with a moderator, a guest and audience phone calls. Our guests ranged from the mighty to those with practical advice to offer. Our moderators were experienced journalists, and so kept their opinions to themselves. Their role was to keep the in-studio guests and the callers on subject. We did have two party talk in the evening and all night, but our on-air people were there to allow callers to express their views, not to offer theirs.

We had all the major players from every field in our community and many from the state and national scene on the air, as well as practitioners in many areas who offered helpful advice to the public. We even had a sold-out awards dinner in 1965 that honored leading citizens from a banker to Lou Saban coach of the AFL Championship Buffalo Bills.

It was a far cry from the crew of ideologues who dominate much of today’s broadcast scene. Their “knee-jerk” positions on the right or the left that reject any viewpoint but theirs, stifles discussion and overwhelms reason. Sometimes I feel like a lot of villages must be missing their idiots!

It’s this kind of “my-way-or-the-highway” thinking that puts those willing to seek public office between a rock and a hard place in choosing a position. It ignores the fact that elections are not decided by those on either extreme. They are decided by those in the middle, by the moderates. Those willing to view issues with an open mind and vote for the individual who can do the same thing.

So the extremists on one side or the other say they will stay at home if they don’t get a candidate of their liking. These so called “core” party members can stay home if they wish, that’s giving a half vote to the candidate from the other party; the candidate they really don’t want in office. That’s bright.

In almost every election, the winner is the candidate perceived by the voters to be closest to the middle. There is no silent majority, never was. There is an occasional demagogue who commands a following, a Joe McCarthy type. And there are always a good crop of ideologues, who manage to drum up a following.

Make no mistake. I am not joining those who bemoan the state of the media these days. While there are too few Tim Russerts, we have never had more information available to us. We have never had better reporting or more journalists striving to bring us the facts. If anything, we have too much news, we know too much. Many are overwhelmed with what is largely negative news and feel that the world is in a state of decline. 



If one more person bemoans the good old days when management stood behind Edward R. Murrow, I’ll scream. It didn’t happen that way; yes to their great credit they backed him when he took down Joe McCarthy, but not for long. See It Now, the show that derailed McCarthy went off the air soon after that high point. And while Murrow did the occasional news special, he was mostly confined to Person to Person an entertaining —but not news— program that had Murrow visiting famous folks in their homes. He finally resigned to head the United States Information Agency.

You don’t have to take my word for it, watch George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. The 2005 Oscar nominated film documents this pioneering broadcast journalist’s travails. Murrow died in 1965 long after his glory years at just 57 years of age, a year younger than Tim Russert. While Tim Russert ruffled a lot more feathers than Murrow ever did, it is a different age, a better age. 

These are the good old days!
At the height of his career in 1954 Murrow lit a beacon for us; “We will not be driven by fear into an age of un-reason if we dig deep in our history and doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular.” I’m sure Tim Russert would agree; I believe most who truly strive to follow in the footsteps of both of these great journalists would agree.

A new blog, a new element in my life. Hopefully bringing a discipline to my life offering my thoughts with those who choose to share them.