The Airportline: Observations

As John Steward continues his hilarious CNBC bashing on the Daily Show, The Airportline throws some shit at some big organisations who clearly have no clue of what they are doing. Enter: the greed of the corporate world.

The financial crisis is depressing stuff. It never ceases to surprise me how many mistakes top corporate people are doing at these times when it comes to their actions and their communication. It's like they have lost touch with everything. The GM people fly corporate jets to Washington to beg for tax payer money, Citibank orders news corporate jets, which they cancel after a media frenzy. The Swedish government forbid banks which they have given aid to give out bonuses, but the AP-funds (the government agency which handle the taxpayers pensions) choose to introduce a bonus system after loosing over 20 billion Swedish kronors last year. Volvo decided to beef up their bonus system for the executives even though they have suffered a dramatic decrease in orders. Eventually also they decided to go back on this due to strong internal and external critique. Either these organisations are employing idiots in their communication departments, who have not been able to explain how bad and detached from society this would look like, or, the management has not cared about what anyone says and was hoping that it would never come out.

Organisations need to understand that communication is not something you do only when things are good, it's not a detached part of the operations, and it's not a PR-tool, it's something that must be everywhere in the organisation. It must guide the actions of its people and the decisions taken must be aligned with what the company stands for. Unless GM, Citibank, the AP-funds and Volvo stands for greed, detachment and a lack of contact with reality they should have realized this. Everything a company does communicates both internally and externally, the apparent lack of understanding regarding this fundamental fact both illustrate the greed of the current system, even among traditionally 'good companies' such as Volvo, as well as an amateurish understanding regarding communication.

Ok, that feels better.