And all this from a management team that's published how many books on their deep people management insights?'
This bit in particular:
Employees took a different view. In a response to Hansson’s post, one employee noted that the way we treat names — especially foreign names — is deeply connected to social and racial hierarchies. Just a few weeks earlier, eight people had been killed in a shooting spree in Atlanta. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent, and their names had sometimes been mangled in press reports. (The Asian American Journalists Association responded by issuing a pronunciation guide.) The point was that dehumanizing behavior begins with very small actions, and it did not seem like too much to ask Basecamp’s founders to acknowledge that.
Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.
Strikes me as extremely unprofessional, childish, and really just downright embarrassing for him, for Basecamp, for Basecamp's customers who now have to have their own internal discussions about whether or not their vendor ESG standards are being met, and for the employees whose personal reputations are for better or worse now associated with this PR disaster. It's truly astonishing what a series of poor choices were made (assuming, of course, that this particular piece is faithfully telling the story).