The ‘Pity City’ CEO Is Sorry Now
vice.com
vice.com
People are going into the office less and businesses are cutting staff. That means less need for office furniture. That's the structural backdrop this business is in. As CEO it's your job to figure out a business strategy against this backdrop.
If people are not selling product it could be
(a) The sales peoples' fault for sucking at their job/not having enough morale so they need your "rallying cry"
or (probably) (b) your fault for keeping the business making only things that people don't really need right now.
I mean there still are people making and selling buggy whips but it's a heck of a lot more niche of an industry than it was 200 years ago and if you were CEO of a buggy whip manufacturer, ripping into your sales people and saying "Stop living in pity city and get out there and sell more goddamn buggy whips!" isn't going to solve your business problems.
So in addition to all those existing chairs, they can sell a whole new set of chairs to almost everyone. Ca-ching!
This is not a business crisis. If they're not making money hand over fist, it is a horrible management mis-step. And the rank and file are paying for it, not management.
I bought a $1200 Steelcase chair for my home office. Well, "bought." I expensed it back to my employer, who gave me a budget for this.
Perhaps that's where Herman Miller should be focusing -- show companies that reinvesting some of their office furniture budget into employees' home offices has a significant benefit to employee productivity (because employees will actually be able to sit at their desks for a reasonable amount of time).
It's one thought amongst many.
https://uswhip.com/our-products/buggy-whip/
You don't actually need a whip to drive a buggy. You use the reins, and some voice commands. If you use a whip, you're probably bad at it. This whip is specific for racing, where you do need to communicate with more than just the reins. But if you're Amish, or driving tourists around Central Park, you almost certainly do not want a whip.
There are still many other whips for equine sports, and for herding. But buggy whips are perhaps an even narrower niche than you might expect. They were always rare, even when buggies were a practical way to get around.
> I feel terrible that my rallying cry seemed insensitive. What I’d hoped would energize the team to meet a challenge we’ve met many times before landed in a way that I did not intend and for that I am sorry.
In other words, I'm sorry that you all took it the wrong way.
This can be generalised easily into a template for a genuine apology:
I'm sorry for doing X - I was wrong. I'll try to do Y better in future.
Note:
- It acknowleges fault, takes personal responsibility and doesn't blame others
- It doesn't make excuses
- It makes a commitment to improvement with concrete action
Everyone makes mistakes. If you think you don't make mistakes or always shift blame onto others you have a problem.
As a fun parlour game, look at this list and think how many of these attributes CEOs you have worked with share https://www.choosingtherapy.com/signs-of-a-psychopath/
2. You don't belittle the feelings of others using words like "I'm sorry my rallying cry seemed insensitive" instead of "I'm sorry that my rallying cry was insensitive".
3. You attempt to make amends.
Emailed the company to tell them how much I enjoyed the fact that the seat let 'air' pass through it, especially when I sat naked in it.
They deadpan responded with an email that since the chair has moving parts, I should be careful to not get anything stuck in it.
Seems like a much different company these days.
Also, a good CEO who supported the company and the team would turn down their bonus in this situation. To lead you need to be seen to be in the same boat as everyone else, or no one will follow you.
> Bonuses for the 2023 fiscal year have yet to be decided, according to the company.
But if the situation is that the company doesn't know whether it can take care of people, but CEO still wants people to focus on the mission... One gesture would be for the CEO to have the kind of skin in the game that the employees do -- which isn't a huge equity and bonus package, and golden parachute clauses -- but to drop CEO total comp. down to the level of the workers, until the company is sure it can cover responsibilities to its people.
That said, I'm skeptical of clickbait-type calls to pitchforks/canceling. Don't apologize because content consumers are angry in general, and itching to act out like a mob, and other people are itching to incite and monetize that mob.
Instead, please rethink the dynamic with employees, and whether you're keeping up your end of the bargain, and fix that if necessary. If employees believe in you -- even if times are rough, but you're in it with them, and have their backs -- the employees should stand up and tell the random Internet mob to get lost.
(Connection of MillerKnoll to "tech" industry, for anyone who doesn't remember the start of dotcoms: when money started being thrown around wildly... the Herman-Miller Aeron chair was an icon of dotcoms. A dotcom startup would get investment, acquire office space and likely Aeron chairs, write some code, throw a launch party, and hope for an IPO.)
Can Fully still exist as a B-corp longterm? I hope so. My Fully standing desk supports are excellent, working great with an oversized 8’ desktop I grabbed from Home Depot. My office mate and I bought a matching pair for our private office aka post-covid coworking space. Would buy again.
https://officerepublic.news/en/2019/09/knoll-acquires-fully/
When money can't buy the middle class houses, educations and cars, it will lose or will have lost it's value.
Stronger relationships (and collecting capital) are way more important to me than money.
Who would suffer for the exiled upper classes?
For home office, maybe seek out someone local who makes or refurbs antique chairs. Lots of options.
And the local artisans actually care about cultivating a clientele, as opposed to huge furniture execs who are focused on justifying their bonuses by blaming the rest of their company.
This is to be expected. Typical power structures, especially those in corporate America favor the promotion of liars, backstabbers, cheats, and controlling people to leadership positions at a far higher rate than calm, friendly, nice ones.
This goes doubly so now that workers have a bit more power -- remember that outside tech, the job market is still pretty tight for employers, similar to 2021. Honestly, following Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy, anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a leadership position should on no account be allowed to do the job.
If you want to change this, there are few options -- but a good one is to stop rewarding these assholes with your money. I am going to avoid Herman Miller as much as I can in the future for personal or professional furniture.
Can we just get on with it now? ;-)
This is why only a few people are capable of running companies. The reality of profit and loss - aka “math” - is too much for most people.
If it was just math, a lot more people would be better at it. But your own statement shows how there’s much more to it than math: “Pay them and hurt the company, or don’t pay but maybe lose your best employees.”
No math is going to tell you how to decide that situation. And business is full of such decisions, which collectively can make or break a company.
That said, it's far from the most egregious thing I've heard, I'm not going to spend many cycles thinking about it. But I can understand why the employees would be upset by it.
People setting up home offices has been a hugely growing market that apparently has gone uncaptured by MillerKnoll. I wonder who sets the strategy for a company that we could blame for this failing? Whomever they are, they probably shouldn't get a bonus as that would be rewarding failure.
If the company is failing, then leadership should be cutting their losses and engaging in deep layoffs. Downsize production to adjust for lower demand, preserve working capital, focus on efficiency. Upsetting your employees is the worst of both worlds: your employees perform worse, and you don't save any money on compensation while that happens. So you make a deep cut, take the emotional hit, make it clear that it's the only cut you're going to make, and then ramp the company back up.
Uh, not really. The only one emotions we are talking about here are the CEO's, and how they are impacting communication with employees.
> The reality is the company is failing, can’t pay people what you don’t have.
There are good ways to communicate this reality to your employees. If you think what the CEO did is a good way, then I wish you good luck.
How does that math make sense at all?
CEO's get paid when the companies do well and they get paid when they do poorly. They get paid if it completely falls apart. How does that help companies perform better? How does that profit and loss math work here?
Americans...
In civilized parts of the world you cannot fire anyone except for in specific circumstances.
There's always another option: restructuring (the organization, compensation structures, product portfolios and market positioning...), getting in the trenches (understanding that performance fundamentally depends on emotional state)... The "math" tells you where you are, and it can illustrate that you sometimes work within real limitations, but it doesn't define how you should react.
Who are you claiming here is capable of running a company because the reality of profit and loss isn't too much? The person receiving over $3m in bonuses despite the her company "needs to make money and apparently isn't"? It sure seems to me like she's one of those people who "still want bonuses".
What I have encountered, and this is partly because I did a stint in management (and the necessary education that you’ll typically be required to get in Denmark if you’re promoted into management) before I went back to being a programmer as I hated managing people, was that management lives in a different world than employees as well as being an employee themselves. I think this is a video of someone who forgot that there are two worlds, and also someone who maybe forgot (or never learned) about motivational theory, and well, how to communicate with dignity and respect, but at the end of the day, an organisation has goals and CEOs and managers are responsible for reaching those goals with the resources they are given. One or the first things you’ll learn in MBA type studies is that everyone is expendable, it’s only a question of how much it’ll cost to lose them. You can see this as a negative thing, but it can mean a lot of things. In programming it tells a manager to encourage their employees to build code in a manner that’s not too dependent on its authors. We do this by employing various principles for coding standard and documentation because if we don’t, it gets really expensive when someone quits. I personally think it’s a good thing to learn as an employee as well, because it’s healthy to keep a distance from your job and your personality, so that you can better be an employee and also a person and not have that melt too much together so that it gets soul crushing for you when you get fired. Which you probably will, and often not for any reasons you could help.
That being said. I get that this “pity city” was an eureka moment for her, but how hilarious is it that she didn’t consider how it sounded to non managers?
I’ve never met a CEO or any sort of manager they match your description.
A few were assholes, more (managers) were incompetent but none of them were
backstabbers, liars or cheats, because you genuinely can’t lead people if you
are.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/10-ceos-who-went-bo...
CEOs are also extremely charismatic. When a random doofus nerd runs across one in person, they charm the hell out of the nerd and seem like the coolest, nicest person said nerd has ever met. Same goes for politicians. The fact that you're friends with a couple of CEOs basically means nothing at all.
What are you even hoping to achieve with that post? Your experiences may be very different from mine, and that is just fine, but there is no reason to be rude about it.
Your post is basically saying "Hey, all those times in your life that a company screwed you over were actually good, and you were wrong to be unhappy about it", and I wanted to debunk that for you and anyone else who reads what you posted
This is specifically why I mentioned the American corporate system. The cultures are very different. For an example that you might specifically identify, most American corporate managers would consider anything approaching Janteloven extremely woke and socialist.