After the Super Bowl, CBS launched a new reality show called Undercover Boss. In the first episode, Larry O’Donnell, the President and COO of Waste Management, pretends to be a rank-and-file employee in order to get a better idea of what the front line employees in his company have to deal with.
On the face of it, it sounds like it would be compelling television — it was that. But it didn’t make me want to work for Waste Management.
Larry O'Donnell, President & COO of Waste Management, as the "Undercover Boss".
While it’s great that Mr. O’Donnell had these intentions, I wonder why he couldn’t just be himself and get the same feedback? Shouldn’t a manager — even a C-level executive — be able to get honest feedback from employees? The best ones do. But when a manager creates an environment where he or she isn’t open to constructive criticism, all they will ever hear from employees is what they want to hear.
One scene early in the show struck me as particularly ironic. When Mr. O’Donnell, who is working undercover as a helper on a garbage truck route, notices a white pick up truck following the garbage truck he is working on, his supervisor tells him that the pickup is being driven by a Waste Management “spy” who is following them to be sure they are staying on their route and keeping on schedule.
In explaining the pick up trucks, Mr. O’Donnell tells the audience that they are driven by route managers. He says, “I don’t want our drivers to feel like they’re being spied upon — because that’s not what this is about.”
Of course, he is saying this when he is in fact, “spying on” his employees.
That said, I think Mr. O’Donnell deserves some credit — he is trying to change his company. The closing scenes where a group of Waste Management front line employees were shown a “reveal” of Mr. O’Donnell’s true identity were certainly well received and I believe showed the genuine affection that Waste Management employees have for Mr. O’Donnell.
But let’s be honest about what this is — a huge advertising and PR win for the companies who participate. For me, the whole thing was a bit too contrived.
Mary McNamara, the television critic for the Los Angeles Times said it better than me:
Now, I’m a sucker for any show that features people doing actual work (chefs, stylists and event planners don’t count) and no doubt these five souls, who come off as a genetic cross of Will Rogers, John Henry and Emma Goldman, are just as extraordinary as they seem. I’m even willing to buy the notion that they have no clue whom O’Donnell is and think they’re being filmed for a documentary about entry-level jobs.
What I’m not willing to buy is that the workers O’Donnell chose to spend time with were not the product of an extensive and exhaustive search of the company’s 45,000 employees for the most TV-ready. The trash picker with the kidney condition? The multi-tasking mom who’s about to lose her house? To which she invites O’Donnell? The sanitation worker so beloved by the families on her route that a mentally challenged woman just happens to have a letter of appreciation in her hand the very day the camera crews arrive?
The marketing and public relations teams at Waste Management are making the most of this opportunity. Not only did they create a special “Undercover Boss” section of the company’s website, (pictured above) they also placed stories in papers around the country, including The Star-Ledger, The Wall Street Journal and The San Jose Mercury-News.
My question for the internal communications and media relations folks out there: if the producers invited your company’s CEO to be an “undercover boss” would you recommend she or he do it?
Tomorrow afternoon, I’ve got an adventure planned. Well, that’s a stretch. Let’s say a distraction.
Geoff Livingston, who’s a communications pro here in D.C., has invited me and Washington Business Journal reporter Jen Conner, to join him in a test drive of the Chevy Volt, GM’s long awaited electric car. Geoff mentioned over lunch the other day that he was asked by GM to blog about the test drive and I asked if I could tag along. (I’m going to film Geoff and Jen on my flip camera as we tool around Washington inhaling that new car smell.)
Geoff’s idea for blogging about his test drive experience was to crowdsource it. Over the last several days, he’s reached out to friends on his blog, Facebook and Twitter to find out what people want to know about the car. Look for Geoff’s take on the Volt (and my flip camerawork) later this week on the Live Earth Blog.
Geoff is one of several bloggers and writers in the D.C. area who’ve been invited to try out the Chevy Volt. I think this is a very smart tactic on GM’s part. The more people they can get to try the car, the more people they will get to buy the car.
Increasingly, consumers want to buy green products, but they don’t want to sacrifice technology or pay more if they do buy green. Put differently, for GM and any U.S. automaker, it’s not enough just to make a green car; to be successful, they have to make a great car which happens to be green.
At Sprint, we took that approach with the launch of the Samsung Reclaim, our signature green cell phone. While another U.S. wireless carrier had introduced a green phone first, to be honest, the critics panned it. We took a different approach and packed as much technology as we could into the phone, plus we substantially discounted it. (The initial sales price was $50.)
We didn’t think that consumers should have to sacrifice wireless technology just because they wanted to use a greener more sustainable cell phone. This turned out to be a great move for us and one which has been embraced by consumers – the Reclaim is one of our best-selling phones.
I’ll let you know what our experience with the Volt is like tomorrow. I’m rooting for this car, but we’ll have to see. (I’m not a GM fan as of late.)
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Update: I was going to write a second post which shared my impressions, but Geoff Livingston did that while I was out of town. Check out his post and the video I shot during our test drive for our collective impressions. In short, the Volt was a pleasant surprise. I am not sure what the car will be priced at, but if it’s priced appropriately — under 30K, I’d be interested.
Earlier this month I had a chance to spend a few days in Las Vegas with a dear friend who was celebrating a birthday. He and his wife wanted a long weekend with no kids and a group of D.C. friends who had dispersed over the years. I went and had a blast. While I’m not much of a gambler, I always enjoy Vegas — mainly because of the fine dining, the nice hotels, and the shows.
If you have a moment the next time you’re in Vegas, wander over and check it out. I found Cesar Pelli’s designs, the Henry Moore sculpture and an ice sculpture called Glacia especially appealing.
From a PR point of view, I sympathize with the PR team at MGM Mirage Corp. who are pitching the complex to architecture critics, art critics, travelmedia and the like — to get reporters to write about a building opening, you have to be doing something important inside the building. (That’s what the real news is — not the architecture or art itself.)
Since gambling, excuse me — gaming — isn’t particularly newsworthy, they have to rely on the strength of the architecture and art to capture the imagination of writers. Fortunately, that’s pretty strong.
The television images from Haiti’s earthquake are haunting me and I suspect everyone else who has seen them. People around the world want to help, and for the moment, right now the best thing to do is to contribute money. Fortunately, social media and the Web make this easier than ever.
If you’re a subscriber to AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Nextel, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile or Sprint, you can donate $10 via text message. All you have to do is click — your donation will show up on next month’s bill. My colleague Crystal Davis, who leads our crisis communications team at Sprint has a great blog post about how the process of mobile giving works. She’s also has the short codes for five major relief efforts.
My friend Sunita Ray, who works in corporate communications for KPMG, pointed out on her Facebook page this morning that if you’re donating to organizations like the Red Cross, you should be sure to check your company’s matching gift program before you press “submit” on that donation website. KPMG matches employee donations dollar for dollar. According to www.matchinggifts.com, ten percent of us work for companies with a matching gift program.
Speaking of Facebook, my friend Andrew Noyes, who works in PR for well, Facebook, pointed out a Facebook resource for disaster relief on his Facebook status this morning. (As an FYI, I’ve never written the word Facebook that many times in one sentence.) Andrew suggested that his friends become fans of Global Relief on Facebook. The page seeks to ”spotlight efforts on Facebook to help respond to disasters around the globe.”
Earlier this morning, President Obama addressed the situation in Haiti and he described what people and governments around the world are doing to help. In his remarks, the President had a special message for the Haitian people which bears repeating. The President said in part:
Finally, I want to speak directly to the people of Haiti. Few in the world have endured the hardships that you have known. Long before this tragedy, daily life itself was often a bitter struggle. And after suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, have we somehow been forsaken?
To the people of Haiti, we say clearly, and with conviction, you will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you. The world stands with you. We know that you are a strong and resilient people. You have endured a history of slavery and struggle, of natural disaster and recovery. And through it all, your spirit has been unbroken and your faith has been unwavering. So today, you must know that help is arriving — much, much more help is on the way.
Washington has way too many fundraising dinners. As a rule I’m pretty choosy about which ones I go to — there’s only so much hotel food and coat check confusion I care to put up with. But this week’s annual Federal Communications Bar Association dinner with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski was actually a lot of fun.
What makes this dinner fun is that the chairman of the FCC gives a speech which pokes fun of the companies the Commission regulates. It’s definitely filled with inside baseball jokes, but if you work in the telecom policy world like I do, you’re guaranteed to laugh. Attendees have dubbed the event, “Telecom Prom”.
As one friend of mine explained it, the dinner is where, “geeks try to be cool and we’re just with each other, so it works.”
Here’s a video I shot of my friend Kim Hart, a reporter with The Hill newspaper, explaining “Telecom Prom”.
I love Thanksgiving and everything about it, except for the travel to get to my family in North Carolina. (Coming back up to Washington today took an extra two hours on I-95 — and I returned on Saturday to avoid the traffic!)
While I was home, I had a chance to interview each member of my family about why we love Thanksgiving so much. I think my cousin, a natural storyteller, captures it the best.
The Wall Street Journal’s Bits Blog has a very useful post on Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, “Crush It”. Vaynerchuk offers five commandments for social networking. I can’t wait to read this.
Here’s how The Wall Street Journal tells it:
Gary V’s Five Commandments of Social Networking
1. Treat it like a cocktail party.
You have to get involved in different conversations. We don’t start selling the minute we meet people. It’s not a coupon outlet. It’s a real opportunity to connect with consumers.
2. Don’t draw lines in the sand.
Way too many business people say Twitter is stupid. Any product like Facebook is something you need to pay attention to in the business world. Some people don’t like to change. Instead, they feel they’re right, and say something is silly. Also, there are people who have vested interests in having these platforms fail because their understudies understand it so much better than they do. They are afraid they’ll be pushed out the door.
3. Humanize yourself or your brand.
It is OK to say, going to a soccer game. Or, having a hot dog. Humanization is quite powerful in this space. To be successful, this is the kind of thing you say 2% of the time.
4. Understand the authenticity.
Each consumer’s voice is dramatically more powerful today. This is word of mouth on steroids. The individual consumer has much more weight with corporate America. Most corporate brands will be wrapping their heads around the power of the individual consumer next year.
5. Interacting with potential clients and becoming part of the community is a real job.
You can’t spend ten minutes a day on this and think the social genie will save you. Most of all, you have to care. And you have to listen. That’s my overall arching thesis on this entire space. People think it’s about talking. What you say is irrelevant. The friend that listens is better than the friend who talks.
I’ve told my story about diving into social media before, but today, I’m adding a new chapter to that story. I’ve started video blogging.
It’s not that our team at Sprint doesn’t have video capabilities — we do. We have an entire fully equipped television studio at our headquarters where I can connect any television reporter via satellite to a colleague for an interview. But as great as the studio resources are, they don’t always meet my needs. Sometimes, I need to quickly shoot a video and I don’t have the budget for a high end production or the need for one. Keep reading →
I’m writing this morning’s post from my hotel room in Charlotte, N.C., a great city where I once lived. I’m here because today, Sprint announced the launch of Sprint 4G in Charlotte and several other North Carolina cities, including Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Lexington and High Point (the Triad) as well as Raleigh, Durham, Cary and Chapel Hill (the Triangle).
I’ll be meeting with reporters and bloggers in North Carolina all this week to personally demonstrate our Sprint 4G air cards, 4G routers and 4G personal hotspots. Keep reading →
Earlier this week I had lunch with a friend who works as contractor to a Federal government agency and he told me an interesting story. Recently, the facility where he works established a new policy where he is no longer allowed to bring his personal laptop into the office. He can keep it in his car or in a locker at the front desk where he works, but he can no longer bring it into his office.
If you’ve never worked for the Federal government, you probably are wondering why someone would want to bring their personal laptop to the office. Well, to check personal email for one thing. At work, for security reasons, he’s not allowed to use his work computer to access his personal email. This particular friends runs a blog in his spare time, so he’d like to be able to manage comments and do a little writing on his lunch break, which most of the time he spend at his desk because of his pressing work load.
I understand the importance of security to the government; it’s a very serious matter. But get this, employees are still allowed to bring in personal cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and other PDAs into the facility. When you think about it, a smart phone really can do just about everything a lap top can, and in some cases, like taking photos and video, it can do things a lap top can’t. Wouldn’t that be more of a security threat?
My friend seemed think so. But he really made me laugh when he shared what he told his management team about the new policy. “If you won’t allow my lap top in your office, I won’t allow your BlackBerry in my home.”
I know he’s joking, but I think he has a point. Do you find because you carry a smartphone or PDA as part of your job that you bring your work home with you? Or do you use your work computer for personal purposes during the workday? My experience is that the younger you are, the more comfortable you are with blurring your personal life with your work life. Or maybe you’re a cell phone refusenik?
As for me, I don’t think I could do my job without a BlackBerry, yet some times I need to turn it off and step away from the unending flow of email, Google alerts, Factiva alerts, Facebook updates and Tweets.
