It was kind of interesting listening to the all hands today, the one that addressed the latest news.
Not necessarily because of what was said, because, frankly, that's company internal information that you can probably find out from other sources. i was more interested in how it was said. Let me explain.
When i joined up, i got stock options. This was the Valley, it was during the first boom and i was working for a dot com, so of course i got stock. Of course, i also got some restrictions about how i could sell those options. Notably, i was under a blackout window that prevented me from doing anything with the stock during a 30 day period around the quarterly announcements. Financial folks would recognize that as the FEC restriction on insider trading.
Why was i under that restriction? Well, partly because the company was small and there were very few secrets kept from employees. We knew exactly what state the company was in because we could overhear the CFO bitching about it a few cubes over. So, naturally, EVERYONE had "inside knowledge". Eventually the company grew to such a point that the executives could actually get a conference room of their very own with a door that stayed shut and not have to worry about everyone on the floor finding out what they were talking about. The blackout period was lifted, and employees like me had to actually work at it to get information about stuff that wasn't talked about at the all-hands.
Time marches on and now the execs have a new challenge.
i'll also add that this is the exact same challenge that every company faces, regardless of whether or not they're located in the lower Bay Area.
See, now is the era of the citizen reporter. It is absolutely trivial for any monkey from a CEO to the guy who just wants his red stapler back to have a blog. They take pictures and post them. They discuss stuff that is of interest. As the folks at HP discovered not so long ago, they talk, regardless of whether or not they should.
Execs (well, the smart ones at least) have now realized that their employees have become the second media.
While they can be fairly glib and say things more casually than they can to the folks with more expensive cameras and microphones, they're still talking to folks that can and probably will talk about it themselves. So the smart ones have learned. They treat all hands as mini-media events, where folks stay "on-message" and deliver "key points". They don't stray from the script and for the love of all that's holy, they don't take questions. (Well, not publicly at least. Privately they're more than open enough because it's easier to size up the person they're talking to, plus if they do it by email, there's a virtual paper trail which is handy for that upcoming termination.)
i can't say it's good or bad, really. As an employee, i kinda miss having that level of implicit trust. As a shareholder, i'm damn happy with the idea that we're not handing out bullets for some moron to shoot at the company or information that our competitors will be happy to read about.
i just fear the day that the all hands are presided over by Tony Snow.
