Nelson is much more dangerous than a socialist, he's a realist.

It's just a fact that after being barraged with messages about how important it is to help out the team, juxtaposed with examples of how poorly some teams treats individuals when they no longer suit the team's purposes, motivation of team members can drain away.

That's not something "the boss" (CEO?) wants to hear from their corporate communicators and so it's not something many corporate communicators want to think about.

Nevertheless, it's a real phenomenon.

This is interesting as the quotes you use reflect what many of us are challenged with on a daily basis. Change management, new branding - both internal and external, etc., result in many employees dismissing all. They prefer to put their head down and do their job.

With regards to your question, I admit I don't know much about Nelson, but I think that communicators have to balance both issues.

Susan, I think some--both the particularly unambitious and the ones with an intense relationship with the content of their jobs--but others want to be part of a bigger culture, a bigger purpose.

Some companies--"You are free to move about the country"--provide this for employees. Southwest DOES get employees to care about the financial health of the operation, because they connect it to the meaning of their lives.

If you're going to get employees to care about EBITA, you've first got to show them why they should care about the organization as anything more than a paycheck printer.

And there's the rub...if the "company" doesn't care about my own story (i.e. family life, illness in children that require days off, work stress) then I would be resentful that they want me to care about their corporate story. So the company's that don't care for their employees' financial health, probably need to think long and hard before they want them to get onboard with EBITDAA. I think the days of us loving our employer just because they give us a check are gone.

Don't you think that Southwest is able to get employees to care about the financial health of the company precisely because they have been profitable for so long and don't have the reputation for slashing and burning groups of employees? I suspect that if Southwest started behaving just like other companies and instituted layoffs every year or couple of years, employee's interest in doing all they can for the financial health of the company would start to wane.

This is why the new employees coming into the workforce don't particularly have any predisposition to company loyalty. A fact driven home a couple weeks ago at dinner when my college age daughter was home for the weekend.

Essentially she and her peers thinks our generation was pretty stupid to ever sacrifice for our companies by working late, on weekends, on vacations, etc. (like I did on many occassions while she was growing up) because they watched companies summarily reward that type of loyalty with pink slips. If it was "nothing personal, just business," on the part of companies she reasons, they should understand that it's "nothing personal, just business," that her generation doesn't want to work any more than is expected of them, doesn't plan on staying around, and puts more importantance on their personal lives right now than some nebulous reward sometime in the future.

You know what? I couldn't think of any credible argument to counter....not one that I had any assurance of actually being true.

Impossible to argue her out of her point, yes, Craig. But another sense of a society unraveling, becoming more fractured. If we don't trust our government, don't care about our employers, don't have Walter Cronkite, don't go to church, don't even speak the same languages, don't learn the same myths in school ... what do we all have in common besides a plot of land to live on?

I don't let this sort of thing get me down--it doesn't seem the most pressing problem in the country--but I am not confused about why Lou Dobbs has a following.

And yes, Craig: There is no substitute for winning to make everyone get along.

From the little I've read of Barry Nelson, I've come to believe he's "anti-strategic" because he just doesn't want to give the effort it requires. It's much easier to write about birthdays and bowling scores and other so-called "shared interests," but here's the REAL reality: Our employers expect us communicators to use what we know to help our businesses achieve their goals. Anybody who pines for the days of just writing great stories about interesting people at the expense of bearing down and working out a plan to help employees understand their role in the organization is in for a shock when they find their services are no longer required.

C'mon, Barry. Get over it. Use that creative brain of yours to figure out a way to make people care about the place where they spend at least 8 hours of each day. Help them see how they fit into the bigger picture. Help them solve problems that keep the company from being really successful and making lots of money. That's strategy. Real communicators know how to do it.

I don't think you're being fair, Robert. Barry doesn't argue that companies shouldn't communicate about business imperatives, but rather that they shouldn't do that exclusively, to the detriment of other things. For example, most companies talk about the importance of work/life balance and yet do almost nothing to encourage it. Feature articles on employees who are making their lives work would help others achieve that balance. Same goes for personal health, both mental and physical, or interpersonal skills, like how to deal with a difficult boss.

What Barry advocates is an approach to internal communication that acknowledges employees are human beings who have needs that go beyond understanding the importance of driving productivity or increasing sales.

It's a weird kind of snobbery that looks down at "reporting bowling scores" while at the same time paints management as a bunch of unfeeling, bureaucratic dorks who don't understand how to communicate. Maybe if we injected some humanity and some sense of community values into our internal communication we'd be able to bridge the gap between business leaders and their employees and start building a work environment that nurtures and enriches people's lives rather than the current model, which grinds them up and spits them out.

This is a reminder of why I like to say casually, at cocktail parties, "Well of course I would think that way, because I'm from the Schewchuk school of employee relations."

This is a reminder of why I like to say casually, at cocktail parties, "Well of course I would think that way, because I'm from the Shewchuk school of employee relations."

What you are suggesting, Ron, is actually a strategic approach to communication and not different from what I am trying to advocate. Assuming that work/life balance is in fact a business issue management cares about (and there are many companies where that is true), then of course doing the kinds of stories you suggest would be appropriate and -- yes, as much as Barry might hate to say it -- strategic.

I've grown impatient with the argument that being strategic equals being cold, without heart and soul, and having no concern for employees as humans. In fact, I believe that's where we communicators provide the highest degree of value. We can take issues that are important for the business to survive and thrive -- and which happen to be the issues management cares most about, as they should since they are stewards of the company -- and bring to those issues a real, relevant, human approach to understanding them and doing something about them.

If I have misunderstood what Barry is saying, then perhaps he should reconsider the way he describes the problem. I don't believe it's a problem of being strategic. I believe it's a problem of communicators not always understanding what it means to be strategic.

Substitute "too focused on hard business issues to the detriment of humanistic ones" for "strategic" and maybe we all agree, then. I don't think Barry needs to "get over it" though. He's arguing for positive changes to the way we think about internal communication, and I hope he continues to push us all in that direction.