In the June issue of Speechwriter's Newsletter, I rerun a column from 22 years ago that could have been written today. SN founder Larry Ragan wrote about bogus surveys conducted by companies anxious to get publicity by commissioning surveys. Larry wrote:
A friend used to refer to himself as his company's manager of the bureau of social research.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Oh, on Thursdays I write news releases based on responses to questionnaires I sent out three weeks earlier."
I used to see his stuff quoted regularly in those snippets on The Wall Street Journal's front page.
Has anything changed since 1983 in this regard? I'd argue that only more of these surveys come out these days預nd that their newsworthiness is even more suspect than it used to be.
"Executive Survey: What Makes a Great CEO," bellowed an e-mail press release that hit my inbox Monday. The subhead said, "Surprise, It's Not Ethics according to Survey Conducted by TheLadders.com."
Now, what do you suppose TheLadders.com folks葉hey are headhunters for six-figure execs洋ean by, "Surprise, It's Not Ethics"?
I think they mean to give us the impression that they are edgy and irreverent.
But they don't back it up with any expressed point of view. They certainly don't express the view that ethics should be the single defining characteristic of a great CEO.
In fact, they don't express any view at all; their most startling statistic is one showing that "leadership" is the most popular central CEO trait, with ill-defined traits like "ethics," "strategy," "accountability," "management," "creativity" and "industry expertise" all trailing far behind.
Well, sure. Leadership. Hard to argue with it. But what does it mean? Does it mean more than mere charisma? And can't leadership also mean ethics, strategy, accountability, management, creativity and industry expertise?
Of course, like 98 percent of these company- or industry-sponsored surveys, the thing falls apart under a two-minute-long gaze.
The question is, how should we feel about such serial duping attempts? Larry said it well enough during the first Reagan administration:
Does anybody care? Probably not. We grind the stuff out, nudging the truth here, stretching it there, exaggerating the speck of reality to a mountain of falsehood. To some, that's the way of business: the huckster's phony smile, the pitchman's smirk, the advertiser's technique of "conveying the lie instead of telling it," to quote Fielding.
We should occasionally remind ourselves that communication is a moral undertaking. It is only human beings who can lie. We should try to do so as seldom as possible.
