Bait and Switch

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  He likes this. “It’s good to focus on something like the pharmas. And whoever you’re applying to, it’s good to refer to the ‘pain points’”—meaning what they’re doing wrong that you could fix. “But you’ve got to give them a solution.”

  “I understand the consumer anger,” I say, “but I don’t think the pharmas have ever tried to mobilize the goodwill that’s out there for them. Among women, for example: You have the birth control pill; you have Tamoxifen. They’ve changed our lives. They’ve saved our lives.” Naturally, I’m leaving out the harm they’ve done: the high-estrogen birth control pill, hormone replacement therapy, the Dalkon shield, et cetera.

  “Good,” he says, “so you can suggest a community approach.”

  Ah, that’s the word. Now our food arrives, and I am alarmed to see that the chicken piccata comes with a marinara sauce, which is a sufficient danger to the job hunter that Jeffrey J. Fox’s book even includes a chapter titled “Don’t Order Linguini with Marinara Sauce.” One false move with the fork could be death to the tan suit, so I am condemned to tease my appetite with tiny, meticulously executed bites.

  “But remember,” Ron is telling me, “nothing replaces networking. How are you going to network with the pharmas?” I should, he suggests, start showing up at events and meetings of the PR professional association, mingling, and, in the process, learning where the likely jobs are. Another strategy would be to buy a share of stock in the company I’m interested in and show up at the annual meeting, where anyone can hobnob with the top people “unless you’re a troublemaker.”

  “Mmm.” I have to own a bit of a company to work at it? I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?

  “It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the executive ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.”

  I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”

  When we hit the coffee phase, I remind him again of the promised contact. OK, he says, he can give me one “freebie.” But now comes the serious pitch: if I would like to be introduced to members of his “support group” of actually employed executives, I will have to pay 4 percent of my last year’s salary up front, then 4 percent of whatever salary I land. I realize I can’t pretend to earn a low enough figure to make Ron’s 4 percent affordable because I had already claimed to be making $100,000 a year in order to qualify for the ExecuNet session, so we’re talking at least $4,000. This would buy me endless interview coaching, résumé rewriting, and a chance to eat breakfast every other week with the bigwigs.

  He makes it clear that it is something of an honor even to be invited to spend my money in this way; they don’t take everybody. “A person with an overblown ego, for example, is not going to do too well in the job-search process.” He, Ron, would not have come to lunch with me if he didn’t know that “we have the same values.” I nod emphatically, not sure what those values could be.

  SURE ENOUGH, my freebie arrives by e-mail the next day—a contact at a D.C.-based PR firm called Qorvis.1 I have applied to only a few PR firms until now, both because I have seen few job openings at them and because I would prefer to be embedded in a corporation with some larger, non-PR mission. I fire off a résumé with a cover letter mentioning Ron in the first line. That done, I begin to draft a new cover letter for pharmaceutical companies, advertising my “community approach” to their unfortunate image problems, which I blame of course on overly zealous regulators and reporters.

  There is one last suggestion from Ron to explore: that I become active in the public relations professional society and use it as a means of networking. I had already attempted to follow up on the tip I got at Fuddruckers, and had contacted the Georgia branch of the Public Relations Society of America, but its group for PR folks in transition no longer seemed to be functioning. Ron made a solid case for renewed efforts in this direction: not only do I need to network with actually employed PR people, but it wouldn’t hurt to use my “transition time” to expand my PR skills and hence my résumé.

  At the PRSA web site, which I repair to almost daily for job listings, I comb through upcoming conferences and finally settle on a conveniently timed “professional development seminar” on the theme of “crisis communications management,” which will include what to do when, for example, “the activists attack” or the CEO is indicted. It’s a huge investment—an $800 fee plus travel and two nights in a hotel—and it’s not for just anyone off the street. The application form on the web site demands that I list a current employer, and isn’t satisfied until I finally come up with “Alexander and Associates.” Even if it doesn’t pan out as a source of contacts, the session should be, at the very least, a rare glimpse into the corporate world at its most vulnerable, and a corporate vulnerability can always be translated into a potential job. You have activists storming your headquarters while the CEO is being led off in chains? I can help, or at least I will now find out how to.

  The seminar is held in a hotel in downtown Boston, in yet another windowless meeting room. Outside, it’s a blustery spring day, lit with occasional flashes of sunshine, and I resent being condemned to the tomb-like stillness of artificial air and light. But there’s work to be done. I arrive well before nine to get a head start on the networking, and quickly introduce myself to a half dozen of the thirty or so assembled PR people, asking them each what sort of crises they face in their industries, outside of the obvious tornadoes and terrorist attacks. I meet Lori from Coca-Cola, whose concern is product safety, Roger from Allstate (disgruntled policyholders), two people from a poultry-processing company (avian flu), and several people who work for hospitals (unexplained deaths and neighborhood resistance to territorial expansion). Aha: I had thought of the corporate world as an impenetrable fortress, but it turns out to be under heavy siege.

  At precisely 9:00 A.M. our leader, Jim Lukaszewski, opens the seminar by announcing, “I’ll be driving this bus . . . unless someone decides to topple me”—a curious possibility to implant in us, especially given Jim’s obvious “likability.” He flatters us by declaring us “a group of very senior people” who just need to learn to think “from a different perspective,” which is a “management perspective.” Forget dealing with the media; our challenge is to “get to the table,” where we’ll have the attention of management, and then to communicate with them in a language they can understand, “on the spot” and “in real time.” Once, things took place over the course of days, but now, thanks to e-mail, et cetera, we are talking minutes. When a crisis breaks out, you have a “golden hour” in which to craft your response and sell it to management.

  We start with a video on the cyanide-in-the-Tylenol case, moving from the tragic deaths to their redemption with the introduction of the tamper-proof safety seal. So far so good. I am mightily relieved that there’s nothing being said that I can’t understand—no mysterious jargon or fake PR science—and nothing being recommended that I couldn’t actually do (assuming no ethical hesitancy, that is). Maybe this is the right calling for me. I like my fellow seminar participants, none of whom appears to look down on me for being a “consultant” or exhibits the unbearable upbeatness that Kimberly insisted is a prerequisite for employment. Jim even has a sense of humor, or at least a willingness to insert a wicked little “heh heh” here and there in his spiel.

  I am eager to get onto the juicy things like antiglobalization activists and CEO indictments, but almost all of the first day and mu
ch of the second is devoted to the delicate internal problem of “getting to the table” and attracting the attention of management. This would seem to be pretty far from my own concerns, since I can’t even get in the door, and am unlikely to be allowed anywhere near the table without an apron on and a tray in my hand. But I’d at least like a glimpse into the inner sanctum that I may never penetrate in person—behind the glass walls and the checkpoints, in the “C-suites” where the CEOs, CFOs, COOs, et cetera, make their decisions. Jim, who has advised scores of companies during outbreaks of crisis and appears to be a heavy hitter in the PRSA, may be the perfect guide.

  The most important thing to understand about management, he tells us, is that they are different from you and me—in particular, they are severely “out of touch.” As an example of out-of-touchness, he cites the CEO who asked him (Jim renders this question in a faux snarling voice), “When is this environmental fad going to go away?” And you see, he didn’t get it, Jim says in his own voice, because this “environmental fad” isn’t going away; it’s only getting bigger.

  And why is top management so out of touch? Because they are so isolated and, to tell the truth, idle. “All of you have been on the management floors of your company,” Jim says. “Notice how quiet it is up there? Because no one is doing anything there. Oh, there are a few meetings now and then . . .” We have to understand that the people at the top are lonely people—very lonely. There’s only one CEO, so he or she—Jim is scrupulous in his gender inclusiveness even when it’s hardly necessary, as in the case of CEOs—has no one to talk to, and everyone around him or her is “waiting to see how far they’ll fall.” In fact, the average tenure for a CEO is down to a mere thirty months, Jim claims. Thus the CEO is the last to hear the gossip, except in the case he cites of a CEO who was a smoker and had to pursue his habit on the roof of the building along with his nicotine-oriented underlings.

  All this casts an entirely new light on the CEO, who tends to be portrayed as an overpaid tyrant, but might be better described as one of the mythical kings in James Frazer’s classic book The Golden Bough, who is sacrificed in the spring to fructify the soil. Or the Aztec sacrificial victims who are fattened and coddled for weeks before the ceremonial excision of their hearts.

  Before I can get carried away with sympathy for these doomed and lonely men, though, Jim is outlining how they spend their time: less than 5 percent on decision making, 40 percent on “articulating” those decisions, 40 percent on “teaching, motivating, and coaching,” 20 percent on “repeating and explaining,” 5 percent on “admiration building” (that is, “looking for compliments”), and 1 percent on “reputation building” (it’s not clear whether this is the reputation of the company or of the CEO himself). No, it doesn’t add up to 100 percent, but that’s because CEOs are responsible “24/7.” Jim immediately contradicts this, however, by observing that, any time you really need them, like in a crisis, top management is in Bimini or Barbados.

  At this point Jim is beginning to sound like an antiglobalization activist himself: he’s on the environmentalists’ side; he’s portrayed CEOs as vain, curmudgeonly fellows who spend large chunks of their time basking in Barbados or swanning around looking for compliments. But guess what? We owe them our total loyalty. Our goal in fact is to become their trusted advisers—consiglieri is the word that comes to mind. Sometimes we (PR people) get confused and think we’re working for the media. “How many of you have been journalists?” he asks, and about a fourth of the people in the room raise their hands. Well, forget all that. “Reporters are fundamentally unhappy people.” As PR people, we don’t even have to return their phone calls, he tells us—to a visible shiver of discomfort in the room. Concentrate on solving the crisis, or getting management to solve the crisis, and ignore the media till you’re ready to talk to them.

  It’s the internal culture of the corporation, as seen by Jim, that fascinates me. The picture he paints resembles one of the royal courts of Europe, circa 1600, as described by Castiglione or, closer to our own time, the historian Norbert Elias. We, the PR people, are the courtiers who both despise the king and eagerly press around him, anxious for a moment of royal attention. We must learn to speak in low, quiet tones, always framing our advice “strategically” and never wasting words on anything he already knows. Only if we can insinuate ourselves into his confidence can we hope to save the country—I mean, the company—and of course all the credit will go to him.

  At our group lunch I learn that some of my fellow participants are getting impatient with the endless lecture on dealing with management. They expected something more participatory and hands-on, with a chance to workshop their way through various mock crises. It is odd, in fact, that while Jim stresses the need for brevity in communications with management, he has no such constraint in dealing with us. After all, most of what he’s been telling us is already in the notebook he’s passed out to us, available for reading at our leisure. Maybe, after so many struggles to get to the table, he’s just reveling in this opportunity to get up on it and dance for hours on end.

  I firm up my networking with Lori, learning that Coke endured a major management shake-up for failing to deal promptly with a bacterial-tainting issue in Europe. I have a long talk with the woman who handles PR for the National Forest Service in Montana, that being my home state, about the relative merits of Livingston and Missoula. I chat with Alexandra, who is wearing blue jeans and works for a California company that arranges overseas outsourcing for American firms. “Why should people be angry at you, when these firms are going to outsource anyway?” I ask. “That’s what I’m always saying,” she tells me, looking harried by invisible pursuers.

  I approach Roger from State Farm and ask him to outline for me, as a newcomer to the corporate world, his “typical day.” When it turns out to involve ten hours at his desk, I ask whether the demands decrease as he rises in the hierarchy. For a moment his smile fades; no, with each accomplishment, the expectations only increase. Everyone graciously accepts my card and promises to contact me should any job come to their attention.

  In the afternoon session I have plenty of time to ponder the paradox of Jim, searching for clues as to what is expected of a serious PR professional. He is nice, no doubt about it, even liberal in certain ways. When the subject of unions briefly comes up, and he remarks that they’re “dying,” someone in the group interjects “not fast enough!”—leading Jim to defend the working class. We need to “look at unions with understanding.” “Businesses own everything,” he continues in a Marxist vein. “All the workers own is their contract.” His own father was a blue-collar union member, and “if you want to see democracy in action, go to a union meeting.” At one point, he reveals that four people on the staff of his own PR firm are currently involved—in their private lives, that is—on the community side of various struggles. “Activism is fun,” he confides, “especially when you spend all day being a corporate apologist. Heh heh.”

  But in our professional lives, we are the antiactivists and can never forget it. He gives us the case of a real crisis he successfully managed: A hospital in Philly wanted the city’s permission to place a helipad on its roof. This was, Jim lets us know, completely unnecessary, since there were already four helipads on hospital roofs within a one-mile radius, but a helipad is a “prestige thing” for a hospital. So what did Jim do to counter community opposition to the helipad? He organized a door-to-door pro-helipad campaign. The campaign was successful; the hospital got its helipad and no doubt the opportunity to treat the stress-related disorders occasioned by the heightened noise level.

  Then there is the hypothetical case of community hostility to a big-box store—Wal-Mart comes to mind—in which we are invited to come up with all the good these entities do: create jobs, give consumers choices, pay taxes, et cetera. After these benefits have been listed on the flip chart, he surprises us by announcing that “they’re not worth mentioning,” because everyone knows they’re not true. “So how do yo
u promote the big-box store in the community?” I raise my hand to ask. Jim says, “We’ll get to that,” but we never do. The point, he says, is we have to start by making management aware of how hollow the company’s promises sound. Then, presumably, we can launch our own pro-big-box community-organizing drive.

  At some point in the middle of the second afternoon, I begin to fantasize about hijacking this “bus,” but for purely physical reasons. I have been sitting for more than a day now, not counting the day of air travel getting here, and have just about exhausted my capacity for immobility. The disks in my spinal column are fusing into knots of pure pain; deep vein thrombosis has set into the lower legs; muscles all over my body are liquefying from disuse. Everyone else seems content to be paralyzed, although there are ever more frequent trips to the bathroom or for cell phone use in the corridor, and the Coke gal has been covertly answering e-mail on her BlackBerry. It occurs to me that much of my job search so far has involved sitting in windowless rooms while someone—most commonly a white male in his fifties or sixties—stands at the front testifying, preaching, exhorting, or coaching. Maybe it isn’t the content of the presentation that matters, but the discipline required to maintain the sitting posture and vague look of attentiveness for hours on end. While blue-collar workers invite injury and exhaustion through physical exertion, white-collar workers endure the sometimes equally painful results of immobility. Maybe the whole point of a college education, which is the almost universal requirement for white-collar employment, is that it trains you to sit still and keep your eyes open. At the moment, I’d rather be waitressing.

  The last thing I remember before falling into a narcotized trance that may have been actual sleep is a long personal digression into the history of the seated posture. When did chairs come into common use? Certainly no more than a few thousand years ago, well after our muscular-skeletal structure achieved its modern form. We are designed for running and walking, squatting and lounging, not for sitting upright day after day.