Other Voices, Other Views

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

Why no articles about how corporations are helping their people through the crisis?

May / June 2009 By Paul B. Brown

Here’s one way not to begin a new column: suggest that the premise that led to its creation is flawed.

So, naturally, that is exactly what I am go­ing to do.

Here’s the background: TCB Review’s very smart editor Matthew Budman had an intriguing thought that led to this column, which will appear here every issue: If the goal of our magazine is to raise questions that readers hadn’t necessarily thought to ask, wouldn’t it be a good idea to gather as many questions as possible? he wondered. You, Brown, are a magazine guy. Why not go through a mess of other magazines on a regular basis and report back on the intriguing stuff they are writing about—topics they are raising that we just don’t have the space to include?

So far, so good. I am, indeed, a magazine guy who has worked at BusinessWeek, Financial World, Forbes, and Inc. and contributed to dozens more. And if the goal of TCB Review is to offer ideas for the world’s business leaders, then scouring magazines for good ideas that readers might have overlooked is certainly worthwhile.

But here we went off the rails. Mat­thew suggested that this first column deal with pensions: Retirement issues in general, really, and how corporations and the government(s) are handling them, or not. An awful lot of people are seeing their retirement incomes and 401(k)s and pensions put in serious and unexpected jeopardy, and no one has a clear idea of how to deal with such an overwhelming problem.

Great first topic.

But here’s the problem: No one seems to be writing about it.

Oh, some are nibbling around the edges. AARP magazine had a brief sidebar as part of its package of stories on dealing with being laid off called “How Safe Is Your Pension?” A Wired manifesto proposed the creation of “an army of citizen-regulators” and urges corporate-reporting requirements “giving everyone access to every piece of data—and making it easy to crunch.” And even Vanity Fair came at the subject, extremely obliquely, in a piece on the bonuses paid to executives of companies receiving bailouts.

To be sure, the personal-finance magazines are all over the nuts and bolts. “You Can Afford to Retire: We Show You How to Rebuild Your Savings,” promised Kiplinger’s; “Rescue Your Retirement: Our 5-Step Plan Will Get You Back on Track,” pledged Money.

But as for what companies are doing to help their employees, you are hard pressed to find anything—even among the trade magazines that you would think would be all over the issue. And the stuff that is there is baffling.

For example, HR Magazine in March had a one-page Q&A with a benefits expert who basically said it was an employee’s own darn fault for losing so much money—he simply didn’t know how to invest. (Silly us. We would have thought that part of an HR department’s role would be to help that employee.)

And then the magazine followed the Q&A with a longish piece on how HR managers should go about picking a 401(k) provider, but the article focused on what those managers should do to make their own lives easier. There was very little about helping employees.

All this is particularly puzzling given that investment companies such as Fidelity have started hosting hundreds of seminars intended to calm nervous investors.

The Sounds of Silence
The lack of coverage is like the great Conan Doyle story in which Sherlock Holmes solves the case by noticing that the household dog didn’t bark during a burglary. Here, the fact that magazines are not writing about corporate efforts to help their employees tells you (surprisingly) that corporations are not doing very much to help their employees.

What a missed opportunity.

If you wanted to show that “our employees really are our greatest asset,” you would be doing everything in your power to reduce their retirement worries.
If you wanted to boost morale, at a time where there is a remarkable amount of gallows humor around the water cooler, you could be bringing in investment experts to tell people how to restructure their personal portfolios.

If you wanted to retain the best employees, who are keeping their résumés updated (waiting for the moment the economy improves to send them out), wouldn’t you be giving them a reason to stay (such as trying to prop up the company’s stock)?
None of this is happening. And the ab­sence of action speaks louder than any cover story in huge type.

What the Dog Was Doing Instead of Barking
So how were most magazines covering the aftermath of the market meltdown? Unfortunately, about the way you would expect. Cover language from a handful of magazines will give you enough flavor:

“Leap of Faith,” said Institutional Investor. “The United States embarks on a massive borrowing program, just as its creditworthiness drops to a record low. Will the bold gamble succeed?”

“The Great Credit Lockdown: An in-depth look at the banking crisis,” CFO promised.

“Trust. We had it. He stole it,” Condé Nast Portfolio wrote under a picture of Bernard Madoff. “Learning to believe again in a post-Madoff world.”

“Billionaire Bust: Who is surviving the crash? Who is getting clobbered?” Forbes asked.

Now, there is nothing wrong with any of this. And certainly the editors of those magazines were looking for a way to play to their core audience. None of those publications devote a lot of space to personal finance, and you wouldn’t expect them to.

But what was so darn disappointing about the coverage was how abstract they all made it all sound. It was if they were covering a foreign war in which the United States had no involvement. There was nary a mention of the impact that last year’s drop of 33.8 percent in the Dow (and declines of 38.5 percent in the S&P 500 and 40.5 percent in the NASDAQ) had on their readers.

Trying to see the big picture and providing perspective are all well and good. But when you are neck high in a swamp surrounded by alligators, it is awfully difficult for most of us to take a deep breath and say, “You know, if we could just drain this thing and get rid of these pesky gators, this would be a heck of a place to put a golf course.”


PAUL B. BROWN Paul B. Brown is author or co-author of more than a dozen business books, including Customers for Life.