One day, a man named Dustin Curtis tried to book an American Airlines flight via the company’s official website, aa.com. A computer programmer and designer, he was horrified by how complicated it was to use the website. Rather than just being pissed off, Curtis published a post on his blog explaining how he would redesign the AA.com site to make it more efficient and user-friendly. The next day, he got an email from a designer at the company. Among other things, the email said:
The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.
However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means.
Curtis printed parts of the letter on his blog, but left the employee’s name and position anonymous. That wasn’t good enough for pissed-off AA executives, who searched their employees’ emails until they found the culprit. The employee was then fired. They did have a good reason – namely, that the employee violated the Non-Disclosure Agreement he had signed promising not to disclose details of the company’s operation – but many believe that firing the employee was an act of spite.
Remember, kids: this is what happens when you tell people the truth about the lame bureaucracy at your job. What can we learn from this? Two things: one, if you’re going to respond to a blogger or customer who has some complaints about your department, do so from your personal email account; and two, don’t fly American.
The first time I had to write a professional work email and sign my boss’ name to it instead of my own, I was totally flummoxed. There was this particular art to that “corporatespeak” voice, and I couldn’t quite get it right. For those of you in similar situations, here are a couple of useful tips:
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