The risky business of painting rosy pictures

BP is taking a lot of hits for painting a rosy picture for the public at almost every juncture in the current Gulf of Mexico oil crisis. Time and time again, those rosy pictures have proven to be false.

Why are we surprised or even that angered by this? Isn't this exactly what corporations do -- especially large public ones with lots of shareholders? BP doesn't know how to be open and truthful with the public because it probably has never been frank with its own employees. Bending or concealing the truth can become so common that liars actually convince themselves they are telling the truth.

As worker ants, we have all been in meetings where we were blatantly lied to, allegedly for some greater good for the company, I guess. Except in the work environment, it's not called lying. It's called "being positive" or being a "team player." Openness and skepticism are often seen as threats instead of assets by those at the top. In some businesses, like journalism, skepticism should be a prerequisite for landing a job because that's how important stories get uncovered. In other business, skeptics and red-flag raisers can save lives. A culture of honesty without penalty can prevent disasters of all kinds, and, oh by the way, improve employee morale. Generally, people want to feel that they work for honest and communicative bosses.

Unfortunately, telling the truth isn't always a good way to keep your job. Even when we're given permission to speak up in the workplace, to identify and repair certain wrongs, how many folks will actually stand up and weigh in? Not many. Why? Because we've all seen what happens to people who appear to be going against the grain, even when the grain is obviously wrong or unethical.

I understand why people are angry at image-minded BP for allegedly lying. Yet, the lack of public transparency is part of the corporate culture because that's what the norm is inside the four walls of many massive public companies like BP. It's what we now accept in exchange for receiving a paycheck or a big dividend or getting mortgage that we eventually discover we can't afford. Heck, car dealerships teach their sales people how to lie and no one is demanding they be charged with crimes. Let's not even get into politicians and their chronic lying.

The unwillingness of consumers and company insiders to demand the truth during all business transactions, no matter how routine, is why lies are so entrenched in our culture these days. It's why BP keeps painting rosy pictures without fear of accountability when they are proven wrong. It's why folks inside of Toyota remained quiet when certain corners were being cut. We've simply lost our right to be constructively skeptical or to tell the truth 100 percent of the time. Companies want to control everything, how business internally and externally is spun. And in doing so, they only create a more toxic, mistrustful environment.

Until lying goes back to being seen as unacceptable behavior it will be difficult to get the truth out of companies like BP, especially in crisis situations with so much on the line. Lying and the mainstream acceptance of lies, even white lies, are distorting how we conduct business, how we resolve problems and even how we interact with each other. We talk in code and smile in the face of looming disasters so that stock prices remain high.

Taking cover under lies or trying to manipulate the mood of shareholders, employees or customers with rosy pictures might work some of the time, but eventually the lies catch up, sometimes in catastrophic ways. Sometimes too late to right the ship.

Short-lived job growth slows to a crawl in May

Today's news of 431,000 jobs being added in May is deceiving because 411,000 of those jobs were with the government's Census Bureau. The private sector added only about 20,000 new jobs -- a whopping 200,000 fewer than expected -- meaning we are a long way off from any real economic recovery. The two-tenths of percentage point drop in the unemployment rate is also deceptive. What it really means is that people have given up searching for work and/or have exhausted their unemployment benefits and are no longer being counted as jobless. This is a dismal predicament for millions of Americans. Read more.

In some ways, we're all responsible for this

CNN is reporting tonight that BP is spending $50 million on an advertising campaign to smooth things over with the American public. Whether that's accurate or not, I am beyond words to describe this company -- an oil giant that seems more worried about its image than the profound job at hand or the damage already done. Note to BP: Your reputation is ruined forever. In fact, it will probably worsen as all the facts come to light about the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Save yourself the money or, better yet, put it to good use and save some birds and marine life from your oil. Open up some rescue and rehabilitation centers.

The latest computer models are showing the potential for the oil to make its way up the Atlantic Coast and head well out into the ocean. Some say it's not out of the question that the oil could reach Europe, where BP is headquartered.

This is becoming the story of the century. We can bounce back from hurricanes and even wars. But we can't live without water. What's incredible is that we've done this to ourselves. It didn't take an asteroid strike or a bunch of terrorists with nuclear bombs to threaten life as we know it. All it took was a culture (and government) that allows sketchy companies like BP to operate freely, a dose of greed and a thirst for more and more energy. We turn a blind eye to all sorts of bad behavior when we are benefiting from it. And this is the result. We want big SUVs powered by relatively cheap gas. We leave lights and televisions on when we're not in the room. We don't speak up when we see our employers dangerously cutting corners. We don't demand enough from our elected officials or ourselves.

We are, in some ways, all to blame for this disaster.

Read more about BP's problematic CEO, Tony Hayward.

Can a woman be too attactive for the workplace?

There is a story circulating about a woman who has filed a lawsuit against Citigroup for allegedly firing her because she dressed provocatively at work.

Debrahlee Lorenzana, 33, claims she was canned for being "too attractive." The Hispanic mother of one claims she dresses the way she does for cultural reasons and is unaware of any complaints from customers about her clothing. The company, however, claims her clothing is a "distraction." (Insert your own wise-crack here).

I have written about dress codes and external appearances and the role they play in our society. But in my earlier post, I was referring to the more common prejudices against people who might not be considered all that attractive or presentable in their work attire.

So now we have a former employee who says she lost her bank job in New York because she is, in essence, too hot for the office. I worked in Manhattan for a couple of years and can say that professional clothing there is on a whole different level than most other cities, so it will be interesting to see how this case plays out. Read more.

One news story that needs to go away

I wasn't going to do this. I didn't want to be part of the madness. But the insanity of the coverage of the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James breakup is just too much for me not to comment.

Why does anyone outside of their families and friends care about this couple? Their split should have been a brief in the newspaper, a mention at the end of some celebrity-oriented show, a blurb on the Yahoo news home page. That's it.

But here we are, several weeks into the breakup and now we learn that Bullock is going to make an appearance at The MTV Movie Awards on June 6 in Los Angeles. Oh, my God! Stop the presses. Get those CNN reporters out of Louisiana and send them to Hollywood.

I've had it with this story. Not one more minute of any legitimate journalist's time should be spent on it. Unless the mediocre-at-best actress sets herself on fire at the awards or the biker-turned-drama queen figures out a way to stop the oil leak in the gulf, I don't want to hear or read another word about them, their marriage, their childhood traumas or anything else. In fact, I am getting ready to burn my West Coast Choppers t-shirt when I am done with this post.

Lighter news is sometimes a necessary evil in a celebrity-obsessed society such as ours. Media companies need to stay in business. I get it. But the breakup of these two morons doesn't even rise to the level of the Gore separation. Get off of it already.

While on the subject of media coverage, I am glad to see newsman Anderson Cooper of CNN doing a good job on the oil story each night at 10 p.m. ET. While some other major media have pulled back a bit, CNN seems to be intensifying its coverage of the environmental disaster. This is literally a story that gets worse by the day and deserves smart coverage, which Cooper seems to be providing.

The oil spill story, not the Bullock-James ordeal, is one that needs to remain above the fold for many weeks, if not months to come. It's a story that impacts us all in ways we might not have ever seen, while the divorce of two celebrities means relatively nothing.

Endings come in many forms

I have been thinking about endings lately.

Dennis Hopper died over the weekend. Being that the actor was 20 years older than me, I can't really call him a contemporary of mine. But he was one of the first cool guys I saw on the silver screen at an impressionable age. He was Peter Fonda's sidekick in Easy Rider. He was more rebellious than Fonda. More anti-establishment, in my opinion, both in the movies and in real life. He didn't have the Fonda lineage and was more self-made. Through all his troubles, there was something authentic about Hopper, just as there is something authentic about Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and the reborn Mickey Rourke. Authenticity can often get you in trouble, but at least it's honest.

There have been a few celebrity deaths in recent days, including Ali-Ollie Woodson, the one-time lead singer of The Temptations. Woodson was 58, a bit closer to my age. He died of cancer, the same disease that took my father in his mid 50s. Whenever I hear of someone dying of cancer at midlife, I cringe just a bit.

Gary Coleman, who I didn't really care much for as a performer, also passed away in recent days. He was 42. Chris Haney, a journalist and co-creator of Trivial Pursuit, died at 59 on Monday. His game always made me feel intellectually inferior.

I suspect some bigger names will be moving on soon -- actors, musicians, politicians, cultural icons who did have some influence in my life, at least more so than Hopper, Woodson, Haney and Coleman.

Today we are made aware of another ending. The end of the Al and Tipper Gore marriage after 40 years. Here they are early in their lives, when everything was in front of them -- presidential campaigns, environmental causes and so forth. Don't we all have photos like this stuffed in a forgotten box? Apparently, the couple grew apart. One has to wonder how that happens after four decades. Yet, it's not exactly a rarity because we all change so much over a lifetime. Most just grow apart much sooner.

A former colleague of mine just ended what he calls the "best year of his life." He quit his job last year and did a lot of the things he couldn't do while working. He traveled for pleasure, started a blog, spent more time with his wife, took walks, reconnected with simple but important stuff. He took a huge risk in giving up a well-paying job at the height of the recession. He's about my age. It's been ironic that his year off from work as been the best year of his life while mine has been one of the worst. Of course, my year off hasn't been a voluntary one. We all like to have some say about important things in our lives, like when to end our careers. It kind of changes how you view things when someone or something makes important decisions for you.

People in the Gulf of Mexico are talking about the end. The end of a way of life. With about a third of the gulf now closed to fishing because of the BP oil spill, lives are being permanently altered and some marine creatures are facing a dreadful conclusion.

People often talk about life being a series of changes. But in my view, life is more about endings. The end of a career, friendships, hobbies, health, etc., that steer those changes. Those losses are sometimes substituted with new things (good and bad), but more often than not, endings are just that -- the end.

A long way to go before hitting bottom

Well, a quick scan of the news shows that nothing much has changed in the four days since my last post. The oil is still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The Senate turned its back on jobless Americans again by going into recess without freeing up funding for emergency unemployment benefits. Guess they needed to get out of town for the holiday weekend and couldn't be bothered. Hewlett-Packard's announcement today that it is laying off 9,000 employees is further evidence that the unemployment crisis is not getting better.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell was on the radio this morning talking to ultra-conservative host Laura Ingraham -- one of the most grating voices in the media. Seems the Republican governor is joining other conservatives in their newly found concerns related to the the environmental destruction in the Gulf of Mexico. This is a man who still wants off-shore drilling along the Virginia coast. Yup, just can't wait to start scarring the Atlantic so that the state can bring in a few bucks.

McDonnell needs to start paying more attention to obtaining jobs now for the state -- jobs that don't involve living in a rig 50 miles off Virginia Beach and endangering one's life for a paycheck that is barely above minimum wage.

McDonnell, like Ingraham and others on the far right, isn't going to pass up an opportunity to blast President Obama for his handling of the oil spill. So if it means they temporarily need to act like tree-hugging liberals to score some political points, then that's what they'll do.

It's a farce.

I have lived on this planet for 52 years and never once heard a right-winger speak eloquently about the environment, nature or the need to protect the planet. Now they want us to believe they are concerned about the gulf region? They want us to believe they would have forced BP to have this resolved by now? C'mon. The right wing is pro big oil, pro big business, pro big everything. To portray themselves as guardians of the land and seas is comical. BP would be under less pressure to fix the damn leak if Rush Limbaugh clones were in power.

It's not even 11 a.m. and I am pretty exhausted from what I am reading and hearing in the news today. The hypocrisy alone is at an epidemic level and is part of the reason why the news hasn't improved over the holiday weekend. A quick glance at the help-wanted ads tells me that job openings are drying up again. Tensions with one of our closest allies, Israel, are increasing. The list goes on.

So rather than rant about it all, I am going to take a step back and just accept that things are probably going to get a lot worse in every regard before they get better. My gut is telling me we have got a long way to go before we truly hit bottom -- perhaps years.