Sure enough, Google through the press, and there it is, a Business Week Q&A with Wang, headlined "Acer Chief Promises No Gateway Layoffs," in which Wang offers plenty of CEO-execuspeak but no promise:
[BusinessWeek] Is laying off U.S.-based workers at Gateway one way to achieve those synergies?
[Wang] People in Gateway started to think how many employees will be laid off. That's not a priority. We want to keep the business. The synergies calculated don't include laying off people. They're mainly from back-end synergies, especially for procurement of key components and possibly synergies from logistics and services. The priority is to create synergy and maintain the business. We don't want to destroy the business or scale down the business. People at Gateway should look at Acer as supporting their strength to make the business turn around [Bruce Einhorn, "Acer Chief Promises No Gateway Layoffs," BusinessWeek.com, 2007.10.29].
The Sioux City Journal reported that gobbledegook as a no-layoffs promise; having read the headlines but not the original quote from Wang, so did I. Oops. As Hanna points out on SDPB, we sometimes hear what we want to hear. And certainly the folks in North Sioux City wanted to believe that, after years of a good jobs and a good relationship with the company, the new boss's complicated words could be taken as a signal that their jobs were safe.
The moral of this story: never believe your job is safe... and never take anything a corporate CEO says as a promise.
The Acer executive must have learned something from George Bush. Put two things together in ways that seem to mean one thing without ever specifically saying something like "X equals Y".
ReplyDeleteHow many times did Bush, Inc. mention Iraq and terrorism, WTC and 9-11 in the same speeches and then claim they never actually tied them together even if something like 70% of the US population thought they had said that Iran and World Trade Center terrorism were linked.