Oct 19 2018
Fake News | Becky Morgan | Target Online
“Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite were our rocks. Now the Internet funnels so many opinions and sources that it is difficult to know who and what to trust. More fundamentally, it has become difficult to agree on the facts. Your company is likely steeped in fake news too. It may be coming from the leadership team, from informal leaders, or from external influences. The confusing part is that those same groups can be the source of factual news. Who should people believe? It’s extremely hard to be ‘aligned’ or ‘operationally excellent’ or ‘world class’ if we can’t even agree on the basics.”
Source Target Online
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Becky is saying that communications inside a business organization are full of lies and she proposes remedies that are changes in individual behaviors: don’t make things up, facilitate open discussions, listen actively, build discussion skills, etc. But why do people lie at work?
Contents
Management mendacity persists through generations
Most don’t like to but find that they must in order to earn promotions or even keep their jobs. In The Project Game, we examined how managers rate project leaders as too timid unless they plan for the shortest task durations that don’t violate the laws of physics. To get or keep their assignment, the leaders make these claims, miss deadlines, and work desperately hard to finish. By surviving in this game, they secure promotions and carry on the same practices with the next generation. They may prefer to follow Becky’s recommendations but they can’t.
Truth-telling must start from the top
You cannot create a culture of truth-telling bottom-up. As long as managers pass over the truth-tellers, they perpetuate the rule of the best liars. This pattern can only be broken by top managers with the courage to offer “nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Their forthrightness then percolates through the ranks.
#ManagementCommunications, #FakeNews
October 19, 2018 @ 11:42 am
The rules of fake-news/propaganda from the evil master.
“There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted. Our target must always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth is unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”
“If you tell the same lie enough times, people will believe it; and the bigger the lie, the better.”
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points & repeat them over and over.”
“The rank & file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple & repetitious.”
“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”
“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.”
This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.
Joseph Gobbles.