Informality Archives - understand-culture

Malice in Dallas

On March 20, 1992, at the Dallas Sportatorium, Southwest Airlines settled a dispute over its slogan “Just Plane Smart” with an arm-wrestling match. Southwest’s chief executive, Herb Kelleher, took on Kurt Herwald, the chief executive of Stevens Aviation, which also claimed the slogan. Herwald won. When Kelleher’s early pin was voided, he said: “I didn’t know there were any rules!”

Kelleher also dressed up “as Elvis Presley, a woman, the Easter bunny, a leprechaun and a flight attendant to promote Southwest,” the Dallas Morning News wrote.

Casual Friday

In 1966 the Hawaiian Fashion Guild promoted “Aloha Fridays.” In 1992 the Dockers brand of Levi Strauss & Co. mailed a “Guide To Casual Business Wear” to about 25,000 human resources managers. One of its rules: “Keep wrinkled, stained, or dirty clothing out of the workplace.”

A 1995 survey by Evans Research found that 9 in 10 companies allowed casual dress at least occasionally. In 1992 it had been about two-thirds.

Feared or Loved

In the episode “The Fight” of The Office (NBC, season 2), the regional manager Michael Scott asks himself a question: “Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy: both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

Friendly, Not Friends

Alison Green writes the workplace advice column Ask a Manager. In September 2020 a reader wrote that her boss wanted to be her best friend. Green answered: “Your manager’s job is to judge your work, so you’re inherently on unequal footing.”

In a 2018 podcast episode called “The Friend Boss” she put it more briefly: “there’s a difference between friendly and friends.”

The Vocabulary of First Names

Please, call me Bob. The senior person offers the first name at the first meeting.

Mr. Johnson was my father. A friendly refusal of the title. It means: use my first name.

Hi, I’m Jim, and I run the place. The boss introduces himself by first name and only then by role.

We’re on a first-name basis. The relationship is informal. It does not say who decides.

Associates and Partners

Sam Walton called the people who worked at Walmart associates. In a letter from 1978, Sam Walton wrote: “Our associates make the difference.” He described the company as a partnership in which associates share in the profits.

Starbucks calls its employees partners. In 1991 it launched Bean Stock, which gave stock to every employee, full-time and part-time. The aim was that every person would have “a stake in the success of the company.”

President “Jimmy”

James Earl Carter took the presidential oath as “Jimmy,” not “James.” In December 1977, Hugh Sidey of Time called him “the first President in history to get away with official use of a nickname.” National Park Service historians checked with the White House about which name to use. “Back came the order: Jimmy.”

Carter had campaigned the same way. In Iowa in 1975, before the 1976 caucuses, he would walk up to strangers. The journalist Judy Woodruff recalled that he would “put out his hand and say, hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer from Georgia, former Governor and I’m running for president.”

Sidey also saw a cost. He wrote that Carter’s “seemingly casual, unorthodox approach to the presidency may now be working against him.”

The HP Way

At Hewlett-Packard, the company’s way of working became known as the HP Way. The founders insisted on “first-name informality.” Employees received goals but no fixed method for reaching them. HP’s 1977 objectives described the aim of “allowing the individual great freedom of action in attaining well-defined objectives.”

In 1995 David Packard published a book called The HP Way.

The CEO in a Cubicle

At Intel, the chief executive Andrew Grove worked in a standard cubicle. In January 1995 an article titled “The Education of Andrew Grove” said: “Grove sits in a cubicle precisely to eliminate barriers between chief executive and staff.”

The article added: “When he is around, anybody can stop by and bend his ear, even to tell him he screwed up on a decision.”

The Bullpen

Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City on January 1, 2002. He cleared out the biggest room in City Hall and made it an open office. It was called “the bullpen.” Dozens of aides and managers sat together in it.

In 2019 Bloomberg wrote that at City Hall he sat “right in the middle.” At his own company, he wrote, “I don’t have a private office, no less a corner office.”