August 20th, 2024

Digital Identity

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  • Thanx to Jeneane for the link. She did one of Scoble… I get the Elton John look-alikedness, but Stephen King?


    July 16th, 2024

    real george

    George Vezza retoornt in the comments below, and thus one last time will I elevate his epistolary blog-mots to a spot here in the post:

    Frank,

    Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed reply. This is my second blog and I may stress my blog not Nestle’s. As you can tell this is my time (the weekend) and I have done so out of personal interest on knowing more about the blogging world where MY interests were peaked by Robert.

    This is not some corporate plan to sway the blogging world towards Nestle being perceived as a kinder gentler Company. It was not a well scripted PR plan to pull Robert on my side in fact had I known this would be the perception I would have left his name out of it.Since the meeting last week with Robert Nestle has not had time to make a decison on a blogging strategy. This is just me and I hope I am doing the right thing.

    George to Robert…..lets leave Nestle out of this for a moment. My own feelings are that there is a long history of Governments, Religion, Countries, and yes Corporations that have blinded the masses with propaganda and eventually did evil acts. With this history it is good that people like you and the blogging world act as watchdogs to avoid repeating of the past. I certainly don’t believe this is the case at Nestle. If I ever get the feeling that I am wrong then I walk away and return to my home Country and find another Company.

    You know generally when a Company is big they don’t need to save money to risk cutting corners,they pay all licence cost for software, they invest in proper wastewater treatment plants, they become good social citizens.The Companies that take risks don’t last long. In fact many times we are not competitive with small local companies who do not follow local laws and do not draw the attenton of NGOs. The world is to small to play around with saving a few dollars and risking public isolation.

    As you clearly understand Corporations are run by people and many decision making responsibilities are pushed down to the local Country Managers and sometimes they make mistakes. People maked decisions mostly with the right intentions that sometimes backfire. However CEOs are responsible for all decisions that impact the Nestle Brand and often find themselves in situations that require repair.

    The more people you have making decisions the more open you are to mistakes being made. The key point I was trying to make from an inside perspective is that Nestle is not a calculating evil doer. I know most of the key personal at the most senior rank and I see on a daily basis communication and policy being developed with strong intent for social responsibility.

    I noticed there were several blogs on why I did not engage in details and debate issues. The reason for this is simply that I am not blogging to improve PR for Nestle on events around the world. This would take far to long and I am enjoying a quite weekend in July where the weather is hot. I urge you to visit our site and read Nestle in Africa if you want details.

    The Company I work for has been around for over 100 years, anyone that has lived a 100 years would make some mistakes but that does not make them evil, my belief and that is all I have is that Nestle is a great corporate citizen with honestly good intentions.

    With regards to your comments about your co-worker….. (”Right now I have a desk next to a guy who is a superb bureaucrat. The other night he was sweating over a deadline and he’d been working hard for days”).Does he have to be a bureaucrat to work hard and take pride in his work. Maybe he is like many of the hard workers in our society that chooses to do what ever they do well for self satisfaction not simply to collect a paycheck.I believe that you love to blog and spend a great amount of time doing it because you are passionate about this. Be careful some one may give you a shake while you are on the keyboard and tell you to smile while inside you have been smiling the whole time

    Regards,
    George

    Now, having read what I writ, and reading through what George replite, I am constrained by the circumstances and a reputation as an avoider of flames at this late stage in my career to seek literary and epistolary help elsewhen.  Thinking that perhaps my froostration at this lack of communication is centered more in the wicked intentionality of a master marketeer and that flamage would only serve some darker corporate purpose, and wanting trooly madly deeply to continue a reputational lifestyle of troost and attention in which there are no flies on me, nor e’s in my Web 2.0 product branding, I sought help in the texts.  I found this, which nicely speaks my mindt:

    ‘I carn’t not believe this incredible fact of truth about my very body which has not gained fat since mother begat me at childburn. Yea, though I wart through the valet of thy shadowy hut I will feed no norman. What grate qualmsy hath taken me thus into such a fatty hardbuckle.’
    Again Frank looked down at the awful vision which clouded his eyes with fearful weight. ‘Twelve inches more heavy, Lo!, but am I not more fatty than my brother Geoffery whose father Alec came from Kenneth - through Leslies, who begat Arthur, son of Eric, by the house of Ronald and April - keepers of James of Newcastle who ran Madeline at 2-1 by Silver Flower, (10-2) past Wot-ro-Wot at 4/3d a pound ?’
    He journeyed downstairs crestfalled and defective - a great wait on his boulders - not even his wife’s battered face could raise a smile on poor Frank’s head - who as you know had no flies on him. His wife, a former beauty queer, regarded him with a strange but burly look.
    ‘What ails thee, Frank?’, she asked stretching her prune. ‘You look dejected if not informal,’ she addled.
    ‘Tis nothing but wart I have gained but twelve inches more tall heavy than at the very clock of yesterday at this time - am I not the most miserable of men ? Suffer ye not to spake to me or I might thrust you a mortal injury; I must traddle this trial alone.’


    July 15th, 2024

    Corporate Community and Ethical Blindness

    Nestlé seems to be on the offensive regarding their reputation on the web. This discussion page from Wikipedia illustrates a balanced and reasonable approach by corporate PR to keeping their public image clean. Another facet of this campaign emerged this morning in a comment on my post regarding Scoble’s open-faced warmth and the hospitable welcome he gave Nestlé leaders on a recent occasion at Microsoft. George Vezza of Nestlé disagreed with my representation of his firm and shared his disagreement here:

    Frank,

    I am a senior executive at this so called cruel corporation you speak of. I attended the workshop and met Robert Scoble. It was his presentation that has urged me to reach out to the bloggers of the world. Let me say that working at a senior level for 22 years with Nestle gives me a pretty good first hand view of this so called “evil corporation”. Maybe it is you that is naive and not Robert. Do you think that the 270,000 employees are all droids that carry out the evil doings of the CEO. We are raising our children, taking care of our pets and contributing to society like every other human being. We are people just like you that have strong personal values and care about others. We are extremely sensitive to local laws and any employee that knowingly breaks those laws will be terminated. This is the message that comes down from the top. I have been privy to many meetings with the CEO and never witnessed any sign of covert plans or actions that you may find in an “evil corporation”. Why would we do this, our Consumers make a purchase decision every second and they vote with there choice of our brands. Social responsibility is not just good practise but it is critical for good business.

    When Countries are in crisis with Hurricanes, floods, etc. it is Nestle employees (not evil corporations) that are taking decisions to send food and aid. Then because of badpress and easy target we are then accused of trying to sway the poor for profits. There are many situations when we choose not to publically announce our donations because we know that some group will try to twist the gesture in to a corporate profit scheme.

    But why try and change your mind, you seem to be fixated on the non profit NGO articles that exist(3rd party accounts). I am actually writing this blog to support my new friend Robert Scoble who shared 2 hours of his valuable time and is passionate about what he does.

    George Vezza
    Senior Leader
    Nestle

    George signs off as a “Senior Leader,” and I think it is telling that his title is (or quite recently was) also “Vice President, Marketing and Communications, Nestlé Region Caribe.” While it was Robert’s presentation “that has urged [George] to reach out to the bloggers of the world,” I think we can safely assume that it is also a corporate public relations strategy.

    I do think that Robert helped convince the company leadership that they should pay attention to blogs. Good job Robert! And thanks for the follow-through George. By opening up the conversation I think people of conscience on all sides of these issues will make more progress than by sitting in our little bloggy corners talking inward and only to each other about depressing situations. I responded to George in my comment box, but the response was lengthy and I thought to raise the discussion up here to the blog post level in order to keep it alive a little longer and to draw some attention to it. I was raised by a corporate dad, a meat industry guy who found community among his co-workers. We were well provided for, and our friends, dad’s co-workers and their families, were nice people with decent values. I get where George is coming from. Anyway, here’s what I wrote in response to George’s comment reproduced above:

    George, I stand corrected. The corporation of course is NOT cruel. It is mere artifice, a product of paper, forms and agreements. And you are correct that in a few minutes time I did pull together third party accounts of your company’s ethical lapses, rather than returning to source material for documentation. And of course a lot of that source material would come from NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) and non-profit organizations, since there is no profit in struggling against a system that emerged in the 17th century to organize markets and has seen little change since an oligarchy of major shareholders emerged to stabilize that system for their own continuing profit.

    I appreciate your sensitivity to criticism, and I am sure Robert can stand up for himself if he feels like he needs to question my assertions regarding his awareness of your company’s tacit support of slave labor in raw materials markets in the chocolate industry and the thirty year uncorrected history of infant formula marketing in third world markets that is well documented in this Wikipedia article.

    I understand your loyalty and the cloying self-righteousness of your assertion that your community, your friends and co-workers in the corporation, is motivated by positive feelings, by empathy and concern for your fellow man and that you ship foodstuffs to hurricane victims. On behalf of victims of natural disasters everywhere, thanks!

    Your corporate community comprises hundreds of thousands of employees working for a company founded on a market economy that limits the liability of shareholders to corporate assets. Naturally it is management’s responsibility to protect those assets and to break no laws.

    I don’t think that you are evil George, nor are your hundreds of thousands of co-workers. But I think you have been sold a bill of goods regarding ethical responsibility and the way your corporation shades the difference between doing what’s permitted and doing what’s right.

    I’m sure I am naive in some ways. I’m refusing to be a “good German” in this era, trying to remind people that while many good men and women died during World War Two, corporations like Krupps, Mitsubishi, Shell Oil, Nestle, and IG Farben lived on. Of these companies, only Nestle was fortunate enough to be a global enterprise with headquarters in a neutral country. Shell Oil shared that good fortune by being nominally a company that belonged to the “Allies.” But indeed, these companies did business across borders, profited by the need to feed, and arm, and fuel armies on both sides of the conflict. I am sure it is naive of me to think that a principled position for the directors at IG Farben to have taken would have been to deny the German government access to Zyklon B and to refuse to use forced labor.

    But Nestle is not IG Farben, and where Nestle’s business plans and marketing strategies have a negative impact on local populations, the issues are not so easily qualified. There are billions of us on this planet and we need large organizations seeing to the logistics of food and beverage manufacture and supply. The way we are organized in a free market system, Nestle is at the pinnacle in meeting our demands.

    If you can honestly say and support that these demands are not manipulated to the detriment of consumers in the case of the African baby formula market, that your bottled water operations consider the balance of inflow and withdrawal assuring that aquifers are replenished rather than drained, that your company has a positive program to refuse raw materials from slave grown cocoa bean plantations, then I will take it all back and apologize to you and to Robert for mixing him into this and to Nestle staffers and shareholders world-wide for raising an issue that I believe needs public discussion.


    July 12th, 2024

    Naive? You decide…

    Everyone says that Robert is just a prince of a fellow. So when I read his opener, “I just did a speaking gig at Microsoft. Spoke to Nestle executives from around the world. Nice group of folks,” I naturally assumed that he’s had his head buried so far up the ass of technology that he hasn’t heard the news about certain multinational corporations and their cynical and rapacious greed.

    It’s not just about the infant formula and the cash flow issues and the understimulated moms who are left with no alternative to formula feeding and an increasing infant mortality rate. Naturally, this is a story that can’t be lived down and the corporation should be broken up and asset values returned to the shareholders as a lesson regarding multinational corporate ethics. But there’s no international court to adjudicate that, no real hope for social justice. So we watch Nestle and try to curb their monstrous greed wherever we encounter it. And that “nice group of folks” line is bullshit. They, the so-called “nice executives from all over the world” are rapacious, greedy mother-fuckers or they wouldn’t have risen that high in the food chain at one of the most thoughtless and cruel corporations in the world.

    Nestles corporate support of African slave labor in chocolate production should be enough to make any thinking, caring person turn his or her back on the nice-guy corporate execs, or spit on their shoes, or something.

    Our local experience with Nestle/Perrier had to do with their corporate policies around illegal extraction of groundwater. We had to struggle for years to get these jerks to back-off their plans to dry up our aquifers in Wisconsin for their shareholders’ profits. Sadly, they moved on to Michigan and are now doing their best to suck that state dry.


    June 11th, 2024

    But wait, there’s less!

    Reading Scoble’s blog about his departure from MS, I realize how pissy my ho-humming it in the previous post might seem.  Robert’s earnest integrity, his unselfconscious self-absorbtion, his position as avatar of tech bloggers everywhere - all point to a more serious and credible context for this “one man leaves corporate gig for a well funded job with a small company” story.  So for anybody who is heavy into Scobleism as a faith or a political practice, I can only apologize for my small and perhaps demeaning sense of the story.

    As for Liz Lawley, I wish her nothing but the best!


    June 11th, 2024

    From the sublime to the “Gee, really?”

    Jon Husband, co-founder of Qumana, is one of those people who hangs out there in the world of the internecks doing great work and making me feel guilty for not having his energy and focus. A website, an effort of Jon’s that’s not getting enough of my attention, is Thermo[SAT]. A year or so ago David Weinberger made the general comment to all of us that he is not reading our blogs. I knew what he meant, and while of course I was pissed that he wasn’t hanging on my every word, that he wasn’t concerned about my cat or what I had for breakfast, I could dig it. There are scores and scores of blogs by brilliant and creative people making an effort to annotate their own lives online. Who has time for all of them? Besides Scoble, of course. I think my New Year’s resolution (on June 11th this year) will have to be to pay more attention to the Wirearchy blog and Thermo[SAT].

    In the ho-hum department, Robert Scoble’s changing jobs. I took the long way around for this news… Scoble, I’ve heard, is a wonderful guy, but basically his auto-human-aggregator schtick never interested me much so I seldom visit his blog. So I was at Thermo[SAT] for the update on Net Neutrality, not satisfied with what Doc Searls had provided by way of reflection, and I saw that the highly selective Thermo[SAT] “blogliste” contains a link to Terry Heaton, so I clicked through and there was the news about Scoble. Clicking back to get the links for this post, I saw that Jon had already covered it, so okee dokee… Scoble is leaving Redmond and headed for the Bay Area. That’s nice, I guess. The bloggers and vloggers are tootling this news from the rooftops. This shift reminds me of that scene in that movie where the guy says,

    Gozer the Traveller will come in one of the
    pre-chosen forms.  During the rectification
    of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a
    very large and moving Torb.  Then of course
    in the third reconciliation of the last of
    the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new
    form for him, that of a Sloar.  Many Shubs
    and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in
    the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell
    you.

    No offense Robert. Good luck!


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