FIR #211: Come On In! The Culture’s Great!

The September installment of The Hobson & Holtz Report includes reports on these stories:

* Apple, Google, and Facebook are all in the news and none of it is good. In fact, some employees are up in arms.

* Gartner’s Emerging Technology Hype Cycle for 2021 is out.

* There are CEOs who won’t touch social media with a 10-foot pole. Then there are those who want nothing more than to post a meme that goes viral.

* Artificial Intelligence’s place in the Gartner Hype Cycle gets its own deep dive.

* People tune out bad news for a variety of reasons. Knowing why can help you overcome obstacles and get your message heard.

* There’s a wide gap between how executives think their companies’ cultures have done during the pandemic and how employees feel about it.

Our FIR recording sessions are now being streamed live, because why not? We already stream it in order to capture a backup recording on YouTube; we’ve just been making these restricted streams. We have decided to make them public so you can watch and comment. Our next recording is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, October 16 at noon ET. You’ll see our pre-recording conversation as well as seeing how the sausage gets made. Watch live here.

(You can watch the video of the making of this episode, though it’s clearly too late to share comments we can read right into the show.)

We are hosting an FIR Communicators Zoom Chat each Thursday during the stay-at-home period at 1 p.m. ET. For credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly or request the credentials in our Facebook group or send an email to [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Neville’s link blog, Outbox, is available, as well.

Host Notes

* Neville and his co-hosts have recorded the 50th episode of the Small Data Forum podcast. It will be uploaded any day now. You’ll be able to find it here.

* Join Shel’s internal communication BEAM (a short-form social audio service); the app is available only for iOS (so far).

Links from This Month’s Episode

* How to Catch Up on Work Emails After Vacation

* Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo

* Facebook Decries Wall Street Journal Reporting on Internal Research

* No More Apologies: Inside Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image

* Facebook Quietly Makes a Big Admission

* Apple, Google Raise Concerns After Removing Russian Political Opposition App From App Stores

* 3 Themes Surface in the 2021 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

* <a href="https://www.zdnet.