By CAROL MUSYOKA
In Summary
- Businesses may have undergone a period of rapid expansion with the resultant increase in revenue, followed by a plateau or decline in sales due to unforeseen circumstances such as the entry of a competitor
- A typical knee-jerk reaction for such businesses is to cut costs, with labour being the softest target.
- However, a series of retrenchments leads to lowering of staff morale and the unintended consequence is that good staff then start to leave as they are uncertain of the organisation’s future
The law of unintended consequences, often cited
but rarely defined, is that actions of people always have effects that
are unanticipated or unintended.
A good example is found in businesses that have
undergone a period of rapid expansion with the resultant increase in
revenue, followed by a plateau or decline in sales due to unforeseen
circumstances such as the entry of a competitor.
A typical knee-jerk reaction for such businesses
is to cut costs, with labour being the softest target. But a series of
retrenchments leads to lowering of staff morale and the unintended
consequence is that good staff then start to leave as they are uncertain
of the organisation’s future.
Management then starts to provide incentives such
as higher pay to retain talent and the vicious cycle of increased costs
begins to play out again.
A less apparent illustration of unintended
consequences occurred a year ago on December 4, at the most unlikely of
places — the King Edward VII Hospital in London where the Duchess of
Cambridge had been admitted with severe morning sickness.
Two Australian DJs from 2Day FM in Sydney — Mel
Greig and Michael Christian — called the hospital purporting to be
Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth inquiring about the Duchess’ health.
Jacintha Saldhana, the nurse who received the
5:30am call, mistakenly believed the DJs to be genuine and put the call
through to another nurse, who went ahead to give personal details of the
duchess’s condition to the pranksters.
Three days later, Jacintha, a mother of two
teenage children, was found dead in the hospital’s nursing quarters in
an apparent suicide.
While the intended consequences of the
pre-meditated prank had been to entertain and titillate the station’s
listeners, the unintended consequences was the suicide of one of the
pranksters’ victims.
Following the tragic outcome, a media backlash
ensued both in the UK and Australia, resulting in threats and actual
boycotts of business by advertisers on the radio station. This is
ideally where this tragic story should come to an end. But it doesn’t.
Following the suicide debacle, Christian moved to
work at another radio station owned by the same parent company —
Southern Cross Media, this time in Melbourne.
Six months later, he was named the “top jock” by his employer in an internal competition to find the “best in the land”.
According to his employer’s website, it 2was a reward for his role in the company’s community of seasoned and emerging talent.
“From the start I felt like I had something to prove to myself,” Christian said. “That regardless of all that’s happened in the past few months I’m still at the top of my game. So it felt good to see my name at the top of the final leader-board.”
The Independent newspaper in the UK reported that Stephen Conroy, Australian communications minister, criticised the award. He said: “There was some very serious consequences of what was a prank and to be seen to be rewarding people so soon after such an event, I think it is just in bad taste.”
So you would think that it couldn’t get worse than this from a public relations perspective, right? Wrong
Southern Cross Media is clearly not a learning organisation and this was apparent later in the year when the company’s chairman made a less than appropriate statement regarding the suicide debacle.
At the annual shareholders meeting in October, Max Moore-Wilton was answering a shareholder’s question as to whether there was a cultural problem within the organisation following the UK incident and two others involving other DJs who promoted outrageous commentaries live on air.
The chairman’s response was: “In each particular case, we thoroughly investigated them and it comes generally within the context of some of these incidents where a whole series of events come together and in the immortal words of somebody who I forget, S-H-I-T happens.”
According to his employer’s website, it 2was a reward for his role in the company’s community of seasoned and emerging talent.
“From the start I felt like I had something to prove to myself,” Christian said. “That regardless of all that’s happened in the past few months I’m still at the top of my game. So it felt good to see my name at the top of the final leader-board.”
The Independent newspaper in the UK reported that Stephen Conroy, Australian communications minister, criticised the award. He said: “There was some very serious consequences of what was a prank and to be seen to be rewarding people so soon after such an event, I think it is just in bad taste.”
So you would think that it couldn’t get worse than this from a public relations perspective, right? Wrong
Southern Cross Media is clearly not a learning organisation and this was apparent later in the year when the company’s chairman made a less than appropriate statement regarding the suicide debacle.
At the annual shareholders meeting in October, Max Moore-Wilton was answering a shareholder’s question as to whether there was a cultural problem within the organisation following the UK incident and two others involving other DJs who promoted outrageous commentaries live on air.
The chairman’s response was: “In each particular case, we thoroughly investigated them and it comes generally within the context of some of these incidents where a whole series of events come together and in the immortal words of somebody who I forget, S-H-I-T happens.”
I guess it helped that he spelt out the words rather than say them out loud.
The unapologetic chairman was quite obviously
pilloried in the media thereafter, especially since he claimed that the
use of such language was “common everyday parlance” in Australia.
“If you don’t like it, or the media don’t like it, well that’s fine,” was his response to the Australian Associated Press.
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