Well, that was fun! You can guess what I rolled:
"I want to wrap up with just one more point, and it comes from the heart. We say that we value each and every one of our employees, but that simply cannot be true. I mean, here I am, getting an award, out of the hundreds of executives who eligible, and that out of how many tens of thousands of employees? Look, each one of us is required to fire 10% of our team every year, and don't the surviving 90% of us know that it's for the best? If you find that shocking it's only because we say one thing and do another. But there's nothing wrong with the truth. The truth sets us free. Ten percent of us, to be exact (haha). So I say it's time we spoke the truth. There's nothing to be afraid of! Except my time limit -- sorry -- let me hand this back to you, Ruth..."
Well, that went viral pretty quickly didn't it? The sad thing is that it wasn't even unfairly edited, someone in the front table just posted the whole thing, someone else snipped out the ad-hoc rant, and next thing you know every industry rag, paid newsletter editor, and conflict entrepreneur had used it to advance their own story about the firm. In the hands of a more skilled crisis PR firm we could've made hay out of it. Come to think of it, they kind of did -- the way our stock price jumped just made losing my unvested shares a little more painful. I wish I could say there's some Jerry Maguire ending, that I'd gotten a job with one of those get-tough HR consultancies, but even the politicos who held me up as some kind of prophet never returned my calls. I can't even blame the wine, because I never drank any. Why did I say it? I guess I've got a lot of time on my hands now to figure that out.