Word on the street is if you are c00l, you speak TRUF to da POWA.
My view is this is a bunch of exaggeration; nobody really speaks truth to power. In the real world, REAL power means: You get fired, arrested, beaten, etc.
But PROVE ME WRONG! Tell me how you spoke truth to power.
Writing nasty emails doesn’t count.
Well, there was Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He seems to have survived.
But yes, I have on occasion spoken truth to power, as in telling a boss that she was wrong about something when she was genuinely wrong. I haven’t been fired yet. If you have the evidence, and show that your (true) position ultimately makes sense for the person in power, you can speak truth to power. In fact, I have been praised for saving the company money by pointing out the truth of the situation to someone higher up in the organization.
Years ago my boss called a big company-wide meeting to announce our grand new direction. We would be putting all our efforts into developing a particular new technology that would revolutionize how computers were used and in the process make us all millionaires. After the boss was done with his big presentation I stood up and described in uncomfortable detail why what he had just proposed would never, ever work. In retrospect, it was a pretty foolish thing to do, but I was young and cocky and didn’t know better.
I didn’t get fired, though. And the grand new vision quietly withered away.
I do it here all the time in ATMB. Does that count?
I don’t encounter a reason to do so anywhere else. It always seems that it’s someone else having the problem, and thus it’s not my place.
Back in 1990 I worked for an Insurance Company. I managed to get myself onto the short-lived “Employee Council”, which pretty much did nothing at all.
Then one day our company announced that they were making major cuts in employee benefits and insurance. Quite a number of our people were figuring out how to move to their spouse’s insurance through other companies. Some of the people on the Council asked the CFO to come to our meeting to talk about this.
CFO comes in like a bull, loud and intimidating, and cows everyone. “Our employees cost the company too much and if they were not our employees, we would cancel their coverage completely and refuse to sell them insurance”. Not one person said one word during or after his angry rant.
Except me.
You work at Target, you get a discount at Target.
You work for an airline, you fly for almost free.
We work for an Insurance company, and our employees are finding better coverage with OTHER insurance companies.
Is this fair? Is this good PR? Is this the way you think this company should operate?
Everyone else in the room looked at me like I was completely fucking insane and no one spoke a word.
When the meeting was over, several people got on the elevator with the CFO to go back upstairs. The moment I stepped onto the elevator, they ran for it. I rode up alone with him. I continued to discuss it with him on the ride up.
In the end, we experienced only a very moderate increase in our insurance rates, something like 30% of the increase they had previously announced. We also did not lose several of our other benefits, or experience the cutback in vacation time they had announced.
One stupid crazy fucker, ME, spoke up, and changed the path of a multi-billion dollar company.
Oh, before and after that, I’ve had the balls to speak truth to power, and I’ve paid the price for good or ill. I was fired from a job in 2008 for exposing the hypocricy and corruption of my bosses. OH WELL.
I don’t recommend this path to everyone. It has most definitely cost my career on many occasions, limited my potential, and limited my wallet.
But I cannot imagine being any other way.
Agreed. When I think there’s something wrong, really wrong, I tend to speak up about it or else feel deeply shamed for not doing so. Nothing as dramatic as what you said, but I’ve more than once been the only person speaking up to contradict an intimidating/tyrannical leader or boss.
I think that it’s a piece of idealism which mellows with age. Not a bad thing, but for many will lead to burnout, if not more severe consequences. They don’t call it Power for nothing.
The enthusiasm and dedication to their principles is attractive in the young. Shows they’ve got some sense of right and wrong and willingness to stand up for it. More mature persons can get to be a bit tiring (and lonely) if they make a habit of it.
A friend says, “You don’t have to go to every war you’re invited to.” I like that.
I was at a small high-tech company about eight years ago. I started as an engineer and worked my way to becoming the VP of Research’s right-hand man. I was making a ton of money and my entire social life was wrapped up in the company.
One day, I was asked to break a non-disclosure agreement and screw over a partner company. I refused and quit. I lost all my friends and I had a hard time getting work afterward.
But it was worth it. Not just because I found a better job, but because I acquired a higher opinion of myself. When I walked away from that company, I felt like a higher life-form than the wage-slave I’d been.
Ive done it several times, and got promoted.
In my biz the punishment is you get to be the one listening to everyone ‘telling the truth to the power’. Its not fun because you know you were the one doing exactly the same thing a few years back, if not worse.
Otara
I got my butt knocked around by police during a protest march, which I think counts, so I’ll say this:
When you speak Truth to the Powers That Be, The Powers That Be say “So? come back when you have the power. Otherwise, sod off.”
What I think is meant, and gets confused, is that the people (you know, the Proletariat Masses) really have the power, they just haven’t figured that out yet, so you’re supposed to speak to the people. Not the ones who are oppressing the people.
But I’ve gotten too cynical to believe that will actually work.
Yeah. Last year I told a committee of the Board of Directors that they were screwing up in the way they were micromanaging the project I run. I came within a hair of being fired (or quitting).
Now I just tell it to my fellow powerless colleagues. 
No. 
Yep, a year ago to this day, my father in law died. I needed some time off to take care of my Wife, myself, and the business of death.
It was a stressful time at work. I went into work to take care of as much business as I could before the travel that I had to do and my boss started to give me grief about leaving to take care of my family.
Understand, that while it was busy, it was a years long project, that I was support on, nothing critical. I was helping support the vender that was making a product for us. And they where way, way behind schedule. The last thing I remember is yelling GOOD BYE! To my boss (I never raise my voice). I was stressing out completely, had had zero sleep.
For the record, we are allowed 10 days off for such leave. I was not sure how much time I might need but certainly no more then what was allowed. My boss was very unhappy that I might take 5 days. He thought a few days would be fine (I had thousands of miles to travel) “It had better not be any longer than that”. A threat.
I had come into work after finding out my FIL had died. I’m trying to take care of my wife, the trip ahead and all that needs to be done. I am considerate and professional enough to come in to work and tie up lose ends. Most of what I was needed for could be done on the road. Eighteen years I’ve worked there, and I get a threat. Um. No. Nope and no.
I did what I had to do. After I returned, I talked to my bosses boss, and human resources (my bosses bosses boss is the head of HR [it’s weird, it’s government) I’m sure had caught wind of this. My bosses boss had a 3 hour talk with my boss, and my boss apologized to me. Big time. My boss had the riot act read to him I am quite sure.
Things have been much, much better ever since for our entire department. I think, after knowing some manic-depressive, unpredictable passive aggressive people in the past that my boss has got some help.
It’s much better now.
In high school we had metal detectors that were supposed to make the school safer. In reality they just created long lines outside of school and didn’t stop students from bringing in weapons. I know because a lot of them liked to flash their knives just to show off, and occasionally to ask me for money (I never carried any.)
So when I was assigned to draw a cartoon for the high school newspaper I decided to say something about it. We had two detectors. When you set one off you were asked to go to a second line where security scanned you with their magic wands. The cartoon showed an openly armed student walking through the metal detector, and a fat dean with a cigar casually telling him to head over to the second line.
The cartoon never made the paper. It was censored by the head of the English department because it was a drawing about guns.
The sad thing about all this was that I didn’t know how to draw and had my friend create the artwork for my idea. I didn’t want this to get out so I didn’t fight for the cartoon even when the teacher in charge of the newspaper told me I should.
Today I get a different kind of bullshit from the law school I go to, but now I know it’s more effective to use a reasonable argument while going through formal channels. It isn’t as thrilling as trashing the establishment through a cartoon, but it gets the job done.
I’m glad you’re in law school now. We need to trash the establishment as much as we can right now. Very few people are winning and it does not seem to matter. Nobody seems to know what the goal is.
That metal detectors are comon in schools is very, very sad.
In yet another twisted way my fear of everything somehow results in my appearing to be brave, I find problems, confirm that they exist, gauge various peoples’ level of pissed offedness, and then, because I think I wouldn’t deserve to be employed if I let these problems continue, I talk to someone. I generally write up an outline of what the problems are, why they exist, some ways they can confirm the problems exist, and a few suggestions. Unfortunately, my suggestions typically involve the company spending money, establishing known roles and responsibilities and, most seditiously, improving communications. Then I sit down with one or more of them and spend an hour or two going through the first two or three issues I think are most critical, leaving them the additional several pages of other issues and ideas. (Note: at one point in my career, this caused me to be encouraged to transfer to a different divison, where I worked for about five years until the person I’d talked to moved on to ruin his next job).
This past week it was the recently-deposed manager of my group of programs, along with his successor and my CAM. (Yes, the mighty groo has his own Cost Account Manager). Forget about the four major crises between last week and January – I laid out my case for why the deliveries we have for summer 2011 and fall are already at great risk. For 2010, well, we’re not making our deadlines for many, many reasons, and I’d concluded that the four main deliveries were, when we get desperate, all dependent on a very small set of features which we need to make bulletproof. And yes, you read that right: I went through a list of many unfortunate decisions made by a guy who’d just been shifted laterally out of harm’s way, and my abdomen was cramping up because I was so nervous, but I wanted to let the new manager know what to avoid, and how we might mitigate some of the pain in the future.
Now, with my team, I’ve run out of every other motivation, so now I just get behind closed doors, let them vent their anger at me, tell them who I’ve talked to about their problems and that I’m just as frustrated and skeptical as they are, and then, I tell them the truth: mid-October deadline: fake! it’s a soft deadline. Mid-december deadline: hard deadline for two main capabilities; the rest are soft and after we get the hard ones out of the way, fuck 'em. The October 1 deadline (which we made just before 5:30 today? Started out soft, but a manager got cornered into promising it and we needed to tag our source by COB today or she would be eating shit, and she knows it and has acknowledged that to me. (This is my other way of speaking truth to power – the engineers are supporting the entire enterprise, and they deserve not to get jerked around).
Those are just regarding business planning, but I’ve also made federal cases out of savings bonds drives, payroll deductions for The United Way and the various ways everyone lies to themselves about how predictable software development can be.
After a quarter decade of this, I have to say: I don’t think it’s worth it. As I said, I’m afraid of damn near everything, and this takes its toll. On a few occasions, it’s gained me a few dollars here and there, and pretty much all of the power players will wave me into their offices when “I want to discuss some issues that I’m concerned about™,” but I also find myself alone in meetings, the repeated bearer of bad news amid a sea of young managers struggling to report only the good news. And, for someone reputedly as bright, energetic and useful, my career seems to be on a much shallower trajectory than others in my cohort. In that sense, it’s rather lonely.
You should write editorials and run a newspaper for a living. Anytime an elected official calls up to yell at you about what you’ve written about them you’ve got to figure you’ve done something right.
With luck it happens once per week or so.
The one time I had the chance to do so, I chickened out.
A new principal (= president) of McGill called a meeting of the entire faculty. I went–first mistake. He started out by saying that the quality of the faculty at McGill was equal to that of Harvard. This is absurd. At least in math, where I knew it was nonsense. I wanted to say to him: “Mr. Johnston, are you dumb enough to actually believe that, or do you think we are dumb enough to believe it?” I had tenure, so there was no real danger to me, but in that large audience I chickened out. I had other reason to dislike him too. Glad fellow, well met. A financial disaster for one thing. His successor spent ten years cleaning up after.
Now the asshole is Governor General of Canada (as of yesterday).
[Mod hat off]
ooh, thumbing your nose at the Queen’s man.
He does sound like a fool, but then it’s not as if the GG really does much in the government, is it?
About a month before this ‘truth to power’ conversation, my boss told me to adopt a procedure I knew was wrong. The legal department had approved his idea and I knew debate would be fruitless so I acted political and let him know I would do it but took no action other than doing the opposite.
A month later, he and legal wanted me to track down data so as to reverse his original request because he now realized it was wrong and the company might get into legal trouble. When I explained we had no legal issues because I had never followed through with his original request he asked, “You mean you did nothing. Why not?”
“Because I know it was wrong.”
He stayed pissed for a while. Oh well.
Jesus did many times, along with the apostles, and many prophets. Much of scripture is speaking truth to power and it is a prime example of speaking truth to power.
And I also have done it many times. If you are given something from God it will effect them. Power is the ability to control others, mostly this is done by lies and guilt and fear, sometimes pain and imprisonment. Power uses these methods to subjugate people, knowing the truth, what God says about the situation can disarm their ability to control and manipulate you. As stated in John quoting Jesus “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
So yes it works, though not always in the form that you expect or hope for, for when you are doing this your help comes from God, and God works in ways that are above our understanding.