Back at the end of February, coffee giant Starbucks held their Licensed Stores Awards event, apparently a morale/booster type of thing for employees, which is designed to deepen the indoctrination of the wage slaves— er, I mean, promote company harmony and employee loyalty.
At this event, as is sometimes the case with these big corporate allegiance orgies, a little piece of performance art was presented in which upper management dressed like 80’s rock stars and lip-synced to an adapted version of that one famously reprehensible Jefferson Starship earworm. Yes, the Caffeine Crew was treated to a bouncy, spangly mime act to the tune of “We Built This Starbucks.”
That’s not the best part. The best part is that souvenir CDs were produced and distributed to all and sundry at the conference. And modern technology being what it is, you can now download and hear the song yourself.
The song is, in short, unutterably hilarious. And it shows my own mega-congom-huge-co’s efforts in this area to be sadly lacking, because all we did at last year’s all-hands meeting was, in keeping with the Vegas Lounge theme the Internal Communications wankers had dreamed up, to put the top executives in tuxedos and then hire a Frank Sinatra impersonator to sing a verse or two between their droning presentations. Pretty dull and unimaginative by comparison.
What other weird and stultifying go-team-go spectacles has our vast community witnessed?
Way back in 1986 I got my very first ever tax-paying job as a McMinimumWageSlave. All sorts of gossip was hurtling around the store, many higher ups congregating and having meeting after meeting and then it was announced, we were having a huge multi-district conference to introduce the magic that would become fast-food salads!
Somehow our store was HQ and the local high school auditorium was rented for the big festivities. Being the drama/choir geek student that I was, I pimped my ‘connections’ like crazy and somehow finagled a spot facilitating stuff.
We had suits in vegetable costumes dancing to skits, frisbees and beachballs with our new McGreenery logos flying thru the air, area managers trying to defeat general managers onstage in a quiz bowl about salad prep, the average age of the audience was seventeen and even we thought it was hysterically pathetic.
I just can’t understand what possesses upper management to do things like this. “They already hate us, let’s make sure they don’t respect us either.” I mean, what are they thinking?
A corporation I worked for for 14 years had a sales conference every spring, where you had to be a certain “level” in terms of rank before you were invited to attend. The non-invitees were given access to the conference via video tape of highlights they could watch after careful editing. Having been one of the selected elite, I had the opportunity to see both the live version and the video.
These guys always picked the campiest/stupidest/moronic “highlights” for the video. Many dumbass skits were done that instilled fear among the work force, that fear being: These are the guys in charge!?
One particular sketch that stood out was where one of the sales regions gave a high tech light show/dance number where they started out with a Star Trek theme (to boldly go yadada, yadada) and ended up with Men in Black, the region manager and the operations manger as the MIB. They went on to woodenly present the prior years failures, portrayed as “rebuilding to success”.
My last four years there was like watching a slow motion train wreck.
Was the meeting in Washington, DC? Cause I happened to be flying at the same time, and I quasi-befriended some folks waiting in the airport lounge with me who were coming from some kind of Starbucks conference.
We have something like that at my company for the corporate employees meeting and they tape it for the stores.
However, our meetings are always great fun. They always start the meeting with a silly video based on a theme. The video is usually an old movie with the exec veeps and president’s face superimposed on the movie characters; however there was the Star Trek theme where the execs were playing characters appropriate to their real job. Then they work the theme into the presentations. They know the presentations are dry - they do a good job of spicing them up.
I think it works for our company - the execs know that what they are doing is silly and they play that for all it’s worth. I admire that because it shows that they don’t take theirselves all that seriously.
And I inevitably get home with a headache from laughing so much.
The first one I saw had a biker theme. I think they used a scene from one of those 50’s biker movies. The scene opened with the bikers waaaaaayyy down the road. When they got closer, you saw the CEO’s face superimposed on the lead biker, with other officers’ faces treated similarly. As they roared through town, competitors logos were on the 40s style storefronts, with appropriate worried looks coming from the townsfolk. That year’s theme was “Leader of the Pack”. When the moviette was finished, our CEO came onto the staging wearing a leather jacket and riding a Harley.
