What If We All Work for a ‘Pity City’ Boss?
A video tirade by MillerKnoll CEO Andi Owen telling employees to work harder and stop worrying about their bonuses cracks the polite corporate façade.
MillerKnoll CEO Andi Owen has had enough.
“You can visit Pity City, but you can’t live there,” is pretty good advice in the context of, say, a one-on-one mentoring meeting with a promising-but-entitled young employee who’s just suffered a setback. But it’s exactly the wrong thing to say as the CEO of an 11,000-person company trying to encourage employees to meet the challenges of selling office furniture in a work-from-home economy.
Footage of MillerKnoll Chief Executive Andi Owen dispensing this advice via videoconference has leaked online, causing a social media firestorm. The company — formed after the merger of Herman Miller and rival Knoll — has emphasized that the video clip is just 90 seconds of a 75-minute town hall, and says that it has been taken out of context.