Page 78 - The Voice of Authority

and from the legal services provider’s own salesperson—
and a formal customer letter to headquarters to stop this
unhelpful template and get an answer to the billing ques-
tion.
Such template responses tempt employees to jump from
the twelfth floor and cause customers to pay 50 percent
more to buy from the competition.

Provide Context—Even in Jell-O

Providing context for a comment can mean the difference
between a performance bonus and a prison sentence. For
example, an executive at Universal Inc. states to investors
at the annual shareholders meeting that orders are back-
logged and profits are lagging behind expectations. If the
executive makes that same comment at breakfast with only
the fund manager and analyst present, that’s grounds for
charges of insider trading.
The scandal involving former congressman Mark Foley
and his sexually explicit messages written to teenage pages
working in Congress basically turns on an issue of context.
Were the messages written while the pages were in the in-
tern program or only after they left the program? Con-
text—Were the e-mails sent from someone in a position
of power over the teens?––may mean the difference in le-
gal rulings.
After the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, the civilians in charge of the cleanup sent word to the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that
they needed “decontamination units.” What the re-
questors had in mind were shower units to hose down
workers as they came off the heaps of rubble. What the
FEMA officers began searching for were nuclear deconta-

66 The Voice of Authority