Smart Founder Flash Fried, Hit the Curveball and a Crisis on the Redeye, & Brilliant Jerk Strikes Again.

Anything but Mine - hire wire walks like we work can turn Alaskan mornings of dreams and daffodils turn into disasters on a redeye home. 

Started out flying to Alaska on Cloud 9 as our friend Gary Chapman, author of The Five Love Languages, agreed to do a first for our January conference, talk on 5 Love Languages + 1.

Then do two live breakout session Better Together and Beyond, 10am to noon. Followed by a session from 2pm to 4pm, Looking for Love in all the Right Places, Home, Work & Play in 2025. Combined content. Epic as Alaskan whales. 

Always Paranoid in Paradise - heading home wave after wave: missed our Seattle connection by 15 minutes and watched, from the tarmac, our plane and first class seats depart the gate. Then 3 live rounds. 

Teton Pass Our hike from Tetons to Jackson Hole started as a crazy idea and then Chris at JBH hit pay dirt, found a Native American trail that was shutdown when we were stealing their land so, we have the chance to revive the smartest switchback route from Tetons to JH.  

Until the morning of June 8th when a large section of the Teton Pass, Highway 22 at mile marker 12.8, literally connecting Tetons to Jackson Hole, collapsed in a landslide, literally, pushing our road to fall off the mountain. 

Took a deep breath of relief until Russian ships started parking in Havana’s port the next day, making our ‘Last Call to Cuba Trip’ look like a ring of fire, going down, down, down.

Not so fast. We called and asked how we could be part of the solution. And the trip is one day after the election and when Trump likely wins (Biden should bow out gracefully), we could party with Putin. All in the same boat at that point. 

We will hold a Cuban Crisis Call after we totally put out the Tetons fire. As Lincoln said, one war at a time.

The first word from Wyoming Dept. of Transportation was - ‘don’t ask how long, we first have to figure out how to fix it first.

So, immediately jumped on the line with Chris about what to do. He is a Buffalo rancher and not really into sugar coating.

Catastrophic was the word of the day.

He is better at finding creative solutions, even so we suffered for three damn days until he called me with a plan - turning catastrophic into more or less a curveball. 

We will discuss with Teton attendees and wait list on what lies next!!!

And then there is missing the curve ball - our friend Victor Ciardelli, founder of Guaranteed Rate, gets bacon wrapped and flash fried like a scalloped by the Chicago Tribune. But, it was unforced errors that caused 95% of damage. Protect the King. 

The story behind the story is that his brilliant jerk1, long time HR executive left the company mad and supplied the paper with names to do a hatchet job on the founder. 

But it was Victor who handed them the ax - classic mistake you don’t have to make.

So smart, so successful and he makes the emotional stumble - reacting angrily with legal threats toward the paper’s inquiries on alleged workplace harassment that the brilliant jerk stirred up.  

They didn’t have a story until they had in hand Victor's stormy responses which validates and reinforces all of the allegations is how the paper sees it and runs the story. 

If he would have said, [‘in our incredible fast growth, have I (not we this time) come up short - certainly. It is something I work on with my team every day’] and then bury them with positive reports and data. 

And reminded them his company was Chicago Tribune’s top work place winner in 2018 and strives to live up to that standard everyday. Granted, you can buy the rankings but still it would have frozen them up like an igloo. Alaska analogies for awhile.

Then this would not have even been a story much less screwed up Victor throwing out the first pitch at the White Sox game.  

But based on his response they could legally and safely report that he released his app that offered loan applications, financial services and yoga classes, that didn’t work and sign ups were slow.

The paper broke the news that, “He yelled out in a meeting ‘marketing was a F- - - ing disaster.’”

That’s not a story when we all feel the same. Marketing is where we send money to burn. Maybe leave out a word or two but most marketing departments should hear the same thing and get a clean slate.  

Then his ex-assistants ratted on him in the paper for being a jerk. 

If Liz ever leaves, I don’t want the AJC calling her. Liz, free vacation of your choice. I’ll have to buy my way out of that one. They can’t hear what you know. Milledgeville2. 

And here is the deal - he had a lot of employees, particularly a minority, who said it was ‘15 years of great culture, best culture ever and Victor talked and worked well with everybody.’ 

Here’s the hatchet job - headline and first 90% of article was he is a monster from hell and buried in last 10% was a total rebuttal with proof that first 90% was not all but mostly and materially BS. 

For example, fact - in the last 10 years the company has not settled one harassment suit or been sued over harassment. 

Even when they mentioned he launched a  “personal well-being” app for employees and customers last fall with wellness celebrity, Deepak Chopra, they commingled in the same paragraph - “next day yelling at executive leadership on company calls, and complained that the team did not show him from a particular camera.“ Ask Lynn Smith Camera angles count. 

Ok, not totally appropriate but a Chicago Tribune article? No. 

Besides him handing the reporters the ax, understand this overall problem, most people in journalism are type B personalities with an ax to grind and they loathe type A, just like I do them when I am behind their car at a red light. 

How do you handle them? Kids gloves, remorseful and hopeful. Not what he summed up for them “if you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t be here”. You and I understand that talk, but not reporters fresh out of Yale as LIT majors with a minor in creative writing.

At this point it’s not about who's right or who’s being unfairly attacked. You have a brilliant jerk in their office calling out names. 

Your entire goal is to cut the legs out from under their revenge story.  

More mistakes on top of mistakes. Paper reported, “The company also retained an outside law firm that, even before receiving the reporters’ list of questions, threatened to sue the newspaper for defamation”.

Ciardelli declined to be interviewed without his attorney for this story. Can we say any louder that we are guilty? 

Buried at bottom.

One testimonial sent to the Tribune was from Melissa Czaszwicz, who said she worked for Ciardelli as an executive assistant in the early 2000s. She wrote that she had a positive experience working closely with Ciardelli, who she said was especially supportive when she had children.

A Better Narrative than Threats: The company’s average rating for the culture at Guaranteed Rate was 8.49 out of 10, with nearly 75% of the employees responding.

The reporters took a last stab at a ‘sex-driven’ culture.

“Moreno said she once overheard a male manager describe a woman who had interviewed for a job as a “fox.” Another time, she said, a manager invited a female massage therapist to the office. 

Time to update our HR manuals. Foxes and therapists not allowed.      

Cliff Notes: 

1. Brilliant Jerk, coined by Cliff in NYT here. 

2. Milledgeville, Georgia, United States--Georgia's state mental asylum located in Milledgeville, Georgia, now known as the Central State Hospital (CSH), founded as the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, also known as the Georgia State Sanitarium and Milledgeville State Hospital during its long history. As the asylum's buildings were vacated, four were converted into prisons. One prison remains on the property today. In a separate facility, the Cook Building, the hospital houses 179 forensic patients (who have been found by courts to be not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial).