Woke-As-A-Service (WaaS): “What color is your heart today?” This is what business has become?

My friend sent me this article from the Chief Well-Being Officer of Deloitte the other day. First off, “Chief Well-Being Officer?” That’s a C-Suite title that probably nets $175,000 and literally every other executive deeply resents this person. I’ve said this dozens of times in hundreds of ways over the years on this blog, but guys that become executives in enterprise think about work in very different ways than most of us. To them, burnout is almost a badge of honor; it’s certainly not a “crisis.” We’ve been talking about “employee engagement” for a decade+ now. No one really cares and nothing much has changed, except a few software suites have been sold. Why? Because executives, who have actual decision-making power in companies, don’t care about people “being engaged.” The only engagement they care about is their daughter, Brooke — and that’s only because they need to pay for the goddamn wedding.

So, words do matter, and corporate vocabulary is a complete and total mess. Execs and peons basically are speaking two wholly different languages.

In that article linked at the top, this Chief Well-Being Officer (CWBO!) says that one way you should get on the phone with a colleague is to say:

What color is your heart today?

I openly LOL’ed at that.

Could you imagine ringing up a hard-charging COO and being like “Bob, let me just start by asking you: What color is your heart today?” Bob might legit hang up on you in 0.71 seconds.

You see this a little bit with pronouns too, of late. I was on a Zoom meeting/call once with 18 people. Eighteen. Remember that. The organizer is like, “Well, before we begin, let’s go around and say our pronouns.” You had 3-4 old-school biz hard-charger guys on this call. Instantly one of them sighed outright. Now, the logistics of this were stunning, because by the time we got to Person 15 saying “he/him,” no one remembered the pronouns of the first 10 people, so it’s not like you have a chance to use them on the call. It was a complete mess. Woke for the sake of woke. I like the concept of pronouns and I get it, but people tend to view business as one thing (“where shit gets done”) and view societal wokeness as another thing (“this is where I change my Instagram for aesthetics, right?”) and those two aren’t supposed to overlap, necessarily.

So, what color is my heart today? Probably red. Now let’s get out and hit some KPIs.