FT columnist fights back at HP Enterprise response

Lucy Kellaway, a columnist for the Financial Times, responded in her article to a letter she received from the head of marketing and communications at Hewlett Packard Enterprise after a column she wrote criticizing what its CEO said at the World Economic Forum.

Kellaway writes, “The most popular way of dealing with tiresome journalists or with conflict of any sort is silence. Business has gone entirely passive aggressive.

“In that spirit, I sat down to compose a reply to Mr Gomez. ‘Dear Henry,’ I wrote. ‘Thank you for your message, which I’ve read and noted.’

“I looked at what I’d written, deleted ‘and noted’ and typed ‘with interest’ instead. I signed off ‘Yours sincerely, Lucy Kellaway’ and pressed send.

“Yet as I did so, a wave of sadness came over me. The outlawing of overt conflict at work and the replacing of it with silence and passive aggression is not a good thing. Sometimes it makes sense not to escalate. Other times it doesn’t. The cost of all this withholding can make one feel leaden with grudges, silted up with all the grievances that are never spoken.

“So with this column I am retracting my first answer to Mr Gomez, and going for the liberating, aggressive version instead. He was aggressive to me. I’m returning the favour.”

Read more here.