Over the weekend, amid all the turmoil and toxic public created by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing investigation and subsequent lawsuit about the company’s abusive workplace conditionsthought Fran Townsend of Activision Blizzard It would be the perfect time to tweet “The Whistleblowing Problem”.
To sum it up, this is a woman who is in after the DFEH’s lawsuit became known, sent an email to the staff declaring it “earned” and was so badly criticized that it was specifically named as the cause of last week’s strike, while the calls for her dismissal as a sponsor for the company’s women’s network are also increasing.
In a previous and public position prior to her appointment in March as vice president of corporate affairs, corporate secretary and chief compliance officer for Activision Blizzard, Townsend was once assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism during the Bush administration, where she was responsible for things like:
she was one of the great boosters behind raising the national “terror threat level” during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign based on three-year-old evidence, a decision, then Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge later said he was put under political pressure. The then head of Abu Ghraib Prison, where people were tortured, said he felt similarly pressured to obtain more information from interrogations after visiting Townsend.
Townsend later defended the Bush administration’s torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity. “Regardless of what you think about whether or not waterboarding is torture, there were legal documents created and relied on by professional intelligence services who then implemented the program,” she said in a 2009 interview with CNN after the Obama administration released Bush-era memos justifying the use of torture by the CIA. “There were very strict controls in the program. These people have relied on them and now they have been released and these people, these professionals, subjected to some kind of public humiliation and abuse, and then the potential of a Congressional investigation is going to make our intelligence community really risk averse. “
With all of this in mind, along with the content and timing of your tweet, the public response has not been positive! It’s been questioned or ridiculed almost everywhere, what’s expected, it’s twitter and that happens every day, that’s what the relationship is for. What is more noteworthy here, however, is that as an executive in a management position in a company in turmoil, she made a bad tweet and reacted accordingly – by doing something like banning her account, deleting the tweet, or just ignoring the criticism, and whatever the rich Do on the weekend – she began systematically blocking everyone, even mildly criticizing her decision to share a story about the dangers of whistleblowing, while her company was amid historically shocking allegations made by employees who testified in confidence .
This includes several journalists and contractors developers, as well as many current and former employees of Activision Blizzard. Your employees and colleagues. Now is a good time to take a look at Blizzard’s core values, one of which is “Every Vote Counts”.
Big ideas can come from anywhere. Blizzard Entertainment is what it is today thanks to the votes of our players and every member of the company. Every employee is encouraged to speak up, listen, respect other opinions, and accept criticism as another avenue for great ideas.
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