Season’s Greetings on "Bad News Friday"
The holiday season is well and truly upon us, and many of you have already decamped for festivities with family and friends. Last-minute shopping and holiday preparations are also in full swing, which probably means you don’t have a lot of spare time available for reading posts like this one. With that in mind, I’ll keep today’s salvo mercifully brief.
Some of you might be aware that tomorrow marks the annual celebration of Festivus, a secular holiday that occurs on December 23 and is intended as a reproachful reply to the rampant commercialism of the Christmas season.
While I am not a formal celebrant of Festivus, I can appreciate its place in modern culture. Most people who know of Festivus first learned of it from an episode of Seinfeld, the long-running television sitcom. In an episode of the program first aired in 1997, George Costanza’s family hosts a Festivus dinner, gives pride of place to an undecorated aluminium Festivus pole, and indulges in traditions that include the “airing of grievances” and “feats of strength.” George’s father, Frank, kicks off the “airing of grievances” by announcing, “"I got a lotta problems with you people, and now you're going to hear about it!" And hear about it they do.
I have a lot of problems with some people, too, but I’ll spare you the diatribe in deference to the interests of seasonal cheer and goodwill.
What some people don’t know about Festivus, however, is that it was and presumably remains a real, if esoteric, secular holiday. Moreover, the origins and advent of Festivus significantly preceded the broadcast of the Seinfeld episode that gave it wider notoriety. American writer and editor Daniel O’Keefe is said to have created Festivus in 1966, three decades before television introduced the unconventional holiday to the masses. How did Seinfeld come to know of and to feature Festivus? O’Keefe’s son, Dan, was a Seinfeld writer, and he recounted his family’s unusual holiday traditions in a script for the episode that shone a spotlight on the bare Festivus pole.
Stranger than Fiction
Perhaps it’s true that reality is stranger than fiction, though we generally believe that fiction should be, by its nature, more imaginative than reality. Then again, our social reality is created by the interactions of people, all of whom possess imaginations of varying vividness.
As we prepare to embark on a holiday season that, for some of us, will extend into the next calendar year, a few people are thinking imaginatively and creatively about whether now – and I mean “now” as in today – is an opportune time to bury bad news. The burying of bad news generally occurs late in the afternoon or early in the evening on any given Friday. The practice is predicated on the belief that most people will be less likely to pay close attention to the news while they’re preparing (or have already begun) to enjoy their weekends.
If you’ve got really bad news, what better Friday to expel the foul cargo than when large numbers of people are about to take leave of their daily burdens for an extended period? Today should be the Black Friday of bad news days, at least as such news pertains to minor or major debacles of companies, markets, industries, and governments.
I suppose this end-of-week, pre-holiday detritus doesn’t qualify as truly bad news; generally, none of it relates to death, illness, or severe injury. The type of bad news we might see later today involves degrees of embarrassment, damage to brand equity or reputation, perhaps some humiliation or mortification, and sometimes instances of managerial incompetence and corporate bungling or malfeasance. Shame is always optional.
If, for example, your CFO is resigning unexpectedly, now is a perfect time to break the news to the distracted populace. Similarly, if your salespeople are being formally investigated for bribing government officials in a foreign country, now is a propitious time to discreetly let the world know about the probe. Optimistic earnings and revenue guidance have sprinted well beyond reality on the ground? Get the news out now. People might be better disposed to consider whether to buy, hold, or sell your shares after they’ve been graced by the magnanimous perspective engendered by a lengthy break.
We can test this bad-news hypothesis later today – though, on second thought, perhaps not, because you’ll all be enjoying your time away from profession workaday concerns. Can you see now why today – Friday, December 22 – might be the best time of the year for dumping bad tidings into a sea of indifference?
Don’t worry about the bad news, though. Now is a time for year-end celebration and joyous festivities, for the company and good cheer of family and friends. As for Festivus, I have, too, have some bad news: the feats of strength, which were to feature Elon Musk in a grappling contest with Mark Zuckerberg, have been postponed indefinitely.
Cheers to all! I wish you all the very best as you enjoy a well-deserved holiday break.