Now I like this brand. I use this brand. But this is one step further than the euphemistic ‘our UK based call centres’ that you often hear..

That’s what they say.

This is what they mean.

Doing two projects which are concerned – sometimes obsessively – with mining or finding consumer insights. And happened to re-read the estimable John Simmons’ ‘My Sister’s A Barista’ on Starbucks. At one point Howard Behar, the head ops guy says ‘We’re not filling bellies, we’re filling souls.” Now this is chilling and brilliant at the same time. Forget all this nonsense about the third place and romancing coffee. The ‘consumer insight’ behind Starbucks is that people have empty souls and need them filled up. I think it’s both true, and impossible to own up to.

I wonder if there is a category of taboo insights like this – the ones that are too hot for the insight industry to handle. Plenty in alcohol, where I’m noticing you can’t talk officially about the purpose of alcohol (psychological state change) any more. You have to use euphemisms like bonding or relaxing.

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Lovely story from a new colleague Nicola Collister (who also runs the marvellous  Jestique.) In her time as a call centre leader, she was in the middle of a big shift in how the centre ran, with multi-skilling and new technologies being introduced.  One of her best performers, a 15 year veteran, came into her office, nearly in tears about the changes. You don’t understand, she said. I know this job and I can do it really well, but I also need, in the afternoon, to be thinking about what the kids are doing that night, what other plans are and what I’m cooking for tea, because my husband needs his tea when he gets in at 5.30. And there’s no room to do that anymore.

We sometimes forget that change in organisations can unsettle the very way in which people experience themselves. Their anxiety is rarely heard publicly: it burns away inside their  heads or is fetched up in gossip, rumour and various forms of persecution. Good managers, I suspect, are capable of paying attention, even holding this anxiety. Which requires, in turn, that they have earned the trust of those they manage. Without that, they have no right to engage in the conversation. Nicola had that woman’s trust, but it’s rarer than we like to think.