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ARTICLE · 03 MAY 2023

Don't Provoke A Pity Party

Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.
Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.
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Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.

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Today's Wall Street Journal story about the CEO whose "Pity City" comments provoked outrage after a viral TikTok premiere is yet another cautionary tale about the instant...

United StatesMedia, Telecoms, IT, Entertainment
Jennifer Rubin
Jennifer Rubin
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Today's Wall Street Journal story about the CEO whose "Pity City" comments provoked outrage after a viral TikTok premiere is yet another cautionary tale about the instant infamy social media brings to an employer's gaffes. For those unfamiliar with the latest virtual water cooler chatter, a furniture company's CEO, in what turned out to be an errant effort to distract the employees from the company's failure to meet financial targets to fund a bonus pool, suggested during a town hall that the employees "leave pity city" and instead focus on the matter at hand (working harder to make the bonus by achieving the company's financial goals). Her comments quickly went viral as the most recent example of executive tone-deafness. And that tone deafness takes on particular significance for a public company with its trove of easily accessible and very public executive compensation information. In this instance, the crowdsourced social media conclusion was that the CEO, from

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