Paul Burri: Using the Grapevine

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By Paul Burri

Wise business owners take — and see — advantage of company rumor mills

Back around 1966, The Miracles recorded a song called, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Just to be sure the term “grapevine” is not totally obsolete, here is my definition: grapevine — an unofficial and informal communication channel for gossip, rumors and other undocumented news or policies.

Knowing how to use the grapevine can be an extremely valuable tool in business and especially in a small business. If you are not sure whether your company has a grapevine, believe me — you do have one even if you have only two or three people. You need to know how to talk into it and how to listen to the return message.

Here’s an example. Say you own a small business and because the economy is slow (does this ring any bells?), you are thinking of cutting the hours of your employees down to 32 hours a week. Problem is, you’re not sure whether this will cause a “revolt” among your staff and perhaps even cause you to lose a few of your key people. So instead of posting an official memo on the company bulletin board, you subtly put it out on the company grapevine and then wait to hear how they feel about the idea. There are several ways to do this; allow one of your phone conversations to be overheard, leave an “incriminating” note lying around, ask one of your most trusted employees to start the rumor, etc.

If you are not experienced at this, you will be amazed at how quickly the word spreads on the grapevine. Now suppose you don’t hear any major negative feedback to your rumor. That probably means your employees are amenable to the idea — even though they may not like it. (After all, they read and besides, they probably knew even before you did, that business was getting slow.) On the other hand, if there is an explosion of negativity and resistance to the idea, you will hear that pretty quickly, too.

And here’s the advantage of using the grapevine. It gives you deniability. When one of your employees comes to confront you about what they heard about cutting hours, you are in the position of denying that you were ever considering such an “outrageous” idea. You can say, “Where did you hear that? I have no idea who started that rumor.”

Then you have time to go back and think about whether to go ahead with the idea or to think up an alternate approach to cutting costs — including payroll costs.

Try it, it works.

— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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