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That’s a fatality! A reader of Corporate Cancer writes to tell of her experience fighting back against, and roundly defeating, a pair of infesting SJWs.

Just a note to thank you both for your book Corporate Cancer and for the constant refrain on your blog to never apologize and to embrace the conflict. With the help of your writing, I’ve had a complete victory over an SJW-infiltration campaign, albeit at a small and very local level.

I’m a board member of an organization that provides a direct, well regarded program to help families in our rural community gain a financial toehold. In the time that I was away from the board on maternity-leave, a Boomer-SJW and a GenX-SJW, so stereotypical they could be caricatures of themselves, took over the board and made great efforts to redirect the program so that it would primarily benefit single white women like themselves, instead of our target group of young families. We were on the verge of having our bank pull out and the entire program dying as a result. A banker friend on the board had been complaining to me about it all year, but didn’t have the tools to lead a counteroffensive.

In my first meeting back on the board, Boomer-SJW and GenX-SJW pressured the board into passing a vote that was a blatantly illegal act of self-dealing, in favor of their SJW-oriented vision. It also became clear that GenX-SJW had A LOT of time on her hands and was making up problems for herself to spend months solving. 

Corporate Cancer and a search of your blog for relevant posts, gave me the framework to explain to Banker what was happening. I was able to pull out a copy of Rules for Radicals and show Banker that GenX-SJW was applying about five of the rules to purposefully derail our organization in favor of her vision, that she likely had training in how to do this, and was doing it on purpose. Banker was astounded. We were able to build an anti-SJW coalition that included our executive director, treasurer, and vice president.

Following the advice in Corporate Cancer to kill them with the rules, I sent out a lengthy email holding up the illegal vote against our bylaws and state laws, and asking the board to rescind the vote and conduct it legally. 

I promptly received an email, copied to the whole board, from Boomer-SJW about how she was too upset to even consider my arguments because my email was so mean that she had been crying since receiving it. I “replied all” to the entire board with a one liner saying “Regardless of your feelings on the matter, the action is still illegal and needs to be rescinded.” 

She followed up, to me alone, with a long wall-of-text email about her feelings and how she had been crying for three days and how mean I was by “sea-gulling” her (apparently this means, swooping in and “crapping” on someone’s head). She insisted that I owed the whole board a public apology for being mean.

At this point you happened to have a week of posts about not surrendering, never apologizing, and embracing conflict that could not have been better timed for encouraging me to stay the course. After consulting with the ED and Banker, and laying out a six-month plan with the Banker to “trigger” the SJWs into quitting, I re-read many of your posts on these topics, and found the courage to pen a response including lines such as “If you think that a homeschooling mother three taking six hours of her Sunday to provide you with over $1500 of free legal advice is “crapping” on you – I can’t help you with that,” “I will not apologize. I have done nothing wrong and am not in the business of issuing insincere apologies,” and “I’m also a sensitive person – in this case sensitive to our board deciding to take illegal action that harms our beneficiaries.” 

She stopped telling me about how much she was crying.

From there, I launched a campaign to take away GenX-SJW’s biggest pet projects by outsourcing them to a specialist attorney, effectively sidelining her. Throughout, I maintained a calm, professional demeanor, and expressed my bafflement that Boomer-SJW and GenX-SJW were so emotional about it all. I reassured the board president and the executive director that I wasn’t upset, wasn’t taking it personally, and was not at all considering quitting. 

And the drama seriously escalated, with GenX-SWJ losing her mind in Zoom meeting – head in hands, pulling at her hair, accusing everyone on the board personally of corruption for not giving her what she wanted, and declaring our employees to be derelict in their duty because in their shoes she would do more [magically impossible things, like having our bank recruit other banks to fund us] “BECAUSE I’M AN ACTIVIST!” In private conversations afterwards, the employees and other board members were actually using the words “mentally unwell,” “unstable,” and “needs help.”  She followed up with an email making mountains out of mole hills, and appointing all of the work of fixing it to herself, or else she would quit. I’m not privy to what actions the board president took, but the next communication was her resignation letter.

Left on her lonesome, Boomer-SJW and her feelings didn’t know what to do with themselves, and she resigned just a month later. All-in-all our six month counteroffensive only took four months to come to completion, and really only three actions: holding them to the rules, not apologizing, and focusing on deliverables and deadlines to be performed by the most competent person available. 

To the best of my knowledge, GenX SJW is devoting her newfound freetime to “Conversations about Decolonization” and Boomer-SJW is “Working on Climate Change.”

Our meetings are back on track, our program is focusing on our intended beneficiaries, we have a competent lawyer helping us, and we’re getting ready for our phase-two roll out. We’ve cut both the meeting times and the number of committee meetings in half and are getting twice as much work done. 

All of which is to say thank you – for providing the framework, vocabulary, and encouragement that helped me excise the cancer from our organization. In terms of real-world impact, your writings and blog posts on this topic have helped keep [families] on the path to homeownership, when the project would otherwise be dead.

 A few smart corporations are finally beginning to grasp that convergence is corporate cancer that will destroy their businesses and are actively attempting to surgically remove the SJWs that infest them. Basecamp has taken a strong anti-social justice stance that might just turn things around there:

1. No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. Today’s social and political waters are especially choppy. Sensitivities are at 11, and every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn’t have to wonder if staying out of it means you’re complicit, or wading into it means you’re a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It’s become too much. It’s a major distraction. It saps our energy, and redirects our dialog towards dark places. It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore. Update: David has shared some more details and more of the internal announcement on his HEY World blog.

2. No more paternalistic benefits. For years we’ve offered a fitness benefit, a wellness allowance, a farmer’s market share, and continuing education allowances. They felt good at the time, but we’ve had a change of heart. It’s none of our business what you do outside of work, and it’s not Basecamp’s place to encourage certain behaviors — regardless of good intention. By providing funds for certain things, we’re getting too deep into nudging people’s personal, individual choices. So we’ve ended these benefits, and, as compensation, paid every employee the full cash value of the benefits for this year. In addition, we recently introduced a 10{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} profit sharing plan to provide direct compensation that people can spend on whatever they’d like, privately, without company involvement or judgement.

3. No more committees. For nearly all of our 21 year existence, we were proudly committee-free. No big working groups making big decisions, or putting forward formalized, groupthink recommendations. No bureaucracy. But recently, a few sprung up. No longer. We’re turning things back over to the person (or people) who were distinctly hired to make those decisions. The responsibility for DEI work returns to Andrea, our head of People Ops. The responsibility for negotiating use restrictions and moral quandaries returns to me and David. A long-standing group of managers called “Small Council” will disband — when we need advice or counsel we’ll ask individuals with direct relevant experience rather than a pre-defined group at large. Back to basics, back to individual responsibility, back to work.

4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions. We’ve become a bit too precious with decision making over the last few years. Either by wallowing in indecisiveness, worrying ourselves into overthinking things, taking on a defensive posture and assuming the worst outcome is the likely outcome, putting too much energy into something that only needed a quick fix, inadvertently derailing projects when casual suggestions are taken as essential imperatives, or rehashing decisions in different forums or mediums. It’s time to get back to making calls, explaining why once, and moving on.

5. No more 360 reviews. Employee performance reviews used to be straightforward. A meeting with your manager or team lead, direct feedback, and recommendations for improvement. Then a few years ago we made it hard. Worse, really. We introduced 360s, which required peers to provide feedback on peers. The problem is, peer feedback is often positive and reassuring, which is fun to read but not very useful. Assigning peer surveys started to feel like assigning busy work. Manager/employee feedback should be flowing pretty freely back and forth throughout the year. No need to add performative paperwork on top of that natural interaction. So we’re done with 360s, too.

6. No forgetting what we do here. We make project management, team communication, and email software. We are not a social impact company. Our impact is contained to what we do and how we do it. We write business books, blog a ton, speak regularly, we open source software, we give back an inordinate amount to our industry given our size. And we’re damn proud of it. Our work, plus that kind of giving, should occupy our full attention. We don’t have to solve deep social problems, chime in publicly whenever the world requests our opinion on the major issues of the day, or get behind one movement or another with time or treasure. These are all important topics, but they’re not our topics at work — they’re not what we collectively do here. Employees are free to take up whatever cause they want, support whatever movements they’d like, and speak out on whatever horrible injustices are being perpetrated on this group or that (and, unfortunately, there are far too many to choose from). But that’s their business, not ours. We’re in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge. We’re responsible for ourselves. That’s more than enough for us.

Of course, the SJWs are trying to hold their ground, utilizing the popular “you are the problem” defense, complete with a nuclear MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. quote. Damn, they really aren’t pulling any punches, are they? What’s crazy is that this tactic actually works in some corporate circles instead of simply getting the lunatic fired for insubordination.

Jason and David, I believe that your recent company policy changes are both terrible and redeemable. But to be redeemable, you first must recognize that you are a BIG part of the problem. That you too perpetrate the myth that some people deserve to oppress and repress others. Once you hold yourselves publicly self-accountable, then the next step is transparency. Show us all the warts along with the unblemished skin. And from there, we can go about healing Basecamp.