were highly entertaining and
almost certainly exaggerated
by our host. The laughter at
the lunch table continued
among my colleagues, and
ended with the coining of
a new phrase that meant
being fired for stealing from
the company in a flagrantly
stupid fashion. From then
on, we referred to such an expulsion as
being Polked.
It was never clear to us if the story was
true or apocryphal. But it didn’t matter.
It stuck. There was no entry in the policy
manual that told us we would get fired for
eating in the Polk Building if we weren’t
in training. But after hearing that story,
none of us would even consider repeating
the offense. More importantly, it put us on
notice that there are probably all kinds of
bad behaviors that could get you fired with-
out being explicitly told so in advance. The
story taught us to use our common sense
of what’s right and wrong. We didn’t need
a rule book. If you do right, good things
happen. If you do wrong, there are conse-
quences, up to and including getting fired.
The story, and the phrase coined from it,
became a self-policing mechanism among
my peers. If any of us ever said or did any-
thing even remotely questionable, they
would be quickly met with a probing look
and the admonition, “Careful, genius. Keep
that up and you’ll get Polked.”
As the David Armstrong quote at the
beginning of the article indicates, rarely
does anyone ever actually read a company
policy manual. The purpose manuals pri-
marily serve is a legal one. If the company
is ever sued for wrongfully terminating an
employee who broke the rules, the com-
pany lawyer can cite chapter and verse in
front of the jury exactly the policy the now-
terminated employee violated. But if your
objective is to keep people from violating
the rules in the first place, the policy manual
will do you little good, because nobody
reads it.
So how do employees learn the rules
of an organization? One way is through
their own behavior and experience. If they
get punished for something, they quickly
learn not to do it again. It must have been
against the rules, written or not. If they get
rewarded for something, they’ll keep doing
it. But nobody can possibly break all the
rules themselves. So the main way people
learn the rules is through the stories they
hear about other people—those who broke
"BEHAVIOR IS DICTATED
BY WHAT IS REWARDED
OR PUNISHED, EVEN IF
THE ORIGINAL REASON
FOR THAT RULE IS LONG
FORGOTTEN AND PERHAPS
NO LONGER PRESENT."
main office across the street. So the floor
was equipped with a cafeteria that served
a free lunch and snacks to all trainees to
keep them in the building and focused on
their studies. And since the only people on
the floor were the trainees and trainers, they
didn’t even have need for a cash register.
Over one of those first free lunches,
one of our trainers regaled my new-hire
class with stories about the company. The
first was a highly engaging one about two
of our predecessors several years earlier.
Two young men, just out of college, had
joined P&G and spent their requisite time
in the Polk Building. A few weeks later, one
of them arrived at work without his wallet. Not wishing to spend an entire afternoon working on an empty stomach, and
too embarrassed to ask anyone for a loan,
he remembered the free lunches across the
street. So he simply walked into the Polk
Building, went to the cafeteria, ordered his
lunch, and enjoyed his free meal. Pleased
with his resourcefulness, he shared his
exploit with his comrade and convinced
him to join him the next day for a free lunch.
Together, they walked in and leisurely
consumed their free meal without a single
question or sideways glance from anyone.
There were no security guards to keep them
out, no signature required, no badges to
swipe to authenticate their “trainee” status.
Emboldened by their success, they
repeated the exercise twice more that week
and several times over the rest of the month.
Of course, after seeing the same faces
returning for lunch so often over such a
long period of time, the cafeteria staff began
to wonder what was going on. Even the
instructors teaching the courses were usually never in the building more than a week
at a time. They had full-time jobs across the
street to get back to as well. Had these two
been hired as P&G’s first full-time trainers? The women in the cafeteria made a few
phone calls to check, and quickly realized
these two were interlopers, bilking the company one lunch at a time.
Despite their pleas of ignorance, the
story ended with their unceremonial exit
from the company, the details of which
the rules and suffered the consequences,
and those who didn’t and got rewarded. So
in addition to your legally required policy
manual, what you need are some good sto-
ries. The previous one is an ex-ample of
someone breaking the rules and paying the
price. But stories of positive reinforcement
work just as well, as the following story
about one of the oldest and most respected
companies in America illustrates.
