Tom B.’s is Cummins Newsroom’s latest flawless little life story. It reads like something from a corporate Hallmark card – training, teamwork, travel, and a neat bow of “values” at the end. It’s warm, inoffensive and perfectly useful if your job is to paper over inconvenient facts. Which is the point.
Let’s cut through the press-release polish and ask the simple question nobody in the newsroom ever seems to answer out loud – do contrived happiness profiles fix rotten systems, or do they hide them?
The Story – Polished And Predictable
Tom B’s piece – “Powered by Values: Tom B.’s Journey at Cummins” – ticks all the newsroom boxes. Passion for the product – check. Mentorship and training – check. Flexibility and benefits – check. Values, values, values – check.
That’s the template. Take a human being doing honest work, photograph them in flattering light, serve the anecdote with a dollop of corporate purpose, and voila – the narrative machine hums. It’s distraction dressed as storytelling.
The Function – Another Human Shield, Not a Solution
Why do these stories show up with such frequency? Because they work. They humanise the brand, soothe investors, soothe recruits, soothe the social feeds. They also deflect attention from governance failures, whistle-blower complaints, and the kinds of internal problems that don’t photograph well.
It changes the narrative headline for a day. That’s useful for a company under repeated reputational pressure – but it’s not accountability.
The Missing Bits – What Tom Doesn’t Say
Tom’s proud of training programs and travel opportunities – fine. He praises “integrity” and “teamwork” – good. But what about the data that actually measures those values? Retention rates for disabled employees or those that suffer health issues, outcomes for grievances (I actually wonder if one against senior staff has ever been upheld), independent audits, the voting figures for splitting Rumsey’s dual Chair/CEO role – where are those figures? Where are the answers to the questions raised by former employees and by public reporting?
Human-interest copy isn’t a transparency substitute. If you want to prove you value people, publish the metrics that hurt. Release grievance statistics, show the outcomes of investigations, and explain how remediation has actually changed behaviour on the factory floor. Otherwise you’re asking readers to choose emotion over evidence.
The Audience – Who Is This For?
These posts are optimised for three audiences – potential recruits, the investment desk (some even churned out on Yahoo Finance by ACCESS Newswire, labelled as paid-for pieces), and the in-house PR scoreboard. Recruits see a friendly face and imagine career opportunity. Investors see a stable culture and discount reputational risk. Internally, the comms team clocks another “engagement” win.
That’s cynical – and deliberately so. The angle is not to inform; it’s to reframe. And reframing only works until the underlying problems become impossible to ignore.
The Real Test – Accountability Over Imagery
If Cummins is serious about values, it needs to do the boring work that values require: independent audits, meaningful remediation, transparent reporting and a willingness to publish outcomes that don’t make the company look perfect. That’s not content strategy. That’s governance.
Tom B’s story is perfectly pleasant. It also reveals how easily a brand can hide behind good people-profiles while systemic issues fester. The real question for executives and counsel is whether they prefer easy optics or messy truth. A question we already know the answer to.
Final Thought – When Photos Aren’t Enough
Photos, quotes and feel-good features are cheap reputational currency. They buy sympathy from the gullable, clicks and a brief reprieve. But when the same company repeatedly faces serious allegations, the currency runs out.
Tom B can be proud of his career. Cummins should be proud of (most of) its people – if it can also be proud of the systems it uses to protect them. Until then, the newsroom will keep rolling out the same recipe – and the rest of us will keep asking why a company that loves telling us about its values refuses to prove them where it matters.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project