'Balfour Beatty joint venture awarded £121 million contract for the Ministry of Defence!'

….Shouts a news-release from yesterday.

People share it over social media (LinkedIn, for example);

Share it and/or ‘like it’.

People enjoy good news, especially those related to the company they work for.

People despise whingers that constantly complain about the company they work for.

I’m one of those people that do the latter, and on my list of favourite whinging targets is Balfour Beatty.

And I do not even work for that company, which makes the employees of it even more upset about my actions.

So, I get despised, sneered at, mocked and ridiculed, occasionally receive patronising or downright nasty hate-mails.

Yet, in my own disillusioned state of mind, I keep on thinking that my questioning is valid and deserves honest answers or at least a response to each.

For example, I thought it fair and reasonable to ask Andrew Hayward, head of Ethics, Risk and Assurance the following question yesterday:

Dear Andrew,

A couple of weeks have gone by since you last heard from me – you must have felt relieved, that I had finally given up on the doomed little campaign I was trying to instigate – by and large unsuccessfully, and got on with my normal life which I must have had once, otherwise I would have never been employed by a BB subsidiary in the first place.

For now, I reserve the right not to disclose my future plans on this subject to you or others. Regardless, I believe to have the right to ask you to tell me the name and full contact details of the person you are reporting to.

I expect to receive this information within the next 24 hours.

Best regards,

Zolna

I knew the timeframe I nominated was reasonably short, so I sent the same request to another couple of people that would (or at least should have) known the correct answer, in case Andrew took an early Christmas break or was otherwise busy, yet no response came from anyone.

Thankfully, I have a large number of BB-connections in my LinkedIn network so, I’ll address them directly:

Help a brother (sister) out!

Let me know who oversees the work of the Ethics committee of your (Balfour Beatty) company.

(email is zolna.murray@gmail.com and privacy is guaranteed for any info given in confidence);

Realistically speaking, there is almost a zero chance that I will get any meaningful info back following this plea;

On the other hand, writing to all of these people will at least provide me with another little experiment:

In a day-or-two I’ll know how many BB connections will keep me on their own networks having received this request.