Saturday 24 October 2009

The Aviva Triangle

So Andrew Moss, CEO of Aviva has been caught up to his nuts in one of his collegues?! The affair, Dubbed The Aviva Triangle (an apt title given that's such a great name for where he appears to have been hiding the sausage) screamed out at me from the Standard last last Thursday.  However my excitement turned to pure joy when I read that the lady in question, the lovely Deirdre Moffatt, was his HR lacky!  How I roared.

No wait, it gets better.  Unbelievably, Mrs Moffatt's husband is none other than Andrew Moffatt, Aviva's European HR Director.  How frustrating for Mr Moffatt - most senior HR execs would give their right arm for a chance to appear in the mainstream media, ala David (Fit to burst) Fairhurst.  And when he does finally get his 15 minutes of fame, sadly its not celebrating his impressive European talant management strategy.  Oh no.  He gets his mug in the papar because his boss is banging his wife.  Ouch!

Now on the face of it, I've never really had a problem with internal affairs.  Yes I know there is the usual protest that two people indulging carnally, particular senior bods, can conspire and confer and get up to all sorts of nastiness but get real people. If you think only those with their hands in each others underwear are guilty of that then you are living on another planet. It goes on all the time, regardless of who is knobbing who.

But wait a minute? What's this?! A company source said "All three decided she had to go". Did they really? Of course they did, she didn't really have a choice. Apparently Andrew wasn't going to resign and if had done it wouldn't have been accepted.

Why not? Because the chairman has a cock that's why.

Given I can't afford to lose my job I won't be blowing my chief exec any time soon.

Apologies for my absence folks.

Apologies for my absence folks. As I said in my recent tweet, my workload in the last 5 months or so seemed inversely proportional to my organisations' revenues. Who said HR are not needed in a downturn - Rubbish!

There are people to fire - sorry, 'rightsize' as we now call it - the survivors need serious stroking and of course there is all the internal comms to manage. And I'm not talking about official lines of communication, briefings and the like. No. I'm talking about keeping on top of all the watercooler gossip that's been keeping the grapevine smoking.

It's not easy trying to justify a Bonus AND pay rise for the top team when everyone else is on an indefinite pay cut. However given the amount of internal PR work I have to put in on this issue alone I feel justified when I look around the table at my fellow leaders that I, out of all of them, have earned mine.

And so it is a rich landscape of all matters People to which I return!  The Royal Mail, Aviva - see post - to name but a few.

I do hope to manage my time better so I can keep this blog up because HR is suddenly looking like a great place to be for once!