'stroking'

In Eric Scholosser’s Fast Food Nation he brings up a managerial technique called “stroking.” The technique is almost magical in it’s effect toward people. It’s supposed to keep the employees emotionally happy and connected to their work without paying them more. Telling employees their doing wonderful jobs and their such hard worker’s is a corporate manipulation, a vial, that is used not only on the lowest level of business world but the higher corporate level as well.

Scholosser brings up a convention that stroking was used. In this convention extremely successful and famous people were paid to talk to managers of various companies. The stroking or this pep talk filled them with self-confidence and a ‘go get ‘em ’ attitude.

I see stroking as not only manipulation tactic but a celebration of mediocrity. Not that being the lowest employee in a corporate latter is so bad, but to keep people in a zone where there is no encouragement to grow. I can even understand why no one wants their job to be taken by a subordinate, but to not be fair, in having the hardest working people in the business being so ill-treated, namely their pay checks, is criminal!