The Rise and Fall (and Survival) of an Exec Comms ‘Meaning Junkie’

No one is more dangerous to a company than an enthusiastic executive communication professional who has changed her mind.

Luckily for companies, most exec comms pros don’t.

Unluckily for Google about eight years ago, one of theirs did.

And Claire Stapleton is out with a new memoir with a self-explanatory title: Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises and My Escape From Big Tech.

I’ve only just ordered Stapleton’s book. But she told me her story from a communication perspective during a fascinating hourlong Zoom this week.

The first thing I noticed about talking to Stapleton was that, when she talked about the executive communications-focused early years of her Google career, she sounded energized, even ebullient.

Just out of the University of Pennsylvania with an English major in 2007, Stapleton soon found herself supporting Google’s legendary TGIF town hall meetings, where top executives weekly shared updates with employees and took suggestions and criticism in a way that helped all parties continue to believe that Google was a special kind of company inside and out, a workplace poised to contribute great things to the world.

One of young Stapleton’s roles in supporting TGIF involved writing an email alerting participants to the logistics and agenda of the gathering each week. The insider-y nature of the email let Stapleton exercise increasing creativity and irreverence. It became an accidental cultural institution at the company, leading to Stapleton’s being dubbed by employees and management alike the “Bard of Google,” Google’s “poet laureate” and also execs’ “court jester.”

Of that time, Stapleton speaks a little breathlessly even now, both about the speechwriter’s thrill of writing words for important people to speak—and about becoming known, through her TGIF email, for genially “taking the piss out of” big-shot tech talk around Google and serving as a kind of cultural go-between for employees and management.

That lasted about five years, until Stapleton was recruited for what turned out to be a less happy assignment at Google’s Creative Lab and then a marketing job at YouTube, where she eventually went on maternity leave. When she returned from that leave, she felt different, the company felt different, her relationship with her boss was different and the world was different, smack in the middle of the #me too movement. Perhaps it can be summed up to say that Stapleton felt less “personal investment” in Google, as she put it to me, and more in her fellow women Googlers.

Around then Google VP Andy Rubin left amid sexual harassment allegations and reportedly received an exit package worth $90 million. When spontaneous outrage erupted in a Google women’s online forum Stapleton belonged to, Stapleton used her communication powers to help organize a 20,000-woman walkout on November 1, 2018. It was organized in three days and lasted for a half hour. “What let me lead the walkout was my Google-honed marketing skills,” Stapleton said, noting the irony.

Just like her heady early years as a Google exec comms pro, her sudden star turn as a labor organizer “was exhilarating,” she said. In some ways, it scratched the same spiritual itch: “I’m kind of a meaning junkie,” she told me.

After the walkout, Google executives made noises that fed Stapleton’s naive hope that this movement could be seen as a positive cultural phenomenon at Google, a sign of healthy dissent. The Google’s CFO—the top woman at the company—gave a speech at a Wall Street Journal conference saying as much. And Stapleton was actually invited to give a presentation to YouTube marketing people on what she learned about communication from the campaign.

But the chill blew in, and within about five months, Stapleton left in an urgent mutual decision—forced partly, she thinks, by the fact that unlike some of her colleagues, she didn’t renounce her role in the walkouts or her relationship with the women Googlers she’d convened. There’s more detail on Stapleton’s Wikipedia page.

Almost seven years later, Stapleton doesn’t think of Google as particularly evil. She thinks it operates like most companies. It’s just that those promises back in the late aughts were compelling, especially to a young, talented kid right out of school who wanted to marry her young idealism with her professional career.

She still does some contract communications work and she seems not to have a disparaging thought for exec comms pros still toiling in the mines. But though she won’t say never, she can’t quite get her mind around going back into corporate communications full time. She compares her Google departure to a “romantic breakup” and says even seven years later she feels, “I can’t get married again.”