I would say thatthis storyis a bigger threat to the reputation of Working Mother magazine than to the reputation of Novartis.

The pharmaceutical company, recently found guilty of "systemic gender discrimination" in a federal court (in addition to unequal pay and promotion opportunities "women were treated to the silent treatment, the worst assignments, and the offer of a seat in a boss's lap"), has been a fixture on the magazine's list of the best employers for working mothers for more than a decade.

Perhaps I should have been paying closer attention, but I was shocked to learn that "the 100 best companies are chosen according to employers' self-reports, with no input from employees." That seems like an open invitation to companies to exaggerate and self-aggrandize, and the revelations about Novartis will surely impact the credibility of those rankings. (We do our own Best Agencies to Work For research, which is based entirely on employee votes.)

But if Working Mother is the big loser in all this, it's also worth a warning to big companies who seek credit on such rankings without doing the hard work: in a social media age, it won't take decades, years, or even months for employees to point out any gaps between perception and performance. If you want a reputation as a good employer, earn it the hard way.

I had intended to blog about the France Telecom crisis--24 employees have committed suicide in recent months, a trend many observers are linking to restructuring efforts--last week, but now Leslie Gaines-Ross has beaten me to it. (And actually, it seems that European PR blogger Paul Seaman was on the story ahead of either of us.)

The company initially claimed the suicides were the result of personal, not professional, issues and pointed out that the figures were in line with national statistics. But several victims were explicit in blaming the stress of work. One said "management by terror" had driven him over the edge, adding: "I am committing suicide because of my work at France Telecom. That's the only reason."

By the middle of last week, there were signs that the company was taking the crisis more seriously. CEO Didier Lombard called a halt to the reorganization and promised to introduce workplace counselors. Louis-Pierre Wenes, the architect of the change initiative, resigned.

Seaman is critical of the company's response here, suggesting that the "apologize, reform, move on" approach to crisis communications is "patronizing and condescending" and that by accepting blame for a problem that at the very least has multiple, complex causes, the company is actually deflecting a more serious analysis of the issue.

My own feeling is that the company's public relations efforts appear to be motivated by a determination to put the issue to rest, which is understandable but not necessarily the most responsible course of action. I would have preferred to see some sign that France Telecom would sincerely like to participate in a process--I don't think the company itself should lead that process--to learn more about the causes of these suicides and avoid similar incidents in the future.

(I'm not sure I agree with Paul, who seems to think he knows the cause: "There is a problem with modern individualism: it makes people nurture their vulnerability, and especially their being victims of capitalism." I'm not sure any problem is quite that simple or one dimensional.) CORRECTION: In the comments, Paul points out he was not trying to explain the causes of the suicides with that comment, and that he acknowledged in his post that "Suicide is deeply personal. Its causes are difficult to fathom." My apologies if I over-simplified or distorted his argument.

Meanwhile, at her HBR blog, Gill Corkindale is more interested in the implications for change management in general, asking: "Do you believe, as I do, that managers and employees should accept that change is inevitable and work together to share the burden of stress and organisational change? Or do you feel, as some of the France Telecom workers do, that companies go too far, driving employees to distraction with continuous change programmes, unfair demands, and unskilled management?"

How about both? Change is inevitable--and even the most wrenching change management program is less stressful than the alternative, because failure to change is likely to lead to total destruction. On the other hand, companies too often fail to gain employee consent to change--it is imposed rather than developed through a participative process--and fail to share the responsibilities and costs equitably.

Adweek reports (hat tip to Steve Cody's RepMan blog ) on an "innovative" idea: selling the new brand or ad campaign internally before taking it out the rest of the world.

That this is considered interesting enough to be worth writing about is surely a stinging indictment of the short-sightedness and narrow vision of the advertising industry.

For the past four or five years I've been giving a speech on the subject of authenticity that emphasizes the need for companies to actually live up to their advertising. "If the brand is a promise," I tell people--and by now their eyes have begun to glaze over, I've been saying it so long--"then your employees are your promise keepers."

I use the old McDonald's "we love to see you smile" campaign as an example, because if any of you ever got a smile out of a McDonald's employee you did a lot better than I ever could.

I say this not as proof of my own prescience--because this seems to me to be so obvious that my mother, sister, or dog could have come up with it--but as evidence of the ad industry's inability to see beyond the 30-second spot, the jingle and the tagline. (For your additional amusement, I point out that the article in question appears under the "non-traditional" and "incentive marketing" banners in the magazine.)

So congratulations, I guess, to Bill Wyman, senior marketing manager at Pepsi, for the campaign profiled in Adweek. "If we were going to be successful in the marketplace, we were going to have to live and breathe the Pepsi brand with all of our employees," Wyman says. "We set out to find every opportunity to communicate what we are doing, and why and how we are doing it."