Four more years!

Gruntled Employees began four years ago today, on September 28, 2006. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, from his famous 1980 debate with then-President Jimmy Carter: "Are you more gruntled than you were four years ago?"

I know I am, thanks to you. Four years ago, I took a made-up word and a philosophy about employment and human resources and started this blog. Since that day, there have been 165,892 pageviews, many of them by people not my mother. I'm honored to have had a small slice of your time, and I'm honored by the hundreds of comments and thousands of tweets that have continued the conversation.

The first post was called "Radio Shack Deletes 400 Workers, Common Sense," a story about how the electronics retailer fired 400 employees by email. At the time, Radio Shack defended this Stupid Employer Trick as being necessary "improve its long-term competitive position in the marketplace." Since that infamous email, Radio Shack's annual revenue has dropped about 16 percent (or nearly a billion dollars), and its annual income has dropped about 24 percent. Nice work, guys. I doubt that workers at The Shack are more gruntled than they were four years ago.

Thanks again to all of you who read these posts on the website, by email, and by RSS. Who knows? Maybe four years from now it will be "Morning in America."

Here's that clip from the Reagan–Carter debate:

Comments

[Frank Roche]

Congrats, Jay...this is one of my all time favorite sites...it's all great thinking.

[Jennifer McClure]

Congrats on your 4 year blogging anniversary Jay! Always good stuff here.

[HR Exhibition]

"Since that day, there have been 165,892 pageviews, many of them by people not my mother. "

congratz!

[Phil Miles]

Congratulations on the milestone. Is "Gruntled" a "made-up word?" Here's an interesting post from one of my law school classmates on just that issue:

http://joshblogs.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/justice-scalia-is-wrong-gruntled-is-a-word/

Enjoy!