1. They have a serious legal or ethical concern about some activity of their company, and feel it can only be redressed with the help of the media. Karen Silkwood comes to mind.
2. They are happy people who want to share their happiness with the world. They think something is funny and want to enjoy it with the rest of the blogosphere, because they believe it will do no harm.
3. They don’t really feel like they belong to the company that issues their paycheck, but are rather members of a larger community they like much better. This is particularly true of journalists who leak to other journalists to demonstrate that they are all part of the same great Big J team.
4. They are about to leave the company and are looking to suck up to the guys who are going to be covering their departure or their arrival at their next career pit stop.
5. They are powerless little weenies who want to appear more important than they are for the five minutes they are at the center of the information transaction.
6. They are has-beens or wannabees who don’t want to admit to the blogger/journalist/aggregator that they don’t know anything about the topic under discussion. Since virtually anything, no matter how blind or unsourced, is now fit for distribution to the Twitterati, this is a glorious new day for such people.
7. They are malevolent sabateurs who hate the company, hate management, hate anybody who is doing better than they are at the corporation. They are always looking to skewer their enemies and make them look bad in the public eye. They view leakage as a way to undermine everybody who they despise. A day without a leak that hurts somebody is a day without sunshine to them. They sit in their little den afterwards and cackle at the malicious carnage they have wrought.
8. They are to be forgiven, for they know not what they do.
9. Everybody is doing it.
10. They are only following orders.
When the midwife slaps our little behinds, we get hurled into life’s needs. We demand to be fed, or baaaaaa. We demand to be changed, or baaaaaaaaaa. We demand an allowance, or baaaaaaa. We demand all the rights that others have, or baaaaaaa. We are conditioned to demand entitlements, or baaaaaaaaaa.
The baaaaaaaas, as we grow more mature, may turn into coercion, extortion, and intimidation if we’re deprived of our noo noo.
“Dear Abby”, in one of her many columns, spelled out eight motivaters for satisfying life’s needs: Love, Hate, Fear, Guilt, jealousy, Anger, Hostility, and Resentmnt. Each emotion has its own unique program of performance.
John Dillenger, Baby Face Nelson, and Al Capone, I’m sure, at one time were “cute” little tykes with voracious appetites for their needs.
When we look at the CEOs’ of Phillip Morris, Auto makers, and Big Oil, we’re sure at one time they were cute little tykes, too.
If the “Bully” backs us down, getting up will be very difficult, if not downright impossible.
Like it or not, with the slap on the behind, we’re cast into the coloseum of life; no different than the Romans facing the Gladiators.
Is that a hyena or a jackal? Looks rather bemused, in any event.
I’d like to hear what you have to say about Raj Raj.
11. They are ham-handed, negligent emailers who mistakenly forward internal documents to a media contact whose name just so happens to be close enough to the company’s EVP that the sender hits “return” at the first auto-fill opportunity rather than punching up two more keys to get the correct name in the “To:” line.
Or was that just me.
11. They had too much light beer at happy hour w coworkers.
With the Cubs and the White Sox being close to mathematically eliminated already, it’s great to see the Bing blog showing some of the proverbial green shoots that all the politicians were talking about a few short years ago.