Cummins had a busy little day in the newsroom on 10 March.
First, out came the scented candle: a syrupy employee profile titled “Driven by purpose: How Jigyasa S. is helping shape Cummins’ digital future.” Then, before the sugar crash had even settled in, out came the diesel slab: “Cummins expands versatile medium-duty portfolio built for every job.”
And there it is. The whole company in two posts.
One hand strokes your hair and whispers about curiosity, inclusion, growth and psychological safety. The other hand shoves another medium-duty diesel lump over the counter and calls it progress.
Cummins wants applause because it has worked out how to put a smiling human face next to an engine release. Marvel at the innovation.
The first piece is pure corporate incense. Jigyasa is “driven by purpose”. She thrives. She collaborates. She removes inefficiencies. She helps people succeed in meaningful ways. She builds clarity. She supports transformation. She finds inspiration in enterprise goals. She believes in growth. She values flexibility. She cherishes being seen not just for what she can do today, but what she can become tomorrow.
Christ alive.
You can practically hear the violins swelling in Columbus.
This is not a profile. It is a deodoriser. A warm human mist sprayed into the air so the next item, a dense lump of diesel flogging, goes down easier.
Because right alongside all this purpose-drenched drivel, Cummins is still doing what Cummins does best: selling old combustion with newer adjectives.
The second release is a masterclass in industrial beige. Cummins is “strengthening its leadership” with a “versatile power portfolio” designed to meet “evolving demands”. Leading the line-up is the X10, a medium-duty diesel “workhorse” built for vocational, transit, pickup and delivery and regional haul customers. It offers slightly better fuel economy than previous platforms, which is Cummins-speak for: same basic poison, marginally neater packaging.
Then comes the magic phrase. Not magic in the good sense. Magic in the sense of a grubby little PR trick wheeled out to make something filthy sound futuristic. The X10 boasts a “Twin Module Aftertreatment system”.
A what?
In plain English, Cummins is once again bolting more hardware onto diesel exhaust and asking everyone to clap because the fumes now pass through a more sophisticated excuse machine. This is what passes for innovation in their world. Not moving beyond the old model. Not retiring the filth. Just adding more plumbing, more acronyms and more brochure sludge to keep the thing marketable for another product cycle.
So let’s line the two pieces up properly.
In one, Cummins is a caring modern employer where bright people ask questions, build confidence and contribute to a larger purpose.
In the other, Cummins is still huffing medium-duty diesel into the future while muttering about uptime, durability and fleet readiness like a man trying to seduce a truck stop with a laminated spec sheet.
Purpose on the homepage. Diesel in the bloodstream.
That is the real headline.
And no, this is not a coincidence. It is choreography. Cummins knows a straight engine release is dull as dog shit to anyone outside the trade. So it wraps the machine in a person. It borrows warmth from an employee story and uses it to soften the sight of another diesel platform being pushed as if civilisation itself depends on keeping work trucks slightly more efficient while still belching their way through the century.
The target here is not Jigyasa. She is not the villain. She is the prop. A real employee, no doubt doing real work, repurposed into corporate mood lighting so Cummins can look caring in one frame while staying exactly what it has always been in the next.
That is what makes the whole thing so grubby.
The company is not merely celebrating a worker. It is using her. Using her language, her face, her ambition, her story of adaptation and effort, to suggest that Cummins itself is humane, progressive and future-facing. Then, with barely enough time for the perfume to settle, it lumbers back into the room carrying a diesel engine and calling it versatile.
This is their transformation now. Not structural change. Not moral seriousness. Not some brave leap beyond the old dependence on engine sales. Just a split-screen trick.
Employee halo on the left. Diesel carcass on the right.
And they wonder why nobody with a functioning brain trusts corporate communications.
Even the language gives the game away. In the employee profile, everything is about empowerment, purpose, growth and people. In the diesel release, everything is about performance, chassis integration, serviceability, application flexibility and future emissions standards. The first is there to make you feel good. The second is there to keep the revenue pump primed. One is emotional laundering for the other.
This is not a company caught between two eras. It knows exactly what it is doing. The “digital future” stuff exists to stop the diesel reality from looking quite so stale. The human story is there so the hardware pitch smells less like a hardware pitch. Cummins wants the credit for modernity while still collecting the cash from old iron.
And yes, it is all so horribly familiar. Big company spots reputational drift. Big company publishes worker profile soaked in empathy and purpose. Big company then sells more of the same industrial guff it has always sold, only now with a little moral garnish on top. Suddenly a diesel engine is not just an engine. It is part of a larger story about innovation, community and shared progress. A piece of machinery becomes a values statement. A press release becomes therapy.
Piss off.
What Cummins calls purpose is usually just branding with better lighting. What it calls progress is often just continuity with extra casing. What it calls transformation is too often old combustion taught a few new lines.
And what drives this latest “digital future” push, if we are being adult about it, is not world peace, not human flourishing and certainly not some saintly devotion to the common good.
It is sales.
Sales of engines.
Sales of systems.
Sales of the same old heavy industrial dependency tarted up as customer need.
The employee feature exists because “Come buy our diesel workhorse” sounds grubby on its own. So Cummins drags in belonging, confidence, curiosity and care to carry the emotional load. It is less a newsroom than a laundering operation for corporate self-image.
That is why the double drop matters. On their own, these would just be two boring Cummins posts. Together, they tell the truth. The first tells you how Cummins wants to be seen. The second tells you what still pays the bills.
A caring face beside a diesel block. That is the strategy.
So yes, all the best to Jigyasa. She may well be talented, diligent and everything Cummins says she is. But this piece is not really about her, and that is the insult buried inside it. Her story has been fed into the machine so the machine can keep pretending it has a soul.
It doesn’t.
It has a communications department.
And somewhere in that department, some poor bastard probably thought this was a smart little one-two. Open with purpose, close with torque. Humanise the brand, then move the metal. Instead, what Cummins has produced is a perfect accidental self-portrait. A company still soaked in diesel trying to pass itself off as enlightened because it has learned to say “psychological safety” before hawking the next workhorse.
That is not a digital future.
That is just old Cummins in softer focus.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project