Cummins Confidential Special : The Newsroom Strategy Of A Company Ashamed Of Its Own Products

The Newsroom Starts Swinging Again

I step away for a bit and Cummins immediately starts stuffing the newsroom like a taxidermist with a deadline.

Not one clean hit. Not one decent story. Just a whole conveyor belt of heritage slop, ethics perfume, women-in-engineering bunting, employee uplift guff, brake-pad filler, marine-engine flogging and a travelling diesel carnival wheeled out like the second coming of Christ in steel-toe boots.

Read separately, each item is just another little corporate bowel movement. Read together, they tell the truth.

Cummins is not informing. It is staging. It is arranging props around the machine so the machine looks less like what it is.

And what it is, beneath all the smiling headshots and institutional self-love, is the same old Cummins carcass dragged into another quarter with a bit more gloss on the hide.

This whole run was one long deodorising operation.

The Founder Myth Gets Dusted Off Again

They begin, naturally, with the old saint.

The People Who Built Cummins is a sepia little handjob to Clessie Cummins and his “Barnum and Bailey Days”, a phrase so absurdly revealing it ought to have set off an alarm in their own comms department. But no. Out it comes proudly. The founder as showman. The founder as hustler. The founder as diesel evangelist driving publicity stunts across America while the crowd gasps and the engine hums and history bends the knee.

This is not history. It is lineage laundering.

Cummins wants to remind you that it was born not merely of engineering, but of daring, grit, spectacle and some frontier magic. That way, when the company starts rolling modern roadshow trucks around the country ten days later, it does not look like a sales operation. It looks like tradition. Legacy. Continuity. Noble old bullshit in a pressed shirt.

The founder myth is there for one reason: to bless the fresh machinery with ancestral holiness.

That is why the story appears before the tour pieces. Because a moving truck is just a moving truck until you drag a dead founder out to wave at it from the grave.

The Human Faces Are Wheeled In Next

Then, as ever, comes the garnish.

Not content with one round of industrial self-congratulation, Cummins drags in the employee stories. Warm, soft, fragrant little things. Human humidifiers. Profiles designed to make a global engine manufacturer look like a place where personal growth flowers in rich loam rather than a place that still shifts hardware for a living and would quite like you not to stare too hard at the exhaust.

First up, Gabriela C. Embedded software. Empowering teams. Shaping the future. Global perspective. Deep commitment to people. Trust. Inclusion. Growth. Whole-person nonsense. The usual bowl of LinkedIn porridge, stirred carefully and served lukewarm to people who still think the phrase “authentic leadership” deserves parole.

Then, because one tray of moral canapés is never enough, they roll out Powering Progress: The Women Behind The Cummins X10. Women’s History Month, naturally. A lovely opportunity not to examine structures, labour or power, but to wrap a medium-duty engine platform in a few strategically deployed female professionals and call it progress.

That is the trick. Always the same fucking transparent trick.

Take a woman doing her actual job. Take another woman doing her actual job. Photograph them nicely. Add uplifting copy. Then use them as emotional sandbags to soften the impact of yet more engine flogging.

The women are not the problem. The company using them as moral upholstery is.

Cummins is not celebrating people here. It is arranging them around the merchandise like parsley round a slab of dead meat.

Then The Ethics Medallion Is Pinned On

And because no corporate theatre is complete without a rosette pinned to its chest, along comes the Ethisphere piece.

Most Ethical Companies. Integrity. Accountability. Doing business the right way. One can almost hear the room filling with the soft wet sound of executives inhaling their own farts.

Now, this is where Cummins is especially irritating. Because the point is not that the award is fake. The point is that ethics itself has been turned into a glossy managerial product. Questionnaire. Scoring. Benchmarking. Recognition. Brand enhancement. Talent attraction. Virtue, but with a process map and a sponsor pack.

Which makes it perfect for Cummins.

If you are about to spend the rest of the month hawking marine engines, brake pads and a diesel road tour, of course you want an ethics plaque taped to your forehead first. Of course you do. You want the room pre-sedated. You want the reader to associate the company with moral seriousness before the actual sales shite comes clanking into view.

It is not ethics as character. It is ethics as atmospheric treatment.

Spray before use.

Back In The Filth, Where Cummins Actually Lives

Once the candles are lit, the actual business returns.

Not the human waffle. Not the heritage lacquer. Not the ethics glaze. The meat.

A “market-ready” K50 marine engine in Asia Pacific. Because apparently one cannot simply sell a marine engine anymore. It has to be “showcased” in a “growth sector” with “local customer demand” and all the rest of the dead-eyed trade prose these companies crank out like they are being held at knifepoint by a PowerPoint template.

Then the Meritor brake-pad piece. One pad, four calipers. Patent-pending. Technician-friendly. Great. Splendid. A friction-material press release. The sort of thing you’d expect to be read only by a bloke in hi-vis eating an egg mayo sandwich in a parts office. But there it is, jammed into the same publishing stream as ethics awards and founder lore, because that is the newsroom formula now. Sell the guts, perfume the room.

And then the roadshow.

Christ, the roadshow.

Forever Rising Tour. Innovation Back On The Road. The X15, X15N and X10 hauled across the country in a travelling diesel pageant that Clessie himself would probably recognise instantly as the same old carnival act in a cleaner pair of trousers.

This is Cummins at its most honest, though not in the way it means to be. The company is showing you its soul here. Not in the employee pieces. Not in the ethics puff. In the roadshow.

Put the hardware on wheels.
Send it town to town.
Get punters touching it.
Get them driving it.
Turn the machine into theatre.
Call it progress.

Same circus. New fonts.

What They Are Actually Doing

This is the overriding narrative.

Not innovation. Not transparency. Not “telling our story”.

Cummins is braiding together four strands and hoping nobody notices the rope.

First, founder mythology.
The old man was a showman. Therefore the modern show is noble.

Second, human halo.
Here are thoughtful employees, women in engineering, software people, leaders with empathy, collaborative teams and all the approved language of dignity and growth.

Third, ethics incense.
Here is the shiny little seal saying we are among the good ones, now please breathe deeply and do not look directly at the product line.

Fourth, the actual sales engine.
Marine hardware. Diesel tours. Brake pads. Platform marketing. Application coverage. Customer response. Revenue.

That is the structure. That is the newsroom logic. Cummins is not publishing “news”. It is building a padded room around the machine.

Because the machine alone no longer carries the emotional load.

You cannot just bark “here is more diesel” at the public anymore and expect applause. You need women. You need software. You need whole-person bollocks. You need ethics. You need founder dust. You need a nice soft choir singing behind the hardware while the deal gets done.

Cummins knows exactly what it is doing.

It is plating old industrial appetite as purpose.

The Whole Thing Smells Of Fear

That is really what hangs over this little blitz. Fear.

Not panic. Not desperation. Nothing so dramatic. Just the low-grade corporate fear that the product, on its own, no longer inspires. The fear that engines are no longer romantic enough, brake pads no longer sexy enough, marine power no longer meaningful enough, and roadshows no longer innocent enough to be sent out without a support act of moral and emotional fluff.

So they send the support act first.

A founder tale here.
A woman engineer there.
A software saint.
An ethics badge.
Then, once the room is softened up, in rolls the proper business on fat tyres.

That is not confidence. That is insecurity in a blazer.

A confident company does not need to drape every hard commercial movement in warm human fabric. A confident company says: this is what we make, this is why, this is the trade. Cummins cannot leave it there because it knows the trade looks too grubby on its own.

So it wraps the gearbox in feelings.

A Brief Word On The Women And Workers They Keep Hiding Behind

Again, because it needs saying properly: the employees are not the target.

The target is the company that keeps dragging workers on stage to make the machine look less ugly.

Gabriela does not deserve criticism. The sneer is for the comms parasite who looked at her and thought, yes, let’s use this as a human shield for an engine-maker’s self-image.

Dalia and Tara do not deserve the sneer. The sneer is for the institution that looked at Women’s History Month and thought, perfect, let’s strap it to the X10 and pretend a mid-bore workhorse is now a feminist artefact.

That is what makes Cummins so grim. It takes real labour, real people, real expertise, and turns them into scene dressing for the commercial through-line it never actually abandons.

People as garnish.
Ethics as glaze.
Heritage as sauce.
Hardware as the entree.

That is the plate.

The Roadshow Says More Than The Rest Of It Combined

Of all the pieces, the touring circus is the cleanest expression of the company’s worldview.

You can keep your ethics award.
You can keep your founder fable.
You can keep your employee uplift.
The roadshow is the truth.

A company confident enough to drag its future around the country on trucks, invite people in, offer ride-and-drives and stage the whole thing like a revival tent meeting is not pivoting away from old instincts. It is doubling down on them. It is saying, with all the subtlety of a brick through a conservatory window: this is still who we are. We sell machinery with spectacle attached.

And that is why the founder piece mattered so much. It was not nostalgia. It was permission. Permission to act like an old travelling engine church while pretending this somehow amounts to modern transformation.

It does not.

It amounts to corporate taxidermy.

They have stuffed the old beast, polished its teeth, put a spotlight on it and hired a few employee profiles to reassure the children.

Cummins Did Not Use My Break To Inform Anyone

That is the thing to understand.

This was not a run of newsroom updates. It was not a harmless cluster of internal morale pieces and product notices. It was a coordinated little self-portrait, and the portrait is foul.

Cummins spent the gap building an atmosphere in which everything ugly is buffered, everything commercial is elevated, everything human is instrumentalised and everything morally awkward is fogged over with enough legacy-and-values sludge to keep the smell down.

That is the special.

Heritage sauce.
Ethics glaze.
Human garnish.

Underneath, the same old slab of Cummins.

Still selling.
Still staging.
Still mistaking deodorant for absolution.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project