Good news for living Cummins employees. TCAP is giving you the day off. Nobody needs to worry about us stuffing their full name into another headline this morning because Cummins has returned to the safest demographic in Corporate Communications: people who are no longer in a position to Google themselves. On 16 September, six weeks out from Halloween, Life at the Company introduced John Niven. Not John N. Not another carefully rationed surname initial. John fucking Niven. Career history, photographs, business relationships, family connections, the lot. Less than a month after TCAP noticed living employees disappearing behind initials while the dead received the deluxe biography treatment, Death At The Company is back.
On 17 August, TCAP published Death At The Company : Reactive Cummins Hides The Living And Starts Digging Up The Dead after noticing a peculiar split developing inside the Cummins newsroom. Contemporary employee stories were increasingly arriving as John T., Sergio B., Collins N. and similar first-name-plus-initial constructions. Meanwhile, somebody at Cummins appeared to have found the archive cupboard, a shovel and absolutely no restraint.
Out came Clessie Cummins. William Glanton Irwin appeared with his identity intact. Donovan Joel Cummins wandered back into the newsroom with the full naming convention. Photographs were labelled, relatives were named, old jobs were reconstructed and long-dead businessmen received enough biographical detail to make an amateur genealogist wonder why they had bothered paying Ancestry.
The living got initials. By contrast, the dead got the fucking census.
We suggested that Life at the Company might require a modest rebrand.
Cummins has now supplied the sequel.
John Niven Gets The Premium Package
This week’s historical arrival is John Niven, and Cummins has not been shy. Its new People Who Built Cummins article traces Niven through his work with W.G. Irwin and Clessie Cummins, his involvement in the company’s early financial difficulties, the 1923 Sears episode, his period as general manager, his later work at Purity Stores and his connection with J. Irwin Miller. There are photographs, commercial relationships and family details. One image caption even identifies his father, Richard Niven.
Apparently once the pulse disappears, the privacy shutters come flying off the fucking windows.
More importantly, compare that editorial treatment with Cummins’ modern employee material. John T.’s profile discusses almost sixteen years with the company, leadership responsibilities, mentoring, bereavement, use of the Employee Assistance Programme, tuition assistance and his life outside work. This is not some anonymous quotation shoved beneath a photograph of a hard hat. Cummins gives readers a substantial and personal portrait of the man.
Still John T.
Sergio B. gets his upbringing, career progression, sourcing work, leadership philosophy, employee-group involvement and university outreach. Collins N. talks about his work, development and the satisfaction of watching engineering ideas become physical products. Again, nobody is arguing that TCAP has some divine right to their surnames. Employees may prefer initials, Cummins may have sensible privacy conventions and somebody may simply have looked at Google and thought, fuck that noise.
Fair enough.
The finished editorial contrast remains absurd.
The Living Get Privacy. The Dead Get Production Values.
Cummins has accidentally created a bizarre little naming economy. A living employee can tell the world about grief, ambition, family, career progression, workplace support and personal philosophy while retaining one final consonant between themselves and complete search-engine identification. Then Corporate Communications opens the historical archive and suddenly everybody is getting processed like a passport application after six pints.
Full names arrive alongside parents, employers, photographs, commercial disputes, business relationships and historical movements. Death, it seems, unlocks the extended edition.
John Niven does not get John N. Instead, he gets Sears, Purity Stores, Clessie, Irwin, Miller, his father and half the bloody twentieth century arranged around him.
Of course, it is not difficult to see why. Historical subjects are beautifully compliant. They do not ask to see the draft, question the headline, demand that an unflattering sentence comes out or ring Communications on Monday morning because some accountability-blogging bastard has appeared underneath them on Google.
Better still, they behave. Once the archive has placed them in position, they stay exactly where you fucking put them.
Corporate History Is Lovely When Nobody Can Answer Back
Niven’s place in the Cummins story gives the company a thick wad of material to work with. According to Cummins’ own account, he understood both Clessie Cummins and W.G. Irwin well enough to help bridge the gap between an engineer obsessed with making machinery work and the businessman whose money was helping stop the entire experiment disappearing up its own arse.
Then, inevitably, came Sears.
In 1923, after the Hvid engine arrangement with Sears, Roebuck & Co. collapsed, Cummins found itself in an uncomfortable commercial position. Niven travelled to Chicago with Clessie and, according to Cummins, helped negotiate a settlement that returned nearly $100,000 to the young company.
That is prime corporate-history material. The infant business is wobbling, money is tied up, an engineer and businessman head for Chicago, heads get knocked together and the company escapes with enough cash to keep going. A century later, Communications can polish the episode, pick the photograph, identify every dead bastard involved and package the whole thing as another neat chapter in the origin story.
Nobody from 1923 is getting pissy in the comments.
That, ultimately, is the beauty of the archive.
Then The Grocery Trucks Arrive
Niven later moved west and became associated with Purity Stores, where Cummins says he provided another useful opening by putting a Model H diesel engine into one of the grocery chain’s trucks. The trial helped demonstrate that Cummins diesel technology could survive ordinary commercial service rather than merely looking clever in an engineering workshop.
As a result, more Cummins-powered trucks followed. Later still, J. Irwin Miller reportedly spent time learning business management under Niven before returning to Columbus and eventually becoming one of the defining figures in Cummins history.
From a corporate storytelling perspective, the lineage is almost indecently convenient. Clessie, Irwin, Niven, Sears, early diesel trucking and Miller can all be laid out in a straight historical line, polished until the rough edges behave themselves and served back to the modern audience on a fucking silver tray.
That is precisely why these dead-company profiles are so useful. The history can be assembled into a clean institutional lineage in which every character occupies a defined place and nobody suddenly develops a competing interpretation because everyone involved has been dead long enough for the argument to cool.
Modern employees are messier.
They are still alive.
Terrible fucking habit.
Life At The Company Has A Pulse Problem
The best part remains the category.
Life at the Company.
John Niven is in Life at the Company.
TCAP did not choose that label. We simply arrived afterwards and, somewhat rudely, checked for breathing.
As a result, the category now contains this glorious contrast between contemporary employee stories and increasingly detailed historical profiles. On one side sits the modern Cummins workplace, full of carefully edited accounts of purpose, inclusion, empathy, development and making an impact. On the other sits a corporate cemetery with Wi-Fi.
The deceased get excavated with enthusiasm. Names come back, families come back, jobs come back and old business deals get another run around the block. Some poor sod who died before colour television gets better search-engine identification than the bloke currently leading Global Escalations & Insights.
Frankly, you could not design the joke more efficiently.
The Archive Cannot File A Grievance
Corporate history also offers one priceless editorial advantage: the subject cannot fuck off halfway through the campaign.
For example, a living employee can leave Cummins, change their mind about publicity, dislike how their story was presented or decide that having their full identity permanently bolted to a corporate article was a terrible bloody idea. They can ask questions, request changes and generally behave like irritating human beings with continuing agency.
By contrast, John Niven is unlikely to cause any of those operational headaches. Neither will somebody involved in a 1923 Sears negotiation suddenly email the newsroom at 2:17 in the afternoon asking for a correction. Purity Stores is not going to accuse Cummins of taking the truck trial out of context, while Clessie Cummins will not wake up, log into X and start quote-tweeting Corporate Affairs.
The dead are magnificent stakeholders. There are no objections, awkward follow-ups or frantic requests to remove a surname after publication. Nor is some cunt from HR going to appear halfway through the process asking whether consent was documented in 1923.
Consequently, corporate heritage offers something the living workforce never can: history with the troublesome participants removed.
Cummins Has Accidentally Built Two Newsrooms
The result increasingly resembles two publications occupying the same website.
One newsroom handles the living. It is polished, warm and cautious. Employees discuss belonging, leadership, careers, values, mentoring and personal growth. Sometimes Cummins tells us remarkably intimate things about them, but the surname stays tucked safely behind an initial like the last biscuit some selfish bastard has hidden behind the tea bags.
Meanwhile, the second newsroom appears to have been staffed by Victorian grave robbers.
That lot disappear into the archive and return dragging full identities, engineering gambles, financial crises, fathers, employers, grocery stores, failed business arrangements, old trucks and enough historical shit to reconstruct the company from first principles.
One side gets purpose.
The other gets plot.
Worse still for anybody hoping TCAP might eventually run out of material, the dead keep producing better copy.
John T. Versus John Niven
Nothing illustrates the naming arrangement better than putting the two Johns beside each other.
John T. leads Global Escalations & Insights and receives a detailed contemporary profile touching both his career and personal life. John Niven helped negotiate with Sears in 1923, became Cummins general manager, later ran Purity Stores and appears in company history with his full identity, commercial movements and family connections neatly assembled around him.
One is alive.
The other gets the surname.
Perhaps mortality is Cummins’ most effective privacy-management tool.
That was the joke in August. September has simply wandered back carrying another exhibit under its arm and asking where the fuck we want it displayed.
Death At The Company Is Becoming A Franchise
The beauty of this sequel is that nothing particularly dramatic had to happen. Cummins did not need to announce a scandal, nobody needed to resign and there was no regulatory filing or billion-dollar settlement lurking beneath the newsroom copy.
Cummins simply published another dead man.
Because the company’s own editorial pattern is now established, however, John Niven walks straight into an existing TCAP series like somebody arriving for a shift he did not know he had.
That is how recurring corporate comedy works. The first occurrence looks odd. The second looks familiar. By the third, somebody should probably start ordering branded mugs.
DEATH AT THE COMPANY.
Where careers never end, provided the employee has.
There you go, Communications. That one’s free.
The Dead Get Their Surnames Back
So, inevitably, Death At The Company has returned.
The living can enjoy their TCAP break. John T., Sergio B. and Collins N. can remain exactly where Cummins left them, safely behind their initials, while the newsroom goes rummaging through another century for someone whose surname no longer creates an administrative headache.
This time, Cummins has supplied the name, career, photographs, family, commercial history and institutional mythology. TCAP merely has to stand beside the finished product and notice the wonderfully stupid contrast.
A living employee enters the newsroom and the surname gets shortened. A dead employee arrives and the archive doors blow off their hinges, the family tree comes out, the corporate history gets loaded and the full identity is restored.
Cummins calls all of this Life at the Company.
Absolute bollocks.
The living get initials. The dead get their fucking surnames back.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins – People Who Built Cummins: The Businessman Who Helped Bridge the Gap
- The Cummins Accountability Project – Death at the Company: Reactive Cummins Hides the Living and Starts Digging Up the Dead
- Cummins – Leading with Purpose: How John T. Creates Impact Through Empathy
- Cummins – Powered by Purpose: Meet Sergio B.
- Cummins – “I Can See My Work Come to Life”: Collins N. on Making an Impact