For those of you who have been following along with the Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) that our CEO Jerry Stritzke participated in yesterday – thank you.
Here are a couple words from him on the conversation that continued through the evening:
“I enjoyed being on Reddit. It’s an incredibly passionate and engaged community. I value and encourage transparency from the people who work with me and the people whose lives we touch. We do a huge number of things at REI to engage with employees and drive transparency and so discussing things like what it means to be a membership organization are normal practice. That’s vital because our members are actually the owners of REI.
About the Reddit thread specifically – this is a completely legitimate conversation (how we invite people to join the co-op and how we measure employee performance). It’s an issue we’re currently focused on and so I plan to dig into the question more deeply. We will have a collective conversation about this issue. This will include conversations in our stores. If I’m not happy with what we find, we’ll make a change.
Bottom line, though, an open and transparent conversation is something CEOs should not be afraid of. I, for one, welcome it.” – Jerry