Want to know how to rally the workforce and get people excited about following you into a tough battle against your business competition? Here’s the formula as demonstrated this week by Dell CEO Michael Dell:

• Write a memo to your workers about big changes you have in store for the company;
• Label it “Confidential” or “For Internal Use Only,” but find some way to get it leaked to a prominent business publication – preferably The Wall Street Journal;
• Be brutally reflective, even going so far as to challenge some of the basic business strategy of the company. For example, if you have built the businesses on marketing directly to consumers and users, perhaps write something like, “(We will) fix our Core Business to be competitive. The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion…We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need.”
• Take a thinly-veiled swipe at one of your biggest competitors and energize employees with tough talk about how your new approach will be bigger, better, and radically different. Example: “We know our competitors drive complexity and needless cost into customers’ environments. These so-called ‘service divisions’ create a never-ending cycle of activity with unclear return on investment. We intend to break this cycle … and will help customers escape this complexity trap and unlock the true potential of technology.”
• Frame the memo as a call to arms, a manifesto for change, and most importantly, as “a defining moment in our history.”
• Be honest about the challenges ahead, but point to a better future (“the future looks great for Dell”) and the tough work ahead, but emphasize the Promised Land that lies ahead. For example, “we are up to the challenges that we’ll face on our journey — challenges that will test, teach, and ultimately strengthen us as a company and a team.”
• Thanks everyone for the hard work to come (“Thank you for transforming Dell with the customer in mind every day.”)

Will this work? Only time will tell. But when Starbucks’ Howard Schultz did something much like this a few weeks ago, it garnered quite a bit of press and some positive employee feedback. Clearly, the “leaked memo” does a great job of grabbing the attention of customers and the business community at large. And maybe, it will help Dell to buy time to get the new strategy put into place.

I’ve been on the road for the past week, so my apologies for being away from the blog during that time. Here are some interesting surveys that came across my desk while I was gone.

Soft skills rock: A recent poll of hiring managers by OfficeTeam, HR.com and the International Association of Administrative Professionals says that 67 percent of hiring managers say they would hire an applicant with strong “soft” skills even if their technical skills were lacking. However, only 9 percent say they would hire someone with strong tech skills but weak interpersonal skills. In addition, 93 percent of hiring managers felt that technical skills are easier to teach than soft skills. The point—and it’s true of everyone in the workforce, from administrative staff up to high-level executives—is that the ability to work collaboratively trumps all else. Technical skills are nice, but they don’t do much good if you can’t work with others.

Outsourcing still an issue: Global outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas note that there is a growing trend toward greater outsourcing of work in the financial services industry. Writing about the recently announced merger between European banking giants ABN AMRO and Barclays, John Challenger says that “in addition to the 12,800 jobs the combined banks plan to eliminate, the banks announced that 10,800 [jobs] would be ‘moved offshore to low-cost locations.’ This comes just two weeks after Citigroup announced it would be eliminating 17,000 jobs and outsourcing an additional 9,500 jobs to low-cost locations inside and outside of the United States.” He adds: “The issue of outsourcing has fallen off the national radar over the last couple of years. … However, as the recent banking announcements prove, outsourcing is still a significant tool among corporations seeking to cut costs.”

A sobering prospect: Need another indicator that the gloom-and-doom talk of huge worker shortages is just overblown rhetoric? A survey by Bankrate.com says that nearly one in five workers “plan to work until death.” Wonder why that is? Well, the poll also found that 28 percent of those surveyed save less than 5 percent of their gross pay a year. This includes 16 percent of Americans who acknowledge that “they are not putting any of their paycheck aside for retirement.” If you ever questioned the need for automatically putting employees into 401(k) plans and other self-funded retirement vehicles, this poll should cure you of that.

It’s hard to get shocked anymore by businesses cutting jobs. In some sectors—like newspapers, where The Tampa Tribune this week announced a cut of 70 staff positions—layoffs and cutbacks have become so common that they have ceased to be newsworthy since they seem to happen every day. And that is exactly why yesterday’s big layoff announcement from banking giant Citigroup was so surprising.

Part of it is the sheer size of the Citigroup cuts (17,000 jobs, some 5 percent of the company’s 327,000-person workforce), but another part is the amount the company will save as a result—$2.6 billion in 2008 from these cuts alone. When you add in savings from some previously announced restructuring, Citigroup’s overall savings will total more than $2 billion this year, nearly $3.7 billion next year and close to $4.6 billion in 2009. Those are mind-boggling numbers.

Citigroup’s action is also surprising because the 17,000 job cuts represent the “largest single job-cut announcement outside the automotive industry since 2005,” according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Unlike many of the financial job cuts that have occurred this year, [the] Citigroup cuts are not directly related to the housing slowdown and decline in mortgage lending,” John Challenger says. “Rather, it was the pressure to reduce costs, which were significantly outpacing profits for the nation’s largest financial institution.”

What is also troubling is that unemployment rates in major markets are on the rise. As reported in the Data Bank column in the April 9 issue of Workforce Management magazine, unemployment in major cities (measured from January 2006 to January 2007) is up across the board. Some examples:

• Boston —5.2 percent, up from 4.4 percent
• Chicago —5.1 percent, up from 3.9 percent
• Los Angeles —4.6 percent, up from 3.9 percent
• Minneapolis/St. Paul—4.7 percent, up from 3.8 percent
• New York —5.6 percent, up from 4 percent
• Phoenix —3.9 percent, up from 3.3 percent

“We are starting to see non-automotive and non-housing job cuts grow in size,” Challenger says. “If consumer and business spending cools this summer, the economy could weaken further and large job cuts may become a more common occurrence.”

So, just what is happening here? Do we have a “war for talent,” as we keep hearing about, or is unemployment rising as companies cut back? According to BusinessWeek, it’s a bit of both. While workers with skills in short supply are in high demand, BusinessWeek says that “the strongest evidence that there is no general shortage [of workers] today is that overall worker pay has barely outpaced inflation. In the U.S., the share of national income going to corporate profit, rather than, say, labor, is hovering around a 50-year high.”

In other words, if you are a teacher, salesperson, or petroleum engineer, employers are beating down your door. However, if you are an auto worker, journalist or middle manager, well, good luck.

Circuit City’s decision to get rid of some 3,400 workers because they were getting paid “well above the market-based salary range for their role,” according to the company, seemed to me to be a curious way to handle your workforce. Why would a company struggling to compete with strong competitors like Best Buy think that canning the highest-paid (and therefore, probably its best) workers is a winning workforce strategy.

It’s not, of course, and now the other shoe has dropped: Three older Circuit City workers who lost their jobs as a result of this “wage management initiative” (the company-speak for firing people) have sued the company, claiming that the electronics retailer violated California’s age discrimination laws when it laid them off.

There are a lot of issues behind the sale this week of the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and a number of other newspapers and TV stations, to Chicago real estate magnate Sam Zell, but the No. 1 issue in my book comes down to a culture clash.

Tribune’s acquisition of Times Mirror back in 2000 put it in a position where its longtime flagship property (the Chicago Tribune) was no longer Tribune’s top dog. The newly acquired Los Angeles Times was now Tribune’s largest (and best) newspaper, and its single largest source of revenue.

Problem was, Tribune Co. management never really gave the Times its due. Not only did it resist graciously acknowledging the Times’ achievements (13 Pulitzers in five years), but it also prodded and poked editors and managers in Los Angeles to manage their newspaper more like the Chicago Tribune. This didn’t sit well with the Times folks. Like Judea under the Romans, Los Angeles became the most troublesome and difficult province to govern in the Tribune empire. Eventually, something had to give—like a sale.

And at its core, this was a culture clash. The styles of two companies, Times Mirror and Tribune, never matched. The Los Angeles Times was never appreciated by Tribune management, and the newspaper staff took every opportunity to point this fact out. On the other side, Tribune never fully embraced Times Mirror as a respected and full member of the Tribune family.

Merging cultures is never easy, especially when the acquiring company isn’t as big or famous as the company being acquired. It’s rare when corporate ego doesn’t get in the way. And it’s rarer still when the acquiring company can subjugate itself to the greater good of the new company. Norwest did this in 1998 when it acquired Wells Fargo and Co., a much more well-known bank. Norwest not only took on the name of the newly acquired company, but it moved its longtime corporate headquarters from Minneapolis to San Francisco. In addition, it put together a team to analyze the cultures of the two companies and to advise management how to avoid missteps. The new company won a 2005 Workforce Management Optimas Award (in the General Excellence category) for its efforts.

Tribune management was never able to check its ego or refashion the company in a way that made the Times and other new Tribune properties feel that they were part of a new and greater enterprise. It’s a lesson that others seeking mergers would do well to learn, but sadly most will fail to heed.