CommLog

We've Moved!

It's been a while since we've posted at CommLog, and that's because CRA's been undergoing a website redesign, one that incorporates CommLog more thoroughly into our overall site. The new site's been launched, which brings us a new CommLog in a new location.

The new URL is http://www.crainc.com/commlog; please update your bookmarks. And for those pulling RSS feeds, we have a new FeedBurner feed here.

Fireside Chats For The Future

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is a must-see for any history nerd or political science geek. It's a great new museum with unique circular architecture, multi-media theater, and high-tech exhibits. The standing exhibit features major events in our nation's history and the perimeter walls display a glimpse in to each presidency.

The section on FDR highlights the New Deal, World War II and an audio recording of one of FDR's fireside chat radio broadcasts. I've always been intrigued with FDR and the way he guided the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II. This time, I was inspired when I heard the Fireside Chat recording. I realized FDR was the first leader to use  media as a strategic communication tool.

The American people believed in FDR, understood the polices, and felt they would be safe under his leadership. His Fireside Chats addressed major events, policies, and programs through which he reduced uncertainty, gave Americans more pride and hope in their country. He needed people to understand why he was creating such policies and how government would eventually help the economy and later, the war effort. People identified, trusted, and respected FDR--he gave his leadership a voice of clarity and reassurance. A brilliant strategy using technology as a strategic tool, while he gave his aggressive initiatives a human voice.

Fast forward to the present where the technology and mass media choices are endless. How can leaders use the "Fireside Chat approach" to add a human voice to their policies, decisions, and personal brand? The answer: today's CEO blogs are yesterday's Fireside chats. CEOs and leaders who blog provide candid, human clarity to their ideas, thoughts, polices, and personal interests. Americans believed in FDR because they saw him a person--a human who put heart into decisions he thought were in the best interest of the country. Every leader can use their blog in a way that fits their style and preferences. In a world of increasing uncertainty, employees look for clarity, guidance, and reasons behind leaders' decisions.

Leaders who blog:
Randy Baseler, VP Marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes
Michael M. Crow, President, Arizona State University
Fastlane Blog (Multiple Senior Leaders), General Motors
Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers

You can learn more  FDR's first Fireside Chats and hear his first broadcast  in  Alan's earlier CommLog post.

The State of the Blogosphere

Technorati's David Sifry has released his latest quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. Take note senior executives and communication leads everywhere: The blogosphere continues to double every 5 1/2 months. Technorati is now tracking 27.5 million blogs and counting. David's summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs [Note: 300,000 new blogs since he compiled his report)
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Reviews of Books Read in 2005

The folks at CRA are heavy readers, and we're often asked what we're reading and what we've liked. I read 19 books in 2005, with a few others that I started but did not finish, and below are thumbnail reviews of those that qualify as business books. Note that I tend not to finish books I don’t enjoy, so most of these reviews are favorable.

Blink: A compelling book that reviews the research related to “rapid cognition,” or how we make decisions in an instant. The bottom line: sometimes our snap decisions are spot on, and sometimes they’re not. It all depends on the context and your expertise. Some find Blink dry; I thought it was more dry than The Tipping Point, but still excellent.

Squirrel Inc.: A wonderful book on narratives and how they work in organizations, structured as a narrative itself. I think Squirrel Inc. is required reading for any communication professional, and for most leaders.

Blog: Radio pundit, Con-Law professor, and blogger Hugh Hewitt’s treatise on weblogs. Disclosure: I met Hugh at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, and between that meeting, the RNC in New York, and a panel we shared for Campaigns & Elections, we became familiar acquaintances. At times it’s hard for some folks (including me) to divorce Hugh from his conservative and evangelical opinions, but I think he gets blogs spot on in Blog, and it’s worth reading … especially as a follow-up to The Cluetrain Manifesto, noted below.

The Likeability Factor: Tim Sanders' follow-up to Love is the Killer App, which I think is required reading for, well, about everyone. Unfortunately, The Likeability Factor isn’t. You can scan this book in a single sitting, and I passed over large sections. Review it in the bookstore and leave it at that.

Getting Things Done: Looking back over 2005, which was without a doubt my most productive and balanced year to date, I attribute nearly all of my effectiveness to the ideas I took from Getting Things Done. Here David Allen has written a very important book to those trying to manage life in our modern, information-driven world, and I was so enamored I ended up striking up a personal and professional relationship with David that’s been equally fulfilling. Get this book, read it, and apply it’s principles. You’ll be glad you did.

Management of the Absurd: Another must read. Richard Farson lays out a set of contradictions in modern organizations and management that are spot-on. I have a review here; read this book, especially if you’re in a leadership role.

Never Eat Alone: Keith Ferrazzi wrote this book primarily around personal stories, many of which I ended up skipping because they became redundant, and in some cases, sounded self-aggrandizing. That said, the book is likely of use to those thinking for the first time about how to build and manage relationships (I think “manage” is the appropriate word for Ferrazzi’s approach to relationship; I would prefer “cultivate”), and I took away a few ideas that I’m glad to have.

House of Lies: Wonderful reading for anyone who has worked in or with large consulting firms. Martin Kihn--who wrote the book while working in a large strategy firm--nails the large-firm culture with a compelling mix of wit, sarcasm, truth, and poignancy.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: The manifesto for the effect of the Internet on organizations and society. Essential reading for anybody working in, leading, or trying to understand modern organizations, else you, too, miss the cluetrain. (You may also catch the cluetrain online.)

How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life: The first of several books I read on Reagan this year. HRRCML presents the 10 lessons Peter Robinson drew from working in the Reagan White House as a young speechwriter. If you’re not a fan of Reagan’s, you’ll find the book fawning. If you are, you’ve probably already read it. If you can be objective, you’ll read it as a set of sound principles for living one’s life.

Freakonomics: I was late to read this blockbuster. Enjoyed it, but didn’t find it as earth-shattering as have some. If you’ve not viewed the world with an empirical eye in the past, and if you didn’t take any econ in college, you’ll love it.

When Character Was King: Peggy Noonan’s account of her life with Ronald Reagan. Fawning to some; spot on for others. Passages are beautifully written, and it’s all very much in the Noonan style (for those who enjoy her Wall Street Journal op-eds). This is more of a history (and in some ways, a goodbye) than an account of lessons learned. I enjoyed it.

The Greatest Communicator: My final Regan book of the year, written by his chief strategist, Dick Wirthlin. A fascinating account of Reagan’s approach to politics, communication, and leadership, and not as fawning as some other Reagan recollections. I think every communication professional out there should read it, as should all senior leaders.

So there’s the list. I’ve started 2006 with Descartes’ Notebook, which I should finish shortly. One final book that we gave a lot of folks in 2005 but which I'd already seen was Rebecca Blood's Weblog Handbook, that we recommend to anyone interested in learning about or publishing blogs.

Technorati Tags: Book Reviews, Rebecca Blood

Our Approach To Presentation Design

A COLLEAGUE AND I have spent the past few days helping a number of client teams prep for a significant presentation to senior management. We do this from time to time, and when we do our focus is typically on message strategy and credibility. That said, presentation design is a heuristic for both, and we inevitably end up teaching the basics of good v. bad slide design at the same time.

At the firm we take an approach to slide design that is different from traditional corporate practice. Our basic philosophy:

• You are the message: A person can communicate with greater persuasive power than any slide presentation.
• Exception: Pictures that say a thousand words. But they REALLY have to say a thousand words. They should also be high-resolution images, or don't use them. Garr Reynolds has more to say about this, and he's right.
• Your slides should "do no harm": They should never compete with the speaker, and only augment the speaker's point. As a result they should be lean on text and lean on animation (there's only one slide animation that has any taste, and it's the slow fade). Otherwise the audience is paying attention to the slide and not to you.
• Ensure everything is essential: Keep the ink:data ratio as close to 1:1 as possible. This means killing chartjunk and following sound principles of chart and table design. It also means killing all that branding and those logos -- the audience knows who you are.

As we explain this philosophy we typically point people to the research of Edward Tufte, which I'll do now. There's also much more in the CommLog archives if you search for "PowerPoint."

Yesterday we spent a lot of time coaching around the physical design of slides so they best reflect our approach. As we did I referred to the "CRA presentation style" more than once, and thought it might be useful to describe the physical setup of our standard PowerPoint template here as an example.

Our PowerPoint template comes in two flavors: White background and dark background. Here's a shot of each. We use the dark background in dark rooms, and the white background in light rooms (you may click any of these images for a larger view).

We've honored the Golden Ratio by matching the proportions of the slide itself to that of the Golden Rectangle (1:1.618). In our case the slides are set to be 10" wide and 6.18" high. This "letterbox" look is more interesting, permits more interesting layouts, and looks great when you project.

We use Gill Sans font, our preferred font for headings in documents across the firm (we use Garamond for text). Gill Sans is easy on the eyes, has an interesting feel to it, and holds up well regardless of text size.

When we use images (which we prefer to do over text ... they help convey an emotional dimension) they're always high resolution, and often full screen.

When laying out images and text, we turn on PowerPoint's "guide" function and set our guides so they reflect the "rule of thirds" and make layout choices based on the guides and their four points of intersection (for more on this go here).

When we DO use bullets, they're a simple as possible ...

So that's our template setup. We think it helps our on-screen stuff be more effective, which is our goal. We've also been inspired by the good taste of Garr Reynolds; go see his stuff. Hope the above is of use.

Technorati Tags: powerpoint, presentations, garr reynolds, information design   

Tips for Intercultural Communication

While doing some client research on intercultural communication, I found this simple article from HBS's Working Knowledge. The author offers tips for communicating with a diverse workforce:

1. Learn how the source culture best receives communications.
2. Train international employees early and often.
3. Train the non-foreign-born, too.
4. Assign mentors and take care of the spouses.
5. Practice open-door communication--carefully.
6. In company-wide communications, avoid jargon and slang.
7. Play by the rules and stick to business.

Some of these tips remind me of what we take away in business from uncertainty reduction theory, a seminal theory in intercultural communication. The theory proposes that we seek to reduce uncertainty in our communication interactions. We do this automatically by making predictions at the cultural, sociocultural, and psychocultural level. In other words, we make assumptions about other people based on prior experience or accumulated knowledge. When we communicate with people we don't know or with individuals from an unfamiliar culture, it's critical that we check our assumptions and seek to learn about one another by making factual observations, asking questions, and disclosing personal information that prompts a reciprocal response.

Future of the Global Workplace

"Regular employment" may be dying, making temporary labor a strategic concern.  The world is getting "talent constrained" (India and China especially), and, as a result, labor arbitrage may be the wave of the past.   

For a provocative view of the future of the global workplace, click on to a very interesting interview with Jeff Joerres, president and CEO of Manpower, recently published in the online edition of The McKinsey Quarterly:

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1709&L2=18&L3=31&srid=27&gp=0

Are Your Stars Aligned?

If you’re thinking about re-designing your organization—remember, it’s all about aligning with your strategy. Strategy—which includes vision, mission and goals—should be the foundation for building your organization, and it should be front and center every time you make a decision about your organization.

Need to decide what your structure and reporting lines should look like? Revising your reward system? Considering how to attract, retain and develop the right people? Trying to foster better collaboration and networking across groups? If you’re tackling any of these challenging issues, you should refer to your strategy as a guidepost for making organizational design decisions.

Jay Galbraith created the star model as a framework for thinking holistically about the major components of organizational design. It’s a great visual and helpful reminder about how all of the pieces of your organization fit together.

An excellent resource on organizational design is Designing Dynamic Organizations by Galbraith, Downey and Kates; it’s user-friendly, a comfortable read and provides a place to dig into details on the star model.

Download Star.doc

A Few Thoughts About Learning

While doing a little light reading on systems thinking, I came across a quote I really like—“ Nothing inhibits future success like making procedures to formalize what generated a previous success.”

In The Art of Systems Thinking, O’Connor and McDermott remind us that what we often hail as a success was really a break-through—a new way of thinking—which comes from a change in one of our mental models. Once a break-through is formalized and institutionalized it becomes the norm—and we tend not to question it or give it any further thought. This is especially true when our organizations select people who act and think like the existing team. No one questions the norms. The risk? Nothing changes and over time the system runs down.

So, what can we do to avoid organizational decay? O’Connor and McDermott offer thoughts on two types of learning—simple learning and generative learning. Simple learning takes place when we change what we do in response to the results and feedback we get—for example, making changes to your operations based on the results of a satisfaction survey completed by your customers. It’s important to do this—and it’s a good way to get better and/or more efficient at what you already do.

However, if you’re really looking for the change, revitalization, and innovations needed to stave off decay, you need to foster generative learning. Generative learning happens when we let feedback change our mental models—that is, change our deeply rooted assumptions and our way of looking at things—an essential if you need to solve big problems and drive your business toward a changing future.

(Source: The Art of Systems Thinking, Joseph O’Connor & Ian McDermott)

Intranet Trends

CIO columnist Shiv Singh outlines seven Intranet Trends to Watch for in 2006.

Some excerpts:

1. The Intranet grows up and makes new friends
   

   For example, corporate e-mail, telephony, mobile warrior applications, virtual team rooms, executive dashboards and enterprise intranets are distinct tools with independent owners, budgets and business cases behind them today. However, in the not too distant future, you’ll have a single, integrated voice and data interface that will combine these tools in a dynamic, natural and adaptive manner. IDC calls this coming consolidation the Enterprise Workplace while Forrester refers to it as the information workplace. Irrespective of what you may call it, expect the trend to hit you in the next two to three years.

2. Intranet ROI will be pushed to the back burner
   When was the last time your management team asked you to create an ROI model for corporate e-mail? It was probably quite some time ago. In contrast to e-mail, intranet managers have often been asked to justify investments in their company intranet. Well, there’s good news. In the future, senior executives will be less concerned about the tangible ROI of an intranet. It will be an assumed cost of doing business, just as corporate e-mail has become.
3. Expect Intranets to become even more pervasive
   

   Expect to see many more dynamic, innovative intranets in the near future, whether they’re servicing the board members of a Fortune 500 company or farmers in a developing country. Also, expect to be challenged to deliver more dynamic and innovative intranet solutions for your employees and business partners.

4. The user experience matters at last
   

   IDC explains this trend as a new “user experience platform” that is emerging to improve the lives of information workers integrating existing intranets and transactional applications. And as an intranet manager, this is good. A few years ago, employees barely cared about their company intranets. Today, they’re using their intranets so much that they expect them to have the simplicity and usability of Google or Yahoo! Furthermore, in many large companies, the intranet serves as the official face of the company. Companies with unusable and complex intranets are doing a huge disservice to their employees.

5. The Ajax revolution hits the intranet
   

   Now imagine a physical map of your office on your intranet. But also imagine that you could scroll around it, click on a graphic of a desk and get a person’s name, designation and contact information right away. And imagine if by clicking on his or her name, you got a listing of all the recent e-mails sent to you by that person. Or imagine an application on your intranet that has built-in calculators that let you quickly calculate your ideal monthly 401k contributions and depict the results in a graph without requiring several pages to load. And imagine if the graph could be manipulated in real time. That’s the power of Ajax.

6. Blogs come and go but RSS will remain
   

   The related technology to continue to keep an eye on is Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Companies that embrace RSS as a content format and use it to publish information to employees will have far greater success than with blogging alone. Enabling employees to subscribe to subject and department specific RSS feeds and then view them via readers will enable more targeted, community focused conversations in the workplace. And the ease with which postings can be viewed in an RSS reader will encourage more employees to participate. For RSS to be adopted however, companies will have to let their employees subscribe to both internal and external RSS feeds. If this happens, then I believe that in some companies blogging combined with wide adoption of RSS readers will become even more relevant than the company intranet.

7. Wikis gain prominence and get integrated
   

   In a similar fashion to blogs, wikis do have a role in the workplace but only if they’re used for the right purpose and if they have the right culture to flourish in. Many smaller, less structured companies have embraced wikis as their intranet technology platform. For these organizations with flatter, less formal hierarchies, the self correcting mechanisms of a wiki create the right balance of empowering the employees to share and preventing things from spinning out of control. After all, each time a contributor edits or adds to a page, his or her name appears in the revisions list.

CAUTION: Benchmarking Ahead

“Benchmarking” is being used widely across businesses today. And if companies aren’t using it, they want to be, or perhaps, feel they ought to be. But do you have appropriate standards in place to implement benchmarking? Let’s say you conduct a “benchmarking survey” to compare the “numbers” in your company to the “numbers” of other companies. You find your company has more favorable numbers in all areas but one. Sounds good, right? So you report these findings back to management. Sighs of relief that “everything is just fine” may give leadership that warm, fuzzy feeling, while in reality these findings mean little more than you’re the best of a mediocre group. If mediocrity is in fact what you are striving for, congratulations, you’ve achieved it. Is this what you’re trying to accomplish?

If your answer is no, and your benchmarking agenda entails discovering and incorporating best practices, you may want to dig a little deeper. Benchmarking should not be a comparison check. Benchmarking should be used as an improvement process. You should be searching for best practices, what the standards are, and who sets them. But you should also be interested in how those people meet the standards and why those practices are “best.”

Remember to think before you leap. Here’s a link that may help to guide you along your benchmarking way.   

Ten Benchmarking Mistakes to Avoid

Strategy Bites Back

Jeff Grimshaw recently finished reading Strategy Bites Back, and was kind enough to compile for the rest of our firm a summary of the passages from the book he found most compelling. It includes this paragraph, which I think is spot on:

Part of the reason people fail when they try to walk the talk is that their intention was doomed from the start. Failure was inevitable because they have things backward. Walking is the means to find things worth talking about. People discover what they think by looking at what they say, how they feel, and where they walk. The talk makes sense of walking, which means those best able to walk the talk are the ones who actually talk the walking they find themselves doing most often, with most intensity, and with most satisfaction.

Symbolic Messages

As we've said in the past, the two "loudest" channels for sending messages in organizations are leadership decisions and actions and rewards and recognition. The latest issue of Knowledge @ Wharton (free registration required) highlights an example of each.

First, an article on the trade-off between "talent and disruptive behavior" examines the Philadelphia Eagles' heretofore under-reported decision to boot T.O. from the team.

Employees like Owens are found in almost any organization, but they can be more difficult to manage in cultures that demand top-flight results and, at the same time, place a premium on cooperation and harmony. [Wharton management professor Peter] Cappelli says the Eagles' decision to cut Owens sends a signal through the organization about culture. "By letting T.O. go, the Eagles are saying, 'We're willing to pay a pretty high price to maintain teamwork. We will not tolerate people who are not contributing to the overall good of the organization. This is an exercise in refocusing the organization and getting people's priorities clear."

The challenge with symbolic messages, of course, is translating intentions into outcomes. To date, there's no evidence the "exercise" has refocused the organization. But in the midst of distraction, the team seems to have heard the message about the organization's intolerance for...eh...distraction (last paragraph).

Continuing the theme of symbolic messages, a second article examines whether process management programs such as Six Sigma and TQM unintentionally discourage innovation. Wharton professor Mary Benner says they do.

Changing the culture at GE or any established company to embrace long-term innovation will be challenging, Benner acknowledges. "Most managers know they must do this. But there are few short-term rewards for focusing on long-term. When you give people a choice of something that's new and distant in time, they will choose the short-term, measurable goal... You can get stuck being very, very good at something you were good at yesterday. That's what some managers choose because it is measurable."

Measuring innovation is not easy because there is no yardstick. Rewarding innovation makes compensation a tricky exercise. Managing those who innovate is also challenging. "Creative people will push back in an environment where people are required to follow standard processes and are being measured," says Benner. "People who are comfortable in such an environment are not exactly the most innovative."

This is part of a larger issue we've seen time and again: Organizations implementing Six Sigma, TQM, or some other program in such a way that employees interpret adoption of the methodology in its most orthodox form as not a means to an end but the desired end in and of itself. When this happens, reduced emphasis on innovation is just one of the negative unintended consequences to result.

Still In The SlowLane?

I asked several days ago if GM would use its FastLane blog to address its restatement of earnings. Checking in today, there's nothing but positive PR spin: A post about GM's Red Tag event, a podcast of the Escalade preview, and a post by the VP of Environment and Energy about GM's "plans for bioethanol-based fuel systems and hybrids."

True, FastLane's "About" page states:

The FastLane blog is all about the cars and trucks. GM leaders discuss all aspects of our vehicles.

So, technically, I suppose a comment on earnings isn't in scope. But they've used the blog to talk strategic issues before, and you'd think the company would see that the medium they've chosen to use nearly requires some acknowledgment of such a significant corporate issue. Otherwise the silence itself becomes a message, one that also recasts the blog as flog, rather than an authentic way of conversing with the market.

Tivo Alert: Executive Suite

This Saturday at midnight (and on a couple of other occasions in the coming weeks), Turner Classic Movies is showing Executive Suite--an Academy Award-nominated film from 1954 that is, unfortunately, not yet available on DVD. Directed by John Houseman and starring luminaries such William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, June Allyson, Walter Pidgeon, and Shelley Winters, the film represents one of Hollywood's first studies of corporate culture.

I happened on the film when my Tivo recommended it several months ago. What I found unsettling, but not surprising, was the film's all-white cast and relegation of all of the women in the film to "stand-behind-your-man" roles. In this respect, it provides a benchmark against which to compare what has changed in 50 years.

But what surprised me were elements I did not expect to see in a film portraying corporate culture half a century ago. Poor succession planning launches the plot. A secondary plot revolves around insider trading. And a major character--notably, the antagonist--is a practitioner of crisis communication planning and Lean Six Sigma. No one in the film actually utters any of the terms I've italicized in the three previous sentences. But their presence suggested to me that while the players and lexicon in corporate culture may have changed significantly in 50 years, the underlying archetypes may not have changed as much as I used to think.