CommLog

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.

SlowLane Blog?

This morning in the Wall Street Journal[1]  I read that GM is going to restate results for 2001, and possibly, subsequent years. I then clicked over to the FastLane blog to read GM's take on the issue and found ... nothing. Nothing yet, at least, and I'll be interested to see if Lutz or others offer an account on the site.

What's more, I notice there's not much at all happening at FastLane these days. There are only three posts on the front page, and only five over the past six weeks or so. (compared to eight in May and 11 in June).

When FastLane debuted most new media observers credited the site with being the "right" way for a big company to publish an external blog: posts by senior leaders, not highly spun by the PR group, and a mix of marketing flogs and candid takes on the company.

Now, though, I wonder if the site's losing its steam. We lose steam at CommLog from time to time, but we also don't widely promote CommLog as a portal into our firm. If anything it's a mix of hobby for us and service for clients, with any branding benefits a plus.

Is FastLane becoming SlowLane? We'll see, but the announcement of earnings restatement is exactly what a company using blogs in the "right" way would use a blog for: to offer an authentic, not-press-release take on the issue to supplement their other communication efforts.

We'll see if they do.

1. Subscription only; here's a link to Reuters' story.

Blogging @ McDonald's

Friend, colleague, and CRA client Steve Wilson of McDonald's is getting some well-deserved recognition for his efforts to bring blogging to the Golden Arches. (This ClickZNews piece is just the latest, and Steve's been hitting the conference trail pretty aggressively as well.)

Just over a year ago Steve asked that I speak to a collection of McDonald's leaders and content managers. The topic was the implications of new media (in this case blogs and wikis) hold for internal communication and leadership communication in companies of McDonald's complexity, and the progress his team has made since then is remarkable.

Steve blogs "outside the firewall" as well, and there's a nice bio of Steve here.

The CIO Who Admitted Too Much?

CIO Insight is currently highlighting what it describes as the story of "The CIO Who Admitted Too Much."

[T]he CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren't working out. "I'll start by saying that the vast majority of system problems we have are problems related to updates," [CIO Shawn] Schwegman wrote. "These update problems have been manifesting themselves as inventory update failures, missing orders, missing images, incorrect status synchs, etc." "At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to Overstock's failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates properly," Schwegman wrote. "I cannot apologize enough for both the number of problems you all have had to deal with and for the length of time you've been plagued with these problems. I consider this one of my greatest failures over the last two years and I am terribly sorry."

The article's title, which asserts that the CIO admitted too much, misses the mark. Stepping up to take responsibility for what his business partners were ultimately going to blame him anyway is hardly the worst of his sins. Schwegman did two things wrong. First, when the memo leaked, his lame spin--that "the memo was simplified because he was writing 'to a bunch of non-technical people,' and that simplifications may have been misleading."--exacerbated his problems. Second, after offering his mea culpa, he failed to speak with certainty about the next steps needed to begin solving the problems.

PR & New Media

There's an interesting conversation about PR and new media going on in the blogosphere right now. First read this by David Weinberger (one of the Cluetrain authors). Among his points:

Now I think PR is entering a phase where it sees itself as helping companies with their public relationships. ("Public Relationships — Adding hips to public relations"?) I first heard this term at EdelmanPR (disclosure: to whom I'm a consultant), but I don't know who coined it. I find the phrase useful because it asserts a connection to traditional PR while pointing to a new dominant possibility. It implies, in line with Tim's thinking, that PR needs to get out of the intermediation business. It means that more voices have to be allowed to speak from within the corporation, since relationships based on a committee-produced controlled voice will fail. It explains why blogs are such a useful tool: They are public relationships. It assumes there's persistence to the relationship, not merely press releases thrown in our faces whenever the company has some new crap to flog. It assumes mutuality. It relies on the relationships being based on frankness and transparency.

I heard him make this point at the PR Seminar, and at the time it seemed to strike many of the PR folks there as an insight. David's post (and you should go read the whole thing) was prompted by this post on "The New Public Relations" by Tim Bray, which also prompted a critical post from Chris Edwards. Follow those links, too. The points about PR are worth reading, and they illustrate how blogs are conversations as well.

Intranet Blogs

We've long advocated for the use of blogs as internal communication tools ... executive "from the desk of" blogs, project blogs, department blogs, there are many ways organizations can benefit from using the medium. A recent column in Darwin managzine outlines some tips so "to ensure that your blog is read instead of inspiring facetious, cheeky t-shirts." Their tips:

* Keep it conversational and light * Know your audience and write to them * Blogs are highly time-sensitive so currency is critical * Anecdotes are encouraged and expected * Use links to refer to relevant information * Be succinct and break-up the text - which encourages "scanning"

You can find the entire article here...

More For The "What Not To Do" File

Also of note at Fast Company Now is this FC blog entry about an email CNBC sent to staffers earlier this week announcing the cancellation of Dennis Miller’s show (be sure to read the deconstruction ... it’s funny, sad, and spot-on). This entry is eerily reminiscent of examples we use in our consulting practice (our favorite: this memo at InternalMemos.com. The problem here is medium, not message, and as we’ve written before, it’s a function of media richness. CNBC made a classic mistake: pushing a rich message through a lean channel. When that happens the message is always misconstrued ... in this instance, as being relationally insensitive, and surely for some, cowardly. (CNBC also made another mistake: waiting until the fifth sentence to deliver the bad news. If you have a hammer to drop, drop it right away. It makes you look candid rather than cowardly. “Folks, I’m writing to tell you some bad news: This Friday’s Dennis Miller Show will be the last. Now let me explain why.” ... that’s the way.) CNBC’s missive reflects the rub of extremely cost-efficient channels like email. They’re fast, easy, and most of all, inexpensive. But unless the content is lean, they’re also a primary cause for misunderstanding at best, and for damaged leadership credibility at worst. At least they didn’t text "U R Fired :-(" ...

Sites That Should Be Blogs, But Aren't

The title should continue: "... and that suffer as a result." Today's case study: TransformingUSAirways.com. What better way to reassure the flying public and shareholders than through the first-person, personal, and timely voice of a weblog? Instead, USAirways conveys information about its bankruptcy and transformation with all the confidence and personalization of ... well ... a bankruptcy filing. Here's what greets you on the home page:

On September 12, 2004, US Airways Group announced that the Company and certain of its subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. The action is intended to provide the airline the opportunity to implement its Transformation Plan built on lower costs, a simplified fare structure, and expanded service in the eastern U.S., Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America. The case will be heard in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia.

One hopes they're not also relying on this site to convey information about their transformation to the employee population ...

Touting Forced Workaholism

Another interesting piece in the current issue of Fortune describes three current ad campaigns from Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and RE/MAX that "boast about basically ruining employees' lives for the benefit of the customer."

"It kind of surprises me that they're doing this," says Maynard Brusman, a workplace psychologist based in San Francisco. "So much in the workplace now is about emotional intelligence and understanding the needs of employees. This to me sounds clueless."

The Evolution of the Intranet

Intranet Trends to Watch For: Cultures and priorities vary, but there are some common issues for organizations as intranets continue to evolve. From Line56. Shiv Singh hypothesizes about what's next for the land of corporate intranets:

The trends identified below based on experiences with several large organizations will give you a hint of what's coming and how to prepare for the next wave in your intranet's evolution. Be careful, some of these trends may already be moving across your organization. Make sure that you're ready for them.

Singh's predictions include the following (for more detail about each, please see the full article): # Intranets return to the domain of the departments # The records management and the legal departments get involved # All employees become intranet publishers # The corporate telephone directory loses its luster # The new killer app -- the knowledge management tool # Real time information delivery becomes a priority # Information retrieval remains unsolved but there's hope # Employees demand a more aesthetic user experience Based on recent conversations with clients, especially those who will implement Share Point in the coming months, these are right on. The only thing we'd add is that more and more of our clients are using their Intranet site to communicate what's important to the organization by focusing it around their strategy. Ask yourself: How is our Intranet site supporting our organizations strategic communication objectives? Or even: What is our current site communicating that is in direct opposition to these objectives? The answers to both questions may include key metrics highlighted, reward and recognition systems, and even layout and headings.

Companies That Cry For Blogs

MarketingProfs writes about Ten Companies That Missed Great Blog Opportunities. On the list: Newman's Own, Teva, and DaimlerChrysler, which gets this critique from the profs:

Dan Barry reports in the New York Times that DaimlerChrysler has created what it called the “first ever” living window display when it challenged a family of three to live for five days in a 2004 Dodge Durango SUV parked in Times Square. Just a silly PR stunt? Maybe. But it got a full column in About New York on the cover of the New York Times Metro section. That's no small feat, certainly. But they've missed a great opportunity for multimedia promotion. A blog of the family's experience would have been interesting. Although streaming media from the site (or even a Web cam) would have been perfect for this stunt, there was not a word about it on the Dodge Durango site or the Chrysler site.

Benefits Restructuring At Microsoft

The Washington Post has a worth-reading account of Microsoft’s recent decision to restructure its employee benefits plan. It’s an interesting case study of the intersection of corporate policy, employee attitudes, internal communication, feedback, and personal publishing.

Friendster for Business?

This article from Fast Company, A Little Help from Your Friends, provides some good background on how businesses use, or are thinking about using, social networking technology. (For more background on social networks, check out Alan’s previous post … and for more extensive background on social networking technology, check out Jeff’s previous post.) So how does it work? These programs scan contacts in your address book, appointments in your calendar, and senders and receivers of your email, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among your contacts—and even go so far as to calculate the relationship “strength” based on the frequency with which you interact with the people in your network (we’ll get to that in a second). bq. If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We're not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers.

Benefits Creep?

One of our Associates, John Daly of UT-Austin, uses "amenity creep" ... the continuing expansion of amenities hotels must offer guests to stay consistent with the competition ... to illustrate how leaders can create unrealistic employee expectations by providing tangible ($) rather than intangible ("attaboy!") rewards. Today Silicon Valley Biz Ink offers an interesting reward and recognition case: The in-office DVD rental machine EarthLink is providing for employees. Trivial benefit and example of benefit creep, or as the press release says, "an excellent way to bring an element of fun to the workplace"?

BBC Director General Resigns

In the wake of the highly critical Hutton report, BBC director general Greg Sykes has resigned. He made the right call...and his final email to all BBC staff sends an appropriate message. He takes responsibility, offers no excuses, and bids farewell in a way that is somewhat sentimental but not cloying.

This is the hardest e-mail I've ever written. In a few minutes I'll be announcing to the outside world that I'm leaving after four years as Director General. I don't want to go and I'll miss everyone here hugely. However the management of the BBC was heavily criticised in the Hutton Report and as the Director General I am responsible for the management so it's right I take responsibility for what happened. I accept that the BBC made errors of judgement and I've sadly come to the conclusion that it will be hard to draw a line under this whole affair while I am still here. We need closure. We need closure to protect the future of the BBC, not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there. It might sound pompous but I believe the BBC really matters.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Want Severance? Train Your Replacement

From Reuters:

U.S. companies are asking technology workers to help export a new product: their jobs. As programing and other computer services move to low-cost locations in India and China, some workers are in the awkward position of training their replacements. Software developer Mike Emmons was shocked two years ago when Siemens AG, the German telecom equipment giant, decided to replace him and his colleagues with lower-paid programmers from India. According to Emmons, Siemens told about 20 workers in Lake Mary, Florida, that outsourcing was the wave of the future. The company gave them severance -- provided they trained employees imported by Tata Consultancy Services of India to do their jobs.

Read the rest...

DHR Employee Shopping Day

Does giving employees a half-day off during the holiday season for shopping or other errands count as a convincing decision that communicates the organization’s values? Or, given recent layoffs, does it communicate a lack of attention to organizational priorities? And what message does a higher-up reversing the decision send? Explore the case of the DHR Employee Shopping Day here at the Decatur Daily News.

More On NASA, PowerPoint, and Tufte

In a follow-up to Jeff’s earlier post, here’s a link to Tufte’s website, where you may purchase The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, and his classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which is required reading for all communication professionals). While his essay is only available for purchase, you can read his analysis of a key Boeing slide here, which is a case study in its own right. Some other informative resources: * Scott Steffens writes about Tufte’s essay here at his Contact Sheet weblog, and comments on Tufte’s and Jakob Nielsen’s contradictory advice on how to present information online. * The New Yorker published an article by Ian Parker, titled Absolute PowerPoint, which is worth reading. * Aaron Swartz posts a parody of Tufte’s essay … his argument presented as a PowerPoint outline … here (also on a weblog). * We posted here the Gettysburg Address via PowerPoint. * Last but not least, you may find our own guidance, CRA’s one-page Principles of PowerPoint, here.

Internal Communication At Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab co-CEO David Pottruck, interviewed in the current issue of Context Magazine, offers useful insights about internal communication.

Leadership Messages at Enron

As we've said before, leadership decisions intentionally or unintentionally send "louder" messages to an organization than any content conveyed through formal communications. Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins' comments in a recent Fortune article illustrate this principle.

...How can top management send a message of integrity to employees? Watkins says executives have to ooze integrity through their actions. At some companies, she notes, bosses will fire employees the moment they are caught stealing even seemingly small items from the company. “The message these leaders send is that their values are number one, not the numbers—if you steal, even a small amount, you will be fired; if you make the numbers but don't play by the rules, you will be dismissed.” That message, she says, is the opposite of what she observed at her former employer. “Enron's unspoken message was, 'Make the numbers, make the numbers, make the numbers—if you steal, if you cheat, just don't get caught. If you do, beg for a second chance, and you'll get one.’ "

Piercing the Wall of Rational Ignorance

The November issue of Information Outlook contains an article we co-authored with a client, Barbara Wilson. Barbara manages the Knowledge Center, a shared services function at Rohm and Haas, a Fortune 500 chemical company. The article describes the communication and stakeholder management strategy we created to increase awareness and use of the Knowledge Center among Rohm and Haas employees. After interviewing a variety of users and potential users, we arrived at three conclusions that would guide the communication strategy.

• Employees like Knowledge Center employees more than they like Knowledge Center technology. Consistent with McLuhan’s oft-quoted maxim—“the medium is the message”—we recognized the need to more effectively leverage Knowledge Center employees as users’ preferred information source.
• The Knowledge Center was seen more as an internal vendor than a strategic partner. This orientation commoditized the Knowledge Center’s services and promoted very transactional relationships. (This is an issue that many of our IT and other shared services clients are currently tackling.)
• The barrier against greater awareness was a “wall of rational ignorance.” Users and potential users were making a choice to not attend to Knowledge Center messages—because: (1) they were too busy, and (2) they could not clearly anticipate a compelling return on their investment of time and attention. The implication: We could not achieve the Knowledge Center’s objectives merely by making its messages “louder.”

The article, which you can download here in PDF format, elaborates the communication strategy we prescribed to address these issues.

The Ban Of Internal Email

As many of you probably read, John Caudwell, CEO of the UK phone retailer phones4u, recently banned the use of internal email across his company (from CNN.com: Firm bans e-mail at work ). Caudwell discovered that his employees were not solving customer problems as quickly as they once had and he attributed this deceleration to unnecessary email shackling employees to their computers. Based on his informal research, Caudwell figured that his employees spent three hours per day on unnecessary email, which equated to $1.6 million per month. The majority of this email was not spam or personal—it was from inside the company and related to customer accounts. Rather than picking up the telephone or walking down the hall to ask a question, employees emailed each other and then had to wait at their computer for the response. Now, is Caudwell’s reaction a bit extreme? Maybe. Do we all get caught up in this email game on a regular basis? Probably. Does it cost us time away from your internal clients, external clients, or direct reports? Surely. So, extreme? Maybe. But definitely not unreasonable when you think of the time we all spend crafting and proof reading email and waiting for responses to our strategically developed (and often unread) messages (when we could get a quick answer by standing up or lifting the telephone receiver). We see this situation almost everywhere we go, and many of our clients surely smiled when they read about Caudwell's reactions…the scenario and Caudwell’s retort confirm two pieces of our advice perfectly…

The US Government & What Really Communicates

When clients ask “What really communicates?” here’s our response (with the channels listed in descending order of their communicative potential): * Policy Decisions * Reward & Recognition Systems * What’s Being Said by Opinion Leaders in Informal Networks … and last of all, * Formal Internal Communications Our general advice: if you want to send a message, make a policy decision or change what you measure and reward. It appears the US government is slowly trying to apply this lesson, based on this Federal Times report: Is Merit Pay Worth the Risk? Experts Say Yes — If Agencies Get It Right. Unfortunately, members of Congress aren’t so certain the government can pull it off. From the article:

“Before the federal government can establish a true pay-for-performance system, we must ensure that a valid performance-management system exists,” said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, a leading voice for government reform in Congress. Voinovich and other lawmakers have argued in hearings that merit-pay systems are good in principle but difficult to design well. If designed and carried out poorly, they argue, merit-pay systems could create work forces that are embittered, demoralized and undermined rather than motivated, well-focused and high-performing … … In short, there are many critical ingredients that make a merit-pay system successful, experts say: well-planned incentives, performance goals and performance measures, fairness, buy-in from employees and managers, good communications, training for managers, effective internal grievance procedures, and money.

Of course, we’re a bit befuddled by the concern, given that most publicly-traded companies have used merit pay systems for decades. Nonetheless, this issue is an excellent example of an organization attempting to change cultural priorities and behavior by communicating through policy decisions, and is worth watching as an emerging case study.

Yours Isn’t The Only Communication-Resistant Culture

We posted in March, and again in May, about how the Columbia inquiry at NASA was suggesting that poor internal communication was a central element in the sequence of events leading up to the disaster. The inquiry board has recently released their report, and they confirm that internal communication was indeed a failure point. According to CBS News:

Members of the board also found that communication was stifled in NASA and that the safety program often was "silent" because engineers with safety concerns were intimidated into silence.

That makes poor communication at NASA a cultural issue, and the commission’s assessment should be case study reading for all leaders and internal communication professionals. You may find the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report here.

More About Internal Communication At NASA

In March we published a post about how internal communication at NASA was an area of focus in the Columbia investigation. The story continues to develop, as this Washington Post article illustrates:

One of NASA's top congressional supporters complained yesterday that concerns voiced by some mid-level engineers about damage done to space shuttle Columbia's left wing during liftoff did not reach senior administrators until after the shuttle disintegrated over Texas on Feb. 1.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) faulted the agency's internal communications system for preventing important information and analysis about the shuttle's condition from reaching senior administrators. She called for the creation of a "bottom-to-top" information clearinghouse to avoid a repeat of the mistake.

The story hints that information technology can provide that clearinghouse, although our experience suggests that without appropriate protocols such tools can easily make the problem of information overload worse. In all instances, the process of internal communication is more important than the product ... and in cases like that at NASA, the real trick is to develop protocols and tools that help senior leaders separate urgent information from heaps of important data.

Unintended Message Effects

When CEOs speak at investment conferences, they sometimes say things that send the wrong message to the folks back at the office.

For example, just months after the Qwest/US West merger in 2000, CEO Joe Nacchio told investors at a Banc of America Securities Investment Conference that most of the layoffs he anticipated would occur among the ranks of former US West employees. He then added that: "Because you wear a clown suit doesn't mean you work for the circus. We'll take off the suits and get down to work, then we'll send out the clowns."

Although the comment is somewhat cryptic, to thousands of former US West employees, Nacchio's meaning was clear: "You are clowns."

Leadership Communication at WorldCom

WorldCom's new CEO, Michael Capellas, seems to appreciate internal communication as a strategic business function. In fact, this article suggests he is initially treating employee communication as his primary business function.

Among the things Capellas is doing right in a tough leadership situation:

(1) Demonstrating a style of communication that emphasizes unadorned facts over "feel good" platitudes. (Especially in tough situations, platitudes make leaders and their speechwriters "feel good," but they rarely do much for employee audiences.)

(2) Communicating probabilities (recognizing that the alternative is to allow rumors and speculation to fill the vacuum) and readily acknowledging when the answer to a question is "I don't know."

(3) Actively surfacing and addressing the toughest questions.

(4) Actively acknowledging that employees will--and should--withhold judgment on his credibility until they can determine whether his actions match his rhetoric.

(5) Treating "listening to employees" as a precursor to developing, communicating, and implementing his turnaround strategy.