I drove to the Toledo airport Friday evening amidst a flurry of NPR commentary about Scooter Libby's indictment and Harriet Mier's stepping down (gotta love All Things Considered). At the end of the segment, Bob Siegel made an interesting point...and one that many of us make almost every day: One of the most out of touch people in any organization (if not the most) is the person at the top.
Gathering data from employees and stakeholders (both internal and external) helps us make smarter decisions. But if we want our audiences to continue responding to our surveys and to take our improvement efforts seriously, we need to make sure that all data-gathering efforts:
"If you don't have IM in this business, you're not there," says Sal Morreale, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. "I tend to have 10 or 11 IM windows open at a time."Organizations face obvious challenges, too. Go here to read the CNET article...it outlines the cons, as well as pros, to implementing IM.
Twice yesterday, I heard, “Management has put a new hiring freeze in place.” I was dumbfounded. Where does this stuff come from? Not from me, I can assure you. Yes, we are trying to be very careful about adding expenses. Yes, we are scrutinizing every new position request. And, yes, we are even asking managers to justify replacement positions. But we have not put a hiring freeze into place—and we don’t plan to. Rest assured, our company is healthier than it has ever been. If you haven’t already, take a look at our operating results through the December 31 quarter (our fiscal third quarter and our most recent reporting period). Revenues are up 8% over the prior year; profits are up 18%. This is healthy by any standard, and I want to keep it that way.What’s more, once a leader begins to put such an unfiltered face on his or her leadership via such public statements (inside or outside the firewall), it pressures the leader to deliver. In this, blogging can become an accountability mechanism not for the tasks of leadership so much as its character. These reasons are precisely why I’ve been counseling leaders to blog for several years. If only more would follow Michael’s example: their leadership would be better for it.
Be nice. Avoid attacking other individuals or companies. This includes fellow employees, authors, customers, vendors, competitors, or shareholders. You are welcome to disagree with the Company’s leaders, provided your tone is respectful. If in doubt, we suggest that you “sleep on it” and then submit your entry to the BOC before posting it on your blog.Another smart idea in the Thomas Nelson approach: an aggregation page that aggregates (using RSS and XML feeds) each employee blog post in real time, creating an easy forum for employees (and managers) to keep tabs on who’s writing what. It’s a nice nod to transparency and personal responsibility without a ton of bureaucracy.
After my conversation with Peter, I was psyched up to give TWiki a spin, so I logged into our intranet server planning to set TWiki up and check it out. Guess what? It had already been installed months ago by our IT manager. I took this as yet another reason that I needed to pay attention. Worthwhile IT innovation is nearly always a bottom-up affair. If you were a naysayer about the Internet, Linux, or even Weblogs, embracing the Wiki might be your chance to beat your staffers to the punch at last.For the entire article, go here...
Chuck was kicking around the idea of using a blog as a corporate communication device. I never got that excited about it being an official thing because a lot of corporate blogs are thinly disguised press releases dressed up to look hip," Libin explains. "We have better resources to get out press releases. But, PR guy Chuck Tanowitz persisted. "What better way to position Phil as an industry thought leader than to create a body of work that would continually grow?" Plus, Tanowitz shared a frustration common to many PR pros. Libin had lots of insights into the state of the security industry and its place in 21st century life, but scheduling time to meet with him during working hours or getting him to write formal columns was nearly impossible. When you're running a quickly growing company, and jetting around the globe for meetings, think piece ideas aren't at the top of your to-do list.Check out the rest of the case study...
Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS. This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out. Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it. And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox. And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information. And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing -- and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's something new and interesting there -- this is about solving that. The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.Read the full text of his speech, and see his PowerPoint presentation, here.
The more I speak with and read advice from top entrepreneurs, sales coaches and highly regarded business authors, the more it becomes obvious that communication is a top-three common denominator among successful sales managers, sales teams and sales channels. ... The emphasis on dialogue, however, doesn’t begin and end with salespeople and their customers and prospects. In fact, it’s a good bet that the quality of communication between a sales team and its roster of clients and prospects will mirror that of the sales team and the sales manager.The author, Paul Nolan, describes the approach Pat Croce, former president of the Philadelphia 76ers, uses and calls Five-Fifteens.
To promote a new flavored-milk product called Raging Cow, Dr Pepper/Seven Up had a “cow” post random comments about a cross-country trip. Although the target audience was 18- to 24-year-olds, the comments appealed more to third-graders. A sample: “‘How would a cow know diddly about the phases of the moon?’ Good question, but ever since that whole jumping over the moon incident, we cows and yonder moon have been TIGHT.”Ugh. The rule I’d most like leaders and internal communication professionals to read is Number 8:
Use blogs for knowledge management: Despite its critics, knowledge management (KM) has not been over-promised; rather, vendors have under-delivered. Blogs can address the gap between KM promise and requirements by letting local expertise emerge. Here’s a good background on blogs and how Lucent is using them in KM. Other companies using blogs effectively include DaimlerChrysler, Hartford Financial Services Group, IBM and ESPN.For the record, CRA has used blogs for our intranet and KM solutions since 2002.
“If an email takes more than two minutes to write, it’s an email you shouldn’t write.”The fact is, an email that takes more than just a few minutes to write probably involves content better expressed through different media (read: media richness), and as such, you’ll likely be better served making a call, or even better, walking down the hall for a 30 second conversation with the intended recipient. (Exception: emails you must write to document an agreement or conversation; in these cases still have the conversation via phone or face-to-face, but write the email as a confirmation after the fact.) There’s more guidance for email management that this, of course—and here are three items worth reading: * Staples has an article titled Managing Email here, and the author, Jan Jasper, has additional tips here at Business Know-How. * Asset Now has a straight-forward list of email dos and don’ts here. * Online user experience guru Mark Hurst has a free whitepaper titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs to Know here.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration researchers have found that placing small button-sized sensors under the chin and on either side of the Adam's Apple could gather nerve signals that can be processed by a computer and translated into words. "What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself. Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement.''
Faster than a speeding blog, more collaborative than a powerful intranet — they can't quite leap tall buildings in a single bound, but Wikis can enable bottom-up socialization. ... Wikis are based on emergent intelligence and knowledge: the belief that the best results come from allowing decisions to emerge bottom-up, in a relatively free-form interchange between the participants of a group, with only a light-handed editorial or managerial top-down control being applied.
The New York Times' recent Blogs in the Workplace discusses blogs as an alternative to email, instant messaging, etc.:
For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log.[...]
At Community Connect, Mr. Tang's engineers use a service called LiveJournal to post updates about tasks like fixing server computers or configuring software. Hitting the upload button sends the text to a private site, viewable by the authors and their managers, including the date and time of the postings and, often, links to relevant Web pages.
"When I want to know something I check the Web log," Mr. Tang said. "It saves me the trouble of e-mailing people or yelling across the room to get a status update."
[...]
"People are starting to use Web logs to archive data that would have otherwise been lost," Mr. Tang said. He noted that much of the company's internal communications had been via instant messaging — and was lost as soon as the correspondents closed their chat windows. Now, though, employees are starting to post transcripts of relevant discussions on the Web logs, he said.
An impressive tool for eliminating consultant-speak from written communications has arrived, and from an unlikely source, reports the NY Times:
The people blamed for incentivizing companies to repurpose, build mindshare and utilize change agents have taken aim at their own lingo.Deloitte Consulting, an arm of the accounting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, has developed a free software program, Bullfighter, that identifies jargon in documents. The goal is to make it easier for investors to decipher what companies are trying to say, said Chelsea Hardaway, the Deloitte marketing director who led the team that designed the software.
"We hope that it is a fun way to make business communications safer for all of us," Ms. Hardaway said. Upon request, she shifted effortlessly to the language of consultants to offer an alternative — or, perhaps, actually the same — explanation: "We envision a center of excellence where our accelerated change agents can maximize their core competencies."
The software, which works like a spelling checker program to spot questionable words and phrases in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents..."
To read more about the software and download it free of charge, visit the Deloitte Consulting website.
(Hat tip to G. Baron for the link.)
Our recent string of e-media-related posts continues. We've posted in the past about how webcasting and streaming video offer leadership yet another means of communicating with employees in the face of sagging trust and credibility. As an update, Streaming Magazine has posted a primer on the major webcasting providers, including a review of how each is developing the medium as a way to communicate within a corporation. You can read the article here.
Speaking of Instant Messaging (IM), FORTUNE magazine technology writer Christine Chen has weighed in with an overview of the medium:
According to market research firm Osterman, 18% of the working population uses IM today, vs. a mere 8% two years ago. AOL, which boasts the largest number of registered user names--195 million--estimates that 1.6 billion IM messages are sent on its network each day. By 2006, consulting firm Gartner estimates, more people will be using IM than e-mail as their primary communication tool at work. And over the past seven months all three major commercial providers--Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL (owned by the parent of FORTUNE's publisher)--rolled out campaigns to target the enterprise market. Their challenge: to convince companies that embracing IM is worth it.She also discusses security, pricing, and other issues ... click here to read the rest.
In many organizations, instant messaging (IM) is becoming an increasingly popular internal communication channel. Some companies, however, are beginning to deploy technology that blocks employees from using IM with anyone other than company employees. Why? Concerns over security, that IM can become a distraction, and that employees may be using the tool for personal use.
Are such moves sound protocols or needless restraint? Patrick Houston of CNET Asia has a perspective, which he illustrates here in Boss, don't take away my IM. A highlight:
Given a choice between communicating by phone or IM, I opt for IM. It's more efficient. A typical IM conversation dispenses with specious pleasantries and gets to the point, expressed more concretely and clearly in writing than verbally. Plus, it's easy to pass along URLs and other bits of text that would be unwieldy on the phone.Read the rest ...But those aren't the only reasons I question conventional corporate wisdom when it comes to IM ...
In our view, each new year affords senior leaders a unique opportunity to set their organization’s tone, focus, and expectations for the coming 12 months. As such, we recommend that all leaders consider how they might use this opportunity to their advantage, and that they commit to do so—not just this year, but every year.
Our general advice:
Appreciate that as a senior leader you can only effectively communicate three or four strategic-level messages over the course of one year.To help clients take advantage of the opportunity to communicate strategy with the New Year, we've been sharing a CRA Communication Toolkit primer on the topic. To download the primer with our compliments, click here.Strategically select your three or four most important messages for the coming year and formally consider them your strategic “message agenda.”
Select a single strategy message that will be your primary message for the coming year and the capstone to your message agenda.
Don’t let your strategy message and message agenda fade over time.
Get the word out early in the year, and do so with all levels of leadership as well as with line employees.
Use each forum to communicate your strategy and your expectations for the coming year—both globally and locally.
Several weeks ago we posted a Tools In Practice related to weblogs and k-logs, focusing on the potential for weblogs as an internal communication tool. Weblogs as business tools is still a slippery idea for some, and we recently found an article by Kathleen Goodwin on Clickz.com that helps clarify the possibilities. Click here to read Meet the B-Blog.
When they need to make a particularly memorable or strategic point, we regularly advise clients to abandon typical "PowerPoint-ese" in favor of telling a good story. When used well, stories--called "narratives" by communication scholars--are more persuasive, illustrative, motivating, and are extremely effective at making a thesis memorable.
There are two keys to their use. The first is detail--effective narratives are rich with the detail necessary to being memorable. The second is structure--true narratives follow a specific structure that permits the audience to identify and process them as stories. While our oral and written traditions are replete with narrative structures, we often recommend the following as a basic structure useful for nearly any message or circumstance:
Weblogs are an emerging communication medium the use of which is exploding across the web. In most cases, "blogs" are link-heavy online journals where weblog diarists post links to news stories or sites they've found interesting -- generally with a few lines of commentary and explanation to introduce each link. Organizations are also increasingly using Weblogs as communication tools, however, and as knowledge management tools, a phenomenon known as k-logging (of which CommLog is an example).
The bottom line is that Weblogs and K-Logs can serve organizations in a myriad of ways, and that they're emerging tools that may revolutionize how organizations use web technology for communication and knowledge management. The web is full of articles and primers on the subject, but we recommend two:
This interview with John Robb (an expert on k-logs) from WritetheWeb.com, and
That we've seen an explosion in the use of PowerPoint and other presentation tools over the past several years borders on extreme understatement. With the increased use of such tools, however, we increasingly find ourselves in a position of reviewing presentation decks that, although produced with much time and energy, simply are not the most effective means of conveying the intended message. To help clients be more strategic in selecting their supporting message material prior to engaging in deck development, we've been sharing a one-page toolkit primer on the Principles of PowerPoint.
Download the primer here with our compliments ...
(This is a 540 K file, PDF format. Click to download, or right-click over the link and select "save target as" to save to a folder)
The New CIO Leader (****)
Trust Or Consequences (****)
Get Them On Your Side (****)
The Ape In The Corner Office (****)
Management Of The Absurd (*****)
David Allen: Getting Things Done
The essential text on being productive in the modern workplace. What's more, David's a guy we like just as a guy. (*****)
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Everything you must know about new media. (*****)
Eyewitness To Power
A fascinating view of communicaiton and relationship-building across five presidential administrations (*****)
