TCR — More and more we are running into Chief Executives that are in trouble.  They’re feeling the pressure and struggling to consistently marshall their troops.

Business communication is a challenge because we tend to think that if you say the same thing twice you are stupid.  And yet when chief executives say things differently from one day to the next people try to see what has changed.

Increasingly communication is a fundamental part of a CEO’s job.

It used to be that people were impressed if the CEO spoke… and even more impressed if he made sense.  Today the expectations are different.

People want inspiration in their work.  They want direction.  They want to be heard.  And none of these things are easy.  None of them can be delivered simply and without planning and careful execution.

That sounds dumb, doesn’t it?  The idea that a seasoned, high-flying business-person needs help with their communication?!

But our businesses are increasingly social.  They are about getting the most out of people.  CEOs have more and more in common with politicians.  They have to sell policies and motivate populations.  And less and less in common with the executives and managers that we used to think of them as.

A CEO’s communication involves change management, internal communication, strategy and planning.  It’s the biggest and most important change campaign that any business has.  And there’s no reason that it shouldn’t spend as much time and money on it as they do on, say, accounting…!

It’s easy to tell a business where the CEO has a proactive plan for communications.  It’s a CEO with confidence in their strategy AND convinced that people know it and know what they can do with it.

/df

DUBAI AIRPORT — I am not sure why, but I have avoided writing about this in the 6 years I have been blogging.  I think it’s like some strange martial art — the moment you have the gall to think you are good enough, you will be taught a lesson.

I love working across cultures.  In the last 12 months I have worked on at least 4 of the 5 continents (depending on how you count them.)  And all I know for sure is that I know nothing.  I am always aware that there are local customs and practices that will catch me unawares.

This is in spite of so many indicators that suggest otherwise.  As I wrote recently, you can hear Michael Jackson everywhere.  This week in Kuala Lumper car after car went by with stickers in their windows with the McDonald’s arches saying “McDonald’s Drive Thru VIP”.

“Ha! Ha!” we can laugh.  “You see! We ARE all the same!  McDonald’s and drive thru…”

But that may actually be a good example of how we are different.  What is a drive thru VIP?  Why the heck have a sticker in your front car window?  (Amongst my investigating of Malaysian culture, I left these questions unanswered.)  All you have to do is walk into a McDonald’s in the Muslim world to know the difference — like the Slavic mafioso and his daughter at the buffet here in Dubai, demanding to know where the bacon is!

A few things to think about as you head across town to meet the feared guys from that other school, or as you jet off to far off lands to share a windowless meeting room with people you think you know.

1. Stop, listen and think

Don’t let a few familiar things make you believe that values, morals and behaviours are going to be the same as yours.

Which is not to say that your mum didn’t raise you well.  But your views on politics, timekeeping, religion, humour, etc. are not always shared by everyone else…  Just because you KNOW that they are right, doesn’t mean everyone else has to.

2. Only speak when it improves the silence

Regular readers will know I love this LBJ quote.  But, like the constant blathering of the ubiquitous CNN and BBC TVs of airports and coffee shops, too many of us like to talk to fill the silence. 

Why? Some accents, attitudes and postures single us out as people to be avoided faster than if we were training a big helium balloon with the word “dork” written on it.

When you are in a new cultural situation, why not keep your own counsel for a while, and see if you can’t think of something intelligent to say when you do open your mouth? 

3. Keep your hands to yourself

It may surprise you.  But not everyone wants to shake your hand.  In fact, in some places people simply can’t.  Likewise the awkward habit of westerners of trying to pat people on the back, grab their forearm, etc.  I am about as white and western as any person on the planet, but if you try to do that locking thumbs hand-shake that athletes now do, or high-five, or bump fists with me… I am going to quietly take you off my Christmas card list… (Oh, you’ll be sorry then, won’t you!)

The same goes for our fascination with questionable hand signals.  Thumbs up, pointing at people, drawing a finger across your throat, etc.  Don’t. 

I was putting a picture of George Bush doing the ‘Texas long horn’ hand sign in my presentation recently… you know the one?… and my business partner Paul told me that when he was a child in Rome a guy on his street got killed for doing that.  It means you are a cuckold.

4. Read everything

There’s so much available in local newspapers, online, in your library that you should never be sitting on a plane or a bus playing games on your phone.

Local newspapers are fantastic for what they tell you… and what they don’t.  You may know about political issues in a country only to find them completely absent from the local media.  Quick!  What does that tell you?!

Yes.  That’s probably right.

5. Be unfailingly nice

Maybe this is something that your mum taught you.  It really doesn’t take much to qualify as charming.  Re-watch some old Cary Grant movies if you have to.  The trick is simple:

- Say please and thank you
- Smile
- Show gratitude when appropriate
- Say ‘no’ firmly, but without malice
- Watch a little before you act

It’s easy for people to say that the world is going all wrong.  We’re good at finding new disasters to replace the old ones.  But one thing that I find constantly reassuring is how much people will work to get along. 

One woman in a hijab in my course this week in KL will always be burned into my memory.  She had a brilliant, warm smile, and she used it indescriminately.  It helped me settle.  And she was kind enough to make me think a tall, pasty guy from Westmount might have something useful to say to a dozen diverse professionals from around the South China Sea.

Brilliant.

/df

ANOTHER TAXI IN KL — I am on my way to the airport.  The circus is leaving town.  In another 24 hours of lounges and airplanes I will be home.

It’s been a hugely rewarding experience.  I have spent the last two days locked in a room with internal communications people from Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, and Indonesia.  They came from different parts of their organisation: HR, Marketing, Brand, Corporate Comms.  Some were PR people, some external affairs.  One represented a bank that had just been through a 5-way merger.  (No sense making things simple!)

There was a fellow from Brunei with amazing stories — but I’ll have to keep those to myself.

I threw everything I had at them.  Before the course I took Paul through the materials and he said “that’s pretty much everything we know.” But my south-east Asian friends were unbowed.  They are a force to be reckoned with.

I pointed them towards Melcrum and Simply and Ragan.  I urged them to join IABC and even CIPR and CiB.  I suggested some books and blogs and social media channels and I am sure they will get involved in all of them.

Today, on the morning of the second day we talked about multicultural communications and I was certain that I was unworthy.  These were people who have been through more in their lives than I could do if I live three more times.

At one point I put up a chart from 2001 that mentioned some of their countries, and they said “2001!  That’s old news.  It’s totally changed since then.” And they are right.

Personally, I haven’t changed that much since 2001.

There’s more to come from this session.  But these are first impressions.

I want to go back.  I want to work in these countries more.  Soon!

/df

Michael Jackson banner in Kuala Lumpur two days after his death is announced

A MALAYSIA TAXI — I have been on three continents in three countries in the past 48 hours.  And one thing has remained consistent:  Michael Jackson.  He’s everywhere you turn your ears and eyes.

My cabbie’s Malay radio station flashes “Michael Jackson Tribute” across the electronic panel every few seconds.

It’s not irrelevant because this week I am teaching an internal comms course for two days in Kuala Lumper. And one section is on “multicultural communications” and another on “corporate culture”.

Although you can see crying Americans on TV sets everywhere I have been and the music seeps out of every store, this is not yet one homogeneous global state.  We are not all a mini-America.

Some of the research we will look at this week backs that up.  And anyone who has every tried to do business in a new culture and failed, will know that most of the cultural differences lie quite a ways below the surface.

Here’s a fact that shows how different parts of this world are:

China Mobile has a market capitalisation of US$271 Billion.  (Yes, 271,000,000,000).  That’s more than twice the size of Apple, Google and GE.  And yet it’s brand is vitually unknown anywhere I have been.

How can that be?

Well it’s because you can be big in Asia… really big… and not so big anywhere else.

Unless you are Michael Jackson.

/df

OVER THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE — I said years ago that the airport lounge has become the Walden Pond of my generation.  It is for me anyway.  It’s a place for respite, relaxation and forced reflection.  (The two big British fellows putting away a bottle of white a 7h30 this morning might not agree.)

I recognise that I may not be part of a big constituency of people who really look forward to the goat stew in the Emirates lounge at Dubai airport.  But for me it is the food of thought.

Dubai is a twitter, I can tell.  I haven’t even landed there and I can feel it already.  The long arm of promotion reaches out even here.  The new Metro in Dubai will open on 09.09.09, I can tell you already.  Through some miracle of promotional serendipity.  And the city is bathing in the proletariatness of the whole thing… “Out of your cars and into the crowd…”

The supreme ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed has also managed something quite impressive today.  The “most elegant” page on Facebook.  According to the paper I have just read.  Amazing.

What a world we live in.  I shall friend him as soon as I get to my hotel.  How cool is that?

I’ve also managed to tuck into a complimentary copy of HBR that was sitting lonely in the magazine racks on the plane (next to Stuff.). And it sets the mind racing again.  Talking about competitiveness.  Niall Ferguson, the best Scottish promoter of America’s historical economic empire that walks this earth.  He’s saying that global competitiveness will return to the US landscape.  While other in the Harvard Business Review seem to disagree.  (Which is a feature of HBR that I rely on; its ability to see both sides of an argument.)

What I love about the question of America’s competitiveness is probably the same thing I love about Dubai’s ability to add extra emotional and promotional value to every undertaking.  The underlying reality is that the future is in the hands of people who build competitive advantage with their brains, not just their hands.

Management and our ability to connect, support and motivate people in the new world economic order, is the key to future success of countries that can no longer rely on production or natural resources.

I love that.  Because it’s an almighty challenge.  And one that my company knows more about than just about anyone else.

/df

“MySpace today announced its intent to restructure its international operations and refocus personnel around a smaller number of territories, while retaining a robust global consumer presence.”

That’s what News Corporation’s MySpace said in their press release yesterday.  According to the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease measures that sentence requires about 15 years of formal education to understand it.  The average age of a MySpace user is hard to be entirely sure of (younger users have always needed to sign in as 17 or older and many are listed as 99 years old), but to assume that they all have the education required to make sense of this seems ambitious.

In fact, assuming anyone has the interest to read it, is a stretch.

Along with the people who write policies for insurance companies, brochures for banks, and nutrition information on cereal boxes, MySpace now seems to have joined the brigade of businesses who obfuscate to avoid saying things they don’t want to.

In tennis it would be a penalty for time wasting.

Statements like those written above are most likely written for the business media.  Journalists and analysts are in the business of decoding this kind of business-speak.  So the headlines said:

Website axes two-thirds of international jobs

MySpace to lay off a further 300 international staff

I think they might have got a better result if they’d made the information simpler.  Maybe focused on talking in ways that their users might recognise?

/df

TCR — This sounds quite familiar to us.  We’ve been through something very similar recently.  And we have a few suggestions for our friends at both Anglo American and Xstrata…

But first.  I read about South Korea’s plans to build a whole new city of the coast of Seoul.  New Songdo City will be built on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land.  And what will it be built with?  All the stuff that Xstrata, Vale, BHP, Anglo and Rio Tinto dig out of the ground.  Mining will never be a business that dries up and rolls away.  If you want to invest in something that will endure, your better with these guys than you are with Google or Microsoft.

Mining merger tips:

1) Think about employees all the way through. 
Some compare mergers and acquisitions to finding out that mommy and daddy aren’t going to live together any more.  In fact the process of merger discussions is more like moving to a polygamist sect.  Employees don’t know who to talk to, about what, when or why.  And the result is that they can end up mistrusting you all.

2) Avoid vilifying anyone
This probably seems easy and obvious, but it’s not.  When we set ourselves in opposition, the opponent seems to automatically grow horns.  And that becomes a real problem when you have to work with them thereafter.

3) Show your change management skills quickly
Nothing is worse than a place that has no plan.  Except maybe a place that has a plan, but doesn’t tell anyone about it.  Managing change in M&A talks is a science… and an art.  We’d suggest you bring in some professionals.

4) Don’t forget about your business as usual communications
A major school-boy error: To send out many messages saying it is ‘business as usual’ and then show no visible signs of doing any usual business.

5) Tell it like it is
In M&A work only a small number of people are ‘insiders’.  And people assume that means that no one else can be told anything, and the insiders cannot talk.  In fact the opposite is often true: there’s a lot you can say (and must), and the insiders tend to talk like drunken sailors.  The grapevine goes into over-drive when people think there is not enough information.  And very few businesses can control the grapevine.  So that’s why you need to communicate more and say as much as you can.

There’s a lot to be said for good management and communications in an M&A situation.  I know our friends will do it well.

/df

LONDON — It is the job of all business executives to look for ideas and inspiration wherever they may find them.  HR and internal communicators are no different.

I’ve been reading and article this weekend about “delayed gratification”.  The essence of which is found in a social experiment where very young kids are put in front if a marshmallow. They are given one and then told to wait for another while the instructor leaves the room.  There’s a bell to ring if they need to instructor.

No prizes for guessing there are a few reaction:

1) Eat it immediately
2) Ring the bell like mad, then eat it
3) Wait for the instructor to return.

The follow-up research then shows that the kids who sat patiently did significantly better in later life.

And I wonder if we don’t interview for this already?  We put a lot of stock in the elusive idea of “emotional intelligence”.  Many companies (including ours) will tell you they interview for it.  But is it maybe just another way of seeing if people can hold back their own agenda long enough to ask about yours?

The second epiphany of the day also comes from an unlikely source.  Having been educated in part in the English system, I have long been critical of it.  Particularly the later years.

So when my eldest child entered the system this year I just withheld judgment.

One of the least appealing ideas to me was that of “sets”.  Do you know what these are?  They are streaming groups in key subjects where children are grouped according to their ability.

Or so I thought.

My excited daughter explained it to me this morning as being more like football leagues (my analogy).  You stay up or go down based on your performance that season.

And I quite like the sounds of that. As she does.

The closest I have ever seen to that is a “high potential” programme at Shell, and I have certainly seen many more attempts at “future leaders” plans.  But that misses the basic premise (I think I now see) of sets.  That is to get the kids to try to perform better each season.

We’re going away on one of our company days this week.  We call them “Mabel Days”, after our founder Mabel Able.  Maybe we can have some of our own epiphanies and learn a few things.

/df

THE BREAKFAST TABLE AT 6AM — My young son is reading his school book aloud.  To practice.  I am pretending to listen.

“What!?” he says suddenly.  “Rescue a cat from a tree?  Firemen don’t do that, do they?”

I sense disappointment.

“Yes,” I reply.  “But only for old ladies in cartoons and movies.”

“OK,” he says, as if I had given him a good answer.

So, how many cats have you rescued today?  How many things have you done that weren’t really what you were meant to be doing?

Here are a few things that communication people are asked to do that may not be the best use of their time…

• Dress up someone’s PowerPoint presentation
• Organise non-business focused events
• Go to meetings where you are not required
• Write other people’s emails
• Proof-read

What have I missed?  From today, how about not answering the call to get the cat from the tree?

Communication is an essential service.  Helping your organisation achieve its business goals is a full time job.  Let’s focus on that.

/df

P.S. No animals were or will be hurt in implementing this plan.

TCR — Something quite amazing happened yesterday.  Did you see it?  No, it wasn’t the Blur concert.  Or the Beckham’s nanny, or Tiger talking about Lefty’s wife.

Yesterday the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China met.  They were in Yekaterinburg, of course.  And their statement (in English!) is here.

Depending on who you ask they represent 15 to 22% of the global economy.  That’s a lot.  Especially for places you have never done business with. 

They have more than 1/3 of the world’s population between them.  Four countries!

They are estimated to also have as much as 40% of the world’s currency reserves.  Which begs the question: do we know who owns our debt?  Do we know who our real bankers and backers are?

And the answer is definitely No.

‘We are committed to advance the reform of international financial institutions, so as to reflect changes in the world economy.’

Yesterday’s news barely made the papers.  It’s not on Internet search terms.  And yet their statement at the end of the day caused the dollar to fall.

There’s a lot going on the world that we’re not paying enough attention to. the last few days in Iran have been monumental.  Communication through mobiles and the Internet has undermined state controls, in a country where half the population is under 25.

Emerging markets — the BRIC’s and those like them — are coming to a neighbourhood near you.  Look out your window, you can see them.  It’s worth getting to know them before they have to come to you.

/df