EARL’S COURT — Not sure how I missed this one.  But The Independent has been running a investigative series on lobbyists.  And they’ve chosen one of the biggest and most respected firms to ‘expose’.

In summary, some journalists pretended to be wealthy potential clients from a large foreign country and they recorded the communications professionals bragging about things they shouldn’t have been bragging about.

It’s pretty white-knuckle stuff.  It doesn’t look good in print.

But…

You can easily see where it comes from on both sides.

NEWSPAPERS – Have been the centre of attention from politicians and communications professionals for months over phone hacking and other unsavoury practices.  They probably feel betrayed.  Some columnists are already revelling in the chance to someone else “dirty” and “seedy”.

LOBBYISTS – See themselves as great facilitators, bringing people and politicians together.  And helping the democratic process. They are well paid and unregulated. But perform and important service.

The impact that journalists and a story like this can have can be frightening.  (Although few would argue that journalists themselves can coordinate and wielded it with any precision.)

Furthermore, yes, the lobbyists in question look pretty silly, and their contacts are knocking each other over to get out of their way.  And even Buckingham Palace has launched a stinging (oh!) rebuke.  But what business conversation wouldn’t look silly on paper?  Would the Boardroom and kitchen discussions of any average Briton not be surprising and alarming to many people who read them?

It makes me think of the amateur sting operations in secondary school that caught Harris admitting he’s stolen someone’s can of Coke.

SELF IMOLATION
However the real sport in this story may be elsewhere.

It’s interesting to see some of the Dons of the communication agency businesses lining up to betray each other.

It’s mild at the moment, questioning the accuracy of the other CEO.  Filing toothless complaints with gummy bodies.  Or suggesting that exaggeration is not healthy.  But some of these fellows are pretty tough.  The backroom brawls of the past — though generally unreported — are legendary.  When communication bosses take each other on, it can get messy.

I recommend standing back.  And maybe getting some popcorn.

/df

PICCADILLY — I’m not a journalist.  Never trained as one.  But I feel like I know the trade a bit.

And this year’s BP story has been an interesting one.  In some respects I feel like it has played out differently in the UK than in the USA.  Americans have been busy trying to sort out the mildly disappointing from the simply mad in the mid-term elections.  And none of them want to talk about the Gulf of Mexico.  In the UK the guilt and worry has been palpable, in a very English way.

And so some stats I stumbled on today I find amazing. 

Did you ever hear of “moral equivalences“?  They’re taught, or they were, in university journalism programmes (my wife went.)  Essentially the debate asks questions like “How many people need to die in far off countries to merit the same front page coverage of a local person?”

I find the concept interesting for the way it has been turned on it’s head these days.  And a number of stats released today show a new version:

• The State Department has announced that when travelling, more Americans are killed in traffic accidents than by crime, terrorism, plane crashes, infectious diseases, etc.
• The total number of people killed on the roads during the study period is 1,822

Interesting, no?

Check this out then:

• According to the US Fish & Wildlife Services, the total number of birds killed by the Gulf oil spill is 1,488
• Total number of animals that were tended to during the spill was 6,359

I am far from opposed to environmental concerns.  We are advising multinationals on their Green policy, and urging them to do more. But how do we get some proper perspective on things?

There’s a memorial near Hyde Park in London for animals who died in war.  It says “they had no choice”.  I shake my head as I go by it.  I love animals, but I sometimes wonder when we’re going to get better at looking after people too.

/df

BY THE THAMES — We are being approached by more and more firms who have suffered calamitous shock recently.

Sometimes businesses can be shaken and undermined by operational errors: crashes, explosions, poisonings, etc.  Some can be caught out with serious infractions: unfair trading, fraud, loss of licence.

And no one seems to know what to do with these.

Dealing with external forces is much easier in many ways than dealing with rot from within.

We’re good at talking about communication when change is market-driven, or by choice, or by sudden external crisis.  We’re not so good when the change is driven by significant internal error.

Questioning (and blaming) others is much more fun than looking inside.

When you look inside you see things that defy description, like:

- culture
- values
- leadership
- style

We are more comfortable with words like:

- process
- systems
- reporting
- compliance

And the two sets of ideas are undoubtedly linked.  But one often relies on the other.  Systems and processes alone will not change and organisation.  And when independent bodies and government panels talk about a “a culture of…”, or “total leadership failure…” they are talking about things which many business people are uncomfortable confronting.

That is a shame because we have shown that these issues are not as hard to address as people would have you believe. 

/df

BY THE THAMES — There’s an interesting article about Transocean in The Sunday Times last weekend (subscription required).  Perhaps you read it?

I have been expecting something to come out, and certainly the implication is that we will hear a lot more about Transocean in the near future.

I am sure there’s a lot to say on that. But I’m not the one to say it now.

What struck me about the article was something else entirely.

Transocean is a company without a home. It has a Houston base of operations. But it’s executives are based in Geneva. And it’s 20,000 employees are all over the world, with manufacturing in Asia and some logistics in the sub-continent. The firm has more assets in the North Sea than it does in the Gulf of Mexico… where Deepwater Horizon has now made it famous.

The firm has announced a €1 billion dividend earlier this year. But the government of Switzerland is holding it up.

The Swiss?!

How much off-shore drilling is done in Switzerland?

And where do employees of Transocean call home?

It resonates today with another naturalised Briton I spoke to while playing cricket (as one does.) This man explained that his family has chosen not to bury it’s relatives anywhere. No stone, no grave. Because the children and relatives are spread around many countries and several continents.

“This way, if we cremate them, we can each have a little cup, to do with as we wish.”  And we all nodded, as if we understood.

I’m not telling you this to make you cringe, or feel sad. But it’s in some ways a fitting analogy for companies like Transocean. They are not of the earth. They are not connected to the soil of any one jurisdiction. So it will be interesting to see how things play out for them.

BP has certainly had a great deal made of it’s “British-ness” over the last 5 months. And British is undoubtedly still important to the business. Even as they have an American CEO and few real operations even in Europe.

For companies that have no home, whose rules do they play to?  Whose administration do they honour? What audience and people can they not stand to let down?

Who holds them to account?

Who knows?

/df

PARSONS GREEN — There’s a lady in a business suit sitting reading The Guardian.  The Media Guardian is tossed on the bench beside her.  Untouched.

It’s maybe symptomatic of a larger issue. And then again maybe I am just getting old. [Cue rant.] Why do the media need sections dedicated to… the media? 

I find myself hanging around late in cinemas just to stare in awe at the screen. Why do we need to have “credits” for the caterers assistant?

Why do the arts and the softer sciences need to be so self-congratulatory?

It does none of us any good.

Can you imagine a great big banner being pulled behind an aircraft: “And the guy who polished the wing was called Gus…”?

/df

DISTRICT LINE — I love the way that the mainstream of public discourse can so easily reject different approaches as silly. I didn’t see the show on John Lewis last Wednesday — Inside John Lewis. A friend of mine did though. And he says they were painted as a bunch of numpties. And a bunch of numpties who don’t know how they’ve got so lucky. Which is ridiculous, obviously.

It is, right!?

You’re not so sure?

One of the great charms of Great Britain is the complexity of its history and the variety of narratives that can emerge. In this century, so far, we are all committed to the Dickens narrative:

• We used to work in coal mines, our bosses were mean and nasty, but the world was worse,
• Then the benevolence of man created commercial enterprise — overseen by faceless gods in expensive shoes — who made everything right.

It’s a capitalist fairy tale that insists that the Corporation is what built Britain (and therefore the world).

But the truth is far less clean and consistent. Companies like JLP and Cadbury and The Co-op did it very differently. Their approach to business was closer to socialist than to our capitalist democracy. And they succeeded.

We read in Fast Company and other coffee-table management magazines that ABC Co offers free dog washing to employees who show up on a Sunday, or all you can drink from the booze cart on a Friday afternoon. But when compared to the approach of a John Lewis Partnership or a Co-op that is as parsimonious and fatuous as could be.

Maybe John Lewis are not numpties. Maybe they’ll still be here when the rest of us have folded up our tents. Maybe we can learn something from them.

/df

Don’t invent symbolic events. Just look out for them.

Some of us (consultants) will happily tell you that a symbolic event is tremendously important in sealing and unifying a great change. But what we often get wrong is how that event comes about. Let me give you two examples.

THE GOOD – Mandela and the Springboks. I won’t belabour this, as it’s been all over the press with the Clint Eastwood film Invictus. But essentially when the new black President put on the jersey of the traditionally all-white rugby team, the country could see old wounds beginning to heal. It was good enough to turn into a film. But it was a culmination of lots of hard work and it was a natural extension of the characters involved.

THE BAD – “Mission accomplished!” it said on the aircraft carrier where US President George W. Bush landed a fighter plane and swaggered down the runway. And it wasn’t. The mission wasn’t accomplished. He was nowhere near the scene of the mission. He had learned to fly while sitting out the Vietnam War. There was so much about it that smelled wrong that Americans don’t even like to talk about it today.

There is a great deal of work to be done to determine how to bring brands together and how to unify company cultures. And most of that spade work is real hard graft. Planning, studies, system changes, restructurings, communication, coordination, etc.

It is only when all that work is done and starting to take effect, and when real change is happening that events occur and/or opportunities emerge.

Don’t lead with it, don’t invent it, don’t force it. It won’t come that way.

/df

ON THE BUS — My friend Chris sent me a link to yesterday’s blog by Yahoo’s new CEO . He said even he was inspired, even though he didn’t work there. (Although if they were smart he would.)

It’s a good read. Not least because it’s a great example of how senior executives can use blogging for both internal and external communications. And lots and lots of companies and communication professionals will look at this with envy.

I have done work for Yahoo! in the past, so I need to be careful. But I am particularly interested in her call-to-action around the brand. Because we have a strong view about that, and I think it’s hard to dispute:

1. Too many people see brand communication as purely external, when it needs to be equally, and even more, focused internally.

2. Brand is viewed as being about attitudes and state-of-mind. But it’s not. It’s operational. And until brand is viewed as a tangible, operational priority no business will get as much out of it as they should.

On top of that operationalising your brand isn’t expensive. In fact, it should be cheaper than some of the other communications plans you have. And far more effective.

And that’s the truth!

/df

LONDON — We think it’s time to talk about it. So next week we are going to run a free seminar on how to communicate bad news. If you would like to come, please drop us a note and we’ll tell you where it is being held and when. (First come, first serve.)

* Free Seminar *
HOW TO COMMUNICATE BAD NEWS
Thursday 12 February 2009, 16:00 to 18:00
Book your place now

Email us at info@ableandhow.com or call +44 (0) 20 3059 2384

See you there.

/df

JUMEIRAH BEACH HOTEL — It’s only 830 in the morning and just sitting outside, waiting for the car, I have got a sunburn and my clothes are almost soaked through. You don’t mess with the weather out here.

You never know what the day holds in Dubai. Yesterday was rain. And I didn’t think they did rain in this part of the world.

—

11 HOURS LATER — I am back now from a full day of conferencing. I think it’s one of the best I have been to. And it was all about marketing. Normally our line of business and marketeers don’t entirely see eye-to-eye. But that didn’t feel like the case today.

There were speakers from big brand firms, from to highest heights of corporate communications companies. There were CMOs and statisticians. A whole mix!

But a surprising number of them talked about employees.

There seems to be detente.

My speech was titled “Building brand value from the inside”. And it was great fun to deliver. I like to challenge people at their own game… And I seem to have survived.

I had three main points:
1. Brands are stronger if they are built from the inside out.
2. Employees can build brand value and they can destroy it. You can affect which they do.
3. Treating employees like other stakeholders, as trusted partners, will help you and your brand.

Except, I wasn’t really that concise.

/df