MARYLEBONE — This year is a big year of change. In technology, in the world economy, the world of sport, even in the way all our countries are run.  There are elections in America, France, India…

What is more significant in a country than a change of government?

And that’s what is promised in India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Serbia,  Kuwait, El Salvador, The Gambia, Armenia, Algeria, Madagascar, Libya, Mongolia, Mexico, Cameroon, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Belarus, Ukraine, Ghana, Angola, Bhutan, Guinea, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Togo.

New presidents in Yemen, Senegal, Mali, Russia, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Albania, France, Kenya, Turkey, the United States of America, Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Kosovo and Zimbabwe.  Yes, Zimbabwe.

We know that the United States presidential election of 2012 is to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. It will be the 57th presidential election.  And it will get a lot of attention.

But how about the world’s largest democracy?

Yes.  That’s India.  How about that one?

Or the big red splotch above?  Russia.

That’s important too.

There are other changes coming too.  Some, we seem to know for sure:

• Gold prices will keep going up.  And hit $2,000 and ounce in 2012, they say.
• The Internet is going to change.  A new IP address protocol will mean that companies may start building two sites for a doubled up Internet — the old one, and the new one.
• We’ll all be talking about faster, slimmer smart phones and The Cloud.  If you don’t know about either, now is the time to do some research.
• Plus many more things you may want to share?

This time next year things will be very different.

I promise.

Businesses will fail.  Some will be dominant that you haven’t even heard of.  Yours will merge, divest, make a 90 degree turn, or implement similar significant changes.

So, what are you doing about it?

Well it is a topic that is quite dear to our hearts at Able and How.  We are launching our Able and How Change Index this year.  And our change management work the world over continues at a pace.

We will be keeping an eye on business, political and social trends this year.  And keeping you up to date with the Able and How Change List (look for it soon in our News section).

Change is good.

Get into it with us.

/df

P.S. And, by the way, NASA assures us that the world is not going to end.  After many years of fielding wild calls, they were forced to put up this website.

LONDON — It’s been hard not to think about Korea this week.  But I have different things on my mind.  Not the loss of a dictator.  Not the worry that still has South Korean’s practicing evacuations like WWII Britain and Cold War America.

I am thinking about Korea’s fertile business culture and the country’s uncanny ability to reinvent itself, rebuild and refocus just in time for tremendous success.

See if you can read this bit without stopping in your tracks:

• in 1961 South Korea ranked 117th in the world for arable land per capita (behind Saudi Arabia and Somalia)
• in the last 50 years Korea’s per-capita GDP has grown at 23,000 percent
• today the tiny country (smaller than Iceland) has the world’s 12th largest economy by purchasing power
• unemployment is 3.2 percent
• one of the world’s lowest rates of public debt
• 80% of the 49 million people live in urban areas
• Koreans are four times as likely to have high-speed internet access as Americans and they pay very little for it

A series of seemingly prescient government decisions have constantly shoved the economy in the right direction.  Even through the tough economic times in the late 90s and mid 2000s the countries has seemed to make the right choices.

Today they are pushing — against their own traditions — for more entrepreneurship.  And I wouldn’t bet against them.

In fact, I’d like to be there now. If the chaebols’ would give us a call? Samsung, LG, SK… we’d like a word.

/df

CHELSEA — The problem with change is that you cannot always foresee what might happen next.  So you create an anticipated direction of travel and risks, issues, dependencies etc. along the way.

That’s how it’s done.  In a nutshell.

The problem with Britain’s big banks though is not that they don’t know what might happen next.  They do, but they’re determined to fight against it.

It is clear when you compare the banking systems of, say, Canada, what the problems of the UK and US systems were.  You can’t really argue it.

As the Chancellor George Osborne has said:

Take the financial sector out of the equation and economic growth in the rest of the economy during recovery has actually been above its average rate of the last two decades.

In fact, the Office of National Statistics says that Britain’s banks are responsible for 1/3 of our national fall in output since 2008.

That’s not really all that funny.

According to many of the banks the recovery is too unclear for action to be taken now.  However, for all the lack of clarity they see around the recovery, the implications of further regulation do seem clear to them.

And they know that that change wouldn’t be good.

Which, of course, is total rubbish.

Change is good.

When it comes to further regulation… and ring-fencing of retail banking, for example… there can really be little argument.

Let’s get on with managing the change.

/df

HYDE PARK CORNER — I love Doha.  I was thinking about that as I wrote a friend at QTel in Qatar.  It’s a lovely place and I know some lovely people there.  This week we have seen lots of poorly disguised derisive comments made about Qatar and it’s rulers.  They are unfair.

Of course I like Dubai too.  And I have special memories of all the time I spent in Riyadh as well.  Particularly the mice in my flat, and the strength of the coffee.  But I do love to work in new and exciting markets.

I’d like to do more in India as well.  I’d like to work for Tata in India.  Or help Infosys.  There are issues in China and other parts of Asia that I am sure could be fascinating to learn from and about.  When I taught a course in Kuala Lumpur in 2009 there were communication professionals who came from around the region.  Vietnamese who spoke English as a second or third foreign language.  People from Indonesia managing one of the biggest financial service sector mergers that I have ever seen.  Government workers from Brunei — I can’t even start to talk about that.

The fact of the matter is that many businesses in these regions are managing change in ways that should make western firms blush.

We can learn from them.  And we should.

A fair exchange of expertise and experience.  That’s what I would like.

/df

VICTORIA STATION — I am seriously proud of our friends at Nissan. We have known for a while that they were working on something big. But today’s stories on the new Nissan Leaf are exciting.

“100% emission-free” (excluding electricity generation emissions).

How cool is that?

Faced with petrol at £5+ a gallon it’s going to fly off the shelves, I would have thought. And London Mayor Boris Johnson says he’ll get 25,000 charging points in the city by 2015.

It’s going to move fast.

I am also counting on people like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to push these kind of vehicles into the developing world. Better 200 hundred of them in the sub-continent that one in your driveway in Seattle.

The bit that I am really excited about though is… the quiet!

Delivery vans, motorcycles, rust-buckets, buses… how quiet can they get? How fast?

Imagine hearing… natural sounds! Like your child crying or the neighbour’s cat!? Amazing.

We like to talk about how good we are at change. “Computers! Look how fast we learned to use them!” But nothing like this, at this speed.

Bring on the new innovation and changes to transportation and fuel consumption.

/df

SOUTH KENSINGTON — Sox was my granddad (left, above). He died when I was about 6. He ran a business called Ingersoll-Rand out of an office in Montreal. I remember visiting the office. I walked by the building two weeks ago. It had long, dark halls, red carpets, a mail trolley and a lovely secretary in a tiny office who knew all our names and birthdays.

I am reading the galley proof of a book called Crisis of Character by Peter Firestein. He talks about the industrial heartland of America shutting down in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. When companies like Studebaker, General Electric and General Motors supported high streets filled with cinemas, ice cream parlours and department stores.

And I think (because I don’t really know) that that was Sox’ world. Firestein explains that Studebaker shut his town almost overnight because their paternalism was bigger than their success. There were too many people who were getting paid for not working.

Businesses were a series of islands where you trusted good people to do good work. Change was slow and tended to mean either growth or else “we can’t talk about it”.

Those kind of businesses are gone. Except maybe in countries like China where GONGOs (my all-time favourite; Government owned, non-governement organisations) still hold the day. But we move past those like a nervous driver passing a car accident.

I wouldn’t have had a job in Sox’ world. Not this job anyway. I don’t make anything, count anything or oversee people who do. My work doesn’t exist. There’s no smoke stack above my workplace.

Although my near-sighted, military-educated, son-of-a-Gloucestershire-immigrant grandfather was not beyond understanding people. He drove an MG, watched endless hours of golf, supported a small army of battery operated Christmas toys and occasionally tortured an electric organ. He would recognise economies on the rise and on the steep decline. He’d see that people were increasingly the vital resource that could become more and more scarce.

He’d still ask what the hell I had made today.

Breakfast for my kids, is all I can answer.

/df

CAPE COD — I am in shock. I have just emerged from a food store. There is a whole row just dedicated to marinades and BBQ sauces. The shelves of food that I might buy in London is a few rows in the very centre of a football field of “family packs” and convenience meals.

I have no idea what I bought in the end. It was like an insulin overdose. I lost all sense of direction.

America takes a bit of getting used to.

They are a strange kind friendly here. They don’t really say hello, or wave on the road… But they talk to you a lot at the shop counter.

As we were driving into our house I waved at an older woman walking two terriers. She looked at me as if to say “if these dogs were only bigger, I’d set them on you.”

<<< — >>>

BREWSTER WHITECAPS — I’ve got four kids with me at a local evening baseball game. Brewster Whitecaps against the Hyannis Mets. The grandad from Ohio in front explains the Cape Cod summer baseball league has been going for almost 125 years.

There’s something lovely and peaceful about baseball. Even the players look well-fed, comfortable and languid.

<<< — >>>

ON THE PORCH WITH THE TIMES — I love the New York Times. The business pages are full of challenging articles. I said to one of my holiday buddies that I missed the fact that we don’t have Yahoo, Microsoft or Nokia as clients at the moment. But we have had them in the past. And I always liked that because I could really find the enthusiasm to read all about the battles in that sector.

There’s so much change going on in business at the moment. And what I love about the United States of America is that the rules are never really accepted. Things change… and people need to adapt. In their own special way, innovation is always welcome here. Today I am excited and amazed by Polyvore – a website that allows you to create your own fashion ads. In June they had more traffic than Vogue and InStyle. They’re set up by two asian and a fellow from India… in California!

Then there’s the story of the pharma ads that fill US TV. I wrote last February about the unsettling “4 hour erections” that Viagra warns of in the middle of the afternoon. (You can find them on YouTube but then prepare for a lifetime of spam.) Now the Federal Government is starting to react to pleas to call your doctor about ‘urinary urgency’, ‘deficient eyelashes’, ‘restless leg syndrome’ and the like.

Apparently you might not be able to get a tax break on these soft-music ads as a business expense any more. America is going to ‘just say no’ to prescription drugs.

No worries. There’s $1.5 billion in sales for just the top two erectile dysfunction drugs. Their $320 million in add sales will pop up in the economy somewhere else… And I am guessing someone in America is already thinking about where that will be.

Bless.

/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

OLD CHURCH STREET — The front of my paper says that Woolworths will be no more in a few weeks. Lay-offs are being announced in 5-figures already. And deep down, we all know that the bad news has only just begun.

But we just carry on about our business. Much the same way that Londoners (myself included) got on the Tube again the day after the July 7, 2005 bombings.

“What else are we meant to do?!”

Well, quite a lot actually.

Here are just some of the things that companies should be doing as the economy falters.

1. Teach some basic economics
There is a reason why our economies haven’t been returned to the Stone Age. There are underlying facts about each of our businesses that will keep them afloat. There is integrity to our public finances (government cash) that we can tell people about.

No one is writing about this yet. When they do, then we will have turned a corner.

Who is going to go buy a new TV when you don’t know if you might have to use it as shelter for your cardboard house under a bridge?

2. Demonstrate honesty, caring and dependability
People are looking to their businesses to give them a sign of what is yet to come and how it might affect them. If they can’t trust what is coming out of your mouth, then they’ll start looking at what you ‘do’ for signals.

One way or another you are going to ‘communicate’ what you are thinking — and therefore, what you believe to be important. If people have to learn about the business by watching you rather than listening to you, they are going to resent it.

Why not communicate properly?

You will gain credibility by being honest and that is credit at the proverbial bank for when you need it in the future.

3. Make ‘people promises’
Every big business is inherently set up to ensure that employees are dealt with in a responsible way in the event of a downturn. In Europe, Canada and Australia there are state requirements. In the USA the private insurance plans are often very generous.

Tell people what the business will aspire to uphold in the event of calamity. “We will always treat people with respect and dignity.”

If your lawyers and HR people tell you not to… and they can’t give you an immediate, business altering reason not to… I suggest you fire them on the spot. (They’ll be treated with dignity and respect.)

4. Communicate a lot
[Human] Nature abhors a vacuum. If you aren’t commenting on the latest rumour or the newest headline then someone else in your company is. Who do you think that is? Is it Trevor in the post-room? Or the lady who drives the shuttle bus? That ancient monolith who writes in the Daily Mail?

People will get their opinion from somewhere. Why wouldn’t you want that to be you?

It doesn’t have to be the CEO. In fact, it shouldn’t be the CEO. You should build new channels, if you need to, to get to as many managers as you can with the daily news. This is how you’ll build your honesty, credibility and dependability. (Did you see what I did there?)

5. Over-manage the bad news
No one ever believes me when I say this, but when we managed a series of lay-offs recently, people actually said ‘thank you’ as they were leaving.

Redundancies, site closures, mergers, sales… are all difficult and emotional things for organisations to have to deal with. As a result we all walk wide circles around them. And they become orphans of the corporate communications world. That is so wrong!

Major organisational change programmes don’t become any less major because you refuse to acknowledge them. Just the opposite.

Get really stuck in. Invest the appropriate resources and time. And ‘own’ the bad news. It’ll stick to the company anyway. Why not manage it right.

***

If you have a communication function in your business that is not working flat out right now, then maybe you should have a word with them. Or, can I?

/df