muppetfreezone

Living together means communicating with others, and language enables us to do that. Just as human beings recognize each other by the sound of their voices, so should organizations.

The way companies speak defines their verbal identity. Most of the time, however, even organizations who value the importance corporate identity, tend to underestimate its verbal aspect. A faceless, detached and aloof business jargon, or even worse – “consultese” - still reigns websites, reports, presentations and interviews, like a smokescreen hiding from the public what it really wants to know. As a result, the people they are trying to reach turn away and go to suppliers who speak their language.

Stop and listen to the way you r company communicates: is it speaking with a human voice that is unique to you and what you stand for? Or is it the impersonal, anonymous ‘voice of business’ you are hearing? Is your speech contaminated with clichés, professional jargon and “consultisms”?

The following paragraph is the copy of a real advertisement which is a perfect example of what I mean by ‘verbal contamination’. I have removed the name of the company as the intention is not to embarrass anybody in particular:

“At (Company name) we know what it takes to direct the future towards milestones of achievement – sound leadership skills and reliable experience. Our success through the years has been based on this exceptional ability to lead, proving our trustworthiness. It is this leadership approach that spurs us towards employing the best global practices, excellent corporate governance and competitive management skills.”

Were you impressed? Moved? Did you understand what this company is about? And the worst: how many of these have you heard or seen before, or keep seeing around you?

Verbal contamination is not harmless. It does to a company what obesity does to the human body: slows down the organizational metabolism, makes the company sluggish to deal with, and un-attractive to work for.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

If reading a brief or a memo to your employees feels like running through soft sand, can you expect them to be inspired and energized, full of ideas and ready to go the extra mile? I don’t think so. It is a fact that companies with high levels of verbal contamination suffer from low profitability, low morale and high staff turnover. Just look around you in the elevator.

These thoughts, as well as my readings in linguistics and NLP led me to the idea of creating Verbal Detox - a program that helps organizations cleanse their communications from business and technical jargon and start speaking in a genuine, human voice.

Verbal Detox is not just editing of text. It is not about replacing long words with shorter ones, verbs with nouns, simplifying or beautifying paragraphs. It goes far beyond the linguistic and grammatical level of communications. Discovering and bringing out the genuine, unique voice of an organization is a process of building identity and confidence. Verbal Detox is intended to helps you pronounce, live and preserve your uniqueness as an organization.

I am going to add the Verbal Detox programme to my website shortly, so you will be able to see how it works. But before I do, I would be grateful if you let me know your thoughts:

Do you think this is justified and needed? Do you believe that the worst affected organisations will be willing to ‘detox’? Some may be proud of their ‘high’ style …

A great article on Brandchannel.com showing the benefits of aligned communications and single mindedness within the organisation. It is interesting that marketers are urged to learn from politicians. I thought it would be the other way round.  Here is the link: http://www.brandchannel.com/brand_speak.asp?bs_id=194

I recently had a very interesting and eye opening experience with a client, who had a strong environmental story  indirectly indicting the  tzars of the local marine industry.  There has been much ado in the UAE press about protecting the marine environment, so we had high expectations when we pitched the story to the local media during the Dubai Boat Show.  Cleraly, our client’s end goal was to make himself visible in the industry through the environmental advantage of his product.  Contrary to our expectations, not one of the Dubai based print or broadcast media showed any interest in the story. It was totally ignored by them and appeared only online. Surprisingly though, all the guys on whose toes we stepped with our story queued at our client’s stand, eager to establish a contact.  What’s more interesting, though not as surprising, our client was showered with interest from international media, including opportunities to appear on Discovery and the National Geographic Channel.  The moral of the story:  Praize the God of Internet,  nowadays, the walls of censorship cannot stop a good story from reaching its readers. They are out there, looking for it and will find a way to get it against all odds. 

The winner? Our client with his killer eco friendly product.  The silver goes to his competitors, which learned something and are now suggesting partnerships. The looser? The local media, which is loosing the last shreds of its credibility, but this is old news. The real looser are the people of the UAE, which were not allowed to know that after 20-30 years 2 million tons of rotting concrete from expired marinas will be dumped into the Gulf. 

I will end this post by quoting The Cluetrain Manifesto: “12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.” No comment.

This blog is for ideas that make sense, but occasionally we all come across something that makes little sense at all.

For most people, geopathic stress lines fall within this category, along with voodoo, magic, fairies, Father Christmas, Feng Shui and the like.

My partner has been suffering from a chronic back pain for several months. We tried massage, rubs, ointments, changing sitting and upright posture, and so on. Nothing worked. We were on the point of going to have acupuncture, when she suggested that we change our places on the sofa where we watch TV. This got me thinking and I suggested I try to see if there were geopathic stress lines in the place she usually sits.

What are they? I (nor apparently anyone else) don’t know exactly, but I use a couple of metal wands, and hold them loosely in my hands parallel to each other. As I move I can feel forces being exerted on the wands and where the strong stress lines appear the wands cross. Similar procedures are used for devining water by some people. I do know that some peple are sensitive to the forces and the wands move for them, and others not and the wands don’t move.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I found that the wands crossed at exactly the place where my partner sits. So she moved to another sofa (checked out for no stress lines prior to the move), and by next morning the pain had gone!

There is no association with magnetism or electricity. I have held the wands over known sources of both with no movement. What it is, I don’t know, but it is a phenomenon reported in many places and it’s presence is often associated with chronic sickness.

Sense or nonsense?

As part of my work I have been associated with marina developments in the Arabian Gulf area and have become aware of the “green” issues which are increasingly important for maintaining the marine environment (see article: http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidZAWYA20080311054922 )

So I have been browsing green sites, and it occurred to me that no-one is talking about how green distributed working is!

What is distributed working? We run a consultancy and although we have an office for compliance with the registration regulations, it is in a distant part of town and takes a long time to reach - so we work from home. In this way we save hours of commuting, hours of polluting the atmosphere with our cars, and hours of trying to find parking and clogging up the streets (we estimate we gain 1 day per week in saved time by not doing all this). Our partners and co-workers are “distributed” ie they work from home (or wherever they want!)

What are the disadvantages? We don’t see any. Even if you work in the same office as your colleagues, you generally use the internal phone to speak to each other and you send each other emails. All our people have an online presence and we can communicate just as effectively as we would sitting in the next office.

It’s not only green and environmentally friendly, it is also much more efficient. We are convinced that the future of the corporation is in this direction. If you imagine the millions of people who commute daily and the amount of damage that does to the environment, you can also see the savings that could be made if those people who do not necessarily need to be gathered in one working environment adopt a “distributed working” model.

Clearly it cannot apply to all: where production requires a colaborative presence in one location, for example. But it applies to most of the administrative and services sectors.

Comments welcome!

There is a lot of talking about Web 2 and we can really see it taking the world by storm, but is it the case with our part of the world? indeed, social sites like Xing, LinkedIn and Ecademy are gaining wide popularity in the Middle East, but unlike the rest of the developed world, corporations are slow to follow. Dialogue is not our kind of thing.

Take one of the largest and most prominent organisations originating from UAE, the real estate developer Nakheel, whose name is associated with the much acclaimed and criticized by some Palm Island and The World project among others. To confront wide international criticism from enivronmentalists, recently Nakheel announced a huge (understand expensive) environmental campaign called Blue Communities (www.bluecommunities.org). As the name suggests it is about communities united around the idea of preserving the marine environment. “Join Blue” say the front cover double spread folds, banners and other costly executions. Yet, if you visit the website there is absolutely no option for contribution, not even the standrd Contact Us in the small print. “Joining Blue’ means adding your contacts to somebody’s database and agreeing to be spoon fed information from their side. What’s the whole point? Where is the ‘community’ in this one sided, rather patronizing communication? There is a premier communication consultancy behind this project, one with a huge client base in the region. I wonder what they advise their clients when it comes to using the net as a platform for dialogue, participation, engagement?

This is only one example and there are many others. Visit the websites of some of the leading agencies in Dubai, how many blogs or other channels for discourse will you find there? In my view Web 2 has not yet reached the uper echelons of the communication industry in our part of the world. Corporations here prefer the seemingly safe approach of the one sided authoritative monologue, believing that as long as they have the financial muscle the audiences will follow sheepishly.

The thing is, in the wall-free cyberspace it is not the financial muscle that defines the winners and loosers. It is not the strong of the day who define public opinion, it is the public opinion who will decide who wins in the end of the day.

I would be glad to hear your opinions, experiences and predictions about this issue. I secretly hope that you prove me wrong!

Here is one of the most common complaint of clients that I have been hearing:

My agency is always firefighting.  They are very creative but when it comes to management just can’t see the big picture.  I am tired of babysitting and repeating the same thing over and over again. This is not why I am paying all this retainer money.

Two things here:  one, the agencies in Dubai these days suffer from severe shortage of qualified people. Their experienced executives are often thinly spread across several accounts and do not have enough time to supervise the junior staff, who often lack basic managerial skills. Nevertheless, if you are paying senior executive hours as part of your retainer, it is your right to demand a share of their time.  On the other hand, you have to keep an eye on the big picture and make your requests to the agency timely and clearly. 

The other thing:  are you keeping sight of the big picture at your end? The agency is at the bottom of the food chain and has to deal with the consequences of all missing links above.  There is a limit to what the agency can interfere in or compensate for.  Sometimes they are left with no choice but firefight.

My advice:  check your act first, then make your demands to your agency firmly but respectfully.  

Seems the most obvious thing to do, everybody is preaching it, yet when it comes to practice, most companies, at least in this market, are back to the good old patchwork of “we will start with PR first (because it is free?!), and when we generate enough income we will do some advertising”, which in Dubai terms means a square mile of hoarding with larger than life déjà vu images.  Digital media does not go much further than a website with some response mechanism.  Budgets are still kept separate between competing departments.  Even within agencies which boast an integrated approach, there is rivalry between advertising and PR over a cut from the campaign budget.

In former lives I have been on every side of this game: the client, the ad agency and the PR agency. Each of these experiences and the collective learning from all, has always led me to one and the same conclusion:  impactful communications start from one strategic platform.  The reason why integration doesn’t work most of the time is that disciplines think in isolation and then try to ‘integrate’.  The result is patchwork and fight over budgets.  

We started Lonsdale Communication with the ambition to do things the other way round:  devise a 360 strategy first and roll it out across different disciplines. To us it is the right way. To the world it is going upstream.  Interesting space to watch, isn’t it?

“A place for ideas that make sense” may sound a little presumptuous at first sight. Who decides what makes sense and what doesn’t?  

Well, I believe that every idea makes sense in a certain context. This is what it is all about.  The innumerable combinations between ideas and contexts are what make life so interesting and inspiring. The variations are endless and always make sense. To see it, all it takes is move the focus from the idea itself to the point of view of its owner.  Understanding another person’s point of view is the easiest thing to do, when we decide to, yet we rarely make the effort.  If we did, the world would be a much better place. 

The combinations are endless, remember?  

So is the hope.