Jana Schilder
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
905 469 0869 (office)
416 831 9154 (mobile)
Jana@JanaSchilder.com

"Think Strawberries" by James Lavenson, 1973

Parallels of good scripts 
and speeches

Electrifying speeches

Stories and anecdotes make a good speech

... more

Tips for brilliant interviews

Six tips to improve your feature writing

Useful transitional words and expressions

Is a camel a Mercedes?

... more

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Louis XIV branded elegance
as French—now that’s
marketing genius

Louis XIV, the first metrosexual, was the visionary who created the first economy driven by French luxury goods of all types. His plan was to firmly entrench everything French as the final arbiter of style in fashion, shoes, food, nightlife, coiffure, perfume, and diamonds. The marketing strategy was simple:  If it’s French, it must be the best—and expensive.   

In Essence of style:  how the French invented high fashion, fine food, chic cafes, style, sophistication and glamour, author Joan DeJean gives intriguing anecdotes about how Louis XIV actually went about implementing plan.

Louis’ tactics included creating the profession of “coiffeur” and using industrial espionage to lure Venetian glassblowers to France to invent plate glass—the foundation for mirrors-making—and integral to fashion.

And yes, apparently it cost the equivalent of $6 for a café au lait and to see and be seen, making Starbuck’s looks like a bargain. 

Marketing tips from the 17^th century

1. It took more than 50 years to establish French elegance as a brand. It takes a long time to get marketing traction. Louis reigned from 1643 to 1715. Contrast this to the tenure of most marketing vice-presidents who want to change whatever their predecessor put in place. Seems they are more concerned with putting their own “brand” on a company than selling the company’s products.

2. Le Mercure Gallant was the first lifestyle marketing magazine. Like Vogue and Cosmopolitan, it told women readers what was “in” and what was “out” seasonally, thus forcing the purchasing decision.

3. Louis established the exclusive boutique (with décor, ambiance and appealing displays) as the way to sell high-end merchandise. Where you buy is important because it adds to the customer experience.

4. Louis worked hand-in-hand with his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who never let his eye off the bottom line. 

Thursday, November 3, 2005

Rosa Parks:  a study in
culture change

 How one petite woman
made a huge difference

Read the story in the New York Times of Rosa Parks’ funeral, a 6-hour affair, from the point of view of culture change. The actions of one can make a difference. We need to act from the courage of our convictions. We cannot allow bureaucracy, injustice and the fear of the masses rule our lives. 

Tuesday, November 1, 2005 

A New Weapon for Wal-Mart:
A War Room.                                                

An incredibly important story by New York Times writer Michael Barbaro about how Wal-Mart is using the political tactic of War Rooms in an effort to try to improve its image with consumers. Read it here.

The New York TImes reports  a documentary about Wal-Mart opens today in theaters

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

McDonald's dips toe in blogging waters

Many organizations don’t realize five important points about culture change: 

1. Communication methods (e-mail, internet, Google, cell phones, blackberries) have de-centralized communication to an unprecedented level. Communication is now more democratic than ever before in the history of mankind. Maintaining confidentiality and preventing information leaks are huge challenges for management and professional communicators.

2. Communication is key:  you must communicate, even if company executives don’t have all the facts. Communicate what you do know now. Communicate other information later. Communicate frequently.

3. Not communicating leads to the 4-D Effect:  disrespect of management, disenchantment, disloyalty, and defection.

4. The human brain is like Pez Candy:  you have to get rid of a lot of Pez blocks before you can get at the one piece of candy you want. There is a huge amount of venting that MUST go on during culture change. Venting helps with buying into culture change. McDonald’s is using blogs to open the lines of communication.

5. It is a paradox:  the more power management seemingly “gives away” by communicating, the more buy-in management gets from employees.

Read how McDonald’s is using blogs to help change its culture here.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Charles Darwin revisited…
Why divergence and extremes
are good for marketing

The Galapagos Iguana is perfectly adapted to its environment.

While convergence is hot in technological circles, divergence may be the new marketing buzzword according to long-time marketing and positioning guru Al Ries.

In his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called divergence the driving force that creates a new species. A new life form is created from minute biological accidents. The marketing parallel Ries draws is that over time, one product gives birth to a new category. Examples are:  computers, cars, soft drinks, and airlines.

Over time, many manufacturers have launched many brands in each of these categories. Because launching a new brand is so expensive and time consuming, marketers and finance people have exploited brand extension to an unprecedented degree. More often than not, however, customers end up confused while the new “extended” products fail to deliver the anticipated financial returns.

Another important point that Ries homes in on is Darwin’s concept that “nature favors extremes.” In other words, bold simple statements that clearly differentiate a new life form—or a new product.

According to Ries, both the low end and the high end of any category are doing well, while the “mushy middle” is suffering. Examples:  Wal-Mart and Whole Foods are both doing well at the respective low- and high-end of food retailing. Similarly with cars, low-priced manufacturers Kia and Hyundai are doing well;  so are BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Ford and GM are hurting, though. Why? They’re in the mushy middle. Translation:  lack of differentiation with customers.  

A compelling argument for strong branding and positioning. A clear rebuttal against line extension. 

Read Al Ries’ article here.

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

No time left to think...
We are all media junkies

The average American spends more time using media devices—television, radio, iPods and cell phones—than any other activity while awake, says a new study from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

Not only are we media junkies, we are also masters of multitasking. The Middletown Media Studies 2 (MMS2), the most comprehensive observational media use study ever undertaken, also found participants are adept at managing their use of two or more types of media at the same time. Women are particularly adept at multitasking, the study found.

"As a society, we are consumers of media," telecommunications professor Robert Papper said. "The average person spends about nine hours a day using some type of media, which is arguably in excess of anything we would have envisioned 10 years ago."

While television is still by far the dominant medium in terms of the time average Americans spend daily with media at 240.9 minutes, the computer has emerged as the second most significant media device at about 120 minutes.

The September 23, 2005 media release from Ball State University is here.

Thursday, September 29, 2005 

The power of PR in the court of public opinion

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver used PR, media relations and government relations to stop feeding junk food to British school children.

Today’s front cover of The Globe and Mail pictures a smiling Jamie Oliver, 28-year old celebrity chef, who has just won an epic battle against serving junk food to school children in England. The junk food ban in English schools takes effect in September 2006.

The 4-hour series “Jamie’s School Dinners” aired on the Food Network in Canada and the US in June 2005 and was supported heavily by all kinds of parental resources about menus, nutrition and alternate choices on Oliver’s popular website. And he used his celebrity status, not to mention his wit and charm, to effectively apply pressure on the British Education Secretary. Read the earlier story on JanaSchilder.com here.

Jamie has had help, though. On the heels of the mega-popular, but frightening film “Supersize Me,” even McDonald’s has buckled under public pressure. McDonald’s new advertising tagline?  “Making good choices.”

This is culture change at its finest and has progressed at record speed—two years, give or take. Oliver is a wonderful example of effectively leveraging PR, media relations, and government relations to do the right thing. To quote Oliver himself:  “Brilliant!” As a result of today’s announcement, B.C. and Ontario are also contemplating making changes to school lunches. And that’s globalism at work. The Globe and Mail story is here.

So, if you’re in the PR department of a soda pop, candy bar or chips/cheesies company, you’ve got yourself a PR problem. And if you’re a school administrator or an elected school trustee, you’ve got a PR problem too, because soda and snack companies have been providing funding (“kick backs”) to school boards across Canada in return for allowing their vending machines on school premises. 

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Grading the CEO speech

Top speaker John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.

Public speaking is the Number 2 fear of most people, CEOs included. The Number 1 fear carries more severe repercussions:  death. Survey after survey, it has been thus for decades.

Start with a joke? Just remember the punchline. Use and abuse of PowerPoint slides? Which CEOs are good speakers? Why don’t more CEOs stand up for their organizations in keynote speeches? These and other mysteries are solved in today’s New York Times here.

Friday, September 16, 2005

The media tide has turned

The two week delay in responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has removed any semblance of objectivity from Atlanta-based network CNN. The number of working journalists that CNN has had on the ground (and in boats, and hip waders) since August 29^th has been impressive.

What these journalists have witnessed—what satirist C. Northcote Parkinson dubbed as “dynamic inaction”—has pushed them over the edge of reporting on the news to commenting freely on the lack of US federal government response in the critical days immediately following Katrina.

Journalist Anderson Cooper, who was actually pulling bodies out of flooded New Orleans homes, is fuming and makes no bones about it. Even 10 pm news anchor Aaron Brown whose editorializing normally ranges from “My goodness” to the occasional raised eyebrow, is on the editorial bandwagon.

New behaviours at CNN

1. Re-running videotape when officials are trying to backpeddle. CNN is holding them accountable by re-running and airing exactly what they said. And some of the videotape clips CNN is running could also be aired on the Jon Stewart Show.

2. Not addressing some politicians and some officials, and "real people" by their titles, normally a sign of respect. In a number of cases, CNN journalists are addressing people by their first names during interviews.

3. Proactively suggesting on the air “ways and means” of reuniting the 2,000 children separated from their parents.

4. Asking leading questions, such as “Wouldn’t you say, so-and-so, that what you did was….?”

5. And they are showing their anger on the air.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Basics of a crisis
communication plan

For many organizations, the complete destruction of all public and communication infrastructure has driven home a classic tenet of public relations:  every organization needs a crisis communication plan.

How many organizations actually have a crisis communication plan? Very few. In 22 years of PR working in major Canadian corporations, professional services firms, government, and non-profits, I have only seen two crisis plans. Interestingly, these were at a freight railroad and an electric utility—presumably organizations that, from time-to-time, would have need for crisis communication. What about other organizations?

5 categories of crises

Proactively, figure out a range on bad things that could happen to your organization. There are five categories of crises:

1.  Natural & physical disasters:  fire, earthquake, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.

2. Accidents:  the company jet goes down with six of the company’s most important executives. Fire at a convention.

3. Product & service failure:  whether by malicious tampering (Tylenol), poor quality (product recall) and misuse (Firestone tires that were under-inflated on Ford Explorers).

4. Scandal-style crises:  One of your executives is charged with a criminal offense. One of your employees goes berserk and kills 17 people.

5. Unintended consequences:  A problem in a third-party organization deeply affects your company.  Right now, thousands of Canadian stores are without fall fashions because of the wildcat strikes by truck drivers at the Vancouver Port. And in England, there is a lack of cheap underwear because of changes in UK-China tariff agreements.

An organization could have 30 to 50 bad scenarios. Communication professionals also need permission to do this in large organizations. There are three reasons why permission is indeed the stumbling block:  1) people are not sufficiently pessimistic, 2) writing these plans takes a lot of time and involves a lot of people, and organizations are reluctant to devote this time to a crisis communication plan, and 3) writing a crisis communication plan involves examining management, operations and safety, and all too often, and organizations don’t want PR people examining their management practices.

Writing the plans, do you write specific, highly detailed information such as which doors to exit from if other doors are blocked, or “broad strokes” plans. Any plan needs to have some specifics—dialing 9-1-1 is not enough.

Contact lists

At the most basic level, you need to know where to get help and where to get a hold of people. And the lists have to be somewhere other than in the burning building, or the server that just got flooded.

Monday, September 5, 2005

 Wal-Mart is biggest
corporate donor to
Hurricane Katrina relief efforts

To-date, Wal-Mart has contributed both cash and goods and services in-kind:

• $17 million in cash donations

• $8 million to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund from the Walton Family Foundation

• $7 million to help organizations such as The Salvation Army, America's Second Harvest, and Foundation for the Mid-South from the Walton Family Foundation

The link to the section in Wal-Mart’s website is here.  

Does this make up for Wal-Mart decimating small businesses, squeezing suppliers to produce ever-cheaper merchandise, and paying its employees minimum wage?  No. It will take a lot more than a singular occurrence to help people get back on their feet after Hurricane Katrina.

However, if they keep this up, they may be on their way to restoring their reputation and public image. Today’s Wal-Mart is not the one that Sam Walton left behind.

Crisis communication lessons

Step 1:  Do something. But start right away.
Wal-Mart has provided $3 million (estimated) in product and merchandise donations.  More than 100 trailer loads of water and merchandise have been donated to emergency services, shelters, and emergency relief organizations.

Step 2:  Do practical things
Evacuees with emergency medicine needs and no money may go to any Wal-Mart pharmacy to have their prescriptions filled free of charge, even if they do not have a copy of their prescription.

An estimated 15,000 Wal-Mart associates are still displaced from their workplaces due to Hurricane Katrina (more than 34,000 impacted in some way). The company has made contact with more than 65% of its associates affected by the storm, including some who have been found in the various evacuee shelters.  Wal-Mart is committed to providing work for displaced associates who want to work in open stores.

Step 3:  Improve things along the way.
Wal-Mart also added an on-line message board and an emergency hotline to help evacuees get in touch with family and friends.

Friday, September 2, 2005

Four things that make
you go “Hmmm” about
Hurricane Katrina

1. How come we had at least four days’ notice of a Level 4/5 Hurricane, and no supplies were moved into position ahead of time?

2. How come the politicians in Washington are congratulating themselves on the job they’re doing when it took four days to get the most basic materials to the relief site?

3. How come President George Bush is touring the disaster site on the same day when relief food, water and medical supplies actually arrive?  Could it be a "photo op?"

4. Why are most of the people who couldn’t afford to leave New Orleans African Americans? 

Friday, August 19, 2005

Go ahead—play with your logo

The smart people at Google have yet another smart marketing idea: they are playing with their own logo. Now, logo-playing used to be taboo, banned, verboten, not allowed by the corporate Logo Police 20 years ago. First, you would have your knuckles rapped by the locals, and then you’d get the call from Head Office….

Why did they get their knickers in a twist?

 For several years now, Google has been sticking a finger in the eye of the Logo Police:  they play with their logo all the time to celebrate birthdays of famous people as well as seasons like Halloween and Christmas.

 The Google logo is a well-recognized brand and playing with it does not devaluate the brand, is not disrespectful, or minimizes shareholder value. Google’s approach is akin to the Absolut Vodka print ads where they use all kinds of stuff to promote the product, but the shape is always that of the trademark Absolut bottle.

Sometimes you have to be big and bold and go play. 

If you want to see more Google fun logos, (242 logos to be exact) click here: and then click on the Google Logos link at the left of the page.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

March yourself to a theatre—quick!

The film critics at New York Magazine, New York Observer, USA Today and the LA Times are falling all over themselves to heap praise on the National Geographic-Warner Independent Pictures production of The March of the Penguins. For once, they’re right.

So, march yourself into a theatre because you want to see this film on a big screen and sit back for 90 minutes of complete amazement. You can skip the popcorn.

Media relations lessons of the film

1. What’s the story? The film documents the 9-month journey of emperor penguins as they bring the next generation into the world. The story of the emperor penguins is compelling, awe-inspiring and legendary.

And the question “What’s the story?” is always the most important question in media relations, too. While not all stories can be this grand, The March of the Penguins is a terrific benchmark. 

2. The cinematography is stunning;  great visuals are more important than ever. It's time to start providing good (if not great) visuals to accompany media releases. We used to do this; let's start doing it again.

3. Not only is this a great story, it is also well-told. The scriptwriting is fantastic. Check out the writing on the website, too, especially the production notes and the Director’s Statement. The website of the film is here.

How much effort did you put into writing your story for the media? Any editor will pay attention to a great story that is well told.

Other lessons of Penguins
You don’t need a big budget.
You don’t need special effects.
You don’t need guns and explosions.
You don’t need fancy cars and chase scenes.
You don’t need Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
….to make a great film.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Reading and filing obituaries are terrific ways to improve writing skills for PR practitioners.

All major news outlets have archives on major news and entertainment personalities. And, most obituaries are written by people very knowledgeable about the life, achievements and best lines (and quips) that the obituary honours.

This week, we mourn the loss of and celebrate the life of Canadian actor James Montgomery Doohan, and his fake Scottish accent as the miracle-working Chief Engineer Scotty on the spaceship Enterprise of the cult TV series Startrek. “Beam me up, Scotty!” and “Captain, I can’t hold the engines much longer!” were two quips that made their way into the popular culture.

If you are prone to writer's block, a good way of getting unstuck is to read some of the obituaries in your file to get the creative juices flowing again.

LA Times obituary is here: 
Associated Press obituary is here: 
Startrek.com obituary is here: 

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

How Wal-Mart dictates
popular culture
Left is the "regular" version.

Willie Nelson launched Countryman, a Reggae project that took him 10 years. While the critics argue over a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down,” even the most vocal free-spirit of the American songwriters has buckled under the pressure exerted by Wal-Mart:  don’t offend our delicate sensibilities.

At Wal-Mart, you can only buy the “sanitized” version, left, of the album, with the palm tree on the cover. Amazon, however, offers a more democratic approach:  you can buy the original cover with the Marijuana leaf, or the Jamaican palm tree.

This is the power of Wal-Mart.

For more on this power, read The United States of Wal-Mart by John Dicker. By it’s sheer numbers, Wal-Mart dominates and dictates popular culture, argues Dicker. You can’t argue with Wal-Mart’s volumes—or can you?

The July 17 review of the United States of Wal-Mart is here.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

The Economist editor
stopped the presses

On Friday, July 8, printed copies of The Economist, the weekly news magazine based in London, was already on bookstore shelves at 2 pm in Toronto with the cover story:  “London Under Attack.” That was less than 24 hours later. How did they do it?

First, they had an editor with decision-making power. Editor-in-Chief Bill Emmott acknowledged that he hadn’t acted fast enough in when terrorists attacked Madrid a year earlier. And, he was not going to make the same mistake twice.

“Major terrorist attacks, probably by Al-Qaeda, just are absolutely fundamental to what we do as a weekly magazine,” said Emmott,  as reported in the Globe and Mail.

At 10 am, the current issue was already on press. But when Emmott heard about the attacks in London, he gave the order: “Stop the presses.”

The result? One-and-a-half million copies with the cover story of climate change, the G8 summit and the revised interest in nuclear power were sent to the shredder. After all, paper is recyclable. But not covering a major news story is something that goes against the grain of respected news outlets. “I shall not pass this way again.”  

Thursday, July 7, 2005

Special deliveries celebrate
Amazon’s 10^th Anniversary

UPDATE at the bottom of this story:

Stunts worked in the early days of PR—and they still work. For its 10^th anniversary, Amazon.com has conscripted Hollywood and music legends to deliver packages of randomly selected customer orders for the 10-day period from July 6 to July 16. July 16 marks 10 years since founder Jeff Bezos opened the virtual doors of Amazon.com from his garage.

Among the celebrities scheduled to make deliveries: Harrison Ford, who will deliver a boxed set of Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD;  Moby, with his recently released CD Hotel;  and Jason Alexander, who played George on Seinfeld.

Why this is a brilliant marketing strategy

1. It creates an event that generates buzz. Can you imagine the great bar stories that will result from Amazon’s Anniversary…. “And then, there was the time that Harrison Ford delivered our Raider’s DVDs….”

2. It leverages cross-marketing with film and music stars, who are also looking for exposure.

3. It uses event marketing to drive traffic to the web site: Bob Dylan and Nora Jones, the two best-selling musicians on the site, will perform live on Amazon.com on July 16. Clever!

4. You won’t have to get rid of an unwanted gift from Amazon at your next garage sale or re-gift it to your cousin Mildred! 

5. It doesn’t pollute the environment.

UPDATE: July 19, 2005

Watch Celebrities Deliver Customer Packages

As part of Amazon's 10-day anniversary celebration, Amazon.com and its 10-year partner UPS surprised Amazon customers with special deliveries. You can watch the videos of Harrison Ford, Anna Kournikova, Jason Alexander, Don Cheadle, and other celebrities personally delivering orders to Amazon customers.

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Asian and American
Leadership Styles: How Are
They Unique?

One of hundreds of MBA graduation classes in India. 

“Asian and American Leadership Styles: How Are They Unique” is a very important article in the June 27, 2005 issue of Working Knowledge, the free online newsletter from Harvard Business Review.

It is important in the context of Thomas Friedman’s the “world is flat” concept, meaning that the playing field has been levelled: work can be—and is being —done around the world in countries like India and China, where the standard of living has not caught up to the West—yet.

At the core of Asian economic development is its business leadership—managers and entrepreneurs who sustain and create Asian companies. Do they exhibit the same leadership styles as top executives in the West? There are important differences. Are differences attributable to different cultures or to different stages of corporate development? Read the article here.

Friday, June 24, 2005

IABC Toronto leader takes
a stand on communications

We’re passing out cigars today in Toronto because Alix Edmiston, president of the Toronto chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) with some 1,200 members, has a terrific article in today’s Globe and Mail here. You may need to register with the G&M, but for this story, it is free.

One of the key points a number of senior professional communications have been trying to drive home with both IABC Toronto and IABC home office in San Francisco is that “communications should advocate the importance of the profession to business.”

What does this mean? Well, everyone understands the benefits of using the services of doctors, plumbers, lawyers, engineers and accountants. Who understands the benefits of professional communication?

Advocacy has two parts:  What do professional actually do? [No, “spin doctoring” is just Hollywood’s take on things.] And, what are the benefits of using professional communicators in your business?  Alix covers both these points with style and flair.

Friday, June 24, 2005

Cross-cultural communication
is more important than ever 

A mother and daughter dine at a Chongqing Municipality McDonald's while the insulting kneeling commercial is showed.

Yes, the world is flat, but some actions still produce spikes. Like the one this week caused by McDonald’s new advertising campaign in China. The campaign was pulled from television stations and newspapers on Monday, June 20. Apparently, the Chinese culture is less given to coupon-clipping and even less given to begging.

The Chinese find begging highly distasteful, but this combined with the added layer of an American food conglomerate seeming to offer “alms to the poor” added another layer of complexity to international advertising campaigns. When it comes to cross-cultural communication, you can never be too careful, or ask too many opinions from target audiences.

The TV spot showed a man begging the McDonald’s clerk behind the counter to accept a discount coupon that had already expired. Viewers found the campaign “insulting” and “not humorous.”

Questions

• Was McDonald’s advertising agency in China aware of this cultural sensitivity?

• Did the agency try test market the concept first?

• Did the agency test market then the actual campaign with Chinese audiences?

• Were the decision-makers on the account U.S. executives?

• Were the McDonald’s staffers at the Chinese agency too polite to say anything until it was too late? [This, too, is a Chinese cultural tendency:  the feeling is that they don’t want to be the bearers of bad news.]

Thursday, June 16, 2005

Heartfelt Father’s Day ad from Harry Rosen men's wear retailer

This Father’s Day, popular Canadian high-end men’s apparel retailer Harry Rosen has traded shirts and ties for popsicle sticks, macaroni, buttons, seashells, and even Cheerios. Harry Rosen’s Father’s Day ad is a charming and bold move from a retailer who has the confidence to do a very soft sell. Part of branding and positioning is appealing to customers’ spiritual values, not just creating ways to part them from their money.

Instead of featuring price, the ad speaks to the emotions of parents—moms and dads alike—who may have forgotten the delicious pleasure of waking up every morning to see the fridge covered in their children’s artwork that comes straight from the heart. Who needs Cezanne when everyone can have Crayola?

A Father’s Day ad like this one didn’t appear in The Globe and Mail from any other Tom, Dick or Harry.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005  

Chef crusades for culture change
Jamie Oliver takes on
England’s school lunch system

Jamie Oliver, Britain’s 28-year-old celebrity chef, is taking on England’s school lunch system in a four-part series that is currently airing on Canada’s Food Network.

While the Food Network is a good source of recipes and entertainment a lot of the time, the current “Jamie’s School Dinners” is a deadly serious show about changing the eating habits of elementary school children in England, starting with the Kidbrooke School in Greenwich, a London suburb.

Jamie Oliver vs. 20,000
junk food junkies
It is no secret that English food is almost a caricature of itself with wacky names to match:  Toad-in-the-Hole. Welsh Rarebit. Bubble and Squeak. In English school kitchens, apparently there is no cooking involved. Just opening boxes and bags of frozen, pre-formed stuff—and that’s the problem. There is not a fresh fruit or vegetable in sight. Just hamburgers, fried fish, fries and pizza.  

The horrors of what British children are putting into their mouths is really driven home when Jamie sends typical lunch fare to the lab to be analyzed for nutritional content. Well, you can predict this outcome, can’t you? Fat, carbohydrates, salt, sugar, and food additives abound.

Equally disturbing is when he speaks to a dietician about some of the chronic health problems that children are already having, including extremely serious constipation from lack of any roughage in their diet, child obesity, and a range of behavioural problems that are not conducive to learning.

Ketchup, apparently, is a vegetable in England. Children couldn’t identify asparagus, leeks or beets by name, but they sure knew the Domino’s Pizza and McDonald’s logos.

Now that Oliver is the father of two little girls, he is very concerned about nutrition for growing bodies and minds. You can’t build better Brits on junk food, he maintains. Learn more about Jamie’s quest to reform the eating habits of English kids. More info is here.

Part of the problem? English schools have a budget of 37p per child (about CDN$0.75) for lunch—a quarter of what is spent in British prisons.  Second problem:  in 1967, the British government passed responsibility for the school lunch programs to the Local Education Authorities (LEAs). In 1988, the Local Government Act forced LEAs to put the school meal service out to tender. Throughout the 1990s up until today, budget cuts continue and nutrition takes a back seat to cost savings.

Culture change lessons
“Jamie’s School Dinners” is a wonderful case study in culture change: 

Vision:  Jamie Oliver wants to reform the eating habits of 20,000 kids in England to get them to make better food choices.

Passion:  emotions run high all around. And it turns out that Oliver can swear like a bricklayer;  the show carries a warning label about “coarse language.”

Stress:  Passion leads to stress. If you care and want something to work, stress is part of the territory. He’s not beyond taking shots at Bill Clinton and his posse, who show up one night at Oliver’s gourmet restaurant and want fare from the South Beach Diet, ignoring preparations that have gone on for two weeks for a very, very specials meal. Well, that just sends Oliver on a colourful rant….

Commitment:  You can see that he really wants to help affect change in eating habits.

“Failure is not an option.”

Changing behaviours:  This is the heart of culture change that many programs miss. What do you want people to do differently? Can you list those behaviours? Are they too general, or too specific? Oliver did a stellar job of this. Check out the action items and checklists here.

Ruffling feathers:  Culture change means stress and Oliver is ready to tackle the political system head-on to achieve his vision. Why do the schools buy all this frozen, pre-formed food? And what about producers of this frozen food? From their standpoint, this is what kids have been eating for years, and now it is being held up to ridicule. Suddenly, they are the bad guys.

Involvement:  Oliver finally finds what works—get the kids picking, preparing and cooking their own lunch in the school kitchen. Get those affected by the change involved;  this is the most profound and meaningful way to make change happen.

Setbacks:  A number of things Oliver tries fail. Kids had never tasted fresh raspberries before and spit them out. The parents, too, are an obstacle:  they need to put food on the table fast after a long work day. Packed lunches cannot consist of three candy bars and a bag of potato chips, he explains to parents who clearly feel pressured to change.

Honesty and trust:  If you can’t talk about what is really wrong, you can’t fix it.

Communication:  frequent 2-way communication with Oliver, the school’s head cook (Nora), the principal, and the children themselves.

Goofing around:  If you can laugh about events while they are happening, culture change can’t be going that badly. Oliver makes a point of hamming it up:  he dresses up as a giant corn-on-the-cob and has the children chase him all over the school yard.

Seeing the other side:  Oliver has a brilliant idea to send the school’s head cook to his gourmet restaurant for a day while he takes charge of a school kitchen for a day. Nothing like seeing the other side first-hand to appreciate where the other side is coming from.

Celebration:  Oliver takes time to celebrate small wins that signify progress.

Friday, June 9, 2005

“Think Pink” for shift in business culture
We have been busy producing and directing LIVE!@ROTMAN:  Dan Pink, including project management, logistics, marketing, media relations, and sponsorships.

MEDIA HITS: 
An article on Dan Pink is scheduled to run in the Focus section of The Globe and Mail on Saturday, June 11.

 We are waiting for a date from Report on Business Television when a 10-minute segment with Dan Pink, interviewed by Michael Vaughan will air.

We are also waiting for an air date from TV Ontario, which taped the entire 60-minute interview, and will edit it into a feature television program.

And Ellen Roseman wrote a feature article about Dan Pink in The Toronto Star: scroll to bottom of the article, below. You can read it here.

An eclectic mix of MBA graduates, designers, professional communicators and business people came to hear Dan Pink, the Washington-based author of A Whole New Mind give a compelling change message. About 180 people were in the audience. “Everything is changing because of three factors:  Asia, automation and abundance,” he says.

“If you want to succeed in the future, run screaming at the top of your lungs from anything that is routine,” says Pink.

Left-brained attributes, such as logic, sequence, literalness and analysis are typically the ones that are being outsourced to Bangalore. Typically, left-brained attributes have been stressed throughout the education system in search of The One Right Answer. Routine can be automated, he points out.

“Outsourcing is over-hyped in the short-term, but under-hyped in the long-term. We will see a lot more of it in the future,” says Pink.

“All professions are affected from accounting, to engineering, to medicine and marking. Analyzing data and reports of any kind can be done cheaper in India and China where $500 month is considered upper middle class,” says Pink.

He stresses six attributes which he says will be important to survival, both corporate and individual:  design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. Why? They cannot be automated.

Read Ellen Roseman’s column in The Toronto Star here. Two photographs of Dan Pink ran in the paper, taken by Star photographer Simon Hayter.

Dan Pink event shaping up at Rotman
Professional communicators and other business people are registering for Live!@Rotman, Dan Pink in Conversation, on Tuesday, June 7th. There are details here.

The Design Exchange, which is mentioned in Mr. Pink's latest book, A Whole New Mind, , is now getting involved in supporting the event, and this week Business Edge, a Canada-wide free business tabloid, ran an excellent story about Dan. You can read the Business Edge story here.

Corporations team up with
Orange County Choppers
It was bound to happen sooner or later: some of America’soldest and most revered corporations have approached American Chopper, the Discovery Channel’s highest-rated TV series, with some real "outside the gear-box" thinking.

Caterpillar, the earth-moving machinery maker, and The Gillette Company, the world’s leader in men’s grooming, have recently commissioned high-quality, one-of-a-kind motorcycles built by Orange County Choppers (OCC)—a custom, New York State-based bike shop owned by the colourful, dynamic duo of Paul Teutul, Sr. and Paul Teutul, Jr.—and the stars of American Chopper.

The weekly challenge of building a unique bike, plus the motley crew of the bike shop characters and their zany personalities, is just the start of the fun for viewers: boys, girls, dads, and moms alike. It gets really interesting when it becomes obvious that some of the crew are not firing on all cylinders: one bike builder is always napping on the couch. And then there are the practical jokes, the bad grammar, and expletives deleted by network censors…. How big is American Chopper? The Peel Region Police, in suburban Toronto, just raided a warehouse full of counterfeit goods, including the biggest supply of American Chopper knock-offs ever confiscated.

Caterpillar and Gillette have spotted the next trend. What’s the next trend? The convergence of several factors including: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Huh? Read Dan Pink’s new book, A Whole New Mind; learn more here. 

1. Design: Caterpillar and Gillette both approached Orange County Choppers: "if you were to build a bike that would reflect our brand, what would that bike look like?" Design is big. Conceptual thinking is big. This is the ultimate brand extension.

2. Story: The chronicle that details building the Cat Chopper and the Gillette M3Power Nitro Chopper each take one hour on the show, less TV commercials. Further, reality TV is big. This, combined with the fact that DVRs enable viewers to skip through commercials means that companies must get more creative with their marketing. Product placement is bigger than ever!

3. Symphony: Design meets story, meets marketing gaps, meets employee communications, meets corporate donations. It’s harder and harder to tell them apart: what is marketing, what is branding, what is PR, and what is philanthropy? Companies like Caterpillar and Gillette understand that in order for the corporate story to "hang together," all the elements have to work in concert. They are all part of a company’s image and reputation.

4. Empathy: Gillette will auction off the M3Power Nitro Chopper on eBay this summer, with proceeds going to the National Prostate Cancer Coalition.

5. Play: Both the Cat Chopper and the M3Power Nitro Chopper are fun adventures in adapting the style and design features of a farm tractor and a razor respectively to a custom motorcycle. Paul Jr. calls the Cat Chopper "the toughest bike built by Orange County Choppers." The bike features many unique characteristics of Cat machines, including Grade 8 bolts and other hardware, sprockets, bucket teeth, and a Track-Type Tractor exhaust, not to mention the trademark yellow paint. The Gillette M3Power Nitro Chopper's design features a sleek, streamlined black frame with vibrant green accents, and wheels inspired by the M3Power three-blade technology. "We wanted this chopper to really reflect the look and feel of the razor, so we created the longest and leanest frame that we've ever designed and used the product's black-and-green color scheme to highlight some of the metal work," said Paul Teutul, Jr.

6. Meaning: Diehard bike designers put their soul into designing a bike; it is not merely a means of transportation, or a piece of design, it is a statement of their personality.

When Gillette unveiled the bike, based on the design of its new M3Power Nitro men’s razor, 3,000 fans of American Chopper showed up at its Boston headquarters. And the story got picked up by the Boston Herald. The Cat Chopper was unveiled to Caterpillar employees in North Carolina in early April 2005; the company has already set up a tour of 30 cities where it has Cat dealers in the U.S.

That’s powerful stuff.

What were they thinking?
Toronto Symphony cancels tasteless radio ads 
Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) has canceled a series of three radio ads on Classical 96.3 FM in Toronto that listeners found tasteless and insulting rather than funny.

The three ads, written and recorded by Toronto's Pirate Radio and Television agency, were conceived to solicit new subscribers for the orchestra's 2005-2006 season by showing that symphony attendance is "not only for stuffy old rich people."

Accompanied by a dulcet musical soundtrack, each of the ads—titled "Old Bill," "Rich Joanne" and "Boring Maurice"—features narrated mini-profiles of made-up individuals who belie the "stuffy/old" stereotype.

The most controversial is about "Maurice Carter," a physiotherapist and TSO subscriber whose subscription apparently "does not make sense," the narrator intones, because the physiotherapist is only 31, has eight per cent body fat, two cellphones, three girlfriends and "doesn't press his underwear." In short, he is not "the boring uptight TSO subscriber we had envisioned." After supposedly telephoning each of the girlfriends to confirm Maurice's subscription, the narrator says he's learned two things about the physiotherapist: he loves Beethoven and "he'd better watch his hound-dog, three-timin' butt." The ad ends as the other two do, with the declaration: "You'd be surprised who goes to the TSO."

And TSO subscribers and fans were offended, so the TSO cancelled the ads, but only on the classical music station. According to the Globe & Mail newspaper, the TSO continues to insult its supporters on a different Toronto radio station. What is the TSO thinking?

1. Humour is very hard to do. It is even harder to do it well. That’s why Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno make the big bucks. To poke fun without offending is an art.
2. Don’t alienate the people who give you money—your customers. TSO subscribers are also donors of varying amounts of cash. Many probably thought: "My donation is being used for these trashy radio ads?"
3. Branding is hard. Re-branding is even harder. The TSO had a tough road ahead: current patrons are aging Baby Boomers or even older, bringing top talent to Toronto costs big bucks, and the image of not just the TSO, but also a number of other symphony orchestras worldwide, is that symphonic music is elitist and obsolete. For better or worse, that’s the symphony patron stereotype—and a hard to change stereotype.
4. The TSO’s new tagline, "You’d be surprised who goes to the TSO," works well; the execution is lacking, though.

1. 1. It might be a thought to send a letter to current TSO subscribers apologizing for the radio ads, and explaining the desire to pull in a younger audience to maintain a vibrant following, thus ensuring the viability of the TSO.
2. Think testimonials. The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is using this approach to great effect.
3. Think cross-over. Cross-over is BIG in all musical genres. Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe recorded Barcelona in 1987; Kiri Te Kanawa recorded Maori folksongs; Bocelli has been described as "opera for those who don’t like opera." Elvis Costello is doing Burt Bacharach tunes. Rod Stewart is doing Volume 3 of American jazz standards. Ian Tyson's played with the Edmonton Symphony.
4. Think special events (in the French sense, the "spectacle") that you cannot get on a CD).
5. Pre-symphony chats were a great idea. How do you listen to symphonic music when you don’t know what you’re supposed to appreciate? Iain Scott gives a whole series of lectures on opera; who could do the same for the TSO?

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Managing your reputation
Take critics head-on, with humour -- don't be chicken!

If you play with fire, you can get your feathers singed.

In a letter to John Bitove, head of the Priszm Canadian Income Fund, which operates 481 KFC restaurants in Canada, vegetarian, Playboy model and pin-up star Pamela Anderson accused the restaurant of using suppliers who are cruel in the raising and slaughtering of chickens. The curvaceous Ms. Anderson is a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and has recently narrated a video for animal rights.

Mr. Bitove used a toothpick to burst Ms. Anderson’s bubble. He responded with his own letter which was "leaked" to the media, turning Ms. Anderson into a sitting duck. Mr. Bitove said he wrote to Anderson to "correct all the inaccuracies you're spreading throughout our country."

Knowing full well the media’s lust for a juicy story, Bitove knew they would bite. Are these chicken-flavoured nuggets? Or clever come-backs?

Let’s face it: Ms. Anderson has not built her career on intellectual pursuits. Nor is she a Shakespearean-trained actress. She has consciously built her reputation on her body—good for her! The point is this: if you stand for something (sexiness), it is very difficult to stand for something else. It is very difficult to take Sex Kittens seriously.

Businesses encountering vicious attacks have a problem; do they shut up and hope the problem goes away soon, or, in Shakespearean terms (Has Pam played Ophelia in Hamlet? She would have heard...) do you take arms, (or legs, breasts, thighs, wings, or nuggets) against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them? Now Bitove / KFC "owns" the story, which was featured on page one of several major Canadian daily papers today, making the case that his chickens are treated the same way as supermarket chickens.

Pass the dipping sauce.

Monday, May 2, 2005

This is a story about the unexpected intersection of three spheres: the realization that e-mail is an essential service and that both computer security and customer service are myths.

At the nexus of these three spheres lies a Black Hole, which is where I’ve spent two days of my life last week. I’m no Stephen Hawking, but I finally figured out what happened. And some startling computer security and communication implications have been raised.

Bell Sympatico, Canada’s largest internet service provider (ISP) with millions of customers, was blacklisted on Thursday, April 28, 2005 at 9:07 am EST by an organization called www.rfc-ignorant.org

Ignorant.org is a legitimate subscription service for ISPs and self-appointed "clearinghouse for sites who think that the rules of the internet don't apply to them." Ignorant.org’s chief goal is to hold all ISPs accountable for the standards set by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF.) Ignorant.org blocked outgoing mail from Sympatico accounts to certain ISPs that subscribe to its service. One of those ISPs is IT.ca No mail to this domain could get through to IT.ca's customers from any Sympatico account.

What was Sympatico’s "sin"? What caused my e-mail to be blocked for two days? We’ll get to that. Sympatico’s "sin" points to a major security flaw that could easily be exploited by terrorists. My gripe with Sympatico is that their customer service is lacking. Grossly lacking.

My journey into the e-mail void started Thursday, April 28 around 6 pm, when I realized that all e-mail sent to a colleague was bounced back. For those of us who are Free Agents but work in virtual organizations, e-mail has become kind of important.

On Friday, April 29, I was convinced that I was the victim of some phishing or pharming scam, or perhaps a Trojan Horse. I ran full virus scan and so did a number of colleagues, all of us Sympatico subscribers, plus two people I was trying to reach who were not Sympatico customers.

But virus scanning, and then spy-ware checking, which took our computers out of service for a long time, turned up nothing untoward.

Around 4 pm on Friday, I finally summoned enough courage to click on an imbedded URL in one of those bounce-back messages. This led me to a site called www.rfc-ignorant.org and it didn’t take a lot of prowling around to learn that this internet cop had, in fact, blacklisted Canada’s largest ISP. There are about 40 of these organizations that police the Internet.

Discovering this problem was a lot easier than getting Bell Sympatico staff to act on it. I had on-line chats with Adrian and later Craig of Sympatico’s instant messaging helpline.

Turns out the Sympatico Customer Service Department is trained to deal with squares, circles, and triangles. My problem was a trapezoid. Apparently, these Customer Service reps decided my issue had to do with internet abuse, so I was sent packing to yet another Sympatico help department. By early Friday evening, I connected by phone with Steve at Sympatico who finally logged my problem with a trouble ticket and the promise of a resolution.

By Saturday morning my e-mail tests to colleagues were still producing bounce-backs. I was still in that Black Hole.

So, I abandoned hopes of getting any real help from the techno whiz kids at Sympatico and whacked www.rfc-ignorant.org into www.whois.com to find the organization’s owner, Derek Balling, and his phone number in New York City.

I probably pulled Derek out of bed at 8:50 am EDT on Saturday, explaining that their blacklisting of Bell Sympatico was causing me and likely untold other Canadians grief. Derek indicated ignorant.org required an e-mail to be sent to their System Administrator to prove that Bell Sympatico was legitimate and should be removed from the blacklist.

I killed another 30 minutes with Sympatico, this time with Ryan on the 1-800 hotline, and explained what had to happen.

Saturday, April 30 at 2 pm, I received an e-mail from Sympatico indicating that they were acting on the problem, and it should be resolved in 12 hours. Sympatico did not indicate the nature of the problem. A quick test indicated that, yes, the problem had already been fixed, at 11:23 a.m, a couple of hours earlier.

Thinking that I had already wasted two days trying to fix this problem, it was worth one more phone call to Derek Balling at ignorant.org. I was hoping for some juicy story about phishing or pharming. The truth was hardly exciting.

"What happened?" I asked him. "One Sympatico customer complained on Thursday morning that the postmaster@sympatico.ca e-mail address bounced back," said Balling. "Another customer complained of the same problem at 2 am Friday morning."

"We verified the address, postmaster@sympatico.ca and got a bounce-back, too. It’s a reputation issue and our criteria is simple: the postmaster address must work," said Balling. So, because someone at Sympatico either forgot or delayed clearing the postmaster e-mail box, it cost me two days of my life, it cost my collegue hours of wasted time, it caused him to not work on a client's file, …

Sympatico caused the problem.

I did all the leg work to fix their problem, begged them to take action to fix the problem, got no apology—and no thank you, either. And I’m sure I’ll be getting my monthly bill from Sympatico.

Apparently, it is very easy to get an ISP provided "blacklisted." Even Bell Sympatico is not immune. The strategy seems to be to shut down an ISP first, and wait to see which customers complain.

Filing a complaint with Ignorant.org is so easy to do that any terrorist could do it. How long would it take to get things back on the rails again, and how much damage could be done?

When were organizations such as www.rfc-ignorant.org made the keepers of the world's e-mail? Although Ignorant.org probably meant well, they cost me two days of productivity.

These organizations seem to be largely self-appointed. Shouldn’t there be more rigour around this process? What is to stop an unethical blacklisting service from cutting off all e-mail to or from the Royal Bank, or a hospital, or freight railway, for example?

"Filtering e-mail, cutting people off from e-mail, and reinstating their e-mail—there needs to be a more broad-ranging discussion on these issues, especially in the post 9-11 world," says Rene Hamel, a computer security expert at Toronto-based The Inskter Group.

"That process must include human contact. Firms like ignorant.com must be able to communicate with someone to discuss the problem and its resolution. Pulling the plug without proper processes to solve the issue is not the answer," says Hamel, who spent many years in computer forensics with the RCMP.

1. After all the stuff we’ve read about in Harvard Business Review about empowerment, it's still a myth. It is still very difficult to get Customer Service representatives to take action early in the process. How do you spell empowerment in 2005? "C-h-i-c-k-e-n."

Sympatico people I dealt with: 5 (Adrian, Craig, Steve, Ryan, and Lise)

Responses I received: "I can’t escalate that."

"That’s not our department, that’s abuse@sympatico.ca" "The abuse department doesn’t work on weekends."

"No, I can’t tell you when it will be resolved."

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Lana Duke knows when to 
put her PowerPoint aside 
Lana Duke, the franchise owner of Ruth's Chris Steak Houses in Toronto and nearby Mississauga, plus two in San Antonio, is speaking today at the downtown Toronto location.

Her PowerPoints are staying in the computer, turned off, because, as she discussed last night, the point of many speeches is to link the speaker with the audience, not have the audience looking off to one side at a screen. (The slides come back out when the presentation has a professional development slant to it, with the audience in more of a student-like frame of mind)

In her presentation to Toronto business leaders and some favorite customers, her theme is the importance of continual selling. She emphasis that people buy from other people, not from "organizations" and therefore, being understood and appreciated as a person is the heart of a good sales pitch.

There's more than likablity, of course, and she points out, even if Ruth's Chris sells the "Sizzle," the actual steak is as good as it is possible to find.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

MASTER COMMUNICATOR:
Thomas Friedman and the art of the "sound bite"

Three-time Pulitzer prize winning journalist and columnist for The New York Times Thomas Friedman is on the book circuit this month.

He is promoting his third book, The World is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 496 pages). Part of flogging books is public speaking and interviews with the likes of CNN and Charlie Rose.

The World Is Flat is Friedman’s metaphor for the great leveling going on today, driven by new technology and software that allows individuals from Canton, China, to Canton, Ohio, to collaborate and compete on a whole new scale.

"I'm exhausted just writing about all this," says Friedman, grinning sheepishly. "Flatness is the single most important trend in the world today."

In the book, he identifies 10 "flatteners" that converged around 2000 and are now reshaping lives, business, and politics—and leveling the playing field globally. Some of these flatteners include: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the invention of web browsers; open source software; Internet search engines; outsourcing; offshoring; insourcing; and supply chaining.

His over-arching message? We now have unparalleled connectivity and collaboration. Where work is done doesn’t matter any more. As a result, we need a whole new infrastructure to correspond to the new way of working.

Friedman is a great researcher, analyst, and writer. He is equally talented at coming up with sound bites—a.k.a. "Key Messages" for professional communicators. Because, at the end of the day, you have to be able to distill you messages into a few words. You have to put in the research and thinking time, but no one wants long, drawn out explanations. They don’t catch on; no one quotes them.

The equally talented Democratic strategist James Carville once said that powerful communication must have four things:

1. Simplicity
2. Relevance
3. Repetition
4. Exclusivity

Favourite Friedman-isms
Last week, Friedman was on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS. It wasn’t an interview, because Friedman is like an intellectual Robin Williams—Rose only had to ask one question, wind him up, and then let Friedman go. The sound bites just poured out of him:

Thursday, April 7, 2005

Daniel Pink is coming to 
Toronto in June.

Daniel H. Pink, author of Free Agent Nation and the just-published A Whole New Mind, will be "In-Conversation" at Toronto's Rotman School of Management on Tuesday, June 7, 2005. More information on times and ticket availability will be posted here, as soon as details are finalized.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

US culture in decline
The colossal media machine

With the death of Terri Schiavo this morning, at least the first public chapter of what Peggy Wente referred to in her brilliant editorial ("Right to What?" The Globe and Mail, March 22, 2005), as the rift between the "Divine Spark people" versus the "Primordial Soup people" has ended. The spectacle we have witnessed for two weeks was watching a woman, in a persistent vegetative state, die on television.

What we are really seeing is the decline of culture of the wealthiest country in the world. In the last days of the Roman Empire, people paid money and ate snacks while watching people die at the Roman Coliseum. Here’s the updated version of this colossal circus for 2005: we watched a stranger die—an intimate act—in the comfort of our living rooms. I’ll get the chips during the commercial break; you want Salt-and-Vinegar or BBQ?

How did the US go from being a refuge of persecuted people everywhere to a land of uber-evangelists? In 1961, the media held up JKF’s Catholicism as a potential issue harmful to the US Presidency; his response was that he was a President first, a Catholic second. In 2005, it seems Americans prefer evangelists first, politicians second.

1. In the US, the media made a number of "wrong calls" in their insatiable appetite for 24/7 news. First: CNN pre-announced the fact that an autopsy would be performed on Terri’s body. Her body wasn’t even cold—she hadn’t died yet! Second: CNN had helicopter tracking shots of the white, unmarked van that carried Terri’s body to the morgue, reminiscent of O.J. Simpson as he fled down the highway in the white Ford Bronco.
2. The evangelists are now a huge stakeholder group, and they are influencing the political agenda heavily. In the US, Republican House Leader Tom Delay has made motions that US Law on personal care, and by extension civil liberties and personal rights of US citizens, will be reviewed.
3. Stakeholders know how to get their stories told using the media; this trend will escalate. Traditional and non-traditional stakeholders (and even those who have no business interfering) can jump into the carnival ring with the cameras rolling. The words "martyr," "morality," and "manipulation" come to mind.

1. For Canadian news producers, the lesson is that death is a private event. Even the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison had their faces pixeled out. The US media just got too close; they made the wrong choice.
2. The plight of Terri Schiavo has been a case study for Canada in how not to do things. The importance of a Living Will and a Power of Attorney have been heightened for Canadians.
3. Canadians’ church attendance, our belief in Hell and the Devil, and our necessity to believe in God in order to be moral is about half that of Americans’, according to data compiled by Michael Adams of the Environics Research Group and published in his award-winning 2004 book, Fire and Ice: the United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging values. Canada is much more secular as a country; Canadians have a much more relaxed view of religion and its role in business and politics—so far.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Turning up the 
volume on cross-cultural
communication

The number of visible minorities in Canada is expected to double by 2017, according to a new Statistics Canada report released this week.

If current trends hold, one in every five people will be non-white in 12 years, when Canadians mark the 150^th anniversary of Confederation. By 2017, almost 75 percent of visible minorities in Canada will live in Canada’s three largest cities: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.

In Toronto alone, visible minorities will form more than half the population, representing somewhere between 47 and 53 percent, which will translate to between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people, with many more in the surrounding communities, too. Most of these will be Chinese, South Asians, Blacks, Filipinos, and Latin Americans, according to the report.

While Toronto has been known as one of the world’s most multicultural cities, demands on professional communicators will be increased many fold. The cross-cultural communication implications of corporate communications, marketing communications, government relations, issues management, and media relations will be huge.

These newcomers to Canada will make up our future audiences: owners, business leaders, employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and members of the media. Consider:

1. Language, and by extension communication, are largely culture-based. What is said? What is not said? And when? Who communicates first? Second? What is said to the "inner circle"? What are the differences between oral and written communication in a culture? What about the differences in communicating with first generation immigrants, and then their second generation children?
2. The implications of non-verbal (gestures and voice tone) implications of communication are huge. What’s polite? What’s rude? What’s taboo?
3. English as a Second Language (ESL) programs will be in even greater demand. (Translation services will be in hot demand, too.) Some companies, like Magna, have been communicating with employees in several languages for more than 15 years already to accommodate blue-collar workers and reduce misunderstandings.
4. Communication builds the foundation of trust in any relationship, business or personal. What is the level of openness of communication? For example, the Chinese are very sensitive to the concept of always "saving face" and have an aversion to giving a "no" answer to anything.
5. "Unintended consequences" where the intended effect produces communication by-products instead will increase. The chances for miscommunication and missed communication are great among those whose first language is not English. Subtle nuances and humour are the most difficult concepts to grasp in any language.

There is a high correlation between immigrants and what Washington-based author, researcher, and professor Richard Florida calls the Creative Class—workers that include scientists, engineers, architects, designers, educators, artists, musicians, and entertainers, and whose function is to create new ideas, new technology, or new content.

Canada ranks 8^th overall on Florida’s global Creative Class index, with 25 percent of workers in the Creative Class professions. The percentage of workers in the Creative Classes in Toronto is 36.4 percent; in Montreal, 35 percent; and in Vancouver, 35.2 percent.

Florida’s second book, The Flight of the Creative Class was just released in March 2005. His first book, The Rise of the Creative Class was a critical and financial success on both sides of the Canada-US border.

Check out Richard Florida’s website here 

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Bruce Mau’s napkin sketch for Massive Change; the rest is at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Massive Change, the exhibit curated by Toronto-based designer Bruce Mau, premiered last Friday, March 11, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), and runs to May 29. The exhibit was commissioned and organized by Bruce Grenville of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Massive Change  explores paradigm-shifting events and ideas, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, trade, warfare, health, energy, materials, the image, information and software. The world could be redesigned to make it work better because everything is interconnected.

Bruce Mau  is the hot-shot designer who worked with celebrity architects Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas; he was supposed to be designing a new national, urban park in Toronto’s Downsview suburb; and he recently got an assignment to create a vision for the future of Guatemala. The Institute Without Boundaries  is Mau’s own incubator for design talent.

1. Massive Change is a manifesto for global change.
2. Massive Change is generating buzz.
3. The exhibit uses large imagery to make key points; explores images that have become icons of our culture.
4. The exhibit is optimistic and wildly ambitious.
5. The Massive Change website is well designed and packed with information.
6. The website encourages people to (1) Learn and then (2) Act. The exhibit invites visitors to hook up with others and get involved in solutions.

"Massive Change is not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world."

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"

"This [planet earth] is all we’ve got to make it work. There is no Plan B."

1. Lack of rigor in the overall exhibit, probably due to the ambitious nature of the project.
2. Some elements of the show are disjointed: we’re already aware of the virtues of crash test dummies.
3. A noted absence of major players: as Kate Taylor noted in The Globe and Mail, where are the efforts of the Big Three Auto Makers in the section on transportation? We can’t all run around on the Segway, the upright scooter.
4. Belabouring the obvious: garlands of tin cans and old music cassettes make the point of recycling, which is already going full speed in most Canadian communities.

It is interesting that much of Mau’s vision for Massive Change is based in cybernetics, but the word appears no where in the exhibit or the companion hardcover book (Massive Change, Phaidon, 2004). Cybernetics is the art and science of effectively managing complex and ever-changing systems. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science that incorporates principles of biology, economics, sociology, politics, anthropology, law, psychology, neurology and more. Cybernetics is more than 60 years old. The reason why only 119 people on the planet have heard of cybernetics is that the science has done an abysmal job of marketing itself to the world since its inception in 1946. Still, it has valuable lessons to teach. Curious to learn more? 

Visit the American Society for Cybernetics  WARNING: You could get lost in cybernetics for years, so pack a lunch.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO, Sony Corporation.

Interpersonal skills more important than ever for CEOs

Interpersonal skills and communication skills, including cross-cultural communication, are some of the new leadership requirements for corporations choosing CEOs. A case in point was yesterday’s appointment by Sony Corporation of Sir Howard Stringer, 63, to worldwide chairman and CEO. Stinger won out over Ken Kutaragi, 54, who built Sony's PlayStation video game unit into a roaring success.

The Japanese knew that their consensus-style management was not enough to lead Sony going forward, nor deal with American business (which is typically perceived as boorish by the Japanese).

1. Howard is a marvellous "translator." He can explain one side’s point of view to the other—without pissing people off. He can handle the techno-geeks and the temperamental movie stars—that’s a lot of bandwidth!
2. He can bond with almost anyone, according to friends and colleagues.
3. He has a knack for winning trust and respect even when delivering bad news. Sir Howard’s reputation, for instance, survived the layoffs of hundreds at CBS News.
4. Uncanny intuition for detecting power bases, current and future.
5. He is a good schmoozer.

Read the New York Times article here.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

Flamboyance works well for Richard Branson, who launched Virgin Mobile phone service in Toronto and Montreal last week.

Richard Branson: my dream CEO
PR professionals work diligently to get their organizations’ stories told through their CEOs and other C-level executives. But let’s face it: the CEO you’ve got, is the CEO you’ve got. You can make nips and tucks, but if your CEO doesn’t crave the limelight, or is not a stellar speaker, or cannot work a room, well…you just have to live with it. Sometimes, it’s fun to daydream.

Top 10 Reasons* Why Richard Branson is Cool:

10. He has good teeth and unruly hair.
9. He is a self-made man.
8. He has his own island.
7. He has created valuable folklore (which translates as corporate culture) for the Virgin Group.
6. His companies make money.
5. His home and family life is stable.
4. He is still humble in spite of his fame and fortune.
3. He constantly pushes the envelope.
2. Branson is even crazier than most journalists (which is why they love him).
1. He’s game for any PR stunt.

* Hommage to David Letterman 
Read Chapter 1 of Branson's autobiography here.

A really meaty speech
Lana Duke stakes out 
claim on branding
Canadian Lana Duke, the largest single franchise owner of the popular Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain now turned branding expert, is bringing great steak and great business leaders together in a new executive speaker series just west of Toronto. But don’t yawn just yet…. What’s different about this lunch series? A few things:

1. A natural line extension, from steak to branding consulting. She is applying the lessons of building the Ruth’s Chris brand to selling consulting services—and she is not stingy with this knowledge! "I’m a big believer in mentoring," says Lana Duke.
2. Showcasing some of Canada’s leading CEOs as speakers on how they built their respective brands. Now, if Lana can secure speakers who have a great message AND deliver a good speech—written text or exceptionally well rehearsed text—I will be the first to congratulate her.
3. Avoiding downtown traffic. This lunch series will take place at Ruth’s Chris in Mississauga only, purposefully avoiding downtown Toronto where business lunches are a dime a dozen. "That’s why we built the corporate dining room in the Mississauga location. Corporate is a big market for us," Lana told JanaSchilder.com today.
4. The lunch series is reasonably priced. Steak, side dishes, glass of wine, and speaker for $75, plus GST. And, no traffic hassles and no $18 downtown parking fees for lunch.

I met Lana Duke a few months ago; here's that story. And here are the lunch details. 

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