"Stop doing
what is not productive,...
improve adequate and good behaviour,
maintain exemplary behaviour."
 

Jamie Oliver takes on England's school lunch system

Corporations team up with Orange County Choppers

Under the broad category of Change Management, First Principles Communications includes:

• turnarounds,

• transformations,

• introduction of new executive teams,

• various flavours of "culture change",

• mergers and acquisitions,

• "going public",

• Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act involvement

• and other activities that require employees and other stakeholders to alter the way they think and act.

Track Record provides examples of some of our work in change management.

FPC's services and expertise begin with an examination of the corporate culture prior to the initiation of a major change program, participation with senior management and other consultants (when advisable) on the design of change management, and implementation of a wide range of tactics to shape behaviours.

Our clients' audiences include employees, potential employees, investors, governments, regulators, industry leaders, suppliers, customers, and more. 

In many cases, FPC's approach to Change Management can be summed up as using communications to:

• stop doing what is not productive,

• improve adequate to good behaviour,

• maintain exemplary behaviour.

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.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Rednecks changing
how corporations think...

Corporations team up with
Orange County Choppers

It was bound to happen sooner or later: some of America’s oldest 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.

Communication lesson from
Orange Country Choppers

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.