I have an idea on the runway which will be a paradigm shift in the way we communicate. I need to tell you about it going forward. It will be a sea change, a win-win strategy empowerment-wise. Let me clue you. It’s sliced modularity.
Let’s not drink the Kool-Aid on this one. Eyeball the event horizon and get granular. My idea is to turn it all up-side down. No. Stay with me. I want to be totally open kimono on this.
It’s simple. We do some real-time customer-centric turkey basting here. We tell it like it is. We don’t do what they expect. It’s total immersion. Instead of dealing with things holistically, let’s deal with them partially. Instead of being proactive, let’s be reactive. It’s totally new. No-one’s thought of it before. It’s so next generation it’s got to be mission critical to hit the ground running and leverage the synergies.
At the end of the day, it’s all bandwidth. The ROI will be incredible and we can really grow the business. Of course we would have to silo the idea to make it pop with value-added. But it’s not herding cats. With a little bit of BPO or KPO, we can mindshare on this. Back-end netiquette can design pattern the way forward. Collaboration can convergence download the real-time metrics. You just have to think outside the box. Virtualization vapourware brings home the low hanging fruit. Logistically speaking.
Ballpark? It’s Best of Breed.
©Roger Murphy 2009. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Writing 1: the challenge to management
I was angry at first, then depressed, but now I’m back in the fight.
I had to research various company journals this week, looking for interviews with senior managers. I wanted to see what others had done, hoping for some inspiration. After an hour, I was angry. What marked these pieces out for special concern was their lack of original thinking, or, indeed, any discernible thinking at all. And woe to the cynic who says I was looking for originality in the wrong place.
The articles I read were of the most profound dullness – paragraph after paragraph of platitudes, comparative figures and pious hopes. I wondered how they had come to be published. The answer was that these pieces contained the thoughts of the Gods. They had spoken from on high. So they must be published. That, or something like it, seemed to be the reasoning.
Responsibility for these abominations lies in two places. Firstly it lies with editors. The question that should precede the commissioning or publishing of each and every article is: is this good enough to publish? Will this interest people? If the answer is ‘no’, it should not see the light of day.
This is true even of words written by the Chief Executive himself. He has no right to bore his readers, and not only because they may be his workforce. As a communicator it is your job to warn him that he may lose people, and urge him to say something that will be meaningful. You may be the only person in the organisation who can do this knowledgeably, and can back it up with cogent argument.
If you are afraid to do this you are in the wrong job. Editors are hired, inter alia, to warn, to see the problems and solve them. Just be ready to defend your point of view.
Articles like the offending pieces I read, are often the result of lazy briefings and result in what most in-house magazines and intranets are full of – words that no-one wants to read. “It’s time we did that article on the figures, I’ll send an e-mail to the finance man and tell him we need 1000 words.” Fundamentally this is an insult to the readers.
But though editorial laziness can be to blame, I reserve my chief anger for managers. That is, those managers who have still to learn that emitting sound is not the same as talking sense. The challenge for management is to say things that are worth listening to. Remember that no matter how good at alchemy your communications team is, they cannot produce gold from dross.
I have seen managements eventually grow resentful of their communications teams. They see them as a constant reminder of a higher purpose, and a constant reminder that that purpose has not yet been achieved. They are the triumphator’s slave. He who, riding with the victorious commander on a golden chariot through Rome to the adulation of the city, reminds him that he is only mortal.
It must get a bit irksome. But good communicators will be pushing management all the time.
But what do you think?
When I had finished researching these articles, the source of my complaint, I asked myself: When was the last piece of really imaginative reporting I had read in a company publication? When was the last piece of internal or external communication, read in a house journal or website, that had set me alight, or had changed my perception. When was the last time a Finance Director’s article stopped me in my tracks with its perspicacity or gave me furiously to think. When last was my intellect thoroughly engaged by reading an interview with the Chief Executive?
Is this too much to ask? Too much to hope for?
If your answer is no, and you are a communicator, please refer this article to your management and ask for their opinion.
If your answer is yes and you are a manager, then please consider your position, for these are the things that you are meant to be asking your communicators to help you do.
Are you?
© Roger Murphy 2008
I had to research various company journals this week, looking for interviews with senior managers. I wanted to see what others had done, hoping for some inspiration. After an hour, I was angry. What marked these pieces out for special concern was their lack of original thinking, or, indeed, any discernible thinking at all. And woe to the cynic who says I was looking for originality in the wrong place.
The articles I read were of the most profound dullness – paragraph after paragraph of platitudes, comparative figures and pious hopes. I wondered how they had come to be published. The answer was that these pieces contained the thoughts of the Gods. They had spoken from on high. So they must be published. That, or something like it, seemed to be the reasoning.
Responsibility for these abominations lies in two places. Firstly it lies with editors. The question that should precede the commissioning or publishing of each and every article is: is this good enough to publish? Will this interest people? If the answer is ‘no’, it should not see the light of day.
This is true even of words written by the Chief Executive himself. He has no right to bore his readers, and not only because they may be his workforce. As a communicator it is your job to warn him that he may lose people, and urge him to say something that will be meaningful. You may be the only person in the organisation who can do this knowledgeably, and can back it up with cogent argument.
If you are afraid to do this you are in the wrong job. Editors are hired, inter alia, to warn, to see the problems and solve them. Just be ready to defend your point of view.
Articles like the offending pieces I read, are often the result of lazy briefings and result in what most in-house magazines and intranets are full of – words that no-one wants to read. “It’s time we did that article on the figures, I’ll send an e-mail to the finance man and tell him we need 1000 words.” Fundamentally this is an insult to the readers.
But though editorial laziness can be to blame, I reserve my chief anger for managers. That is, those managers who have still to learn that emitting sound is not the same as talking sense. The challenge for management is to say things that are worth listening to. Remember that no matter how good at alchemy your communications team is, they cannot produce gold from dross.
I have seen managements eventually grow resentful of their communications teams. They see them as a constant reminder of a higher purpose, and a constant reminder that that purpose has not yet been achieved. They are the triumphator’s slave. He who, riding with the victorious commander on a golden chariot through Rome to the adulation of the city, reminds him that he is only mortal.
It must get a bit irksome. But good communicators will be pushing management all the time.
But what do you think?
When I had finished researching these articles, the source of my complaint, I asked myself: When was the last piece of really imaginative reporting I had read in a company publication? When was the last piece of internal or external communication, read in a house journal or website, that had set me alight, or had changed my perception. When was the last time a Finance Director’s article stopped me in my tracks with its perspicacity or gave me furiously to think. When last was my intellect thoroughly engaged by reading an interview with the Chief Executive?
Is this too much to ask? Too much to hope for?
If your answer is no, and you are a communicator, please refer this article to your management and ask for their opinion.
If your answer is yes and you are a manager, then please consider your position, for these are the things that you are meant to be asking your communicators to help you do.
Are you?
© Roger Murphy 2008
Friday, 25 January 2008
Heroes and villains
We’re a strange lot. We like things to be perfect and have trouble understanding when they are not.
For example, we expect our doctors to be fit, healthy and in the peak of condition. Were they dogs we would expect them to have a shiny coat, a wet nose and nuzzle our genitalia with evident relish. When we find doctors stressed, deathly pale, and wincing as they move, we worry.
But why? A deaf musician might be thought a contradiction, but it was little trouble to Beethoven, or Fauré. The painter, El Greco, had a serious eye complaint. Then there’s the double amputee Oscar Pistorius, one of the fastest runners in the world, widely referred to as ‘The Fastest Thing on No Legs’.
Why can’t our dentists be snaggle-toothed? Why can’t our doctors get ill? Surely, some of them will get the flu. One or two may even die. What’s wrong with that?
In Britain we love a little harmless eccentricity. Indeed, we revel in it. We adore our corrupt politicians, for example, and when they emerge from open prison we interview them at length on television and give them high-powered jobs in government. When they prove to be drunks, we experience a fellow-feeling for them. Sins of the flesh – we all suffer from that.
Yet, somewhat unfairly it seems to me, we insist on strict sobriety and cold detachment as the proctologist advances towards us with a glinting scalpel. This is an unfortunate double standard.
Luckily though there are fresh avenues opening all the time in our brave new world for those who like to be eccentric and wish to benefit from our national attribute of tolerance. For example, it has recently become clear that society at large no longer requires communicators to be able to communicate. Specifically, reading and writing is not considered a necessary skill in the job. No longer do communicators have to be able to listen to people and explain their ideas cogently. Jargon and the use of buzzwords are now fine. And thank heavens for that. It will certainly make things easier.
What a relief it is to be able to look at these people with the same tolerance and love of eccentricity as our politicians. They add a touch of colour and amusement to our otherwise drab lives. After all, isn’t there something heroically distinctive about writers who can’t write?
And when you come right down to it, there is much to be said for those that gun down others in the street. All right, they exhibit no strict sense of community, and seem bad mannered. But who cares about manners these days? It’s so rear-view mirror. Aren’t these people just doing what we would like to do ourselves? It would be hypocritical and intolerant to condemn them, and we can’t have that.
Perhaps I should stand for parliament.
© Roger Murphy 2008
For example, we expect our doctors to be fit, healthy and in the peak of condition. Were they dogs we would expect them to have a shiny coat, a wet nose and nuzzle our genitalia with evident relish. When we find doctors stressed, deathly pale, and wincing as they move, we worry.
But why? A deaf musician might be thought a contradiction, but it was little trouble to Beethoven, or Fauré. The painter, El Greco, had a serious eye complaint. Then there’s the double amputee Oscar Pistorius, one of the fastest runners in the world, widely referred to as ‘The Fastest Thing on No Legs’.
Why can’t our dentists be snaggle-toothed? Why can’t our doctors get ill? Surely, some of them will get the flu. One or two may even die. What’s wrong with that?
In Britain we love a little harmless eccentricity. Indeed, we revel in it. We adore our corrupt politicians, for example, and when they emerge from open prison we interview them at length on television and give them high-powered jobs in government. When they prove to be drunks, we experience a fellow-feeling for them. Sins of the flesh – we all suffer from that.
Yet, somewhat unfairly it seems to me, we insist on strict sobriety and cold detachment as the proctologist advances towards us with a glinting scalpel. This is an unfortunate double standard.
Luckily though there are fresh avenues opening all the time in our brave new world for those who like to be eccentric and wish to benefit from our national attribute of tolerance. For example, it has recently become clear that society at large no longer requires communicators to be able to communicate. Specifically, reading and writing is not considered a necessary skill in the job. No longer do communicators have to be able to listen to people and explain their ideas cogently. Jargon and the use of buzzwords are now fine. And thank heavens for that. It will certainly make things easier.
What a relief it is to be able to look at these people with the same tolerance and love of eccentricity as our politicians. They add a touch of colour and amusement to our otherwise drab lives. After all, isn’t there something heroically distinctive about writers who can’t write?
And when you come right down to it, there is much to be said for those that gun down others in the street. All right, they exhibit no strict sense of community, and seem bad mannered. But who cares about manners these days? It’s so rear-view mirror. Aren’t these people just doing what we would like to do ourselves? It would be hypocritical and intolerant to condemn them, and we can’t have that.
Perhaps I should stand for parliament.
© Roger Murphy 2008
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