Posts Tagged ‘Communication’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Canine blogging

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

A friend’s son was saying yesterday, that on walking their dog, she had insisted on stopping every 30 yds to investigate every lamp post and leave frequent little doggie messages. This put me in mind of yesterday’s blog about Neanderthals where I was suggesting their cave painting was the equivalent of blogging. It seems to me that this canine behaviour is exactly the same, each dog needing to communicate, to both pick up and leave messages, almost like tweeting. So perhaps the need to communicate and broadcast our thoughts is far deeper than one might think…?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Blogging, Communication | 1 Comment »

Seeing what is (and isn’t) there…

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

I was in reflective mood this morning, so I went for a stroll.  The birds were singing gloriously and the squirrels were chittering angry at me for crashing their party.  I looked up at the clouds and I have truly never seen such 3D images.  They seemed to be an advancing armada of space craft, at least to me.  There is a long history of people looking skywards and seeing patterns, pictures and portents in both the clouds and the stars.

Then it occurred to me that we do much the same thing with other people’s actions and words.  We see, or think we see something and we interpret it, often in a self-referential way, so that the story pivots about us and how it impacts us.  As a race, and as a species, we have got quite good at interpreting signs and nuance, but an awful lot of the time we are just plain wrong.  We see a person grimace when they look our way and think they don’t like us or are angry but don’t know that they have a back problem. 

We can’t stop making these interpretations, it is part of our nature to do so, and to scan our environment for threats, but how often has someone close to you said something like “I know you are cross with me”, when you are neither cross nor even thinking about them?  If we can’t stop drawing conclusions from incomplete data the least we need to do is to check our assumptions, in an open, non-accusatory way, by saying something like “How are you feeling?” or “What are you thinking?”, simple open questions.  This can help avoid an awful lot of hurt and needless upset, and in business, can prevent wasted energy and poor decisions.

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”  George Eliot

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”   Friedrich Nietzsche

Tags: , ,
Posted in Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques | No Comments »

The first cuckoos and their lessons in branding

Sunday, May 13th, 2012

I was walking yesterday and heard my first cuckoos. At first there was just one in the distance, and I thought “How perfect!”, spring sunshine and birdsong. We walked a little further then heard him again, only clearer, he seemed to have moved closer. Then I realised the song was different; a moment later it was clear there were two males, both singing their distinctive version of the familiar call, both proclaiming the efficacy of their wares to all the females nearby.

It occurred to me later, on reading a familiar online network’s blogs that we are like these cuckoos, puffing out our chests and singing to the world, hoping someone is noticing… We know the cuckoos strategy works, but does ours?! Its highly distinctive call serves two purposes; firstly it is claiming a territory and is highly recognisable, but its second purpose is the pay- off, it is seeking to attract a mate.

How do we ensure that we are offering something not just distinctive, but also something our audience really wants, or are we just making a lot of noise and achieving very little?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques | No Comments »

WHAT will it take to Change?

Monday, May 7th, 2012

Today, the second guest Blog from Maurice de Castro, leadership expert and speaker, telling the rest of his personal story:

In yesterday’s blog I referred to a time when I faced the challenge of playing my part in helping to turn a business around that was on a slippery slope to nowhere. I used the Yes BUT story as a means of expressing the power and impact of just a couple of words. Well here’s another powerful example.

During that same period in that same business I made another huge mistake which I learned from and has served me well for many years since in both my professional and personal life.

Here is the mistake.  As the business was in such bad shape when I arrived I spent a ridiculous amount of time asking people “WHY?”

  1. “Why do we have to lowest sales performance in the country?”
  2. “Why do we have the highest cost base?”
  3. “Why is morale so low?”
  4. “Why is customer service so poor?”
  5. Etc., etc., etc.

That seemed a good place to start and made sense at the time but it just didn’t work. I realised after a while that every time I asked the question there were no shortage of answers. Everyone had an answer, every answer was different and every answer became a personal belief.

As you know it’s not that easy to change a belief.  It occurred to me that everyone had a story and I had done nothing but get them to focus on that story and replay it to me. Whilst many of those stories made sense the fact that there were so many made it impossible to identify what the real issues were and more importantly get people to think past them.

I realised that people love a good story.  After a while I worked out that I had to change tact completely as the WHY was only pushing us back even further. So I changed the question.  The new question was.

  1. “WHAT will we do to have the highest sales performance in the country?”
  2. “WHAT will we do to be cost leaders in this business?”
  3. “WHAT will we do to raise morale?”
  4. “WHAT will we do to make our customers love us?”

A simple word and a simple blog I know and many readers will be way ahead of the game and say well of course that’s just common sense. Well as they say common sense doesn’t seem to be that common any more.  It wasn’t for me back then but it is now.  By the way, with Yes AND together with WHAT, everything changed.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business Change, Communication, Guest Blogs, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Leadership | 1 Comment »

Yes BUT, No BUT, Yes BUT …

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

Today, a guest blog from Maurice de Castro, leadership expert and speaker, talking about his personal experience in leadership:

From a leadership perspective one of the most crippling environments you can ever find yourself in is the Yes BUT culture. Those two small yet devastatingly powerful words only serve to maintain the status quo and deprive innovation, creativity and imagination of the fuel it needs to see a company thrive. A number of years ago I was asked to lead a particular business through a rather dark time. Terribly low morale, very high costs, poor sales performance, low customer satisfaction and so on.

The business had created its own debilitating web of Yes BUT’s” so that nothing could or would ever change. It was full of good people working extremely hard but trapped in their own creation. Have you ever watched a fly try to free itself from a spider’s web?  Well it’s a little like me trying to stop my wife buying yet another pair of shoes, it ranks on the impossible list. The fly has to be freed.

After many months of sleepless nights I finally found the solution. I asked a toy manufacturer to provide me with 1000 plain white round squeezy stress balls. On each ball I had the words Yes BUT printed on one side with a big red cross struck right through the middle of the words. On the other side of the ball I had the words “Yes AND” printed. I invited every member of staff to join me at a large local theatre where I very clearly presented our Yes BUT dilemma and gave everyone their own ball. I asked them to take theirs ball with them everywhere they went in the business and if they EVER heard the words “Yes BUT” used I asked them to throw their ball at that person as hard as they could regardless of their position. For the next 3 months balls were flying everywhere and I mean everywhere, it was like a war zone. Within 12 months everything changed. Everything! Two small words made the massive difference between success and failure.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business Change, Guest Blogs, Innovation, Leadership | No Comments »

Communications.. it’s all about the context!

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

Here is a little tale:-

Wife texts husband on a cold winter’s morning:
“Windows frozen.”
Husband texts back:
“Pour some lukewarm water over them.”
Wife texts back 5 mins later:
“Computer completely f*cked now.”

Now this conversation may or may not have really happened but it makes the point very well that communication is all about context, and the meaning we take from a piece of communication depends on what is going on around us and what our concerns are.  What seems clear and obvious to one party might not be so clear to the recipient.  If what you are saying is important take a moment to consider your audience and their situation before you fire off a quick email that might cost you hours of work!

Tags: , ,
Posted in Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques | No Comments »

Corporate lessons from ants

Saturday, April 21st, 2012

I was watching a program about driver ants and they have a lot to teach most corporations that I encounter.  The millions of individuals in a colony each know their role; they know how they add value.  They focus their energy on common goals and support each other.  From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

They find their food by ceaselessly exploring, and never writing off any avenue for progress without first trying it.  When one succeeds, they communicate their findings and then they co-operate to exploit them.  Where one cannot succeed, many can.  They are the very embodiment of synergy.

They are masters of logistics and transport back 150,000 food items from a single raid with the ants turning themselves into a living rolling road.  The largest ones take the front end, with little guys bringing up the rear, whilst the soldiers guard them and mark the route home.

When the colony gets too big to sustain, it splits, with a young queen (new leader) taking half the colony to literally explore pastures new.  Once ensconced in her new nest, she produces up to 2 million eggs to carry on the work.

They are able to take on superior, seemingly impregnable opponents like crabs by co-operating and exploiting their vulnerabilities.  They attack the crabs joints to gain access to their soft internal parts.  Slugs are covered with sticky slime in which a single ant gets stuck; however the others soon turn up with particles of soil that neutralises and absorb the slime and then the slug becomes ant food.

It all comes down to communication and co-operation.  I recently worked with a company with ambitious growth plans and guess what their issues were?  Maybe they should have hired an ant queen?

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.”  John Donne

“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”  Kenyan Proverb”Coming together is a beginning.  Keeping together is progress.  Working together is success.”  Henry Ford

”None of us is as smart as all of us.”  Ken Blanchard

Resources:

  1. Stigmergic Systems:  Stigmergic systems combine information technology with stigmergy and other structures found in nature – to create self-organizing Web sites and low cost knowledge management systems.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business Change, Communication | 2 Comments »

Why Welsh Rarebit is called that and its very strange uses! …and what it teaches us about reputation

Saturday, April 14th, 2012

According to Mark Forsyth, author of the Etymologicon:-

“Welsh rarebit used to be called Welsh rabbit, on the basis that when a Welshman promised you something nice to eat like rabbit, you were probably only going to get cheese on toast.  The English also used to believe that the Welsh were crazy about cheese.  Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) records that:

The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita [the gates of life] to attract and entice the young Taffy, who smelling it makes vigorous efforts to come forth”

So myths become locked into language and accepted by all.  This makes and interesting link back to yesterday’s blog, where people try to control what is said about them (or their clients) in order to build reputation.  In other words, if you get enough tongues repeating the same phrase it becomes unchallenged and thus, to all intents and purposes, true.   This is a very good reason for keeping important messages clear and simple; it makes it possible for people to repeat them without distortion.  The harder a message is to remember, the more likely it will morph into something quite different. 

We tend to think that the more we say, and the longer words we use the more clever we sound.  However there is huge power in simple words and concepts which can not be misunderstood.   Think about it…. one of the most powerful sentences in the English language, one that has changed more lives than any other (probably!) consists of only three words and  eight letters.  I Love You.

So if you want your message to linger (like the taste of a good bit of Welsh Rarebit?!) then keep it short, keep it simple and make it punchy…

“Cheese – milk’s leap toward immortality.”   Clifton Paul Fadiman

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”   Willie Nelson

“How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”   Charles de Gaulle

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques | No Comments »

I started out with nothing… and I still got most of it left!

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Apart from being a wonderful piece of modern American culture and answering the question “Can white men sing the blues?”  this is a great example of using language to convey two meanings at the same time.  The structure of this sentence would normally be used to report something positive, but by making the object a negative word, we have a joyful exercise in pathos. 

In art this can be a source of pleasure.  Most often this kind of contradiction is not deliberate and management double-speak is usually seen through.  Statements that say nothing are futile, and seen through instantly.  It is my experience  that most people are pretty expert at smelling BS and (to paraphrase my mother) “If you can’t say something nice, at least say something clear!” is a great rule.  You may not win any friends but you’ll win a little respect at least!

“Develop a built-in bullshit detector.”  Ernest Hemmingway

“Facts an’ facts, an’ t’ings an t’ings: dem’s all a lotta fockin’ bullshit. Hear me! Dere is no truth but de one truth, an’ that is the truth of Jah Rastafari.”  Bob Marley

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Communication, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Leadership | 2 Comments »

Havin’ pun!

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

I’ve always loved the art of playing with words, and this picture, pasted on the side of a temperamental printer, captures something lovely.  The jamming printer is clearly a bad thing, and a cause of much frustration.  Bob Marley was talking about a joyous thing when he was singing his song Jammin [click the picture to hear it.]  Same word with a totally different emotional meaning.  Language is so subjective and its meaning so ephemeral, you need to know the context to comprehend what was meant.  A traffic jam is a source of frustration and misery and strawberry jam on a scone a thing of beauty!

Email, texting and other instant forms of ‘communicating’ just make it easier and easier to misunderstand one another!  I’m not against them, simply suggesting that the meaning that others take from our words is not necessarily what we hoped!  So if it is important your audience really ‘gets’ you, then take the time to express your meaning clearly!

“Ooh, yeah! All right!
We’re jammin’:
I wanna jam it wid you.
We’re jammin’, jammin’,
And I hope you like jammin’, too.

Ain’t no rules, ain’t no vow, we can do it anyhow:
I’n’I will see you through,
‘Cos everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice,
Jammin’ till the jam is through.

We’re jammin’ –
To think that jammin’ was a thing of the past;
We’re jammin’,
And I hope this jam is gonna last.”  

Bob Marley

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Communication | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »