The Articulate CEO

Not A Hero - Lest We Forget

 

The ANZAC Day march was over - the old Digger had done his best.
His body ached from marching - it was time to sit and rest. 
He made his way to a park bench and sat with lowered head.
A young boy passing saw him - approached and politely said,
"Please sir do you mind if I ask you what the medals you wear are for?
Did you get them for being a hero, when fighting in a war?"

Startled, the old Digger moved over and beckoned the boy to sit.
Eagerly the lad accepted - he had not expected this!
"First of all I was not a hero," said the old Digger in solemn tone,
"But I served with many heroes, the ones that never came home.
So when you talk of heroes, it's important to understand,
The greatest of all heroes gave their lives defending this land.

"The medals are worn in their honour, as a symbol of respect.
All diggers wear them on ANZAC Day - it shows they don't forget."
The old digger then climbed to his feet and asked the boy to stand.
Carefully he removed the medals and placed them in his hand.
He told him he could keep them - to treasure throughout his life,
A legacy of a kind - left behind - paid for in sacrifice.

Overwhelmed the young boy was speechless - he couldn’t find words to say.
It was there the old Digger left him - going quietly on his way.
In the distance the young boy glimpsed him - saw him turn and wave goodbye.
Saddened he sat alone on the bench - tears welled in his eyes.
He never again saw him ever - but still remembers with pride,
When the old Digger told him of Heroes and a young boy sat and cried.

 

Clyde Hamilton

 

Why Missions, Values and Visions Fail

The common mission statement or vision, supposedly the bedrock of an organisation is often nothing more than a foundation of sand. Most corporate visions are too broad to be useful and too vague to be implemented. It isn't that the vision doesn't mean anything so much as it could mean anything. Too much is left open to interpretation and the result is our people, unsure of performance expectations, start working at cross-purposes. Where organisations have tried to go a dstep further by developing values statements there are often similar issues. The values are either poorly defined and open to interpretation or they merely reflect what an organisation thinks people would like to see rather than the reality. Look at this example:

Our Values

Communication
We have an obligation to communicate. Here, we take the time to talk with one another… and to listen. We believe that information is meant to move and that information moves people.

Respect
We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We do not tolerate abusive or disrespectful treatment.

Integrity
We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely. When we say we will do something, we will do it; when we say we cannot or will not do something, then we won’t do it.

Excellence
We are satisfied with nothing less than the very best in everything we do. We will continue to raise the bar for everyone. The great fun here will be for all of us to discover just how good we can really be.

They sound good don't they? Until, that is, you realise they are the stated values of a company you may have heard of - Enron. Do they in any way reflect the reality of that particular company? Of course not. But they are the perfect example of how values and mission statements have become nothing more than rhetoric. Now, here is a test for you.

Make a copy of your corporate values, a copy of Enron’s corporate values, and a copy of corporate value statements from a couple of other companies. Remove the company names from all documents. Take these lists to a random cross section of your employees and ask, “ Which of these corporate value statements best describes our company’s actions?” “Which least describes our company?” While you are at it also ask several suppliers and several customers.

Each time, as an afterthought, ask each group “By the way, do you happen to recognize which – if any – of these is actually ours?” Chances are that none of your suppliers, none of your customers, and very, very few of your employees will be able to tell the difference between Enron’s corporate values, your corporate values, and the values of any other random company.

What does this mean to you?

1. Most corporate value statements are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

2. Actions are what count – not what’s on paper.

3. If there’s a disconnect between what you say is important and what people do, you need to fix that right away. Rather than building a series of rules, build a series of examples. People learn from examples and role models – not from a list of words.

It’s all about alignment. What you say you want, what you really want, and what you reward all have to be in alignment. If not, then you are doing nothing more than trading in rhetoric and you will be undone by your actions... much like Enron.

 

'The Great Dictator' Delivers A Great Speech

'The Great Dictator' was Charlie Chaplin's most successful film and his first true talking picture. Released in October, 1940 it was the first film to bitterly satirize Naziism and Adolf Hitler at a time when the United States was still at peace with Germany.

At the very end of the film comes one of the great cinematic speeches - one that perfectly encapsulates Chaplin's disgust with greed, bloodshed and division. It is remarkable that Chaplin's speech of more than 70 years ago still retains so much relevance in the modern world and, perhaps, more than just a little sad. Here then, is the great master at work... Charlie Chaplin seeing the world for what it was and, in many ways, still is.

 

Qantas Finish 2011 A Winner - For All The Wrong Reasons!

The list that stops a nation - Australia's Biggest PR Disasters of the Year - is out and in an unprecedented achievement, Qantas won three of the top 10 gaffes of 2011 when the list was released by social networking tracking site Cyber Chatter. It's never been done before and it is hard to see how anyone could ever do it again but, then again, Qantas is still with us and 2012 is a brand new year. Who would bet against them? So, here it is, Australia's Biggest PR Disasters of the Year together with links to news.com.au for anyone who missed the stories first time around.

1. The Qantas grounding inconvenienced and angered a nation. People are still waiting for refunds yet CEO Alan Joyce still has a job.

2. "Qantas Luxury" Twitter scandal. The plan was to get people tweeting good things about Qantas. They got thousands of complaints.

3. Troubled footballer Brendan Fevola's contract termination with the Brisbane Lions ends up in court.

4. Tony Abbott freezes during a TV interview with Channel 7's Mark Riley in the "shit happens" tape.

5. Qantas "golliwog" social media promo causes a race brouhaha.

6. Ricky Nixon and the fallout from his unseemly association with a teenager.

7. Indigenous writer Larissa Behrendt describes bestiality program as "less offensive than Bess Price", an Aboriginal woman in favour of the Northern Territory intervention.

8. Kyle Sandilands goes on a personal vendetta against a journo. Austereo loses more than 20 advertisers and the shock jock is forced into a humiliating apology.

9. Australian Defence Force cadet is violated when she is filmed having sex.

10. Gasp Jeans become a mockery after their startling email response to a customer complaint goes viral.

Are We Over Being Over-Connected?

The backlash against 24-hour connectivity is gathering pace around the world amid concerns that the lines between work-life and personal life are becoming more and more blurred.

Workers who find themselves answering work emails on their smartphones after the end of their shifts in Brazil can now qualify for overtime under a new law. The new legislation was approved by President Dilma Rousseff last month and basically says company emails to workers are equivalent to orders given directly to the employee.

Brazil is one country that is well and truly over-connected. Brazil has a population of 195 million people but the number of mobile subscribers exceeded 210.5 million in August last year, according to the Brazilian National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel).

Subscriptions were growing at about 3 million a month, mostly from internet-enabled phones. There were more than 25 million internet-enabled mobile phones in the country last year.

Labor attorneys told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper the new law makes it possible for workers answering emails after hours to ask for overtime pay. I'm not sure how successful such a request would be but it is probably only a matter of time before we see it tested in the courts.

This issue of over-connectivity has now started to pop up in several corners of the world.

In May, Chicago policeman Jeffrey Allen filed a class action suit against the city, asking for unpaid overtime compensation. He argues his connection means the city of Chicago owes him lots of overtime. His attorney Paul Geiger says it's a simple case.

"What we are saying is he's using this mobile device at the behest of the Police Department very routinely and very often off duty and not being compensated for all the time spent on the device doing the city's work," Geiger says.

The city gave Allen a BlackBerry when he worked in a unit determining which assets of criminals police could seize. Susan Prince, an attorney with Business and Legal Resources, says the deciding factor in this dispute is likely to be the Fair Labor Standards Act, which governs wage and overtime provisions for American workers.

"Basically, it comes down to whether an employee is exempt or non-exempt," she says. "Exempt employees, they make the same salaries no matter how many hours they work during a week, so using a BlackBerry from home at night is not an overtime issue for them. But when you're dealing with non-exempt employees, they have to be paid for all the time they work."

It is a case that will be watched very carefully in the US and around the world. Regardless of the outcome we are already seeing an impact. In December, German carmaker Volkswagen agreed with labour representatives to switch off Blackberry emails after hours. The move came after French IT company Atos announced plans to eliminate company internal emails by 2013.

German telco Deutsche Telekom and consumer goods maker Henkel have also introduced measures to curb after-hours emails to reduce the pressure on workers to be always on call.

Are we truly over over-connectedness or is this a convenient way to excuse our own mobile addiction... after all we can always switch off can't we?

 

 

A CEO Who Is Anything But Grounded

On the 29th of October, Qantas CEO Alan Joyce announced that he was grounding all the aircraft in his airline in a bid to bring a protracted dispute with numerous unions representing Qantas workers to a head. The dispute had resulted in ongoing industrial action that was costing the airline millions of dollars a day and despite so-called ongoing negotiations neither party seemed capable of moving towards a resolution. So the day after the AGM the shock announcement is made that the airline has effectively shut up shop and left some 60,000 passengers around the world stranded.

Alan Joyce claims this was necessary as the unions were 'trashing the brand' and the damage to the airlines reputation had to be stopped but this is disinegenuous at best. Not because the unions were not damaging the brand but because Alan Joyce and his board had effectively overseen the devaluing of the brand ever since his tenure began. In the past twelve months alone Qantas has seen its share price tank by more than 40% - considerably more than rivals like Singapore Airlines so you can't just blame the markets. A reputation that used to see Qantas regularly ranked No. 1 for safety and service has fallen away to such an extent that the airline is lucky to crack most people's top ten. Frequent Flyers (of which I am one) rate Qantas well behind airlines such as Emirates, Etihad, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Cathay Pacific, Air New Zealand, JAL, Lufthansa and Qatar.

Despite this appalling record the Remuneration Committee of the Qantas Board recommended a salary increase for Alan Joyce approaching $2 million! All this at a time of declining profitability, share price, reputation, service standards and customer satisfaction. What is worse is that it was approved at a feisty AGM the day before the airline announces it is grounding all its aircraft.

I do not pretend to know the in's and out's of Qantas's business nor am I making judgments as to who is right or wrong with regard to the ongoing industrial disputes. However, the sheer stupidity from a public relations and moral point of view of undertaking these kinds of actions in these kinds of circumstances beggars belief. When a Board and CEO behave in this manner it destroys their credibility. Once and for all people, you cannot claim you need to restructure to save costs while at the same time significantly increasing costs through bumping up executive salaries. You cannot claim that you need to improve performance while continually rewarding executives for non-performance in terms of key measures like share price and customer satisfaction. You cannot claim to be negotiating in good faith when you use tactics to blindside your workers and your customers. As a CEO you cannot claim credit for anything good that occurs without taking responsibility for anything bad.

Ask yourself a question... for relations to become this strained and incendiary between a CEO and his workforce just how incompetent does that CEO have to be? Alan Joyce may have done fantastic things for Qantas behind the scenes but none of it is visible to any of us. From a public relations point of view he is an unmitigated failure and in the modern world of social media and a 24 hour news cycle that should be enough to get any CEO fired.

 

The Three Little Pigs in a World Gone Mad!

Remember the childhood story “The Three Little Pigs”? A classic tale complete with animals, action, and some life lessons about not taking the easiest route that, despite variations over the years, has always retained its core story. At least it had up until now.

Apparently a new version of the story is now appearing in US classrooms. In this new version, the wolf has a sudden heart attack while trying to blow down the third little pig’s adobe house. The three little pigs rush to his aid, save him, and while trying to flee from him once recovered, realize that the whole “huff and puff and blow your house down” thing was a simple “lack of communication”: the wolf actually wanted to move in with the pigs and was testing each house’s structural integrity.

The story also includes issues around housing shortages as well as houses made of recycled newspaper and aluminum and the wolf turns out to be a vegetarian. What the hell is going on?

Here are a couple of exerpts for you to judge for yourself...

Facebook - The Communication Tool That Can't Communicate

Why is it that every major Facebook change seems to also be a major public relations disaster? With Mark Zuckerberg, the darling of mass media, considered some sort of business guru, you would think that there would be a little more thought that goes into the company's approach to privacy, major user interface changes, and how those are communicated to the very people those changes affect.

When it comes to innovative ways to enhance or expand the Facebook experience, Mark Zuckerberg and team seem to be well ahead of the curve. But when it comes to communicating what it’s doing, Facebook seems to stuck in the stone age.

Admittedly, they do a good job getting news and information to members of the press and blogosphere who can share details of announcements to broader audiences but why isn’t anyone at Facebook talking to the members themselves? Why doesn’t anyone at Facebook ever send an e-mail to inform members about problems and how they are being fixed? Why doesn’t anyone at Facebook write up some guidelines on how to address changes to things like privacy settings? Why doesn’t anyone at Facebook post an alert on members walls to let them know that something important needs their attention?

Instead, what seems to occur is that you have to rely on your 'friends' to post information about any problems or changes and, inevitably, some of that information will be incorrect or incomplete. That makes for a very frustrating experience

Too often, Facebook fail to provide documentation on how to use new features and turn everything on by default without notice. The company posts something on its fan site and assume that every member will see it. It needs to treat its members with a lot more respect. It should be sending each of its members a link to information - either in their walls or in their inboxes - so they can easily find it and, more importantly, so that they get the correct information.

I am not a user, but the fact is that Facebook is a communications platform and the changes that are made to their interface immediately and drastically affect millions of people - people that don't have a choice in those changes. That kind of impact requires complete and deliberate transparency when communicating with your customers not the 'guess-what-we-just-did' approach Facebook appear to favour.

Proof The Inmates Are Running The Asylum

We all like to complain about bureaucracy and the stupidity that is often inherent in it but in doing so we often leave ourselves open to claims of paranoia or grumpyness. Unfortunately our complaints are usually of a very personal nature and sometimes difficult to quantify or replicate for other people. It is only natural, therefore, that some of those complaints might be treated with a degree of scepticism or a suspicion that we are exagerating. Anyone who has found themselves in such a position will be excited to know I have found proof that the stupidity of our bureaucracies is actually far in excess of anything we could have possibly imagined.

Exhibit A:

I mean, come on... death isn't punishment enough? It needs to be augmented with a $200 fine because death isn't enough of a deterrent for recidivist offenders? What kind of idiot thinks that this sign is necessary or that this policy is sensible? If the sign is to believed it means that not only will you be killed if you touch the wires but your estate will also be pursued by the Newcastle Tramway Authority to recoup the outstanding fine.

Exhibit B:

Am I the only one who can see that there would be no need for such a warning if we didn't have the warning sign? Of course not! You can all see it too but apparently the moron responsible for this couldn't. To erect a warning sign warning against the inherent dangers of the warning sign itself is a very special kind of stupid. This is not someone born with some sort of mental difficiency - this is someone working at it on a daily basis.

Exhibit C:

In the same spirit as the previous sign I guess but again you have to wonder who thought this was a reasonable use of council funds. Once again, without the sign the problem doesn't actually exist. With the sign the problem not only exists but the sign is itself the likely cause of the problem by conveniently identifying itself as a viable target.

Masterchef Imitates Life

There are two reasons to watch reality T.V. - one is to regale with laughter at how little of it resembles reality in any form and the other is to cringe during the bits that are all too real. As a general rule the bits that are all too real are those where the contestants or protagonists are put under pressure and respond in very human ways. Masterchef Australia is a master of puting its contestants under pressure and their response is eerily similar to the way many corporates and their executives respond when they are put under pressure. In short, everyone stops thinking, makes really bad decisions and then blames those decisions on either unforseen factors or a failure to take something into account. The truth is that when pressure is brought to bear far too many people just panic, latch on to the first possible solution they can think of and then try to rationalise the process later.

The Masterchef contestants are ostensibly in a cooking competition but hardly anyone is ever knocked out for poor cooking. What gets them everytime is poor decision-making. For example, the challenge is to cook for 200 people on a farm using an open fire and a contestant decides to attempt gnocchi. When was the last time you had gnocchi at a BBQ? The challenge is to create a low salt, low carb burger so a contestant adds a sprinkle of salt to the burger to enhance flavour. Why would you add an ingredient you have been asked to avoid? The challenge is to produce a sweet dish in 30 minutes so a contestant decides to poach a pear which will take 30-40 minutes to cook properly. Why would you choose a dish that takes longer than the time available? The answer to all these questions is they did so because they didn't think at all and the examples of this in the corporate world make Masterchef look like a cooking competition.

For example, Coca Cola were feeling some competitive pressure from rival Pepsi and, even though they were still the market leader by quite some distance, decided to abandon everyones favourite Cola recipe and bring New Coke to the market. The result? Unmitigated disaster.

We all know companies that have made people redundant only to discover no one else could do their job and have to re-hire them as consultants to train someone else. We all know of businesses renown for their innovation and creativity only to themselves be blindsided by someone elses innovation and creativity. We all know smart, rational people who have succumbed to the dumbest, most irrational behaviour.

What is most concerning is that in Masterchef, as in life, the contestants usually know they are making a mistake but persist anyway. It is the most frightening example of the triumph of hope over experience... and the less recognised, but more common, triumph of experience over reality.