It takes me a long time to get going in the morning. So I have a number of mantras I chant under the shower.
“I live an enchanted life” is one of them.
Last week I saw it come true during my trip to the US.
I had a series of enchanted moments that made my stay in California and Colorado very special and took away the stress of the past month.
One day, I entered my hotel room in Denver while the maid was cleaning it. The book on my night table, Three Cups of Tea, the incredibly moving story of Greg Mortenson’s work, caught her eye.
“What’s your name?” she asked and added “mine is Ida”.
There was this light in her eyes. Was it because we care about the same things?
The next morning, I was the only passenger on the shuttle bus back to the airport. The driver, Samuel from Ethiopia, bought me coffee and talked to me about spirituality.
I was delighted to see that CSR, a real passion of mine, is drawing so much interest. I am particularly happy that the people in my session were so interested in the case study I presented about Grameen and Danone.
Given how fond I am of Prof. Yunus, I can talk non-stop about Grameen.
At the end of my trip, I spent a couple of days in Napa with my friend’s daughter, Lana.
The day before I left we made a card for my mum and drew a rainbow on it.
And guess what…I woke up the next day, went outside and there it was…this enormous rainbow…the biggest Lana and I have ever seen.
I was watching with horror and anger the reports on CNN about the aftermath of Katrina and the fears around Hurricane Gustav.
My friend Charles Pizzo sent me this video about the Katrina Myth. It is worth watching until the end (check out the part about London’s flood barriers…).
Charles lost his home and material possessions during Katrina.
I was flying home from the US on Monday morning. When I landed at Gatwick, I realised that half of the day was gone and time had stolen part of my birthday…
I imagined part of me being stuck between the folds of time, for ever celebrating my birthday in the middle of the ocean.
I closed my eyes and saw a spectacular creature emerge from the deep of the Atlantic and take a bite at my birthday…a marine Grinch…
So how can I get half of my birthday back???
And if I don’t, does that make me younger ???
Who knows?
I did have a wonderful birthday once I landed.
Many thanks to those of you who sent me flowers, post cards, e-mails, Facebook messages, text messages and thanks for all your phone calls.
You made my short birthday very special!
I was attacked by the birthday Grinch on my way back from Texas. I attended IABC’s leadership institute in San Antonio last week. My fellow IABC executive board member Felicia and I gave a presentation on how to use professional development to grow membership. We had a great audience.
It was nice and warm in San Antonio and I didn’t really feel like leaving on Sunday…
Texas with its huge open spaces intrigues me.
So I thought I would take a piece of Texas back with me to keep me company on the plane. I bought No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. The movie is superb… but the dialogues in the book are even better.
And yes, it does feel like being back in Texas, definitely!
For some reason, I like the Chinese New Year much more than the one we celebrate on Jan 1st.
May be, it is because the New Year in China is linked to an animal.
So, I am very happy to have a new fluffy, brown rat sitting on my desk– a present from my friend Diane.
And it has already brought me luck.
This morning, I was finally able to find peace of mind and work on my book. I had not done this for a couple of weeks. The preparations for IABC’s EuroComm had kept me very busy.
It does not have a name yet (any suggestions?). It came in a very festive, golden bag with a little note about its meaning:
“In China, it is deemed an honour to be born in the Year of the Rat. The Rat is respected and considered courageous and enterprising. The Earth rat is honourable, hard working and a focused achiever”.
It also says that “Rats make excellent writers and broadcasters”. No wonder my little friend was helping me this morning….
In the spirit of the Chinese New Year, I went to listen to a talk at Asia House yesterday about the role played by women in building China’s new entrepreneurial class.
I was really impressed by Madame Ma’s speech. She runs an industrial bakery in Beijing with 600 workers and has won the contract to supply bread to the Beijing Olympics.
And it was great to be at Asia House. I love the atmosphere of the place. It is so gentle. What a great start of the year!
I worked on this event for about nine months together with my IABC colleagues and the team at La Salle University… and I can’t believe it’s all over now.
We had a wonderful time and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this project.
I have organised lots of conferences over the years … and I always get it… this strange dizziness that comes when everything is over.
So, last night, in order to feel better, I went to a party a client of mine was giving.
With a glass of champagne in my hand, I worked the crowd and gave in to the spirit of the evening. The music and the rhythm of the different conversations were so soothing that my mind started to relax and …. I went back to Barcelona.
I have often pondered over the secrets of conference organising. Some of my best friends are in this business, so this is one of my favourite topics.
It is all about the atmosphere of an event. Conferences are not really about presentations and ideas; they are mostly about the kind of experience you manage to create for the participants.
I am not sure how one does that. I think after a while it comes natural to you.
It has a lot to do with the spirit of the time.
People’s expectations change so quickly in our day and age. You have to be able to step into their shoes and understand what they are really looking for. It might be the opportunity to be away from the office and explore what is going on in their sector and what that means for their career; it might be support from their peers in case they are not getting it from their bosses; it might be inspiration and guidance.
But back to my anti-climax…
One of reasons why I am feeling like this is my schizophrenic relationship with routine. Having been educated in a Germanic environment, I crave routines….but the minute I have to stick to one I start hating them. And again when a routine disappears from my life…I feel like an orphan for a couple of days.
Today it’s Friday and I am already missing the weekly conference call I would always have with my colleagues at La Salle at the end of the week.
I think I am definitely going to go out and buy that teddy bear…
Thanks to social networking and other on-line platforms, it is extremely easy these days for different publics to discuss your company’s CSR activities on the internet. Readers can shine a light on the smallest details of your CSR strategy and question your motives.
Social media makes CSR work more challenging for communicators. It has become a 24/7 business.
You might find yourself sitting in front of your computer in your polka-dot pyjamas (no, I don’t have pyjamas like that …but I would love some and my birthday is coming up…) late on a Saturday evening advising your client on how to deal with a sudden wacko attack on-line.
New challenges for communicators…but indeed exciting ones!
Many of the questions I was asked at ESADE were around the issue of NGOs and how to select the right one for your company to partner with. One of the participants, who used to work for a major corporation in India, remarked how companies tend to choose only the largest NGOs, those who have become household names.
I could not agree more that creativity is what you need when approaching the world of NGOs. There are some great ones with strong local outreach and new, revolutionary approaches to old problems. Their work might not be as heavily publicised as that of household names, but it is highly effective.
“How can you tell if the people working for an NGOs are really committed to its mission or if all they care about is their pay-cheque?”, asked another ESADE student. It is a great question, and a difficult one to answer.
In my work with NGOs over the years, I have always relied on my gut feeling. I can usually tell after half an hour spent talking to an NGO representative what is going on. Visiting their offices and experiencing their office culture also helps.
My discussion at ESADE confirmed the impression that there is a huge appetite out there for new approaches to communications. Social media is stretching our imagination. It is presenting communicators with questions never encountered before.
I look forward to receiving the answer to some of these questions at IABC’ EMEs annual regional conference next week.
I wrote a while ago in this blog about my attempts to explain the virtues of communication to a US immigration officer. My profession does tend to be misunderstood.
But it’s not always that bad.
Actually, to quote Austin Powers (I know it’s childish, but I love him), these are very groovy times to be in communications.
Top management is finally waking up to the idea that corporate communication is important. They know that what they need from us is strategic advice, not colourful brochures. And the reasons why they are waking up are
Intangible assets (customer loyalty, brand equity, reputation, etc.) are becoming more and more important. They are difficult to imitate by competitors and investors look at them before deciding whether or not to put money into a company. Communicators are the masterminds behind reputation and brand recognition.
Publics are becoming increasingly difficult to convince. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 44% of the people interviewed in nine EU countries trust conversations with friends and peers while only 33% (!) trust articles in newspapers.
Gen Y. Seventy-five million young people born between 1977 and 1998 are slowly appearing on the corporate radar screen. They might be working as interns at the moment, but they are definitely the board faces of 2020. They have grown up on participatory sites like YouTube and MySpace. They are not as loyal to a company as their parents used to be. They will not accept sanitized corporate speak. In order to recruit and retain them, corporations will need top-notch internal communications
New channels of global communications are being opened up by social media tools, bringing different cultures across the world together instantaneously. Culture is no longer about the culture of nations, it is created by networks of people coming together in new groupings and tribes. In this new environment, it is essential to pay attention to communication.
At the conference I will be chairing in Barcelona in February, we will be discussing these topics and more.
I was speaking at the IABC Africa conference last week and heard a presentation that made me think.
The 26 Letters project seeks to inspire us to see value in words, reading and writing so that we remember how important the alphabet is as a tool with which we can make sense of our world. 26 writers and 26 designers were asked to work on a letter of the alphabet each.
According to the presenter, words are concepts and teach us to think. And this got me thinking. I wrote a post a while ago about the way in which my thoughts change depending on the language I happen to be doing my thinking in.
The presenter also said that words allow us to develop a sense of who we are and who we are is based on our ability to use words. As a writer, I find this an intriguing concept. However, I don’t believe it’s true. I believe it’s the other way around: the words we use are the product of who we are. They are the result of all the experiences we have had in this life. The awareness of who we are comes first and words follow. I know this is a difficult one and I would like to hear your thoughts.
The presenter was convinced that a link exists between the lack of words and violence, and believes that those who don’t have the ability to use words become disenfranchised and turn violent. This is where I strongly disagree. I wished it were that simple. Throughout history we have seen plenty of highly literate people become violent and incite other people to violence. Sometimes it is the ability of leaders to use words in a certain way that makes people turn violent (has the war in Bosnia thought us nothing about this subject?).
To stay on the subject of words. I was intrigued to hear Brad Whitworth mention the concept of “refrigerator journalism”. To those of us who grew up with the inverted piramid, the idea of producing information in a way that allows readers to stick it on refrigerator doors sounds extermely liberating!
I was delighted to hear from Louise Marsland of bizcommunity.com that South Africa has the 6th largest group of users on Facebook. Louise believes that social media has brought back personalisation to technology and I definitely agree with her.
What I did not know is that the blog post that got the largest number of hits (600,000) ever is by a woman in Hong Kong who grew a male organ….
I know my little post today does not compare with that but I still had a great time in Johannesburg!
“Are you ready to be an honest broker of history?”
This question was a constant companion during the years I spent in Prague working as a journalist. It would pop up every time an editor wanted me to tell the polished story of a successful transition economy and its dashing heros. None of this fiction existed, but it was useful to those who were trying to sell newspaper ads to Czech companies.
It was therefore refreshing to hear Dave Marash of Al Jazeera English speak at IABC International Conference about his TV station’s new approach to reporting. Al Jazeera uses local journalists embedded in the culture of the country it wants to cover. It believes that citizens are more likely to feel represented by journalists who can relate to them rather than by fly-in-fly-out reporters who have come to study them for a day. The result is that citizens become more reliable sources of information.
Hallelujah! I spent years in Eastern Europe trying to convince my editors of this. What I heard in New Orleans was also the confirmation that the innumerable hours spent having coffee in Prague and other Eastern European capitals with sources I never quoted were not in vain.
Dave Marash also spoke about Al Jazeera wanting to slow down the pace of reporting for the sake of more detail and nuance. Utter bliss for my ears tired of bite-size journalism that does not tell you what is really going on!It was another speaker at the International Conference, Jennifer James, who asked the question about being a truthful broker of history. She also mentioned how we tend to create reality and that a lot of information we create is not connected to reality.I have been thinking about this ever since New Orleans. Communicators are brokers of stories. Our stories turn into reality the minute they reach their audiences. I wonder whether there is a different reality for each culture we encounter.
And what is real and what is not?
It might be that I spent too many years in kafkaesque Prague or I might be on to something here.
That’s what a Croat friend of mine believes and what I have always found difficult to image. But on Monday, everything changed.
I was on a tour of the hurricane Katrina disaster areas in New Orleans and, while trying the take in the horrible devastation, I peeked into one of the houses (or what remained of it). My eyes fell on a toy, two little Panda bears hugging in an attempt to find refuge and forget the devastation. Tears came to my eyes with my mind promptly retrieving a long forgotten image: a rusty key.
It laid on the kitchen table of a friend one evening I visited him in Prague. Bill (not his real name) travelled every summer to Auschwitz with his American family. And it was on one of these trips that he had found the key lying between the train tracks that had been part of a terrible journey.
In my imagination the owner of the key was a girl who had been deported to the camp. She had managed to hide it in the few clothes she took with her. May be, it was the key to her room or that of a drawer where she kept all her favourite music sheets and books.
I don’t know if this story my mind started telling me that evening in the neon-light glow of a drab Prague kitchen is true. And I don’t know what happened to the child who used to play with the little Pandas. What makes these two objects so heart-breaking is the bridge they manage to span between horror and reality. They look absolutely sovereign and unshaken amid sheer dreadfulness and manage to tell a powerful story.
There might be a lesson in this. I have already written about the challenge communicators face when trying to tell the story of human tragedies in a way that makes people relate to them and care. I wish I could find a quick fix but I suspect it doesn’t exist.
The brilliant speech cultural anthropologist Jennifer James made on Tuesday at IABC International Conference gave me hope. According to her, humanity is moving into a compassion phase (after the greed phase of the past years read Enron). We are in a new era of authenticity. People are overloaded with information and do not know whom to trust. In order to get their message through, communicators need integrity and the ability to tell a compelling story that resonates with deep-seated values.
May be some day I’ll be able to master the skills of the little Panda bears…
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