Last week, before volcano Eyjafjallajoekull erupted, when we still had a life… I went to listen to Roger Martin present his new book in London.

The Design of Business looks into the lack of innovation in corporations. Roger, who is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, analysed patterns of thinking that prevent companies from being innovative.

Design thinking is the result of balancing new knowledge (innovation) with current knowledge (efficiency). It focuses on accelerating the process that enables knowledge to advance from mystery to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides you towards a solution) to algorithm (a replicable formula).

According to Roger, the main challenge of design thinkers is turning the future into the past. “’Prove’ and ‘if’ are the most dangerous words to innovation.”

I interviewed Roger for my book two years ago and what struck me already then is his ability to delve into human thinking and dissect it like a frog in a lab.

What really intrigues me are his efforts to understand how human knowledge progresses and how, by thinking harder about mysteries, we come to a different level of knowledge.

I have always been a great believer in the communication potential of microcredit.

Today, I was reading about the first leadership course for microfinance executives run by Wharton’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education.

Karim Fanous of Egypt’s  Lead Foundation, one of the participants, mentioned in the interview the importance of communication as one of the main lessons he is taking from the course. “We need to raise awareness about what microfinance is, how it impacts so many people and how it’s absolutely vital.”

I was delighted to read this…The importance of communication for microcredit organisations is one of the main messages of our book.

The reason why communication for microfinance is so exciting is that you get to tell the stories behind the loans, the difference these make to the lives of the borrowers, the impact these have on their communities…

As Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President of Women’s World Banking, said in the article, microcredit is “a high-touch business with high operating costs because of this very deep relationship with the client”. Communicators should use this relationship as a source of stories.

Stories give a voice to the soul of a project. They create an emotional appeal. They are a powerful tool for spreading the message of microcredit.

As Fanous said, “people need to know these are professionally run institutions with a social mission”. That’s what good business communication is for.

Once a journalist always a journalist.

That’s why my loyalties are sometimes split between journos and bloggers.

But last week, I had this incredible urge to hide my journalistic past…

I am talking about the FT article discussing… the internet in China (did we have time to talk about anything else last week!?). I have the feeling there are a number of things Westerners are not getting quite right.

The Kitten Killer of Hangzhou is one of them.

The FT has thrown this interesting internet phenomenon into the aren’t-the-Chinese-weird- and-a-little-primitive section and spewed the following sentence:

“Uncritical adoption of information from unchecked sources makes it easier to create a herd effect on the internet in China than elsewhere.”

Well, it’s not quite like that…

The video of a woman killing a kitten with her stiletto hills is no trivia. As my co-author Yang-May wrote in our book, the difference between this video and others of this kind on the Chinese web is that it became “the icon of a rallying call across China to stop animal abuse”.
As Paul Littlefair, senior programme manager in the International Department of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), mentioned in an interview with Yang-May, “this video was a turning point for animal welfare in China.”

The woman’s actions were discussed on blogs all over the country. As a result, an increasing number of papers were published in Chinese universities on the subject of the use of animals and its ethics. Searches for the words “animal welfare” on Baidu reached 1 million pages (up from 100,000 in 2005).
And in 2008, the RSPCA and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Law teamed up and hosted an international conference in Beijing to discuss animal welfare legislation for China.

So disappointing none of this was mentioned in the FT …. 

Would you believe there are still people out there who criticise social media for not being as accurate as print media….

I love this amazing video by Saudi poetess May Kutbi.

And I am going to show it every time someone talks to me about women in the Middle East and the usual stereotypes.

Kutbi writes a column for Hia magazine. I interviewed Hia’s editor in chief, Mai Badr, while doing research for my book.  She told me that media “can act as an instigator of change”.

Kutbi’s powerful video is a clear demonstration of this.

Winter has arrived in London. At this time of the year, I am always on a desperate lookout for things to cheer me up.

And the review of our book in this month’s issue of Communication World has done just that:
“If writing about it makes it so, then authors Silvia Cambié and Yang-May Ooi have reordered the paradigm of strategic communication for the 21st century with their book International Communication Strategy. And not a moment too soon.”

We got another positive review from the US. The verdict in the influential Library Journal was:

“This book is highly recommended to public relations professionals looking to optimize their communications in today’s competitive business environment”.
I love it. May be…. I won’t be getting any winter blues after all.

The strangest bit about writing a book is that you lose part of your soul…. It moves on and goes to live a separate life in the minds of your readers.

That’s how I felt on Wednesday night when Yang-May and I launched International Communications Strategy at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business in the City of London.
Many years of work have gone into the book….. Many conversations in different parts of the world, many hours spent slipping into other people’s shoes trying to understand their ways of looking at the word and telling stories. It was overwhelming to see it all coming together.

Yang-May and I were also overwhelmed by the number of friends and colleagues that attended our launch.
I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart Diane Morris (with us in the photo), the President of The International Alliance for Women, for all her support and for co-hosting the event. Many thanks also to Arnold Longboy and his team at Chicago Booth for hosting us at their superb venue. The event was catered by Café Spice Namaste. Many thanks to Cyrus, Pervin, Gina and their team for the wonderful food.

And of course thanks to Yang-May for being who she is…. the best co-author in the world!

Mark Smith of Ipadio.com ran a live phoneblog of the launch. Click here to listen to our presentation.

The event was covered in the Russian and Malaysian press.

Photos: thanks to Nicola Stevens and Diane Morris

My co-author Yang-May and I look very happy in this picture.

Our book has been nominated for the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Awards!

I got the message the other week in San Francisco…first thing in the morning when I turned on my Blackberry. I was rushing …. I had to jump in the shower and almost forgot about it. But in the course of the day, the thought came back to my mind and began to sink in.

When Yang-May got the news, she remembered writing the book in her pyjamas early in the morning…

Awards and pyjamas are such a funny juxtaposition…

Yesterday, we gave a talk at the Institute of Directors together with Giles Colborne on Creating Value through Web 2.0 helped by panel chairman David Wootton.

Many of the questions we were asked dealt with the ROI of social media for small and medium-sized businesses. We used our blogs to provide examples for some of the answers.

I have been blogging on XCulture for over two years. It has been a fascinating journey. One that has taken me in many unexpected directions. The part I enjoyed most has been floating ideas for our book and observing the reactions of my readers.

Click here to download our IOD presentation.

Yang-May and I have been working hard all week on the PR for our book which is coming out next month.

It’s already on the list of the Top Ten Social Media Books. We are thrilled!

And if you are a fan of one of us or both…. you can go to this site, scroll down to the bottom of the page and vote for International Communications Strategy.

The official launch is set for early September and will be hosted in London by TIAW and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

I am delighted that Emma Huang will be able to join us from Canada. Emma has been instrumental in helping me to understand the world of PR in China.

We have done it!

Yang-May and I have finished our book on international communications and sent it on to the publisher, Kogan Page.

I felt slightly dizzy after leaving my local post office in West London. I watched the Royal Mail guy pick up the big red bag with our manuscript in it.

Funny, I though, such an important step and he will never know the role he got to play in our lives. Somehow… for a brief moment… I wanted to give him a hug!

I am still feeling slightly bewildered….

What amazes me is that, earlier this year, after a couple of months of writing, the book began to take on a life of its own.

It was kind of writing itself, as a friend of mine said. It developed its own dynamic…and soon enough it was taking me on paths I never though I would explore (we got content from so many countries, including Brazil, Bangladesh, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the Philippines)

In brief, here are the main points we make in the book:

• New communications practices are being developed by emerging economies and their multinationals. They will soon dominate our way of working.
• Technology and social media are creating new on-line cultures and new audiences for communicators.
• Social business is challenging the collective thinking and changing the way business operates. It needs communicators to spread its message on a global scale.

We have a long list of acknowledgements in the book and we are so grateful to all the people who have advised and supported us.

To this, I would like to add a big Thank You to all the friends who were there for me during the summer, during those long “unsocial” weeks I spent locked up in front of my computer.

Same as with the postman….I want to give you all a big hug!

Photo: thanks to dailymail.co.uk

Part of my book on international communication focuses on China. And I am very grateful to Emma Huang for contributing to my research and for helping me to understand China.

Emma is based in Toronto and I was finally able to meet up with her last week.

We went to a restaurant in Chinatown, ate clams and spoke about our experiences with moving to a city where you hardly know anybody. That’s what Emma did 3 years ago when she moved to Canada.

It is probably our similar lives that bond Emma and me. That and the fact that we are both former journalists.

I am so happy to have been given the opportunity to add Emma to what I call “my large family away from home”.