Do you ever read case studies in communication trade publications published by Ragan and others and think, "No way was it as simple as they say"?

When you think that, you're absolutely right. Nothing inside an organization happens cleanly enough to be put into a 6,000-word case study, let alone a 750-worder.

I was reminded again of this obvious truth by an e-mail I got from a communication manager whose program we profiled as a glorious best-practice. A few weeks after the publication, she wrote to confess off the record that the program "has been bumpy at times."

Bumpy, indeed: At one point in the middle of its implementation, she said, the whole program "looked ugly and even useless. Employees were frustrated because they weren't getting answers, execs were uncomfortable because they had no answers."

In the end, she wrote, "fundamentally [the program] accomplished more than we could have hoped."

I replied thanking her for her e-mail but saying there was no need for it. I wrote, "I know full well when I report on a program that's dug as far into company politics as your program that the real thing is much messier than what I report (even when I ask questions like, 'what would you do differently'). The point is, you guys took the chance and got yourself into the middle of the organization and did your best. And it sounds like you did something very valuable in the end.

"We love to profile work like that," I added, "and we love the communicators who do it."

And that, my friends, is the truth.

Perhaps you've heard about the newsletter this "D.C. Madam" sent to her call girls. Based on excerpts I saw at The Huffington Post, it's the most useful employee newsletter I've seen in years.

Pamela Martin & Associates escort agency boss Jeane Palfrey gave her workers some straightforward business advice.

In various issues of the plainly named, simply designed "Newsletter," in the 1990s, she communicated to her people with the refreshing directness of a newsletter editor who really wanted to get some stuff across:

She readied her workers for the busy season. "Congress is back in session. This always helps to boost business."

She suggested when they might have a day off: "That damn Monday night football...ruines [sic] business every single Monday night!"

She exorted them to be professional: "Organization and efficiency need to be, No, must be the bedrock from which the on-call escort service operates."

She advised her workers on ethics. After telling a cautionary tale about an employee who was arrested, she drove the point home: "The bimbo kept records. ... Destroy the data immeidately [sic]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

She talked customer service, telling her workers that they're "damned fools" if they think they can go on calls, "collect the $200 and 'just talk.'" (She also offered them advice on how to handle "fuckhead customers.")

And she discussed corporate values: "Victoria's Secret," she wrote, "is the only place a Pamela Martin girl shops."

So many corporate publications fail to impart practical information, but instead serve as a mere symbol of organizational communication.

This newsletter, on the other hand, is the real deal.

Okay, I've gotten just about zero paying work done over the last few days.

Since Ragan launched this MySpace-type networking site for communicators--MyRagan.com--I've been out there every damn second, even though I'm not paid a lick by Ragan to participate.

(In fact, they'll soon sense my almost insane eagerness and they'll probably begin to charge me.)

It's like opening a new restaurant, this MyRagan thing. People pour in the front door, you can't welcome them warmly enough--or, to your delight, fast enough--and you're still trying to figure out the seating chart yourself.

But it's fun. It's really fun.

We still have lots of seats available. Unlimited seating, actually.

Come on in. Sit anywhere you like. We're so glad you're here.

Today is May 4, the anniversary of the day in 1970 when four kids were killed at Kent State.

I went to Kent State, graduated in 1990.

A sociology class there taught me about the power of experiential learning.

Every day I walked across those grassy, hilly fields, past the architecture building and the sculpture with the big bullet hole.

My sociology prof was Dr. Tom Lough, who was one of the Kent 25--people indicted for but never convicted of inciting campus unrest.

Lough believed--and spent an inordinate share of our semester trying to convince us--that President Nixon ordered Ohio governor Rhodes to have the National Guard shoot some kids at Kent, to quiet other campuses down.

The theory struck me as preposterous, but I never again assumed that the story was as simple as the "inexperienced Guard troops panicked" notion that the government put forth.

In any case, I won't forget Dr. Lough telling us about the day of the shootings and a 20-year-old boy--"a good radical," he called the boy--running toward the mentor professor with wide eyes, and blood pouring out of his mouth.

And now--if my connection to Dr. Lough and Kent State links to your connection with me--you won't forget it either.

We at Ragan gape in happy disbelief at an unexpected flurry of, at this writing, almost 900 signups—Mom, I swear, I only told a few people!—to our new social media site, MyRagan.com.

Others have doubts. Some of our friends—and probably some of our employees—say, "I see you're excited about this, but where's the revenue stream?" To them, we only say: How can it be bad for business to have your whole market partying hardy in your front lawn?

That doubt, from friends of the company, has a natural flipside. In a MyRagan forum discussion about what members hope the site becomes, Toronto communication consultant Sue Johnston wrote that she hoped it would be "a place to focus. A real community of practice."

But for that to happen, she added, MyRagan would have to be "an environment of trust."

And she asked: "Can that be done in a site sponsored by people who also are a commercial organization that wants to sell us stuff? We'll see what happens."

More violent than Johnston's doubts was the reaction of Social Media Club blogger Chris Heuer to a comment Ragan CEO Mark Ragan made in which he plugged MyRagan. Obviously Mark was trying to promote our new site and probably he wouldn't have found his way to something called the Social Media Club if he wasn't.

But Heuer's reaction, in an e-mail to Mark, was on the snarky side, shall we say. He removed Mark's comment and then e-mailed him to say, in part:

"Should I be using your MySpace 'clone' to promote our workshops and events? Somehow I don't think you would appreciate this, but perhaps I am wrong, in which case I would like to apologize. Thing is, I don't know anyone who appreciates it when someone comes into their party and invites all the guests over to their house. Our goal is to be inclusive and to address all things social media, which would include your network site--so if you want to join the conversation instead of swooping in and promoting your self and heading out, please do so ...."

Mark's reply, also in part:

"To answer your questoin, yes. I want you to use my 'MySpace clone' to tell my users about your seminars. Hell, I will help you do it, if you like. You know why? Because I am serving the same people you are serving. Why wouldn't I want them to know about what you have to offer. I don't fear you.

"You bloggers attack mainstream media for its efforts to limit conversation, but your rules are more onerous and self-righteous than anything seen in the so-called 'dead tree' business.

"Think about it. You created a club for people interested in social media. Along comes someone who just launched the first-ever Social Media site on the MySpace model in the business-to-business world, and you kick them off and write a nasty letter. Wow. Go figure."

So, to sum up: Ragan's friends worry we won't make money on the site; bloggers worry that we are money-hungry pigs who want to own the whole communication community so that we may suck its collective bank account dry.

And Ragan's customers, if they are represented by Sue Johnston, aren't sure how it's all going to work, but they're willing to give it a try, since it seems like a pretty cool idea, and it's free. (Oops. We're at 924.)

I guess I've got to side with the customers on this one. It's usually the best bet.

Okay, so I think I've mentioned here that I love golf. I worked on a golf course in college, I write about golf for newspapers and magazines that will let me, I'm a mid-80s shooter--despite all my passion, only a little better than I was 20 years ago, in high school.

Well on Sunday I shot a four-over-par 76.

The consistent excellence of my golf swing that day was highlighted by the fact that made no miraculous shots or long putts.

After I parred 18, I asked my partner, a dreadful golfer who had shot about 120, if he had any idea what I had just accomplished. Of course he had none.

"I shot 76, man. Four over. Probably one of the best five or six rounds of my life."

"Well," he said, "your putting was terrible."

When I started at Ragan in the early 1990s, we were all so young.

At the Corporate Communicators Conference, the editors never slept--we worked all day and drank all night (often with attenders) in exhilaration mostly attributable to the wild rush of being put up in a downtown Chicago hotel.

Last night we quit when the Hyatt bar shut down around 1:00; but the way I feel today puts me in mind of those sleepless conferences of yesteryear. The nostalgia makes the hangover bearable.

But I'm in no shape to give a decent conference report, beyond saying it was full of all the usual joy to see old friends and meet new communicators.

So for now I'll just share the rather trite-but-heartfelt advice I gave at the last conference session before the cocktail party that launched a million drinks:

"Let’s blog less and listen more. Let’s live in our beautiful world and not in our computers. Let’s do the work that needs to be done rather than the work that happens to be on our to-do list. And for the love of whoever, let’s turn off our cell phones and our Blackberries while we’re with the people we say we love."

This morning I read in The Wall Street Journal where Johnson & Johnson is busting the balls of its ad agency, putting media buying and planning accounts up for bid and "looking to agencies ... to improve the model," as J&J's media chief Kim Kadlec puts it.

She wants ad agencies--rather than media-buying agencies--to create a special division to handle consumer research. Why? So the consumer research propeller-heads can work more directly with the ad agency's creative types.

Kadlec sounds like a typical corporate squarehead who wants all ads to precisely and scientifically address consumers' vastly complex feelings and infinitely subtle ideas about shampoo.

You know why ad agencies don't do consumer research? Because ad agencies aren't good at consumer research. Ad writers should read consumer research of course--the most and the best they can get their hands on.

Then, they should forget everything they read about how human beings feel about shampoo and write an ad that addresses how humans feel, period.

But for an ad agency to distract itself from doing great creative by trying to create a big, elaborate, credible research division--that would be like Murray's Freelance Writing creating the internal capacity to calculate and mail our own invoices.

The idea is preposterous!

Okay, now that this MyRagan thing is up, people are IMing me, out of the blue. Not all the time, but once or twice a day.

It doesn't always feel like an intrusion. Yes, it does.

I got an e-mail earlier today from a Ragan staffer looking for a source on employee engagement. When I didn't respond--I know 500 communication consultants who say they do "engagement" but not a single one who stands out from the crowd on the dubious subject--the dude IMs me. "Hey, did you get my e-mail?"

What's he going to do next, throw a brick through my office window that reads, "Hey, did you get my IM?"

Worst of all was this weekend. I was in Middletown, Ohio, visiting my 84-year-old dad, trying to show him what MyRagan is and how it works and why it's consuming my every waking minute at the moment.

I'm about to sign off--Dad took to social networking like a cat to water--and take off to go golfing, when there's a little beep and a box comes up. It says, "Mark Ragan knows you're online, he signs your checks, he doesn't give a rat's ass that it's Saturday, and he wants to IM you. Yes or No?"

Or something like that.

I hesitated.

Say "Yes," and I'm in for a sweaty 15-minute IM session that will fill my head with business worries for the rest of the day. Say "No," and have a sinking feeling for the rest of the weekend that I quite literally told my publisher to get lost.

I said, "No."

I don't know how Mark felt about it. We haven't talked about it.

But I do know how I feel about IM-ing. I HATE IM-ing, and the modem it rode in on.

Are there any Gen Yers out there who can explain to me that I shouldn't feel this way--that I shouldn't feel that IM is a tool by which anyone can reach into my little private world at any time and force me to make a terrible choice between unwilling acceptance of them, or gut-wrenching rejection?

Somebody. Help me. Seriously. Help me.

On a trip to China a couple of years ago I noted that much of the writing there is nothing but a collection of familiar idioms, clichés and catch-phrases. I asked Chinese people about this and they all said that in China, that's how a writer shows mastery: More repeating old literature than by than creating new.

And yesterday my Hong Kong-based speechwriting pal Lorne Christensen sent me a piece from China Daily. Columnist Liu Shinan writes about the sorry state of speechmaking in China:

"In most cases, the speeches delivered by officials at various levels can be cut by half at least. Actually in many cases, they can be cut by two-thirds or three-fourths without hurting the essential information the speaker intends to impart. This is because the core information, if there is any, is wrapped in flamboyant, empty formulae."

As editor of Speechwriter's Newsletter, let me tell you: The same could be said for many Western political and corporate speeches. Liu goes on:

"... officials ... try to make their speeches comprehensive, deep and high. Shorter speeches would be regarded as demonstrating poor ability backed by inadequate homework. No one would want to leave such an impression on the superiors present at the meeting."

Liu remembers Chairman Mao as someone who knew how to give a speech: "Sixty-five years ago, Mao Zedong published his famous Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing during the Communist Party's campaign to rectify its work style. He called for a terse, straight-to-the-point style of writing and speaking. Now, we need another campaign to rectify the present corrupted way of using our language."

Of course, anyone who has read Mao's little red book knows that the man believed in the power of the platitude above all else. But at least his platitudes were pithy.

In a forum post today on MyRagan.com, Shades of Gray regular Jane Greer remarks:

"... nobody says the word 'morale' about employees any more. I think they should say it and worry about it. If morale stinks, nothing else is going to work and the bottom line is shot. ... Morale is as measurable as anything else and is part of the bottom line whether or not anyone admits it."

Her post reminded me of a cover story I once read in the employee magazine of a public utility whose headline read, "Bad morale: Who's fault is it?"

That was a dozen years ago. Can you even imagine a headline like that today?

But the reason "morale" isn't directly discussed anymore, I think, is that it has a negative, military connotation. When you hear "morale" you think of "bad morale" before you think of "good morale."

And besides, it's a clumsy term that doesn't seem directly related to business success.

At the Corporate Communicators Conference last week, HR meausuremet maven Theresa Welbourne said she measures employee energy levels. Not absolute energy levels, but relative energy levels, as they rise and fall.

Happy employees aren't what management is looking for; productive employees are what it's looking for. Management can see the connection between "energy" and productivity quicker than it can see the connection between "happiness," or "good morale" and productivity.

So I agree with Jane that the workforce's general mood (and departments' more specific moods) should be worried about, regularly measured, discussed and addressed. But I think "morale" isn't the word we're after.

"Energy," while not quite as inclusive as "morale," might be a better term to use.

Communication is insanely complicated and most communication "rules" can and should be broken often.

But there are some rules that are broken so often, they're most notable by the rarity of their observance.

To wit: The communication law of, "To get, you must first give." In my column for next week's Ragan Report--blogger, scoop thyself--I talk about a State Farm senior exec who said at our recent Corporate Communicators Conference that he started a blog and was happily surprised that suddenly employees started approaching him "anywhere and everywhere" with ideas and opinions.

My commentary was this: He shouldn't have been surprised: Most executives have an open-door policy, ask employees for feedback and encourage candor. But few executives understand that in the communication game, you get what you give. You want candor? Be candid. Why should an employee stick his or her neck out if you haven’t first? This executive now sticks his neck out week after week and so employees are willing to do the same. It’s a pretty simple formula.

And lest we smugly think of this as something we communicators "get" but that execs "don't get," we should know that we don't get it either.

I can't tell you how many times I've read through an exquisitely vapid employee newsletter only to read an urgent call on page eight for "candid" letters to the editor. In forums on communication sites, communicators try to get a discussion going by simply asking for benchmarking information on so-and-so.

This leaves the reader wondering: Why are you asking for such information? Do you have a problem in this area? Are you working on an interesting project here? Can we learn something from you along the way, or are you just going to suck us dry and disappear?

Most-violated communication commandment number one: We get what we give.

Shades of Gray pals, what are some others for this list?

I'm all about rules this week. In my last post and in the comments, we talked about the most-violated rules of communication.

Now I'd like, for the first time sober--this is one of my favorite barroom theories--I'd like to lay out my "Everybody Knows Everything Anyway" rule and see what you think.

Bartender, get us another round:

Here's the deal with communication: Most of the time, everybody already knows everything anyway, before you even open your yap.

Give you an example: Once, after breaking up with her boyfriend of several years, my sister told me I should have said I didn't like him. Said she would have broken up with him much sooner.

Now come on, Sis: You've known me all my life. And you've watched me in hundreds and thousands of conversations and interactions. And you watched me strain and struggle to talk to your boyfriend, watched me react to hundreds of lame things he said. You know what my face looks like when I'm interested in what someone's saying, and when I'm not. You know my real laugh. You know my fake laugh. You can tell from across a gymnasium whether or not I respect the person I'm talking to.

You know how I felt about him!

A small example, I know; but one that can often be extrapolated all the way to employee communication. Say somebody has been working for a company for five years.

Has had thousands of conversations with thousands of other employees at the company, from underlings to colleagues to supervisors to directors and even VPs.

Has worked on dozens of projects, and seen how people in their department and in other departments work, how they think, how they treat one another.

Has seen how the behavior of all these people in all these contexts jibes and does not jibe with the company's advertising, its annual report, its press releases, its official internal communications, its values statement.

Has weighed all that against the news coverage the company gets, and the opinions of analysts and the vote-with-their-wallets input from shareholders.

And, armed with all that information, the five-year veteran employee has interacted with the company's customers, members of the community the company does business in, and every random yahoo at every cocktail party and Little League baseball game.

What, exactly, do we think we communicators are going to tell this person in order to get him or her "engaged," in order to "change his or her behavior," in order to make him or her a sincere "ambassador" for the organization.

This five-year veteran, like my sister, already knows everything there is to know about the situation. Like my sister in her relationship, the five-year veteran will do what exactly makes psycholigcal, spiritual and economic sense, when it makes psychological, spiritual and economic sense.

Right?

I say this not to say communictors and communications have no role to play in the life of the corporation--we have an important role in conveying official corporate information and helping employees have conversations with one another and management--but only to explain the grave doubt I feel whenever I hear us talk about changing behaviors, capturing hearts and souls and the like.

People know more than we think, and in the case of my sister, know more than even they think.

In short, everybody already knows everything important, and we are foolish to overestimate our ability to influence things.

Bartender, one more, then we gotta go.

Got an e-mail newsletter recently from a big-name blowhard internal communication consultant.

He's one of these sharpers who are always saying at conferences, "If you want to keep putting out newsletters, that's fine. But if you really want to affect business results, blah, blah, blah strategy, blah, blah, blah behavior change, blah, blah, blah, seat at the management table, blah, blah, blah. Thanks for listening and if you put your business card in my hat I'll market my services to you ceaselessly."

Well this particular big-name blowhard sharper needs some ink-stained newsletter wretch to help him out with his super-strategic e-mail newsletter. The headline reads:

"Do you know how to communicate to change as much as you do about change?"

I have placed this headline in a file. I look at it once a week, hoping that this time I'll understand it.

So far, no good.

(Happy Memorial Day, Shades comrades.)

My wife's aunt is a librarian. She has a new boss. The boss is a horrible, horrible, horrible woman--a dragon and a slave-driver both.

My wife's aunt is a Buddhist, and the gentlest human soul on the earth.

She has made a drawing of her boss and taped it to her living room wall. The boss's face has arrows pointing to it. Next to each arrow it says, "Love."

By God, she's trying.

Shades-of-Gray regulars, have you ever overcome your loathing for a mean or cowardly or stupid boss? Have you ever failed honorably? I'm sure we'd all love to hear your tales.

I quote Larry Ragan too much. But what the hell: Ragan's late founder taught me much of what I know about communication. He's always in my head.

One of his most important notions was that it is not readers' job to tell you what they want to read--or even to have the foggiest idea what they want to read. It is the communiator's job to know what they want to read, and to give it to them. And if you don't know, then you're not a communicator.

Larry's ancient axiom came flying back to me as I read IABC chairman Glenda Holmes' plaintive blog entry of May 25, and his voice kept echoing in my ears as I watched the post languish without any comment for five days since.

This blog item is an attempt to get Larry to be quiet.

Holmes begins by lamenting how little time she's had to spend on IABC's blog, the IABC Café. Work pressures, other IABC duties and family have taken up her time. She thanks guest bloggers for filling in the huge gaps between her posts, and then she makes her request:

"The point of my post is not to recount successes, to whine, or even to defend my periodic absences from the Cafe, but to ask patrons what you’d like to see here in the future and what kinds of topics would convince you to become a part of the discussion."

Does she expect the "patrons" to give her a list? Does she then expect to follow their directions?

• Let's see, I think I'd like to see a whimsical but bittersweet reflection on a communication lesson you learned from your father as a child. While fishing, preferably.

• More sports!

• Tell you what I'd like to read: A balls-out attack on the Public Relations Society of America--the more personal the better!

• Two words: Engagement, baby!

• Tell ya what I need right now: A how-to piece on getting caked-on, baked-on roast beef hash off a frying pan.

Asking readers to tell us what they want is worse than useless. It's generally disingenuous, too. It's an attempt to put your ball in their court.

Communicators should know better—and, judging from the stone silence her request for readers' suggestions has received from the 14,000-member IABC community—they do.