Great America, Part One:

Aunt Susy and I feel bad.

We've been having an argument for several years and it flared up yesterday over bloody marys. Not lost on me was the proximity of this particular round with the July Fourth holiday.

(For you foreigners, this holiday marks the birthday of the greatest country in the United States of America.)

Aunt Susy spends a lot of her time sitting in small chairs in big airplanes, ripping through America's skies for the purpose of selling fancy shoes to American department stores, for purchase by American women who can afford them. Aunt Susy is very good at what she does, and her good taste in shoes is equalled by a personal integrity that has made her deep and long connections that have allowed her to thrive for four decades in a young woman's business.

Because she sits in these small chairs often, she is known as a "frequent flyer," which makes her sound like Amelia Earhart. But all it means is she gets to go to the short line at the airport while jackhammer operators, school teachers, poets and other losers have to stand in the long line.

She feels she "deserves" this special treatment, because air travel is hard on a person and because without business travelers most airlines would have to shut down. I feel she doesn't deserve jack-squat, because business travelers wouldn't stop traveling on business if they had to wait in line with the rest of us. And besides, lots of us do stuff that is hard on a person too, but we don't get to cut in line.

Then comes my inevitable argument--Susy sells shoes; I sell words; she's got more shoes than I do; I've got more words than she does--about democracy, and how it doesn't matter whether the government is subverting equality or corporations are subverting equality, equality is being subverted.

Round and round we go in this monthly muddle.

The only common ground Aunt Susy and I can find is our mutual objection to a policy at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois. Those who can afford to pay an extra $30 bucks or so, a person can get a Gold Flash Pass and "enjoy a reduced wait time of up to 75%—allowing you to ride more rides with less wait."

That means they can cut in line, ushered by security personnel, in front of the jackhammer boys, the teachers and the poets, allowing their poor loser children to ride fewer rides with more wait.

"Great America can go to hell," I say, and I boycott the park.

Aunt Susy agrees in principle. But she admits that since the pass is available, she'd probably buy it anyway.

I wave my hand in her face. Aunt Susy feels bad. I feel bad. Everybody sitting at the breakfast table feels bad.

Thanks a lot, Great America.

***

Great America, Part Two:

I've planned a thorough enough July 4 week that this may well be my last post until next week. My week of celebration includes three rounds of golf, a bocce ball tournament and a boat ride down the Chicago River.

My week of summer happiness revolves around Wednesday night, when our Mexican neighbors will—if the last eight years are any indication at all—reenact the Alamo by gleefully firing tens of millions of alarmingly powerful fireworks, many of them in the general direction of our building. We will not fire back. We will sit on the porch and drink beer and laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and, when the bombs get especially close, applaud. And when we are drunk, we will go to bed and fall asleep, explosions still blasting continuously all around us. July Fourth is the most dependable day of joy and childlike laughter in my happy American life.

Happy--HAPPY!--Fourth of July.

It used to be when journalists tired of their trade they moved into corporate communications. Now things are going the other way: Corporate communications is moving into the tired trade of journalism.

Chicago Reader media critic Michael Miner reported last week on a controversy at Northwestern's legendary Medill School of Journalism, where the newish Integrated Marketing Communications program appears to be bleeding into the traditional journalism program.

Evidence A: Marketing jargon on the Medill home page, boasting of a journalism program with a mission of "ENGAGING the AUDIENCE with relevant, differentiated storytelling & messages."

Does that sound like something cut and pasted off a corporate communications strategy plan, or what?

Mary Nesbitt, Medill's associate dean for curriculum is also removing the term "news service" from the Medill News Service, which allows students to write what amount to wire stories for local papers. Why?

"We've been kind of casting around for something that gives the same idea, that doesn't have the trappings, the baggage of the old 'news service' idea .... I think 'news service' in the working newsrooms in the industry can have a pejorative aspect to it. It has the notion of 'We push it out to you.' And news customers are now able to pull news in from a variety of different sources. And we want to be one of them. .... I've gone through all kinds of discussions and brainstorming about a better name that's more active and more, sort of, expressed the richness of what it is our students are actually doing.

"It may be that we're talking about branding. It's not just what you communicate, but how you communicate what you do. The marketplace is so crowded with brands that you need a robust, consistent one that has meaning for whoever it is you're trying to reach."

Here's a hint, Mary: When you're struggling this desperately to find a new word for something as old as journalism, you are not in the process of branding, you're in the process of bullshitting.

And if Medill's 86-year-old brand has somehow lost its luster, that's a bigger problem than differentiated messages can solve. I don't think Medill has lost its luster among journalists.

I do think traditional journalism and journalists have lost their robustness as corporate owners use them to get rich. More on this—including my experience that it's now more rewarding write for many employee newsletters than it is to write for major newspapers—down the road.

Some bloggers say they use their blogs not to spout off their ideas, but rather as note-taking devices. I always want to tell those bloggers: How about, just take notes?

But an idea hit me over the weekend that I don't want to forget to use in writing and in conversation (most likely, over and over again) that I worry will get lost on my desk, which at the moment contains, in addition to the Permanent Two-Foot-High Stack of Shit To My Left, six legal pads full of notes for a heavy political story I'm working on, a book review I'm doing for Ragan, several newspapers and employee publications, three coffee cups, an empty glass of orange juice, two empty Diet Coke cans, one empty bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade and a list of resorts we can't afford for a trip we want to take to Mexico over New Year's.

So I'm blogging my note to self: Why am I made to feel like a pipsqueak moralist for simply trying to hold my country to the nonsense I was taught as a child in the 1970s about democracy, equality, honesty and compassion?

I do not believe I am a particularly virtuous person or even a truly insightful one. I believe if I'd been brought up in a country whose first-grade teachers told us it was right and proper for the government to chop down cherry trees and lie about it, I would have grown up spending a lot of wind defending the government's right to chop trees and lie.

But I was brought up here. I don't feel like a radical or a lefty or a patriotic conscience of my country. I feel like nothing more than a tape recorder of my upbringing. I also feel this makes me sound like a radical these days.

[I don't know exactly why. But I don't have to know exactly why. Because I'm just taking notes.]

My teacher wife grumps this morning: "These kids"--she's referring to twenty-something colleagues with whom she's arranging a carpool tour of innovative schools this morning--"don't say goodbye on the phone anymore!"

Typical conversation:

YOUNG TEACHER: Hey Cristie, what's your address again?

CRISTIE: We're near the corner of Ohio and Ashland. There's a median on Ashland so you have to go up to Grand and turn left and then turn left on Noble and then turn left on Ohio.

Suddenly she realizes she heard a click right between Ash and land. Having gotten all the information she needed, her colleague had snapped the phone shut.

Cristie says this happens all the

Got a note from Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book. I know Debbie. She's spoken at Ragan conferences and I've written about her blogging book, which is sensible.

But today she got on my nerves by including my ethically pure journalistic self on a group e-mail--not sure who all to--asking us directly to help out by commenting on a corporate blog she's working on with a client. It got on my nerves. Am I being some sort of a prig today, or does this get on your nerves too?

***

Hi everyone,

This is a shameless request. I'm working with GlaxoSmithKline on the
official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA-approved, OTC weight
loss product. You may have seen the TV ads.

While traffic to the blog is growing, readers seem shy about leaving Comments.

You can help jump start the two-way conversation! Take a peek at the
blog at http://www.alliconnect.com.

If you're inspired or provoked, leave a comment on any entry. No need
to say that you know me, of course.

It really is kind of neat that a Global 100 company is doing a blog
like this. It's not easy.

- D

--
Debbie Weil
site: http://www.debbieweil.com
blog: http://www.BlogWriteForCEOs.com
book: http://www.TheCorporateBloggingBook.com

I am 38 years old. I've been married for 13 years. I did not have a bachelor party, because I think bachelor parties are dumb.

But I have friends who are men and who consider bachelor parties important. Call me co-dependent, but what my friends consider important, I consider important.

The last of these fellows is getting married this fall, thank God. (And I don't care about divorces; I've made a public policy of "only one bachelor party per caveman friend.")

I leave tomorrow morning for Put-In Bay, and in case this little Debbie Weil thing becomes what bloggers preciously call a "kerfuffle"--something she and I probably hope with equal fervor doesn't happen--here's where I'll be, according to the bachelor himself:

"Our plan is to get beer and booze set up at the various lodging places [Friday]. We should be downtown no later than 5 PM, and will likely be found at Frosty's or the Roundhouse. If you arrive on Friday and can't find us there, call me on my cell ... I will do my best to be aware of my surroundings enough to tell you where to go.

"If you are planning on arriving on Saturday, based on past experience, I would venture to guess that we will begin around 10:30-11:00 at Frosty's and progress from there to a variation of the Roundhouse, Beer Barrel, Mr. Ed's and/or one or more of the pool bars during the day. If you arrive in the evening, you will probably not be recognized by any of us, and you will probably have a much more precise way of talking and walking than us. Since your powers of perception, speech and locomotion will be superhuman by comparison, I suggest you find us, most likely at the Boat House, Crescent or Round House (or feeding our faces at the Chicken patio). I would discourage the use of phones since no one will be able to operate such complex equipment."

All I have to do is get through this one, and I'm in the clear. Wish me luck, my Shadesy friends. And if you happen to be near the Beer Barrel or Mr. Ed's, stop by.

Lots of perspectives came out of the Weil dust-up--about the ethics of seeding blogs, posting personal e-mail in the blogosphere (and what constitutes personal e-mail) and the viability of corporate blogs--but one truth emerges:

There are only three topics in the blogosphere (at least in our corner of it) that are interesting enough to leap from one blog discussion to many: blogs, bloggers and blogging.

This was the case three or four years ago, when blogging first emerged in the communication sphere, and that was understandable. That it's still the case today is a little bit discouraging.

But: Onward.

Great corporate cultures: They are as boring as they are rare. I've actually fallen asleep while talking about visionary leaders, supportive managers and engaged employees.

The other day on the golf course it occurred to me that it might be more fun to talk about great cultures by imagining the worst cultures, absolutely packed with the most incompetent, boorish morons we've ever met, in every discipline.

I'd recently been paired up at a muni course with a private detective who offered me his card and his "security" services after I'd spent the entire nine holes finding his ball for him, often in the middle of the fairway.

But he's not ass clown who inspired this notion of mine. It was another unplanned golf partner, a Marketing Executive whose very posture suggested egomaniac-with-an-inferiority-complex.

It was a long afternoon.

Over a beer afterwards--the goof insisted we bet on the game and when I beat him, he discovered he had no cash so, feeling bad for the poor bastard, I offered to buy him a concilliatory beer--he asked me for some advice.

He had gathered that I was a writer--I had gathered that he was the greatest marketer in the history of the world, indeed the only marketer in the Northern Hemisphere who understood "strategy"--and he asked me for some advice ("if you don't mind").

He said he wanted to write a regular column in Crain's Chicago Business, on marketing. He asked me how to approach the editor.

I advised him that it is difficult even for the world's greatest marketer to get a magazine to agree to a regular column. (For this, I told him, you have to be the world's most famous marketer, and he and his little suburban firm were unknown to everybody but the garage-door installers he cold-calls every day.)

I suggested he create a blog—"oh great, now I just have to figure out how to create a blog!"—and write it for a year or so to build up a series of sample columns and a following, which he could then present as a package to Crain's.

"That's a real good idea," he told me before his excitement turned to puzzlement. "But how in the world would I get anybody to read it?"

And so began my latest effort: To define a good corporate culture by pulling together the worst company imaginable--one executive, manager, and employee at the time.

We've already got a marketing VP and a security guard.

Readers—recruiting from real life—help me out, and maybe we'll create a kind of worst-case wiki, or even a business best-seller we'll call, Built to Collapse.

The other day I missed my flight coming back from Cleveland. It was a pleasure.

The Southwest Airlines ticket-counter employee was crushed as she said, "We gave your seat away five minutes ago!"

I was calm, worn beyond worry from the weekend and the 120-mile motorcycle trip that got me here so late. This was the last flight of the evening. I was staying over until Monday.

Then the ticket-counter woman looked into flights for Monday and discovered the first available was 3:35. I thought she was going to cry. She immediately got a co-worker involved--they said I was a "good sport"--and they furiously typed on their computers, trying to see if there was a short standby list on any of the earlier flights.

They laughed and kidded and joked with me the whole time, and though their efforts were futile, they handed me a boarding pass for the 3:35 and I fairly skipped out of the airport, reassured in my belief that Southwest Airlines is the standard by which all good cultures should be judged.

(Contrast this experience with what it would have been like at another airline. Flat tone: "We gave away your seat five minutes ago." Flat tone: "There's nothing tomorrow until 3:35." Flat tone: "No, there's nothing I can do." Same result, totally different feeling.)

I used to chide Southwest for its saccharine communications ("Luv!") and was a disbeliever that a company could be so good. But I've become a believer that Southest has everything right:

1. A charismatic, wise and colorful founder whose humanity is so strong it still radiates throughout the organization and provides a north star for the culture. Any executive, manager or employee can ask and answer the question, "What would Herb do?"

2. A sensible business model that says, "We'll do what we do well. We will not use our size and brand strength to try to do what we do not do well for short-term gain." And a management that follows it.

3. A culture that makes people feel comfortable being themselves (see Herb, above) and part of something special. Despite the grinding, routine nature of their industry, Southwest people are proud to say, "I work at Southwest." This used to be true of many companies. Now, just a handful.

4. A greater social calling than keeping investors happy. "You are free to move about the country." Southwest people think of themselves as nothing short of enablers of democracy.

To me, that's the whole enchilada. Those four factors. Shadesters, how do your companies stack up against The Perfect Company? And are they moving in the right direction on these criteria, or the wrong direction?

I'm starting to get self-conscious about this: I'm going on another vacation.

Leaving Saturday for a family vacation in Colorado. Boulder, Colo., to be exact--where two of my sisters live (the third is in Denver).

I love my family--and I like my family--but I always visit them on their home turf with some trepidation. In Boulder, a man smoking a cigarette on a sidewalk is the equivalent of a heroin addict shooting up in a bookstore in Chicago, a fat person is a leper and and the only old people are on their backs in the cemetery.

I'm not old yet, I'm thin because I've been smoking lately and I'll go on the patch while I'm there to avoid the heroin thing.

But that won't be enough: My Boulder family has a different criteria for mental and physical health than I do.

For instance, they think it's healthy to eat well, whereas I think it's healthy to stay up drinking and talking until it is light out.

They think it's healthy to work on one's spirituality. I think it's healthy to work on one's car.

They think the mountain air is healthy. That's funny: The mountain air makes my lips crack and my voice hoarse.

They think it's healthy to take a nature hike together. I think it's healthy to try to embarrass a family member by beating his brains out on the golf course.

We usually find a way to meet in the middle. But getting there is sometimes ... well ... rocky.

(I may blog from there; will be on the computer most mornings; maybe I'll "live blog" the family negotiations.)

It's like trying to write in a dark alley, while fending off watch salesmen, drug pushers and thieves.

I always get a lot of spam—conventional spam filters don't work, because I get (and need) a lot of legitimate mail from strangers (letters to the editor and the like)—and normally I'm fine with deleting the crap.

But lately it's been flowing out of a firehose. In the last two days, here are some of the subject lines:

***

Viagara is that helping hand in bed!

Get zaxnax here! [sic]

you can work from any point of the world

Relax and take the time

Replica watches, bags, pens

Curso Terapia Celular y Bilogica

No more embarrassment!

Be confident and stand tall

***

That's just a tiny fraction, and those are the clean ones!

Is there a spam filter that would keep some of that stuff out while letting all the letters-to-the-editor, conference-speaker proposals and offers to write the next cover story for The New Yorker in?

In exchange for a helpful answer, I'll trade a 55-gallon drum full of Cialis.

If there's a situational pleasure greater than peacefully reading the Sunday New York Times in a cozy airplane seat on the way home from a heavy family vacation with your wife asleep and your daughter watching Winnie the Pooh on the DVD player, I have not yet found it.

Of course, a few sections in, I found something to get into high dudgeon about. An article about the evolution of emoticons said more than half of people over 30 surveyed by Yahoo! said they use these e-banalities every day. (I believe the people under 30 use emoticons every minute.)

That much is fine with me. E-mail is a cold medium (so we always hear) and misunderstandings that never happened in hand- or typewritten letters happen all the time on e-mail. Most people are not equipped with the writing ability--the writing ear--to convey warmth in words and sentence structure. So they resort to :).

But lately I've noticed that professional writers I correspond with are using emoticons in e-mails. Why? "In a perfect world, we would have time to compose e-mails that made it clear thorugh our language that we are being cheerful and friendly, but we're doing these things hundreds of times a day under pressure," suggested Will Schwalbe in the Times piece. He's the author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.

I wonder if Schwalbe uses emoticons in his own correspondence. :(

I've used emoticons less than a dozen times in my entire life--usually in emergency situations when I truly do not have time to make my words convey my intended tone and when I have absolutely no respect for the intellect of the recipient.

To me, a writer who uses emoticons is like an artist who scrawls above his still-life, "Check out these apples and pears."

To writers who use emoticons in any but the most desperate situations, I ask: Have you no professional pride?

If the communication business had its own constitution, on what could all the framers manage to agree?

That was the question I asked in a July 16 Ragan Report column, which I'm running here at the behest of Mike Zimet, who's heading up IABC's latest "advocacy" push, which inspired me to write this.

Can we all agree on the items below? Are there anything we should add?

***

Communicators believe that communication is a moral act. That is, the business is not about using words and images to mislead, but rather to get across truth—the truth about our organizations, the truth about our audiences, the truth about whatever it is we are communicating about.

Communicators believe that words are meant to bond people in understanding. Though it may be true that no amount of clever words can get lions to sleep with lambs, words can help lions and lambs understand where one another is coming from, and that is our particular purpose on this planet.

Communicators know that communication is mysterious. Getting what’s in our head into your head is not a simple or quantifiable process. We don’t know fully how it works, we don’t always know that it has worked. Strunk & White say in the Elements of Style, "When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair." George Bernard Shaw said, “The danger in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." Amen.

Communicators believe that people are much more similar than they are different. This the reason communication works at all.

Communicators acknowledge that communication is not everything—it is only what we happen to be good at. A communicator who accuses everyone else in the organization of “not getting it” or a communicator who believes communication is the solution to all the world’s problems is a communicator who has broken from reality. Putting a writer in charge of an engineering company or an airline would be a bad idea. We are tribal storytellers. We must respect the hunters and the gatherers whose stories we tell.

Communicators believe that most people want to be honest. Even liars and crooks have private moments when they wish they could come clean and go straight. To the extent that we can help them find a way to do that, we should be prepared.

Communicators know that most institutions do not want to be honest. If institutions were living things, they would be able to explain carefully to the communicator, “In most instances, I believe there is more to lose by sharing information and positing ideas and asking for feedback than there is to gain. I realize that many of the people who work within me feel otherwise. But they are people, and I am an institution and we often have divergent interests. They want to live and thrive and be loved and be happy. I want only to survive. They have their influence, and I have mine.”

Communicators acknowledge the importance of outsiders and insiders. Ragan founder Larry Ragan once wrote a prayer asking God to help insiders appreciate the need for critics of the corporation, of the government, of the church. He also asked God for outsiders to appreciate the work insiders do to keep these institutions running and to improve them, even if by baby steps. Communicators, whether they write political blogs or work for unions or work for General Motors, should be the keepers of this prayer.

Communicators know that humor is their best tool on most days, and that deadly seriousness and absolute earnestness should be reserved for those rare deadly and absolute occasions that call for them.

Communicators know that communication is no more healthy (or interesting or honest) than the person or institution doing the communicating. There are no case studies of a corporate communicator single-handedly transforming a corporate culture, just as there are no case studies of a person talking himself into being funny.

Communicators know most communication happens by accident—a furrow of the brow, a late arrival to a meeting, an omission of someone’s name, an over-aggressive handshake an unconscious sigh. Even if people pretend to believe our words, they notice when our bodies betray us.

Communicators believe that their unique role as a go-between among the organization and its constituencies gives them an occasional reason to speak as a “corporate conscience.” But they do not make the accidental leap to the further conclusion that their role makes them the only corporate conscience.

Communication is an old art. Anyone who promises to revolutionize it, simplify it or create a streamlined “process” for it is probably trying to fool you.