Which department do you hate dealing with the most? And why? Me, I hate dealing with IT the most. Sure, I've met some really cool IT people who take care of business quickly and efficiently.

But more often than not, the IT people I run into act as if everything they do is so complicated and will take up so much time. They're always talking about 'building' this, and 'constructing' that . . . as if they were real 'architects' and not 'information' architects.

One IT guy I had to work with was so full of himself and his expertise that it took him longer to build one section of the intranet than it took Daniel Burnham to design and build half of downtown Chicago.

But what about you? What department do you hate dealing with? Human Resources? I feel your pain there. Accounting? Yuck. Marketing? Sales? Legal? They all have their bad points. Let me hear from you.

What do CEOs have in common with cult leaders and serial killers? Well, quite a bit, actually, if you believe a survey by a company calling itself Jericho Communications.

As I wrote in a recent Ragan Report front page, Jericho sent a survey to the CEOs of all the Fortune 1000 companies, and received 208 responses. Here are some of the key findings of the survey:

� When asked what motivates them the most, 43 percent of the executives said 'fear.' Second place, with 22 percent, was 'power.' Only 7 percent (7!) said 'wealth.' Surprisingly, not one said 'The private jet, clothes allowance, expense account, and other perks that allow me and my family to live like the royal family of Saudi Arabia.' Maybe there wasn't space on the survey for a write-in answer.

� Most CEOs were closer to their mothers than their fathers. 37 percent said their mom was their idol, while only 18 percent said it was their father. Nobody admitted that they wanted to actually kill their father and sleep with their mother . . . but again, there may not have been any space for write-ins.

� More than half of the CEOs said they were unpopular in grade school. Only 4 percent said they were popular. That one we believe.

� Their favorite fictional leader is Captain James T. Kirk. That's right, the dude from Star Trek.

� When asked for their most inspirational book, the majority listed The Bible. A close second was Moby Dick. A follow-up question revealed that 100 percent of the CEOs were unaware that at the end of Moby Dick, the whale wins.

So there you have it, a nice little snapshot of your average CEO. But there's only one problem. It's all nonsense. When you add up all those qualities, here's what you get:

A man who lives in fear while thirsting after power; a man who was tormented by schoolyard bullies in grade school; a mamma's boy who idolizes his mother; a man who lives in a fantasy world; and a religious zealot who looks to the Bible for inspiration.

I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound like any CEO I've ever met. In fact, it sounds like a psychopath. It sounds like a weird combination of Hannibal Lecter, David Koresh, Jeffrey Dahmer and Jim Jones.

Or John Ashcroft.

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It's dark in there

Speaking of CEOs, the summer issue of The Public Relations Strategist is devoted to getting 'Inside the Mind of the CEO.' There are some excellent articles in it, but I'm always a little leery when someone tries to 'get inside the mind' of a large group of people.

I mean, not all CEOs think the same, do they? They all worry about profits, sure. They all worry about the competition, sure. But for every one thing they have in common, there are at least 10 differences, I would think. Some worry about employees, some see employees as a necessary evil, for example.

I'm sure if you went 'inside the mind' of Jack Welch, it would be a vastly different place than the mind of, say, Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines. And when Ken Lay was running Enron, the inside of his mind was probably a tad bit different than Michael Eisner's gray matter.

And we certainly hope that the inside of Barry Diller's mind works differently than the mind of HP CEO Carly Fiorina . . . or we might have another New Jersey Governor-like speech looming on the horizon.

Industries are different, people are different, companies are different. There is no 'one mind' of a CEO, just as there is no 'one mind' of an engineer, an accountant, a salesperson, or an employee communicator.

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When employees are truly insane

I found this sentence in an employee publication about seven minutes ago:

'Dirty Harry is 40 years old and as large as a softball. He's by far the most ornery. Roswell has red eyes and looks like an alien. Lock-n-Load is very curious and outgoing.'

No, it's not a colorful description of the company's Board of Directors. It's a story about a woman who collects hermit crabs. Yes, hermit crabs. And yes, it's in the employee publication.

Here's the lead: 'If Laura Whilenger seems a little crabby at times, there's a reason. The legal administrative assistant lives with 130 hermit crabs. Her two children and husband call her the Crab Diva.'

Sure they do. To her face, maybe. But we'll bet dollars to donuts that 'fruitcake,' 'freakazoid,' and 'loony bird' come up a lot more than 'crab Diva.'

Can you imagine the conversations that go on in this home?

'Excuse me, crab Diva? Roswell pooped in the kitchen sink again.'

'Hey, crab Diva, Lock-n-load just took another chunk out of little Timmy's leg.'

'Um, crab Diva, when you finish feeding Dirty Harry, could you maybe help out with the laundry? They're starting to call me Stinky Pete down at work.'

I don't know what's scarier: that a woman shares her home with 130 oversized cockroaches with claws . . . or that this kind of story still appears in employee publications.

We have a lot of fun with these kinds of stories in Corporate Writer & Editor, where I write a regular column called the C.R.A.P Awards.

Got an example you'd like to send me? Drop me a line at steve@crescenzocommunications.com.

Ragan lets me write this blog (God knows why), but in return I have to occasionally shill for Ragan products. It’s a nice arrangement, but we have an agreement that I won’t promote anything I wouldn’t use myself. So this week’s not-so-subtle advertisement is for Boodles Gin—a clean, crisp English gin that is best when it is served icy cold, straight up, with a twist of lemon.

Just kidding. This week, we’re plugging Ragan’s exciting, wonderful, terrific, life-changing seminar, "Strategic Employee Communication Vehicles," which still has four cities left on its five-city tour: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York and Atlanta. For actual dates and hotels, CLICK HERE. I can say without reservation that the instructor of this seminar is one of the smartest people in the history of the planet. I can say that because I am the instructor of the seminar, and my mother tells me how smart I am almost every single day.

So come on out! It’s two days of free booze, great food, lots of fun, and tons of learning.

I lied about the booze and food. But there will be coffee and bagels in the morning, and I usually try to sneak around the hotel to other meetings and steal some cookies for the afternoon.

But there WILL be lots of fun and tons of learning. That much I can guarantee. So check out the seminar program and come out and join the fun! Or call up my friend Diane "Bulldog" Tillman, at 800.493.4867, ext. 4250, and tell her Steve sent you. If she’s says "Steve who?" I’m in a lot more trouble than I thought.

Over the years, I've probably read close to 100,000 employee publications. And I've seen a lot of unusual corporate titles and weird job descriptions.

But the one I found a minute ago might take the cake. I found it in a research laboratory's employee newsletter. Here is the headline:

Concerns Coordinator welcomes employee suggestions

Here's the lead:

'Parking. Overhead costs. Benefits changes. Although she says she's 'really just getting started' with the assignment, ORNL Concerns Programs Coordinator Cindy Kasak can readily recite a litany of issues raised by lab staff members so far in 2004.'

I bet she can!! I've heard of corporate ombudsmen . . .but this is a step beyond that. Concerns Coordinator? Ha! This woman is a professional shit catcher! She catches do-do for a living! Her actual job is to listen to thousands of petty-ass complaints day in and day out.

A picture of the woman comes with the article, and you can tell just from her photo that this is a woman on the edge. She's gamely trying to smile, but she looks like she's passing a kidney stone.

You can see she's about to snap. You can almost hear what is going on in her mind:

'Go ahead, ask me about the pot hole, you son of a bitch. Go ahead, ask me again about the pot hole. Go ahead. One more time. Just one more. Ask me again about the pot hole and I will bury you in it.'

The real scary part of the story comes in the second paragraph. Here it is:

'Kasak, who was named to the position in January, has received nearly 50 'official' concerns, with many related to facilities and parking, relationships with supervisors and coworkers, staffing processes, and changes to the employee benefits program.'

That makes it sound as if there are 'official' concerns and 'unofficial' concerns . . . but nowhere in the article does it talk about what makes a concern 'unofficial.' I want to hear more about that.

If Kasak is getting 50 official concerns a month, I bet she's getting at least 250 'unofficial' concerns. We can only imagine what those are like:

'My cube-mate stinks like hermit crabs all the time. What am I supposed to do?'

'I work next to the CEO, and he's constantly screaming out passages from the Bible and crying on the phone to his mommy. What am I supposed to do?'

We anxiously look forward to the publication's follow-up story on this topic next month:

Concerns Coordinator kills four, wounds seven

'In a dramatic turn of events, former Concerns Coordinator Cindy Kasak reportedly stormed into the cafeteria on Friday with what police say was a 12-gauge shotgun, and opened fire, killing four of her fellow employees before turning the gun on herself.

According to eyewitnesses, Kasak reportedly kept shouting, 'What are your concerns now, you whiny little bitches!?!?!? What are your concerns now!?!?!'

Communicators, how much confidence do you have in the people and machines that screen carry-on luggage at the airports? When you travel on business, do you feel fairly confident that the security system can at least keep things like swords and hatchets off your plane?

Well . . . think again. Wait until you hear this story.

I was flying to Raleigh, North Carolina this week, to do some work with Golden Corral, a restaurant company that has franchises all across North America. Since I was only spending one night, I didn't check any bags. I had my briefcase, and a backpack for my clothes.

At O'Hare, I went through the security gate no problem. Nobody gave me a second look, and both of my bags skated through the metal detector. Coming home, it wasn't that easy. Either the machine or the guy running it didn't like something in my backpack, so they stopped it for a more comprehensive check.

'We need to go through this,' one of the security guards said.

Now, you have to understand, I'm petrified of flying. I usually have to wash down a Xanax with two or three martinis before I'll even go online to book a flight, let alone actually get on one of those death carriages.

So I never object to extra security. If they wanted to strip-search me every time I flew anywhere, that would be fine with me. It might not be fine with the people around me . . . but I can't worry about them, can I? After all, they may be terrorists.

'Hey, do whatever you need to do,' I said to the guy. 'Just keep us safe, OK?' (Actually, I'd already done the whole Xanax/martini thing at this point, so it probably sounded more like, 'Jesh keep ess safe, hokay?')

So the man put on the rubber gloves, and started digging through all the dirty clothes in my backpack. After about five minutes of that, he decided to dump everything out. He put all my clothes in one bin, and the now-empty backpack in another bin, and ran them both through the machine again.

This time, they both passed with flying colors. When I got home, I unpacked the backpack myself. And there, in the bottom, was a six-inch, razor-sharp steak knife. Not a folding knife that the security people might have confused with one of those trick-shop, switchblade combs. This was an actual steak knife, with a huge, serrated-edge blade.

Truth be told, it was (I'm not making this up) one of those 'Miracle Blade' knives they sell on TV. You know, the ones that can cut through metal. It is practically a bayonet.

I had stuck it in there for a picnic with my son, because it can cut the hell out of apples and cheese�to say nothing of a pilot's throat. Then I obviously forgot about it.

I'm still trying to figure out which is scarier: that O'Hare�the busiest airport in the world�missed the knife completely, or that the folks in Raleigh actually ran the backpack through with just the knife in it and still missed it.

Think about that: It was just the backpack . . . and a huge knife. Nothing else. Just the two of them. And they went through a metal detector and past a pair of human eyes that were specifically looking for something suspicious.

And they missed it. Xanax, anyone?

Do you deal with Web content at all�either on an external Web site, or an intranet?

If you do, you should consider coming to Ragan's annual Web Content Management Conference, in Chicago November 30-December 2. Web Content Report Editor Nina Shariff spends the entire year covering the 'Web Content' beat�tracking down the hottest trends, the most talented people and the latest technology. Then, she brings the best and the brightest people to Chicago for the conference.

She's even letting me do a session�despite the fact that I'm not the best or the brightest. I think it's because I live in Chicago and she doesn't have to pay my travel expenses.

I'll be doing the luncheon keynote, 'Five Years of Web Mistakes,'�my version of 'Web Pages That Suck.' It'll be a fun look at what not to do on your intranet or Web site. We'll have lots of fun with 'flash designers' and other people who are ruining the Internet.

So come on out and join Web guru Gerry McGovern and others from American University, The Mayo Clinic and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services at The Fairmont Hotel in Chicago. It'll be fun.

Check out the brochure, or call my pal Janice Lesh, at 1-800-493-4867, ext. 4210, to see if she'll give you any last-minute deals.

What is the most popular communication vehicle at your company? I know companies where the intranet would take that top honor, and I know just as many companies�probably more, actually�where the intranet is nothing more than a 'dead zone' where old corporate manuals go to die.

I also know companies where employees love an e-mail newsletter more than anything else�despite the fact that they get too much e-mail as it is. Done properly, I know that a good e-mail newsletter can be wildly popular. I also know that because of the e-mail rage that is sweeping across corporate America, hundreds of corporate e-mail newsletters go unopened.

Or, at your company, is print still king? That is still the case at many organizations I visit. Employees use the intranet for work applications; they use e-mail to communicate job-specific information with colleagues; but they still rely on the print publication for overall corporate communication.

Or is it none of the above? Maybe video rules the roost at your company. Or voice mail. Or posters, even. Regardless, I'd love to hear from you. What floats your employees' boats, when it comes to vehicles? Let's get a discussion going.

When employee communication really breaks down

I just finished up my 'Strategic Employee Communication Vehicles' seminar in San Francisco. It was a fantastic group.

(Of course, since I told everyone there to check out this blog, which means they are probably reading this, I would say they were a fantastic group even if they were a bunch of bed wetters and dunderheads; but they really were a great group: lively, interactive and not easily offended�which is always sort of a necessary trait at my seminars).

But, that said, it was a weird seminar�because all the hotel workers were on strike. And it wasn't one of those timid sort of strikes, where two or three people sit on folding chairs and occasionally hoist a sign up into the air without even getting their asses out of the chairs.

This was a real strike. These people had an organized picket line, megaphones, lots of cool chants (don't check in . . . check OUT . . . don't check in . . . check OUT), tons of signs ('Scabs are the Devil's best friend') . . . and they were pissed. It was a little nerve-wracking, because you literally had to cross the picket line every time you entered the hotel.

And there was something very surreal and wrong about crossing a picket line to teach a seminar on employee communications. I felt lousy. I felt like a scab. I felt a bit like a phony and a hypocrite, talking about how important the employee audience is, while contributing to the revenue of a hotel that obviously didn't agree with me.

I know . . . I know . . .labor issues are complicated. For all I know, the strikers were dead wrong. Maybe they were asking for too much. Maybe the hotel did everything they possibly could to avert a strike.

But still . . . employee communication seminars, as a rule, should probably not take place at hotels where the employees are striking.

The saddest part of the whole thing for me was when I left, Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m. The main picket line in front of the hotel was still going strong even at that early hour, doing their best to whack their signs together and make loud noises and keep the hotel guests awake throughout the night.

But the cab line to the airport was out a different door, a side door, so that's where I went. And at that entrance, there was only one striker, an older Latino man, sitting on a bucket, with his sign leaning on the ground.

When I came out, he looked up at me, and our eyes locked. I thought he was going to stand, but he didn't bother. He just looked at me for a couple of seconds, and then hung his head back down and looked at the ground again.

The bellman who whistled for a cab said to me:

'Sorry about all the inconvenience, sir.'

'Don't worry about it,' I said. 'How's it going to be resolved?'

'It's not,' said the bellman. 'They're just not going to get what they want. This may drag into next year, but there's no way they can win.'

My last memory of San Francisco was that older Latino man, sitting on his strike bucket, staring at the ground, at 5:30 in the morning, the entire day ahead of him.

Favorite term for the home office?

One of the best things about doing communication seminars for a living is hearing all the cool terms and phrases people have for stuff. The other day in San Francisco, someone called his intranet a 'dead zone.' I'd never heard that before.

And I just heard a cool new term for what people in the field branches call the corporate office. I was already familiar with 'the ivory tower' . . . but this person had a better one.

She was asking a question about how to get people from the field to care about overall corporate news, and she said:

'Our problem is that people in the branches don't like the people in the mother ship, and don't really care what goes on there!'

Excellent!! Mother Ship!! Anyone else got any other terms for the corporate office?

Collecting good PR quotes

My friend Laurel, a communicator up in Tacoma, Washington, sent me this note a couple of minutes ago.

'Steve�we just got some new, giganto computer monitors in our deptartment, so I had to clear off all my clippings & post-its from the old monitor. I ran across three PR quotes that you might like.'

Here they are:

"What is it you call yourself�public relations? Well it sounds like something pretty dirty to me!" Bette Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte

"Name your fiction and I'll endorse it." from Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado

"Go ugly early." Laurel's boss, in a staff meeting long ago, re: getting bad news about oneself out there before someone beats you to it.

Readers, do you have any favorite communication-related quotes? Share them here, and maybe we can collect them into a collection, or whatever.

Send me a political e-mail . . . and die

I have to get something off my chest:

STOP SENDING ME POLITICAL E-MAILS!!!!!!!!!

Thanks . . . I feel so much better already. Has anyone else noticed that this year, the election is causing many, many people�from both sides of the political dung pile�to 'get involved' because they think the election is so important?

That's fine. Nothing wrong with a concerned citizenry.

But, in the old days, in order to 'get involved,' you had to really 'get involved.' You had to talk to people. You had to knock on doors. You had to pass out flyers, or make phone calls.

These days, you can just click a button and irritate 1,000 of your closest friends with your particular political propaganda. And, after forwarding this article or that article or this link or that link, you can sit back, smug and self-satisfied that you have done 'your part' to tilt the upcoming election in the proper direction.

I agree that this is an important election. The most important one in my lifetime. I know who I am going to vote for. And I, too, would like to be 'involved.' But I'm not going to irritate my friends and colleagues and junk up their inbox just so I can feel good about my 'commitment.'

And psssssssstttttt . . . . here's a little something none of the amateur political flacks want to admit. For every anti-Bush piece that is 'eye opening,' there is an anti-Kerry thing that 'everybody should read.' I know . . . because I'm getting all of them.

If you've waited this long to make your decision, and you're going to base that decision on second-hand news culled from the Internet . . . then do everybody a favor and stay home next Tuesday. You don't deserve to vote.

And while we're on the subject . . .
Since we're briefly talking politics, was anyone else as irritated as I was by the constant emphasis on, and over-analysis of, 'body language' during the presidential debates? GOD, did that start to annoy the holy living hell out of me.

I got so sick of reading things like, 'When John Kerry mentioned Weapons of Mass Destruction,' Bush's eyebrow shifted up one quarter of an inch and he shifted his weight to his left foot. That obviously means he gussied up the CIA intelligence and fabricated the report so that he could invade Iraq and finish the job his dad didn't do, and thereby be a better man than his dad, and thereby finally settle this Oedipus complex that has been raging through his system since he got sober and realized he was in love with his mother.'

I'm from Chicago. We don't do subtle body language in this town. We let it all hang out.

When Iron Mike Ditka was coaching the Chicago Bears, a fan once yelled something derogatory at Ditka as he was leaving the field. Ditka used a little body language to respond: He grabbed his own crotch, gave the man the finger and spit at him. Three body language insults in one bold move.

And there's a wonderful picture of that exact moment, if you don't believe me. My friend has it hanging in his basement.

That, friends and neighbors, is body language that means something. If Bush or Kerry were to do something like that, we might have something to talk about.

Forget Dante . . . there are really only two levels of hell

When you teach employee communication seminars for a living, as I do, you come to realize that there are two levels of Hell at most corporations.

There is the first level—which is what people are willing to talk about in the actual seminar, in front of their peers. Level One has to do with overblown approval processes, asinine middle managers, goose-stepping lawyers who thwart communications at every turn, designers who never read the text, and IT people who treat the intranet as their own personal playground.

And then there’s the second level of hell. This is the stuff people don’t talk about at the seminar, because they’re too embarrassed to bring it up, or they’re afraid nobody will believe them, or they have been too emotionally damaged by what happened to them to relive it in front of 60 other people.

I know about the existence of this second level of hell because I drink. And, after a seminar is over, I almost always try to round up a group of attendees to have drinks in the hotel bar.

And after that first martini or glass of wine, tongues start to loosen. The real stories start to come out. The Level Two stories . . . the ones I would have a hard time believing if the communicator wasn’t sitting right in front of me telling the story.

I recently finished the Washington DC and New York seminars . . . and heard some good Level Two stories from both. Check this space in the next couple of days, and I’ll share some of them with you. Here’s the first.

A large company was preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary (I would tell you the name of the company, but I promised the communicator who told me this story after many drinks that I would keep it anonymous. But trust me: you’ve heard of this company).

The CEO of this organization decided to throw a massive party at corporate headquarters to celebrate the corporate centennial.

But . . . first he wanted to make sure employees would like that sort of thing. So he had the communications person send a company wide e-mail suggesting the idea of having a big celebration to gauge employee interest.

Well, the idea was a big hit. “The employees were really into the idea,” the communicator told me. “We got tons of e-mails back about what a great idea this was.”

The only problem? The CEO changed his mind. He decided he didn’t want to spend that much money on a party.

So he called the communicator in and told her . . . “never mind.”

The communicator, of course, was stuck. She told the CEO, “But all these employees were so enthusiastic about it, and now they’re all worked up. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell them we canceled the event due to a lack of employee interest,” was the CEO’s response.

Welcome to Communication Hell, Level Two: Where the communication assignment is to tell thousands of employees who are enthusiastic about an event that the event has been canceled due to a lack of enthusiasm.

More Level Two stories to come . . . .