Battling the tall, white, all-male blogosphere

I just read an interesting post on Alan Jenkins's communications blog, Desirable Roasted Coffee.

Jenkins—a very witty, funny writer—talks about a blogger calling herself 'Halley Suitt.' Suitt wants to bring diversity to the blogosphere. She seems to feel that blogs—like everything else in the world, I'm sure Suitt would say, if given the chance—is run by white males.

To solve the problem, Suitt wants bloggers to accept her 'Ten New Voices' challenge, and link to 10 new blogs. But not just any blogs. Oh, no. They have to be a certain kind of blog. Written by a certain kind of person.

Here are Suitt's rules, word for word, for which bloggers you're allowed to link to:

'1. They can't be male if they are white;

2. You must have five women and five men;

3. You must have at least three non-Americans.

If I missed anything, please let me know.'

Let you know if you missed anything? Where the hell to begin, Halley?

First, what if a blogger is white and male . . . but he's gay? Sorry . . . he doesn't make the cut in Suitt's version of a diverse blogosphere. You only get two strikes in her world, and white, male homosexuals don't get in.

And what about midgets? Why is it that in all the conversations about 'diversity,' you never hear anything about midgets?

You think midgets don't have a diverse point of view in life? You bet your tall ass they do. I've talked to plenty of midgets in my life. They have a lot to say. To exclude them from the New Diverse Order of the Blogosphere, as decreed by Diversity Queen Halley Suitt, would be an outrage of gigantic proportions, no slight intended.

In the 'Corporate Diversity' world, you always hear people talking about how our 'employee base needs to match our customer base.' The idea being that you can relate better to your customers if you have a diverse workforce, right?

Well . . . let's say you have a midget customer. Do you really think that if you send out a midget salesperson to deal with that customer, he's not going to close the deal? Midget to midget? Stamp that sale closed, baby.

But we never hear about midgets in the corporate diversity training programs, either.

In fact, I would say that if you have ten new voices in your new blog reading list, at least two of them should be midgets. Now, if you want to double up on your diversity in order to save room on your list, that's up to you. If you want to have a gay midget, or a midget of color, that's cool.

But I would say two midgets, minimum.

And shame on Ms. Halley for slighting them.

Get employees hooked on the intranet early

I've been doing some work with McDonalds out at Hamburger University lately . . . training their intranet content providers how to write for the screen. It's been a great experience, because McDonalds is one of those professional companies where everything is top-notch—the facilities, the technology, the catered food for training sessions, everything is top-notch. Just a nice experience.

And while I was out there this past Wednesday, I stumbled across a wonderful idea that I think communicators should think about.

The communications folks at McDonalds make sure that for every new-employee orientation program, part of the time is devoted to training on the intranet. In other words, as people are learning about their new organization, they get to spend an hour on the intranet, surfing around, learning the navigation, and seeing what's available.

So before they ever start actually working, they are already familiar with what the intranet has to offer.

Now, maybe I'm a rube and everybody is doing this. But I've never heard of it before, and I think it would solve so many problems associated with communicating via the intranet.

Is anyone else doing this? I know plenty of organizations that go around offering to train people on the intranet . . . but making it a mandatory part of employee orientation is better than that, even.

We have a Corporate Hallucinations Code Red. A member is down and needs our help.

Here's the message I got from her:

'Emergency! My CEO wants me to flesh out a more "interesting" bio on him for some business packs he's sending out. Have you seen good CEO profiles that I could show him as examples? Any advice?'

I have never seen a CEO Biography . . . just loads of lousy CEO columns.

Can anyone help? The blog never leaves a communicator behind.

I love it when I come across good writing when I least expect it. And I especially love it when the writing is on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

It happened today. I was just about finished with my Chicago Sun Times. I'd read my favorite columnists, the news about the former Nazi just elected to be the next Pope, the local news about the current Nazi running the city of Chicago, and the Cubs box score.

I was about to toss the paper away when this headline caught my eye:

'Martini imitators should put a cork in it.'

Now, I've been complaining about the bastardization of martinis for quite some time now. How it's hard to even find a decent gin martini mixed in among the Appletinis and Chocotinis and Cosmolinis and Puckertinis that the Yuppie scum are swilling these days.

I've even written about the topic before . . . but not nearly as well as columnist Ted Pincus did, in the Sun Times. His lead is one that can make a martini lover weep:

"Shaken or stirred, with olive or twist, it's the dickens.

There it once stood, unchallenged in its pristine purity. Glistening in its funny, funnel-shaped glass perched on a delicate stem.

It had always been a shimmering silver lake of limpid, languid solace, the ultimate civilized sunset companion.

The essence of grace. To legions of us, it had been the messenger of quiet bliss, providing a wet, gossamer curtain that descends over the cares of the day, washes them deftly away, and draping our entire psyche in the glow of euphoric serenity.'

My God, I want to marry Ted Pincus, so we can grow old together, sitting on the porch at sunset, holding hands, swathed in our gossamer curtains, aimlessly adrift in our shimmering lakes of Boodles gin . . . .

I know there are some IT people who read this blog (like the talented and funny RebeccaJulie'sFriend), and this question is for you:

Let's say that a company has a weekly e-mail newsletter. Some employees would prefer to get an HTML version, where they can read short blurbs very quickly, and then link back to the intranet for more information.

Others, however, want all the news right there in the e-mail. No links. That way, they don't have to bother with links, can print out the entire newsletter and read it off-line, or even read it on their Crackberries, if they are so inclined.

Is it possible to set it up at a company where people can choose which version of the newsletter they want to see. I know that some consumer e-mail newsletters—like the New York Times—offer this choice.

But would it be much harder to offer it internally?

I ask because a recent client of mine switched from straight text to HTML . . . and people are complaining about it, because it's the kind of company where a lot of employees are on the road, and checking e-mail from handheld devices. And they say it's frustrating to read a blurb and not be able to follow the link.

Others at the same company, however, tell me that if I ever sent a 12-page e-mail newsletter to them (which is how long it would be if all the text was in the actual message) they would never scroll through it.

So I thought, what about giving people the choice? Can we do that? RebeccaJulie'sFriend? Anyone else? Anyone doing this?

I learned a valuable lesson in how to deal with senior leadership yesterday, and I wanted to share it, in case any of you find yourself in a similar position.
The background:

I recently did a small audit for a mid-sized company—about 8,000 employees. I did some focus groups, some executive interviews, and analyzed their communication vehicles.

It was one of those rare and glorious occasions where my report actually landed on the desk of the CEO—who appreciated it so much he e-mailed me directly to thank me for doing the work.

In the report, I talked a lot about the breakdown in face-to-face communication at the company. The CEO himself was fantastic: he walked the factory floors, did lots of Town Halls, pressed the employee flesh, answered questions from employees via e-mail . . . I mean, this guy is a communicator's dream.

But it stopped with him. Other executives, as well as managers, supervisors, and team leaders weren't picking up the ball and running with it. As a result, a lot of employees weren't hearing messages they should have been hearing.

When he read my report, the CEO knew it was spot-on, and asked me if I would present it to a group of his senior people—about 15 plant managers, vice presidents, the CFO, etc. The CEO himself would be there as well.

So that's what I did. Now, I was very careful not to 'blame' anyone. I just talked about why they should take communication more seriously, revealed the results from the focus groups, talked about how the culture got to this point, offered some best practices from other companies on how to solve the problem, and then threw it open for discussion.

The idea being that after I outlined the problem, we would enlist the help of these leaders to fix it.

Well . . . I knew I was in trouble with one guy the minute I started talking. He had that look. If you do any consulting at all, you know that look. I call it the 'son of a bitch look.' As in, 'Who do you think you are, you son of a bitch? I've been at this company for 25 years and you do a couple of lousy focus groups and you're going to tell me something?'

Sure enough, as soon as I was done, this man spoke up. He didn't like being blamed for the negative culture. He didn't like me telling him he wasn't communicating. He started listing all the things he does—informal meetings, meetings, a white board on the factory floor where people could write questions and get answers by the next day, town halls, etc.

And as he was speaking, I realized the horrific mistake I had made. I had put him completely on the defensive. I forced him to defend himself in front of the CEO and his peers.

I didn't mean to. But I made the mistake of thinking that just saying, repeatedly, things like, 'Nobody is to blame,' and 'this isn't about blame, it's about moving forward,' and 'you're doing a lot of things, but maybe we could do them better if we talk about them,' that that would be enough to keep it all positive.

But of course it wasn't. Because while I was saying, 'nobody is to blame,' in the corporate world, someone is always to blame. I mean, it wasn't my fault the communication had broken down. It wasn't the CEO's fault. It wasn't the employees' fault. But it had to be somebody's fault, right?

So no matter how many times I said it wasn't about blaming someone, the people in the room probably felt that they were being blamed.

And that, friends, is lousy-ass consulting. We only had an hour to get some solutions on the table, and I had to spend 20 minutes wrestling the conversation away from the blame game and back to solving the problem.

I should have structured my entire presentation differently. I should have assumed that people in the room would be more defensive. I should have accounted for that. I could have defused the situation before ever starting the open discussion.

My bad.

Lesson learned: In corporate America, when you deliver bad news, someone is going to be defensive. Be ready for it, prepare for it, defuse it, and get ready to move on towards solutions.

I agonized over whether or not to post this blog.

Technically, it has nothing to do with the topics that I feel I should be covering out here: communication, writing, employee relations, drinking, or midgets. But I'm in trouble, and I need the blog's help.

As I've mentioned before, my son—and Vice President of HR for Crescenzo Communications—is in kindergarten.

The other day, when I was going through his schoolwork with him, I came across a thin piece of paper. On it was a riddle, and a puzzle.

The riddle was this:

When do rabbits have 8 feet?

Answer: When there are two rabbits.

Cute, right? The riddle is not the problem, however. The puzzle is the problem. Now, I have to assume that this puzzle is for five-year-olds. Why else would they put it in a five-year-old's school folder?

And yet . . .and yet . . . I can't get it. And neither can five other adults I showed it to. I think it's because I showed it to writers, and we only use one half of our brain. And this puzzle, which involves (shudder!) numbers, needs us to use the other half. Which has been dead for me since Algebra 101.

So I'm hoping maybe you can help. The puzzle is below. I've been working on it for a week straight and I can't get it. Can you?

The object is to guess what number is next in the series. The only clue given is this:

'This is not difficult, but it requires flexible thinking.'

Not difficult my ass, I want to say to the teacher who handed this damn thing out. But I can't go to her, because I'm ashamed that I haven't got it yet. Help a brother out, will you? I want to go tape the solution to the teacher's forehead for putting me through this. Here it is:

1
11
21
1211
3112
132112
?

Have you seen Ragan's Journal of Employee Communication Management lately?

You should. It recently got a new publisher, a new look, and a whole new attitude. Publisher Heather Burns (H-Bomb), blew the entire thing up and started over . . . and it's excellent.

And, for some reason, Heather let me keep my back-page column, and told me to have some fun with it. So I am. Below is a small excerpt from my second column. Make sure you visit the Ragan site to get a copy of JECM. It'll be worth your time.

Why readership doesn't matter
I'd rather have four employees reading a strategic publication
than four thousand people scanning the Service Anniversaries

I got into a familiar fight with a client the other day.

I call it the 'Readership Fight.' We were revamping her bimonthly print publication, page by page, and we got to what she called her 'fun page.' Her 'fun page' is what I call the 'fluff page.' It has all the service anniversaries, soft hobby stories, and other elements that make the publication look like a high-school yearbook.

'Let's kill that,' I said.

'Kill the fun page?' she said, looking at me as if I had suggested castrating Mickey Mouse.

'Yes, let's slaughter the living hell out of the fun page,' I repeated.

'But . . . but . . .' she stammered. 'My surveys all say that the fun page has the most readers. That it brings the most readers in. Readers want the fun page. We can't kill it.'

'So you're saying that because people like it, because it brings in readers, we should keep doing it?' I asked.

'Yes!' she said, probably thinking to herself, 'Maybe this crazy dude isn't as stupid as he looks.'

'No!' I almost shouted. 'It's not about getting readers. It's about what the readers we do have do with the information we give them. How they use it to help the company or do their jobs more effectively. I'd rather have four employees reading and using a strategic publication than four thousand readers scanning the Service Anniversaries for a name they might know.'

This is about the 789th time in my career I've gotten in this debate, and every time I end up losing it. Every time, I end up saying to the client:

'Oh, you want high readership, huh? That's what it's all about? Okay then, since you want a lot of readers, let's add these elements to the publication:

Sex advice. Hey, it works for Cosmo, right? Sex sells, baby. You think a list of employee anniversaries in six-point type brings readers in? How many female readers do you think will pick up the publication to read an article titled:

'Learn Your Man's 12 Secret Erogenous Zones!'

I pulled that title off a real magazine in the checkout line. You think people won't read that? (For the record, I glanced through the article. It is wrong. Men have exactly one erogenous zone, and you probably know what that is. And it's not very hard to find . . . in most cases.

In the JECM piece, I also talk about starting a Gossip Column, Celebrity News, Atkins Diet Tips, and a series of 'Corporate Fear Factor' stories, where regular employees compete for extra vacation time by performing a series of gruesome tasks—such as sitting in a closed conference room with two IT people as they talk about bandwidth.

As I say at the end of the piece, if you're going to sell your soul, you may as well sell it all the way. Half a soul isn't going to get you anything.