First, I want to apologize to anyone who tried to comment on the blog last week and couldn’t. I’ve heard from several people who said they tried to add a comment but the blog wouldn’t let them. Damned, stupid blog. It takes you to some kind of page, I guess, that makes it seem like I am monitoring comments before letting them post. Rest assured, I am not. I don't even monitor my own comments before I post them, let alone yours.

The IT folks are working on the problem now. It has something to do with bandwidth, I’m sure. But in the meantime, I don’t want to wait any longer to post, so off we go.

Well . . . the CCC conference in Chicago last week was a huge success, if a bit of a blur. It seems to have gone by in about three minutes. I remember having a very good drinking session at the bar Tuesday night with Teala, Larry, Sonya, Judy, Mark Ragan and Jen McClure and others.

And I remember having a terrific dinner Wednesday night with Marc Wright, this brilliantly funny, sarcastic Brit who is helping Ragan bring my Master Class over to London in the fall.

And I remember saying something about “love butter” in the luncheon general session, and that leading to a terrific conversation at the cocktail party on that very topic.

But the one thing I remember most clearly is the keynote session, with Professor TJ Larkin.

Larkin kicked off the conference on Wednesday, to good reviews. Ragan decided to bring in The Professor after he got a standing ovation at the IABC conference last year, and he didn’t disappoint.

But the man does have a very unusual speaking style. He starts verrrrry slow, and dry. In fact, after Mark Ragan introduced him, he stood at the podium for a good 20 seconds without saying a word, fumbling with his glasses and rearranging things on the lectern.

At first, I thought he was having a stroke.

But he finally started, and I realized that he does this on purpose. He starts slow—in both speaking style and content—so he can build to a big finish. And it works for him.

The first, slow part of his speech was about the history of communication—and he took us back all the way to the cavemen. This prompted one attendee to lean over and whisper to me: “How long do you suppose he’s going to stay in the Paleolithic period?”

But he eventually got it going, and by the time he got to the 20th Century, he was rolling along quite nicely.

I like TJ Larkin a lot, and have a lot of respect for his work. I’m always impressed by people who can actually cite “research” when they talk, and use words like “anthropology” and “sociology” instead of the ones I tend to use, like “love butter” and “drunken midgets on acid.”

But there is one fundamental thing I disagree with him about. Namely, his assertion that the only effective channel for communicating big issues like major change in the organization is the front-line supervisors. Executive communication doesn’t work. Communication vehicles don’t work. Just face-to-face communication at the supervisory level. That’s it.

During one segment of the talk, he put a picture of a blue-collar miner up on the screen. The guy was big and gritty, with a dirt-smeared, grubby face. He looks like the grown-up version of a kid who used to kick my ass twice a week in grammar school.

“This is Louie,” he told the crowd, by way of introduction. And then he talked about what a great supervisor Louie is—and how his employees are the best workers in the company, and how he always hits his safety and efficiency numbers, and how his employees all love him.

“I don’t need to tell Louie how to communicate,” Larkin said in his speech, admitting that he wouldn’t want to even try to tell Louie how to communicate, even if he needed to.

That much we can agree on. If a professorial type like Larkin, or a sissy communications consultant like me, were to try and tell Louie anything, he would in all likelihood pull our underwear up over our heads, and then dunk us in the toilet.

(It reminds me of the time I had to address a bunch of blue-collar utility managers for an organization in Texas, and as soon as I walked in the room, this huge Texan wearing boots and a Stetson hat put his big, meaty, grizzly-bear paw on my shoulder, and said: “Please tell me you’re not one of those bullshit, all-hat-and-no-cattle consultants.” I sorta wet myself, just a little.)

The problem with Larkin's theory is that he seems to think that most organizations are made up primarily of people like Louie—down-to-earth guys and gals who are terrific managers and naturally great communicators. All we need to do is give them the tools and the information to communicate, and then get out of their way, he says.

And that is where he and I part ways. Sure, Louie is probably a good communicator. But it’s been my experience that Louie is the exception, not the rule. For every Louie, there are dozens of terrible managers and supervisors.

Here are some of the supervisors sharing the workspace with Louie. These people are fictitious, but they are based on real people I’ve met over the years. For every Louie, there is a:

Mary. Mary is a back-stabbing little bitch. Every time one of her employees comes to her with an idea, Mary steals it and takes credit for it. Mary once referred to one of her workers as “my slave” in front of bunch of people. The employee fled to the bathroom in tears.

Don. Don is a raging sexist. Don actually has a chart in his desk, where he keeps track of his daily “Pick of the Day” choice—i.e., the woman employee who looks the best that day. It’s usually the one with the shortest skirt, or the tightest blouse. The man is a walking erection. Don can only relate to women in one way: with his penis. Don’s penis is his core competency, and he has serious low-hanging fruit issues. He has been known to shift his paradigm right in front of female employees. Unfortunately, Don has 12 women reporting to him, so you can imagine how well that works.

Maury. Maury is the poster child for the Peter Principle. He got promoted way out of his skill set, and is in way over his head. He is so busy just trying to cover his ass, and his mistakes, that he communicates to his employees about once every nine months.

Lance. Lance is from the south side of Chicago, and he hates black people. Only he doesn’t say that. He says what all bigots from the south side of Chicago say: “Hey, there’s black people, and then there’s niggers. I don’t hate black people. I hate niggers.” Lance currently has four black people working for him, but nobody is quite sure which category he puts them in.

Deanna. Deanna refuses to join the technology revolution. Her workers will send her e-mails, but she won’t read them. “If it’s important,” she has been known to say, “print out the e-mail and put it on my chair.” Needless to say, all that important corporate information that flows into Deanna’s e-mail in-box, and which should then flow down to employees, never sees the light of day.

I could go on and on. There are countless categories of bad managers in the workplace. And that’s why I disagree with Professor’s Larkin that these supervisors need to be the primary vehicle for communicating big issues in the workplace.

They need to have a role, yes. A big role. But we also have to have plenty of backup plans in place for when the supervisors fail . . . as they almost always do.

P.S. If you try and post a comment and can't, please keep trying. It will be up and running again soon. Please try every minute or two for the next couple of days. I mean, what else do you have to do, right?

So, I’m a soccer coach now. I’m coaching my six-year-old son, Zach, in his first year of soccer.

The thing is, I never intended to be a coach . . .but I’m glad I'm doing it, because it’s teaching me valuable lessons about communications, and even more valuable lessons about how to manage people.

First, some background.

As I said, I wasn’t supposed to be a soccer coach. I think I got tricked into it. When I went with my son and my ex-wife, Tracey, to meet the real soccer coach and pick up Zach’s uniform, the coach greeted us with a huge grin, and said: “And I’m so glad you decided to help coach this year. I really need you.”

Tracey and I looked at each other. We get along extremely well for a divorced couple, but when you divorce, there is always an element of distrust. I was thinking, “What did you do?” and she was thinking, “What have you done now?”

Of course neither one of us had done anything. It was a mistake. Afterwards, Tracey said: “Don’t worry. She just has us mixed up with someone else. The real coaches will show up at practice.”

But they didn’t show up. We were, somehow, the real coaches. Which was a problem, because neither one of us knows anything about soccer. I’m also an assistant coach for Zach’s baseball team, but that’s okay, because I know baseball. I played baseball. I watch baseball almost every single day. I can coach baseball.

I can’t coach soccer. I’ve never even seen it played before. You could tell me there are 45 people on the field at one time, or 5 people. And both numbers would make equal sense to me.

But what’s the big deal, right? I mean, it’s six- and seven-year-old kids. I figured coaching would just be a matter of herding them onto the field during games, and trying to avoid getting kicked in the crotch during practice.

So I’m helping Coach Jean run the first practice, not knowing what the hell I’m doing at all, and she turns to me and says: “By the way, I have to miss the first game.”

Huh? That means Tracey and I will be the two on-field coaches during the game. We’ll be out there on the field, showing the kids where to go and what to do. But neither one of us knows the positions. I don’t even know how many people are supposed to be on the field. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know anything.

And this is Naperville Soccer. Naperville, for those who don’t know, is a Chicago suburb. And it’s one of those hyper-competitive suburbs where people take six-year-old kids' soccer games seriously.

So I’m nervous. Real nervous. At the game, Tracey and I somehow manage to get a team out on the field. Dylan, this big, fat kid, wants to play goalie. Fine. Nichole, this little blond girl who is half the size of anybody else, wants to play defense. I tell her no, and stick her at forward where she won’t get run over.

This is the extent of my strategic plan. Put the fat kid in the goal and the midget where she won’t get hurt.

Then the game starts. It is immediately apparent to me that the other coaches know what the hell they are doing. They have clipboards. They are communicating to each other with hand signals. They are setting plays, moving their kids around, calling out when to center the ball (whatever the hell that means), executing perfect corner kicks (whatever the hell those are) and generally running their team with precision.

My contribution, on the other hand, is to keep yelling, at the top of my lungs, “KICK IT!! KICK THE BALL!! KELLY, KICK THE BALL!! BOBBY KICK IT OUT OF THERE!! KICK IT KICK IT KICK IT!! KICK IT ZACH!!” Over and over again.

The name of our team is the Tigers, and I can hear our parents yelling from the sidelines things like, “SET THE TIGER DEFENSE,” and “CENTER THE BALL, CENTER THE BALL,” and I have no idea what they are talking about, so I just start yelling even louder, “KICK IT!!! JESSICA KICK THE BALL OUT OF BOUNDS, KICK THE BALL OUT OF BOUNDS!!”

That last little bit of coaching genius came to me when I realized that the clock didn’t stop when the ball was kicked out of bounds. And since it’s only two 20-minute halves, I figured that if we could just keep kicking the ball out of bounds, they wouldn’t score.

It didn’t work. We got smeared. But in the process—and in the process of coaching these kids for the past five weeks, I’ve learned some valuable management and communication lessons.

Here are some of the kids on my squad, and the lessons I've learned from them.

Dylan. Dylan is the big fat kid who wanted to play goalie. What I didn’t realize is that he didn’t want to play goalie because he was good at it, or because he thought he might be good at it. He wanted to play goalie because that meant he wouldn’t have to run. But apparently, he also thought it meant he wouldn’t have to move. At all. As ball after ball went flying past Dylan into the goal, it was all he could do to half-assedly raise his right arm to shoulder level. He didn’t even move his feet. Management lesson learned: Make sure people are in the job they can do, not just the job they say they want to do. Now, the only way Dylan will ever play goal again is if he is willing to lie down in front of it. That would stop most shots.

Peter. Peter is actually pretty good. He might have the most talent on the team (after my kid, of course). But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to play. At practice the other day, he was supposed to be doing a dribbling drill, but he kept picking up the ball and bouncing it on his head. “Peter,” I said, “You’re supposed to be dribbling it with your feet.”

“Okay, Mr. Penis,” he said, as he ignored me and kept bouncing the ball on his head.

This is a true story, I swear to God.

Now, I’ve been told before that, because of my unusual haircut, I look like a penis with ears . . .but never by a six-year-old. I realized right there that I probably wasn’t going to make a big difference in Peter’s life. Management Lesson Learned: There will be talented people working for you who just aren’t motivated. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Jack: Jack is insane. He won’t pass the ball to anyone. He won’t dribble the ball. During practice, no matter what drill we’re doing, Jack just runs around like a wild man, kicking balls as hard as he can. He kicks them into the parking lot, he kicks them into other kids, he kicks them at the coaches. After the first practice, Jack’s mom came up to me and said, “I guess you can see that Jack is pretty competitive.”

“No,” I wanted to say. “Michael Jordan was pretty competitive. Your kid is a spaz.”

That said, however, I’d rather have the misguided exuberance of a Jack than the talented nonchalance of a Peter any day. So I created a brand new position for Jack. “Jack,” I said to him. “I like the way you kick. How would you like to be Striker?”

“Yeah!” he said.

So I now position Jack by our goal, with instructions to kick the living shit out of any ball that gets within 20 feet of him. We haven’t been scored on since. Managerial Lesson Learned: Don’t try to change people. Just find a job that suits their talents.

Nichole: Nichole is the girl I mentioned earlier, the smallest kid on the field, no matter who we’re playing. Well guess what? She’s a tiger. She’s a little bitch. She’s mean and gutsy and terrific. She’s my best defender. Managerial Lesson Learned: Don’t judge a book by its cover. True talent is often hidden.

There are other lessons that I’ve learned, including some that apply specifically to communicators. But this post is already way too long . . .so I’ll share those lessons in a later post.

In the meantime, Go Tigers!

Mark Ragan, Jim Ylisela and I just wrapped up the kick-off seminar for Advanced Writing and Editing, a two-day seminar for corporate editors and writers.

It was in Chicago yesterday and Monday, the first of nine cities . . . and it was great. I was a little worried about having three speakers . . . but the people in the room said it actually worked very well, with each of us bringing something different to the table.

And, having taught "Integrating Print and Online" and "The Master Class" for the past two years, it was nice to be able to spend two days on something I don't get to teach very often: writing.

I'll be sharing tales from the road in this space over the next couple of months as we bring the seminar to a city near you . . . but I wanted to share one funny, sad little item right away.

There was a woman in the seminar who works for a health-care facility. We were talking about how to cover bad or negative news without spinning it, when she told the group (the seminar is a lot more like group therapy for corporate editors than an actual class) that she is not allowed to use any words that might sound negative or bad to employees.

You know, words like "disease," or "sick people." Of course, since many things that happen at a hospital are bad, you can imagine how frustrating this it is for her.

“I’m not even allowed to write that anyone has died,” she told us. “I can’t use the words died, dying, or death. If a patient dies, I have to say that he or she ‘failed to thrive.’”

Isn't that precious? Can't you just see the copy she has to write:

"Mr. Halloway, who was run over by a two-ton bus, was admitted to the emergency room, where at 3:12 p.m., he failed to thrive."

At least it's true, right? If you croak, you certainly have failed to thrive, big time. It got me thinking of some of the other "bad" or "negative" words associated with hospitals, and the happy-talk euphemisms that my new friend could come up with.

Here are some of mine:

A catheter would become: “Mr. Peeper’s Happy Straw.”

A bed pan would become: “A Used-Food Receptacle.”

A spilled bed pan would become: "Used Food on the Move."

A shot would become: “A Fun Juice Insertion.”

An enema would become: “A Two-Way Fun Juice Exchange.”

A colonoscopy would become: "An anal adventure," or "A rectal road trip!"

Can you even imagine trying to get cynical, hard-bitten nurses, orderlies, and doctors, who all deal with death and disease every day, to read your employee publication when you have to refer to death as "A failure to thrive?"

Sometimes, the pure lunacy of some organizations astounds me.

Hi there. Sorry for not posting in a while . . . but I've been down in Houston with Jim Ylisela, doing consulting with M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. We've known these folks for a long time, and they finally got around to bringing me and Jim down to have tex mex and margaritas . . . and oh yeah, work.

These people---Laura, Megan, Jay, Pam, Stacy, Sarah--put out superior communication vehicles, and have a lot of fun doing it. So it's been fun to hang out with them.

It's been a packed three days filled with presentations to leaders, vehicle analysis, margaritas, presentations to non-communicators who are doing communications, enchilladas, fights with HR, great conversations with IT, and then more margaritas.

The three days have been so packed, I haven't had time to blog. But when I get back tomorrow, I have some great stories to tell, including:

* How we managed to piss off the head of HR so much, he almost put the guy who hired us into a headlock in the hallway outside the meeting room.

* A great conversation with an HR writer about "how much sexual innuendo is too much sexual innuendo in a corporate presentation."

* How a "politically correct lesbian," (her words) asked us to change "bullshit bingo" to "b.s. bingo" or "buzzword bingo" in a presentation we're doing tomorrow for 300 of their front-line managers. This pc lesbian---who is a wonderfully terrific lady who scored us tickets to the Houston Astros game tonight---doesn't feel "bullshit" is okay to use with that audience.

I'll tell you more details on this tomorrow (have to get ready to take the train to the game, where I hope Barry Bonds hits his 715th home run, and I catch it, so I can burn it right in front of him), but I want to throw out a question:

If you brought in a consultant to speak to your front-line supervisors about how to communicate to employees, and that consultant wanted to talk about "bullshit bingo" and show an actual bullshit bingo card, and use quotes from employees who have played that say things like, "The speaker was shocked when all of us shouted 'bullshit' at the same time," . . . would you ask the consultant to change "bullshit" to "BS" or "buzzword?"

I, of course, want to go with bullshit. I'm not saying I'm right. I won't be here for the fallout, so it's not my call. I just don't think that anyone will be offended by it.

What does everyone else think?

As some of you may know, in every issue of Corporate Writer and Editor, I hand out my C.R.A.P. Awards . . . which stand for Corporate Rhetoric Awards Program.

I usually don’t like to republish my columns out here, but since it’s annual report season, this one seemed to be appropriate, so here it is:

News flash: CEO C.R.A.P.s once a year
The “Chairman’s Letter” in TimeWarner’s annual report
is a non-stop, relentless stream of corporate C.R.A.P.

Most of the awards we hand out here at C.R.A.P. (Corporate Rhetoric Awards Program) Central are given to employee editors.

And that’s not really fair, is it? Why single them out? We see plenty of C.R.A.P. in other kinds of corporate writing, too—including memos, press releases, brochures . . . and in what may be the ultimate outhouse of corporate C.R.A.P.: the annual report.

This month, we’re giving our C.R.A.P. award to the Chairman of TimeWarner, Richard D. “Dick” Parsons. That’s right, the Chairman of one of the largest companies in the world is getting a C.R.A.P. Award. This goes to show that nobody is too big to be C.R.A.P.ped on.

Dick Parsons starts his “Chairman’s Letter” in the 2006 annual report with one of the oldest, stinkiest pieces of corporate C.R.A.P.:

“Today, in business as in life, the only constant is change.”

Whoo boy! That is like the stream of gas that sometimes precedes a particularly vicious C.R.A.P. session! Old Dickie boy is hitting on all cylinders right from the get-go! Not only does he drag out the oldest cliché in the communication business, but he even adds the “in business as in life” chestnut.

I always have fun trying to imagine the conversations between the executive and the writer when I see tired old leads like this one:

Dick Parsons: “Johnnie, how should we lead the Chairman’s Letter this year?”

Johnnie the Ghost-Writer: “I think you should express some shock and surprise that another year has gone by. You know, “It’s hard to believe, but 2005 is already in the books,” or something like that.”

Dick: “Can’t do it, Johnnie. We did that last year, remember? And the year before that. What else you got?”

Johnnie: (Flipping through his notebook). “What about a nautical reference? We haven’t used one since 2002. Something like, “As we guide the ship that is TimeWarner through the rough seas of the modern business environment, we need to have all hands on deck if we are going to succeed.”

Dick: “I like it, Johnnie. I like it a hell of a lot. It sings, baby. But let’s do that one in the employee newsletter, when we talk about synergy. I think it’s a better fit there. What other themes can we play off? What’s going on out there in the trenches?”

Johnnie: “Well, truth be told, sir, we keep switching corporate strategies the way a hooker changes customers. We tell them one thing one month, and then switch it around and tell them something different the next month. Most people have no idea what the hell is going on in this organization.”

Dick: “Okay, then! We play the Change Card. Act like it’s not our fault. Blame it on change. Constant change. Change as the only constant. And tie it back to the fact that most of their personal lives are as screwed up as this company, so they can relate.”

Johnnie: “Genius, sir. How about, “Today, in business as in life, the only constant is change.”

Dick: “Now you’re wordsmithing, Johnnie Boy! Make sure we send a release to the Wall Street Journal with that line in there. They may want to pick up on the whole 'change is constant' theme and do a trend story.”

But Dick doesn’t stop pooping clichés after his lead. In fact, the entire “Letter” is a non-stop, horrifying stream of C.R.A.P. clichés, one after another. Below, I list just a few of the ones he used. And, since I believe that any time you have to resort to a cliché, it usually means you’re trying to hide something, I’ve included my own comments, in italics, uncovering what Dick is really saying: According to Dickie:

TimeWarner is “uniquely positioned to benefit from the changes before us.” "Yeah, you know what that unique position is? We got cash. We’re gonna buy every company we can and crush the ones we can’t swallow up. Unique positioning, my big ass. We got cash, and that’s what counts."

TimeWarner has “the size and resources to compete effectively in a global environment.”
“We’ve got some cool stuff, and I’m reasonably sure we can kick the cheese out of the French and Italians, but I’m going to be real honest with you. I’m scared to death of the Japs. Jesus, those guys are smart, and they work, like what, 120 hours a week? And God help us if China ever gets its shit together.”

TimeWarner has “a workforce drawn from all walks of life.”
"Yeah, see, I hired this broad to be the director of diversity or some bullshit title like that, so we got all kinds of people working here now. We got Mexicans and Vietnamese and lesbians and cross dressers and everything. And believe me when I tell you this: you don’t want to go down into shipping. It’s like a God damned third world country down there."

TimeWarner has a “portfolio of strategically aligned businesses.”
"I can’t stand half the vice presidents I’ve got running these businesses, and every single one of those sons of bitches wants my job. You’re damned right our businesses are silos . . . I’ve ‘strategically aligned’ them so that those pirates can’t get together and start plotting against me."

I could go on . . . but it's too painful. One can only take so much C.R.A.P.

Annual report writers and corporate editors, remember this: When you write empty words and phrases, you’re begging people to cut through the C.R.A.P. and read between the lines. And do you really want them to do that?