Just got back from doing the Advanced Writing and Editing seminar in San Diego, and I have to tell you this story . . . because it illustrates just how dense some companies—and some people—can be.

In the seminar, there was this really nice woman from Cox Communications. She didn’t say a whole lot during the seminar, but then right at the end, she threw out a story that will immediately go down as an all-time classic.

As I said, she does employee communication for Cox. Well, one of the brainiacs at that company decided that, as a publicity stunt, it would be neat to hand out thousands of little suckers with the company name on them, to various audiences at trade shows and other events.

You don’t see the problem with that? Keep thinking . . . .

Yes, that’s right. They were handing out thousands of Cox suckers. Say it out loud.

Cox sucker. As in, “We’ve got a new Cox sucker promotion going on right now, and it’s going like gangbusters!”

Can you imagine some of the conversations that went on during that promotion?

At a trade show:

“Have you been by the Cox Communication booth? They’ve got hundreds of Cox suckers over there.”

Or . . .

“Here, take a couple of Cox suckers home to your kids!”

In the Cox public relations office:

Frazzled intern, looking for more suckers: “God damnit, where are the Cox suckers?”

Smart-ass veteran PR guy: “I always thought they were down in design. Have they moved?”

You know what the best thing about this story was? That I got to stand up in front of 70 people and repeatedly say the words “Cox Suckers” again and again without getting in trouble.

It was so liberating.

We all need to go to London. And we need to go soon.

To be honest, I’m going there anyway, to teach my Master Class, on October 26 and 27.

If you’re a communicator, that alone should be reason enough for you to go, because this is a revamped, souped-up, turbocharged version of the Master Class.

We’re going to be doing all kinds of cool things with podcasts, blogs, wikis, and Social Media . . . and we’ll also spend a good chunk of time on all the traditional topics—writing, editing, print publications, employee engagement, integrating print and online, and face-to-face communication.

I’ve got great, practical ideas from more than 50 global companies, so you should go to London just for that.

But . . . there’s a more important reason to go. A much more important reason.

You should go to London with me to stand up and strike a blow for freedom. Yes, that’s right: Freedom. I can’t put it any plainer than that.

In light of the recent terrorist plot to blow up planes taking off from Heathrow Airport, we all need to go to London to show our support for the Brits, and to let the terrorists know that we will not cave in to their threats!

London’s tourism business will no doubt take a hit because of these threats, and if we let that happen, then the terrorists will be one step closer to stripping us of the one thing we can’t afford to lose: our freedom.

Yes, I know it’s a hassle to fly into and out of London right now. It was also a hassle to storm Normandy beach. But that didn’t stop the Allies in World War II, and it shouldn’t stop us now.

I myself will have to fly all the way to London without my iPod and my flask. Have you ever tried to make it through a seven-hour international flight with no iPod, and no flask? Well, who cares if you have . . . I haven’t.

And I don’t want to try. But I will. Because if I don’t, it means the terrorists will have won. Yes, that’s right. And if giving up my iPod and my flask of gin will in some small way help us and our allies defeat the terrorists, then I am willing to do it.

If there was a beach to storm, I would storm it. But there isn’t. So instead I’ll fly to London without my iPod.

And you should feel the same way.

It is up to us . . . all of us . . . to go to London and do our part.

And how can we do our part? By not only going to London, but by spending lots of money in London, to help shore up the British economy.

I myself plan to spend as much of Ragan’s money as I can, in as many pubs and restaurants as I can, because by doing so I will strike a blow against the Islamic fundamentalists who would strip us of our freedoms, and our lives, if we let them.

This is the biggest war since World War II. And do you remember the words of that great leader, Winston Churchill, as England faced its darkest days? The great man said:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, she shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Well, Churchill and the Brits and America’s Greatest Generation did their part. Now it’s our turn to do ours.

And to do that, we must all go to the Master Class in London. Together. And spend money.

Let us not waver. Let us not falter. Let this be our Churchillian battle call:

We shall drink until closing time, we shall drink at breakfast with our bangers and mash, we shall drink in Soho, and in Kensington, we shall drink on the banks of the Thames, and in Piccadilly Circus, we shall drink in pubs large and small, we shall drink with confidence, we shall drink our way out of hangovers, we shall drink ale and lager and dry English gin, we shall drink and drink whatever the cost may be; we, too, shall never surrender.

And if you happen to live in London already, you can still do your part by coming to the Master Class anyway—because I have it on very good authority that the terrorists hate the Master Class. So by signing up you will irritate them and at the same time strike a blow for freedom.

And to those of you who would say this is a shameless exploitation of a very real terror threat in order to get more people to sign up for the Master Class . . . shame on you. That is just the sort of thing a terrorist would say.

This isn’t about me. It’s not about Ragan. It’s not about our London partner, one of the smartest communicators you’ll ever meet, Marc Wright.

No . . . this is about courage. It’s about refusing to buckle to fear. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself . . . that, and having to fly for seven hours without an iPod or a flask of gin.

And we cannot, we must not, give in to that fear.

There comes a time in every person’s life that he must stand up and make a choice.

My choice is to go to London and soak myself in Boodles gin, because the terrorists hate London, and they hate Boodles gin.

Who will go with me?

How much time does your CEO (or whatever you call the top person in your organization) have to communicate with employees? Not much, right?

Does he have time to “walk the floor” and talk to individual employees? Probably not, right? I mean, he’s busy running the entire company, for God’s sake.

And he doesn’t have time to do regular Town Hall meetings, right? Or weekly brown-bag lunches or informal breakfasts with employees, either, I’m sure.

What about answering personal e-mails from employees? Fat chance.

What about sending individual, hand-written notes to employees who are going through rough times? Okay, okay . . . stop laughing.

Your CEO doesn’t have time to do any of that crap, right? He doesn’t even have time to write his lousy 600-word quarterly column on “Synergy” or “World Class Service.” You have to write his lousy 600-word quarterly column on “Synergy” or “World Class Service.” He doesn’t even have time to read his own column before it goes out.

Well, whenever I hear this common line of thinking, I want to scream. Because I know it’s not true.

It’s the most common myth in the entire corporate world: That the CEO doesn’t have time to scratch his ass. That he has vice presidents who scratch his ass for him.

Bullshit.

Your CEO, or any CEO, has time to communicate with employees if he thinks its important to do so. I don’t care what industry you’re in, or what kind of company. If he thinks communication is important, the CEO can make plenty of time to do it. I know this to be true, because I see it in practice all the time.

In my work as a consultant, I have met far too many CEOs, in all kinds of industries, who do find time to communicate, to buy into the myth that most CEOs don’t have time. If the ones I meet have the time, why don’t the others?

To illustrate my point, I want to tell you something that happened to me last week. It was probably the nicest thing that has happened to me in my entire career.

But to tell you the story, I have to first reveal something I wasn’t going to talk about how out here. I wasn’t going to talk about it because it has to do with my wife, Cindy . . . and this is my blog, not hers. But she said it was okay.

Two weeks ago, Cindy’s mom was given three months to live.

She has been battling cancer . . . but she had been winning the battle. She had taken a slight downturn lately, but she had taken downturns before, and this woman is such a warrior that she always beat the cancer back into submission.

This time was different . . . and completely unexpected. When Cindy and her sister got the news, the world stopped for them.

Cindy’s dad died two weeks before Cindy was born. So her mom, Lynne, raised Cindy and her sister on her own, working two jobs to put them through the best schools on the south side.

It was always the three of them against the world. You won’t find a closer family no matter how hard or how long you look.

Lynne is one of the toughest people I’ve ever met. I always thought she would outlive me.

So you can imagine how tough this whole thing is. When we got the news, we immediately converted my son’s room into a hospice room, and moved a hospital bed in there so that Lynne could spend her last weeks with us.

Well, the same week that we got the news and had to get the room ready, Cindy and I were supposed to be in Holland, Michigan, working with Magna Donnelly, a global auto-parts manufacturing company.

We had gone out there earlier in the year to do some focus groups and other research, and had already presented the findings to the communications team and the VP of HR.

Technically, our work was finished. The client was happy, we were paid, and it was on to the next.

But. . . . the CEO of Magna Donnelly is a man named Carlos Mazzorin. I had done some work with Magna Donnelly last year, and got to see Carlos in action. He laughs at people who say CEOs have no time to communicate.

He never said it out loud to me, but his actions prove that he thinks the CEO’s number ONE job is to communicate. He holds regular, free-wheeling Town Halls with employees, and answers every single tough question they throw at him. He walks the factory floors, stopping to talk to employees at every step of the way.

He does a regular, interactive newsletter called Comments to Carlos, where he answers questions from employees. He writes a regular column called Carlos’ Chatline, where he brings employees up to speed on what’s happening in the turbulent auto industry.

He does this all in spite of the fact that he is constantly traveling around the world to open up new markets; he does this in spite of the fact that he is under backbreaking pressure from the auto companies to cut costs; he does this in spite of the fact that the company is in a constant state of turmoil, and he has dozens of internal, business-related issues that he has to deal with every single day.

Carlos is no less busy than any other CEO out there—and probably busier than most of them—yet he makes the time to communicate.

I have so much respect for the man that, even though our work was finished, I volunteered to come back, on my own dime, at a later date to present the report to Carlos, and talk to him about it.

Carlos said he would appreciate that. So we set a date . . . and he had to cancel. Then we set another date and I had to cancel. Finally, we agreed on a date in August.

It was the same week that we got the news about Cindy’s mom. I canceled, explained what was going on, and said I didn’t know when we’d be able to get there.

My client understood, of course. And she said Carlos understood. And that, I thought, was the end of that.

Until Friday . . . when I received a hand-written note, in the mail, from Carlos.

Not an e-mail. Not one of those asshole “e-sympathy cards” that people send when they’re too lazy to go out and buy a card.

This was a hand-written note, like they used to write in the old days. And remember, I had met this man for all of 35 minutes more than a year ago.

“Hello Steve,” the note started out. “I was so sorry to hear the sad news,” it went on. I don’t want to reprint the entire note, but it ended with Carlos writing: “I only wanted you to know that I’ll be thinking of you and keeping your family in my prayers.”

I can’t tell you how much the note meant to me and Cindy. Cindy is taking this one day at a time, and that note helped her get through Friday.

And it came from a man who is running a company in one of the most turbulent industries in the world. He’s up to his ass in alligators every single day, yet he takes the time to do something like this? And he’s still making time to communicate every single day with his employees?

The next time you hear that CEOs are far too busy to communicate, call to mind Carlos Mazzorin. And blow that bullshit myth right out of the water.

Postcript:

I wrote this blog item on Friday, and didn’t get a chance to post it because Lynne took a sudden turn for the worse. We lost her Monday morning. I didn’t feel right not including this information . . . and I didn’t feel like rewriting the item, either. I’ll be back later this week.

I’m big into Global Communication these days. In fact, October is "All Global Communications, All The Time Month" at Crescenzo Communications.

First, I’m going to Barcelona, to deliver the keynote speech at a communication conference over there. Then, three weeks later, I fly to Warsaw to deliver another keynote at a communications conference there.

Then, I head directly to London, for my Master Class, where I hope most of you are joining me, to stand up to the terrorists who don't want us to go.

It’ll be interesting, all these global presentations. The one in Warsaw, I’m told, will be translated live . . . just like they do in the United Nations, with those nifty little earpieces that the diplomats use. (Is anyone else fairly sure, the way I am, that Condi Rice is listening to Macy Gray on her headset whenever anybody who doesn't speak English talks?)

That will be pretty cool . . . though I’m worried about the translation of my talk.

Specifically, I'm wondering what the Polish equivalent of “ass-less leather chaps,” “bedwetting designers,” and “fat-assed white dudes in suits spewing boilerplate corporate drivel onto bored, cynical employees” will be.

Of course, sometimes, when I let my inner rage get the best of me, I’ve been known to refer to one particular company as a “seething Nazi hell-hole regime.” I bet the Poles can translate that one easy enough.

It’ll also be weird because everything I say will be delayed . . . so they’ll be scowling at the ass-less leather chaps comment a full minute after I’ve moved on to something else. It will be very hard for me to tell which portion of the speech was the most offensive.

Speaking of global communication, and the trouble with translation, I’ve got to tell you an interesting story.

I was doing some work a couple of weeks ago with a Japanese-owned company. A big one. It’s a household name.

The guy who brought me in is one of the great guys in the communication business. Funny, irreverent, and smart. We had one of those great business dinners that doesn’t feel like work at all.

During the dinner, he told one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard regarding global communication.

It seems that the company recently brought in a new, Japanese guy to head up the North American operations. My client was going to be his primary speechwriter, so the first thing he did was set up a lengthy interview with the guy.

“About 15 minutes into the interview, he starts talking about how the company needs to have a 'Yong Mentality',” says my client, rhyming Yong with “Long," like "Yawng."

“He was saying we need to be Yong, think Yong, act Yong,” my client said.

And of course my client got very excited, because this was something new! The way the executive was saying it, it sounded like some kind of ancient, Japanese secret, uncovered by the Shoguns, honed by the Samurais, and perfected by Ninjas!

“Yong!” my client said. “I immediately wrote an outline for the speech, and then started planning. I was going to do a whole communication campaign built around the new Yong Philosophy. I was going to have Yong posters and a Yong handshake . . . the whole thing.”

Then my client delivered the outline of the speech to the Japanese executive, and sat there while he read it. Afterwards, he was really going to dive into the Yong Philosophy with the dude, and ask where he could find more information about it.

“He was looking at it in that inscrutable way the Japanese have, nodding and nodding, but not saying anything,” my client remembers. “Then, all of a sudden, he screwed up his face and asked me: ‘What is this, this Yong you talk about?’”

My client was flabbergasted.

“I don’t know,” he told the executive. “You said it!”

The Japanese thought for a minute, then it hit him.

“Yong," he said very forcefully. "Yong . . . as in not old. Yong. We have to think like a yong company, even though we have been around for a while. We have to be hungry, like a yong company. We have to have a yong mentality.”

And thus died the Yong Philosophy for running a business, before it was even born.