Woot, Raleigh represent! Thanks Steve, this macho stuff always bothered me too, and now I can point the highers-up to a reason why it sucks so bad.

Oh you think this is bad? At my former company the CEO came up with the brilliant idea of having us all embody operating principles of success. The two that will forever stick with me are:

Execute Daily
Deliver or Die

There were more but they went downhill after those two.

Not only did he pull his motivation strategy from the pages of Mein Kampf, but we sent out 37,000 tri-cut, hi-gloss desktop pyramids with these pearls of wisdom to everyone in the company.

Good idea? Well as the saying goes "It's All in the Timing." We delivered these triangular assassin manuals the day after they told everyone in the company there would be no raises that year.

Since I'm still sort of new to my career, could someone please tell me why executives lose all common sense and their grip on reality as they climb the corporate ladder?

This made me laugh. I hate to bear bad tidings, but check out NASCAR's demographics, dude. They're changing, and incorporate some decidedly bluish folk. -- Livin' in a Red State

That kind of lead never works. We do features and news stories, but try to keep the rah-rah stuff to a minimum. This is one of my favorite leads, written by Colleen Hawk, about an office we have in Keams Canyon on the Hopi reservation.

“East of Winslow, take AZ 87 north to AZ 264, turn right and go to Milepost 402.” The directions are the first indication that this is not a typical APS office. Rather, it is a bridge between the past and the present, an office that must effectively conduct company business while being sensitive to and respectful of the culture and traditions of a society that remains true to its history. Driving as the sun rises across the rolling vista of grazing land, you enter the southern edge of the Navajo Reservation and the view changes to bluffs, buttes and mountains displaying their volcanic origins. Soon, you see the buckskin-colored mountains of the Hopi reservation resembling stacks of cobblestones piled sky high.
But you’re still not there.

It goes on about how one of our servicemen, who is Navajo, works in this unique environment, providing customer service and reliable electric power.

Gotta admit, we've got some good writers working here. Makes the job a little easier.

Steve, funny stuff. Writers definitely need to consider their audience when using metaphors! But what do I know...I like Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall (not Larry the Cable Guy though, c'mon, he's not even Southern...he's from Nebraska and the whole thing is an act--he's giving Southerners a bad name).

One quibble: unless there is a movie called "The Entourage" that I don't know about, I think it's just "Entourage", the HBO show.

Rob, love the "triangular assasin manuals"!

alright Steve,
I'm agreeing but I'm guilty to a degree. My company The Fuel Team, uses automotive metaphors in our marketing language, but it's more like, "giving the customer the wheel" or "providing the fuel for your web-based campaign"...never ball-sack stuff.

Sports and macho metaphors are usually made up and spewed by guys that never played sports or went to war. As a lifelong and college scholarship athlete, when I hear shit like that presented by some weenie behind a podium, I want to rush the front and put an Urlacher on him. And stand over him and say, "you mean like that you little fuckstick?"

Crush the opponent? Kill the competition? Nice. As if they'd know how...

Dee - I love you. You had me at "fuckstick." It is my favorite variation on the f-bomb.

Rob - seriously - deliver or die? execute daily? Someone have sadist itch? Were they actually planning public hangings for nondelivery or did they purchase "the chair." Who comes up with this and actually finds it motivational?

I am not one for purple prose and strained metaphor. My current philosophy comes from the all time classic movie "Pirates of the Caribbean"(seriously, if you love dialogue, this is an unheralded gem).

Geoffrey Rush's character Captain Barbossa, when faced with Keira Knightly's character being particularly formal, replies "There's a lot of long words in there, Miss. We're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?"

We should all be so clear.

Gift idea for Steve C: http://www.bustedtees.com/shirt/boringnascar/male

Granted, I work for a hospital, but I think if a woman writes the leads there's a difference. After a quick perusal of my last year's headlines, I found "You asked, we listened," "Helping parents grieve," "Compassion in action," and "Grace under pressure."

Good Lord, now that I read those again, I realize that I could very easily be a staff writer for the Oprah show (gasp!) Perhaps our department needs a little MORE testosterone in the writing.

Well as long as we're being obscure, how about this:

You're drifting in the Delta Quadrant. The last communication with Starfleet was garbled and the Heisenberg compensators are showing signs of failure. You need to relocate the Xindi Arboreals to a planet in the Theta system. What should you do? Run a level three diagnostic on the replicator pattern buffers? Run a scan for temporal anomalies on the generator of the matter/ antimatter force field? Order up a couple of Orion consorts and shag yourself senseless (also known as the Kirk Maneuver)? All of these are excellent choices when you are a friendless geek living in your parents basement who hasn't had sexual contact with another human being that wasn't charged to your Visa card."

Great blog on metaphor, Steve.

More fun than shooting a barrel full of monkeys.

Pat

I am disappointed in you, my friend Steve. For the record, I am a huge NASCAR fan. I understand the point you are fumbling around to make, but give me a break! As Christine wisely informed you on Feb 15 above, be careful making sweeping generalizations about things you admittedly know little about. NASCAR is huge, and in demographics that may may surprize you. Yes, even New York.

When you make such comments about not ever having seen a NASCAR race then add to it a remark about not ever sleeping with your sister in a truck either, then you are perpetuating insults that have been heaped on Southerners and racing fans for decades. Let it go! When people resort to this lowest form of bigotry, they come across as arrogant, elitist bigots. Does that make the point you want to make?

Check your facts -- many NASCAR pit crew members are getting engineering degrees from MIT and other top schools. You might even find someone who likes Goethe. I do. But do not paint them all as dumb rednecks. They simply are not.

Please, Steve, stick to the critique of the writing and leave people like me who do like NASCAR and are Southerners out of it. It just isn't necessary. From a business perspective, think of how many possible seminar session attendees you just turned off.

I'll always stick with you, for you are my dear friend. I admire your wit, your spirit your intelligence. You teach me things. Now, I humbly offer this advice to you.

Les Potter

Les- Any thoughts on using the social media for strategic planning?

Thanks,

Pat

In the late '90s, wrestling was king. I was working for a Large Unnamed Credit Card Company that struck a marketing alliance with the then-king of the ring, World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Something like 26 million people, mostly middle-income 30-somethings, were watching it every week on TV. Like it or not, that's a powerful demographic. Just goes to show you can never underestimate the marketing power of a sport that many people simply dismiss as the stuff of "rednecks."

Be that as it may, my friend Les makes a good point. I suspect Steve is going purely for laughs with the NASCAR bit, but unfortunately a lot of folks might see the remarks as confirmation of their perceptions about Southerners as being backwoods, in-bred buffoons. Now, I know Steve doesn't really feel that way -- on a trip to Richmond a few years ago, I treated him to what he said was one of the best meals he ever had at one of our town's wonderful restaurants. But Steve has a powerful pulpit here and some of the unenlightened among his readers might take his jabs seriously.

It all brings to mind a story that ran on CBS Sunday Morning yesterday about The Martin Agency, which has quickly become one of the most successful advertising firms in the U.S. It is the firm behind the GEICO ads featuring the gecko, the cavemen and the D-list celebrities. It's also behind UPS and -- oh, by the way -- NASCAR advertising. And recently it landed Wal-Mart after the world's largest retailer dumped its Madison Avenue ad firm.

There's no doubt The Martin Agency is one of the hottest and most creative ad firms in the nation. But the CBS correspondent just had to focus on the fact that Richmond has a troubled history dating to the Civil War and that a statue of Robert E. Lee stands on one of its most beautiful streets. Readers who commented on the story, of course, focused on those facts rather than The Martin Agency's great successes. And never mind that the Statute of Religious Freedom was born in Richmond or that Patrick Henry lit the fire of revolution against a church-state here. Because of the power of perception, Richmond will always be known as the capital of the Confederacy and perceived as a place where backwoods bigotry trumps creativity.

Robert and Les:

Now . . . I'm curious. Why the immediate link between "NASCAR" and "The South." Is it because I mentioned North Carolina?

There are a gazillion NASCAR fans up her in Chicago. I know it's the most popular spectator sport in America right now.

I didn't mean to demean the South, or people from the South. I meant to demean the sport in general.

But in re-reading the piece, because I mentioned North Carolina and said "rednecks going fast and turning left," I can see where it looks like I was ripping the South . . . which I didn't mean to do.

You know, every time I write about anything further south than the South Side of Chicago, I seem to get in trouble.

Steve C.

Yeah, as a backwoods, in-bred buffoon, I resent being called a Southerner. I live in the Mid-Atlantic in close proximity to a slew of other geographically-disperse in-breds (otherwise known as politicians). While I love the South and would love to move there, I can't lay claim to being a native.

Neruda, you left off another key piece of that exchange, also my favorite, that also illustrates -- "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your proposal -- means 'no'!"

In fairness to Steve, the point is well taken. I suspect that many of the bad examples cited come from well-intentioned communicators who wish to see their work as somewhat more important than the piece actually is. "Prettying it up" can come off more as pretentious than informative. Not only should we consider who our audience is, but what it is we're communicating and whether it's even appropriate to get creative with it.

As Steve pointed out, we're all, all of us employees, busy professional without a lot of time to get through the poetic prose to the point. I don't know much about the context of the admittedly beautiful piece Kevin offered, but I know if it was sent to me by my company I'd have skipped through the intro to find out what the office does and whether it's successful or how I can help. Or I might have skipped it altogether to get to my e-mail in-box overflowing with communication I know is more directly related to my work of the day. If I remembered I might come back to it as I ate lunch at my desk later.

Michael

Michael, I understand your point about not enough time to read.

Our feature stories we generally reserve for our print publication while we do mostly straight news in our daily electronic employee newsletter.

We use the daily to a) keep our people informed, b) funnel all those e-mails you normally get into one newsletter b) get the news out fast.

We have really reduced the number of companywide e-mails thanks to our daily.

I see our employees walking out with the print pub under their arms (it's 11x17, so it's easy to spot) and I know they are reading it when they have time and sharing it with people at home.

Sorry you guys are getting all that NASCAR backwoods stuff thrown at you. Phoenix loves NASCAR, got two races this year.

Zoom zoom.

I live in the south and I think car racing sucks. If I could figure out how to do it, I'd program my cable remote control to skip over speed channel, or whatever it's called. Stay with the hardball, Steve. I'm guessing that people like Les are offended just because they don't fit into any other demographic that "entitles" them to take offense.

Will Daniel