Let’s for once put some blame on the users of tools, not just their creators. If you put up a slide and stand in front of it, it is your show: you have no one to blame but yourself. If you are a boss, a leader, part of what you are responsible for, like it or not, is how well the people who work for you communicate with each other.
Yes, but if you are one of those bosses and leaders, the single most effective thing you could do to get people to communicate more clearly, more compellingly and more directly with one another would be … to ban PowerPoint from the workplace or from the conferences you’re holding.
Handouts? Fine. PDFs sent ahead of time? Fine. No PowerPoint.
The first company to do it will get a standing ovation at Vital Speeches, I can promise you that.
Thus far, I’ve left BP and its beleaguered CEO Tony Hayward alone. I’m sure I’ve made them uneasy with my silence.
But the beauty of being quiet is that it gives you time to think. Watching the CEO aspects of this crisis, I find myself asking like lots of my communication-minded brethren, “When will these guys ever learn?”
And then I find myself upbraiding myself for the multilevel simple-mindedness of my own question.
First, “these guys” will never pre-learn the lessons of crisis PR, because each generation of executive has to experience things like this for the first time. We don’t criticize kindergarteners for having to learn how to read, just because we had to learn it from scratch ourselves. Similarly, Tony Hayward didn’t go to all of Fraser Seitel’s seminars on crisis leadership. (Clearly.)
Second, the question is, “learn what,” exactly? It’s easy to find flaws in BP’s crisis response—indeed, at times, it has been hard to find anything else—but it ought to be acknowledged that a disaster this big will beget a communication crisis that isn’t tied up in a bow by Day Two.
Finally, framing this matter as a problem of crisis PR misses the larger point, which is that many CEOs are scarily out of touch, both with how their companies operate day to day, and with how the “small people” live. Such truths come out in a crisis—”I want my life back”—but they are part of the cause of crises in the first place.
In sort, this isn’t a crisis-PR problem, nor even a Tony Hayward problem. It’s a CEO problem, a social problem, an economic problem, an environmental problem, a who’s-in-charge-(no-who’s-really-in-charge)-problem.
And if we blame Tony Hayward for it, we condemn ourselves to continue to live and die by the mistakes and lucky blunders of similarly blind social drunkards.
A communicator-correspondent who will go unnamed bleats on Facebook:
Dear Senior Executive: if you won’t speak to me, or email me, or provide me with ANY INFORMATION about what you like/don’t like, want/don’t want, and what your intentions are for the communication I’ve been directed to create for you out of thin air, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the components of the draft don’t meet your requirements. I’m good, but I’m—sadly—not actually a mind-reader!!!
It’s the old, “write down my ideas as if I had them” routine, and it’s as dispiriting as ever.
Executive communications professionals may hope they get their reward in heaven, for heaven knows, they have suffered here on earth.
Protesting commencement-speech choices is a rite of spring, but usually it’s political figures who draw the students’ ire. I’ve never heard of students protesting a commencement by a corporate CEO.
And why are the man- and woman-children unhappy that Dimon is giving the commencement speech?
“I personally know students who have had to drop out of school because their parents have lost their jobs in the financial crisis,” said Syracuse senior Ashley Owens. “To have Dimon as our commencement speaker is really insensitive.”
As young people trying to sound older often do, young Ashley misses the legitimate reason a college student should object to being preached at by a banker: It sounds like the most boring thing in the friggin’ world!
Syracuse students, go ahead and protest Dimon. You’ll get no objection from Vital Speeches of the Day. But do it for the right reasons, for crying out loud.
This is the kind of thing that makes CEOs cautious about making bold speeches: Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship caught on video, pooh-poohing safety regulations, several months before 29 of his employees are killed in an explosion.
Here’s the speechwriter’s proper response to the CEO who fears saying anything, on the chance that it will be held against him or her later: “Don’t say anything from a point of view you couldn’t defend even if you were proven absolutely wrong in the end.” Bonus tip: “When you’re saying provocative things, don’t wear a provocative outfit.”
Have you seen “Undercover Boss,” the new reality show where CEOs take off their suits and don coveralls for a week, to find out what really goes on in their companies?
I read some reviews of the first episode, about Waste Management, and Sunday night I saw the second show, about the Hooters restaurant chain.
It’s taken me until today to quite believe what I saw.
Let me sum up Sunday’s show in case you didn’t see: Coby Brooks, the ineffectual son of the charismatic late founder of the Hooters, shaves his cheesy goatee and poses as a new employee in several stores and a sauce factory. During the week, “discovers”—at times, to his genuine surprise—that some people think Hooters is degrading to women, that “Hooters girls” are actually real people with real problems and that employees at the sauce factory don’t think much of him, since he hasn’t visited the facility since he was in sixth grade.
At several points in the show, Brooks finds himself so newly awash in the meaning and consequence of his job as the CEO of Hooters, that he begins to cry. It turns out that the head of Hooters is no more a hedonistic nihilist than you or me. He wants nothing more than to make his dead daddy proud.
At the end of the show—and this appears to be the formula for the series—Brooks donates $50K to a charity of a manager he liked, gives a fun marketing assignment to two Hooters girls he also liked and sends a stressed-out single-mom store manager into sobs of gratitude and relief by sending her and her children on a two-week expenses-paid vacation.
And then there’s “Jimbo,” a sociopathic mysogenist manager Brooks should have fired (or shot). We watched this guy force his staff of Hooters girls to compete in what he called “reindeer games” to get off work early. The game we watched, they ate baked beans off a plate with no hands. At the end of the show, Brooks simply orders to apologize to the women and change his management style. Uh-huh.
Even less convincing were the promises Brooks made to change the Hooters culture to make it more attractive to customers and a better workplace for employees.
I’ve read reviews of Undercover Boss from some communicators, who boldly declare they wouldn’t recommend that their client or company participate in it, because good TV doesn’t equal good management. And yes, someone should contact the PR people, employee communicators and HR execs at the participating companies and ask them what (in God’s name) they were thinking.
But the show does reveal truth:
The CEO is genuinely startled by a lot of what he sees, he is gobsmacked by some basic realities of the company he runs … and rather than become engage in a farcical effort to introduce dignity to the Hooters culture, he will undoubtedly return to his less spiritually rich but more psychologically sustainable world of spread sheets and earnings reports.
And Jimbo, meanwhile, will go on being Jimbo.
Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
But it seems that I, and others who care about executive communications, ought to do something.
Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz was the first big CEO blogger and he’s the first CEO to resign via Twitter. If you’re interested, here’s the story.
Because your faithful editor will be, shall we say, immersed in the Super Bowl festivities this weekend—visiting a journalist colleague in Gulfport, Miss. this weekend—Vital Speeches is leaning on you, dear blog reader, to review the show in the comments section here.
Help us out. Help all of us out. Is this a show we all ought to watch together every Sunday, or one we should we should stay away from in droves?
