John Bishop's Communications Line 30 March 2007

The future is a foreign country

They are doing things differently there, to misquote and paraphrase author L.P. Hartley ('The Go-Between', 1953). Nowhere is this more apparent than in new media, or social media and the confusing tangle of acronym-ed technologies called the internet. I am not deterred, frightened or daunted by this new world, but I don’t claim to have a grip on all of it either. That’s why we need ambassadors and interpreters, emissaries who bravely go into the ether and come back with baubles and tales of the new sights, sounds and experiences. Much like Marco Polo and other explorers who went from Europe to Asia and came back with spices and other goods to enliven medieval life.

One such ambassador is Simon Young, who started as a writer on marketing and communications (he appears regularly in Marketing magazine). He presented at the Strategic Communications and PR Forum in Auckland on Tuesday and blew his (quite small) audience away with his depth of understanding about the wired world. He talked about his media consumption – where he got news and information and how he entertained himself. Not much of it was about conventional media. Fine, I said, great lifestyle, wonderful experiences, where’s the cash flow? I’m an ambassador, Young replied. I get paid to explain it to people like you. You can see more of him at www.simonyoungwriters.com and http://www.madyoungthing.blogspot.com/

The future in your bones?

CP Snow, the famous British scientist and novelist was favorably quoted by Alvin Toffler (remember him?) in the 1970s. Snow wanted the ‘new’ leaders to have “the future in their bones.” I made this the theme of my presentation to the same conference on Developing an effective communications plan. You can download the paper – it’s on my home page (www.johnbishop.co.nz)

And for useful free stuff on trends see www.entrepreneur.com and

www.trendwatching.com

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Getting better governance ‘by design’

Do we get value for money from government expenditure, or could we do better? The Treasury thinks that there’s little, if any, improvement in the nation’s health despite the near doubling of health spending over the last decade. And they are not alone in questioning whether more spending, of itself, changes very much. There are a number of reasons offered for the weak relationship between spending and results, and poor governance is one of them.

Governance is more than just compliance, but compliance approaches that do not take into account the barriers to achieving breakthrough performance can be counterproductive and result in ‘heavy weight’ procedures that are expensive to administer and costly to comply with. It’s also clear that having a governance programme in place is not enough on its own. Increasingly organisations are looking to multi-disciplinary approaches and to using independent specialists.

One of those specialists is Nitish Verma of Essence Networks, who says that “principles of good governance work only if there is sufficient internal capacity for it. This gets eroded by inefficient day-to-day operations and poor implementation. Governance programmes need to be designed to modify behaviour and encourage good disciplines to achieve strategic benefits.”

A free white paper ‘Unlocking Real Business Benefits from Legislative Compliance’ is available at http://www.essencenetworks.com/essence/request-wp-17.html, and there’s more stuff at the 5th Annual Information Management Summit being held in Wellington from the 28th to 30th March.

Tories show the way in the UK

Michael Portillo, former Conservative Party Cabinet Minister, now a journalist and broadcaster has revealed the real Tory strategy behind their recent strong policy stance on climate change. He wrote in the Sunday Times, “Before David Cameron became Tory leader you could not imagine that the party would campaign for higher taxes targeted at the middle classes. But it (has) committed itself to a levy on frequent flyers. Equally, none of Cameron’s predecessors from John Major to Michael Howard would have looked convincing on a bicycle or hugging a husky.

The Conservative party’s new stance on the environment has knocked the breath out of opponents. The transport secretary, Douglas Alexander, accused Cameron of being “interested in headlines”, thereby unwittingly putting his finger on the central point. The Tories are majoring on climate change not just because they think there are votes in it, but also because it challenges the public’s assumptions about the party. The slogan could be: “If you thought you knew the Conservatives, look again.”

Portillo goes on to point out that over the last twenty years the Tories had successfully alienated a number of social groups (environmentalists, public servants, single mothers, gays, ethnic minorities and the health service), but under David Cameron, sensible, pragmatic policies were bringing them back. In short Cameron was dumping the baggage – the ideological burden of the past. Sound familiar at all?

What is the tea that listens to our lives?

The answer according to the TV ad is Bell. This is either a very cunning metaphor that builds on Bell’s previous linkages with New Zealand or it is an amazingly pretentious claim on behalf of a very prosaic product. I can’t decide, but it did catch my eye.

Talking of marketing in the US there is an online dating agency that has turned to politics to make itself stand out in the marketplace. The True agency promotes legislation in state legislatures to require all dating agencies to disclose whether they run credit and criminal checks on those who sign up with them. True does and it wants it to be mandatory in the industry. Its website carries a prominent warning that married people and convicted criminals are prohibited from signing up and it points to hefty penalties of fines and jail. It seems to work. True.com is one of the most visited sites in the $700 million-a-year online dating industry, attracting 3.8 million people last month, according to US reports.

Get thee to the Philippines

The highest percentage of women in senior management can be found in the Philippines, according to a report by consultancy, Grant Thornton International, the Economist reports. “This reflects a tradition of wide participation in society there. Similarly, the egalitarian legacy of communism could explain the high proportion of women near the top of companies in China and Russia,” the magazine says in its article headlined ‘the global glass ceiling’.

It didn’t list New Zealand or Australia. Japan was the lowest of the thirteen modern economies surveyed, with the US, Sweden, France and the UK all below the survey average of about 22 per cent.

Counter Epicene

And on the subject of women, my daughter, a drama critic and feminist is upset and confused at the very modern trend of women adopting their husbands’ surnames after marriage, and apparently reveling in it. In a recent TV soap opera marriage on Shortland Street, Tania Jeffries, the nurse who married the doctor, Mark Weston, gushed that all she ever wanted “was to be Mrs Weston.” Nurses marrying doctors is a lame stereotype in itself, but that’s reality TV for you – oops it’s a real life drama series. Whatever; my daughter's critique is at http://www.salient.org.nz/columns/womans/mr-and-mrs-smith/

Rock 'n' roll was mine to defend

If rock’n’roll is the music that defines a generation, this is as good an expression of it as you’ll find. It’s Patti Smith “On a cold morning in 1955, walking to Sunday school, I was drawn to the voice of Little Richard wailing "Tutti Frutti" from the interior of a local boy's makeshift clubhouse. So powerful was the connection that I let go of my mother's hand. Rock 'n' roll. It drew me from my path to a sea of possibilities. It sheltered and shattered me, from the end of childhood through a painful adolescence. I had my first altercation with my father when the Rolling Stones made their debut on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Rock 'n' roll was mine to defend. It strengthened my hand and gave me a sense of tribe as I boarded a bus from South Jersey to freedom in 1967. Rock 'n' roll, at that time, was a fusion of intimacies. Repression bloomed into rapture like raging weeds shooting through cracks in the cement. Our music provided a sense of communal activism. Our artists provoked our ascension into awareness as we ran amok in a frenzied state of grace.” Levene Breaking News 12 March 2007.

If you are public, there is no private

Al Gore’s electricity bill became public recently to highlight his alleged hypocrisy in urging action on climate change while being a huge energy user himself. A partisan, mean spirited, self interested attack, undoubtedly, but also quite embarrassing.

And consider this one. The head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, from Portugal was urging his fellow European leaders to set some ambitious targets to cut greenhouse gases at a European summit meeting earlier this month.

He was confronted by reporters about his owning a large SUV, and as The Times headlined” ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ is Barroso’s green message”. “The right to own a gas-guzzling car was indignantly compared with other fundamental human freedoms, such as the choice of a sexual and family life, by José Manuel Barroso, head of the European Commission yesterday.” (Timesonline March 07, 2007.)

Cheap wine is fine says top chef in test

Julia Moskin, a foodie writer and cook, who writes for the New York Times, has challenged the conventional wisdom that good wine produces better results in cooking than mediocre wine, (and she has a swipe at the NZ product along the way).

“After cooking four dishes with at least three different wines, I can say that cooking is a great equalizer. I whisked several beurre blancs — the classic white wine and butter emulsion — pouring in a New Zealand sauvignon blanc with a perfume of Club Med piña coladas, an overly sweet German riesling and a California chardonnay so oaky it tasted as if it had been aged in a box of No. 2 pencils. Although the wines themselves were unpleasant, all the finished sauces tasted just the way they should have: of butter and shallots, with a gentle rasp of acidity from the wine to emphasize the richness. There were minor variations — the riesling version was slightly sweet — but all of them were much tastier than I had expected,” she writes in the NYT 21 March.

She also braised duck legs in cheap port and in a 20 year old tawny, and made an egg and cream custard with a vintage sauterne and a $6 dollar bottle of sweet plonk. Finally she did a blind taste test with three groups of connoisseurs on risotto al Barolo, using three red wines ranging from $60 down to the “two buck chuck”. What came out the favourite? You got it, the cheapest one was preferred. Of the three groups, no one liked the most expensive best. Her conclusion: “the wonderful wines and the awful ones produced equally tasty food, especially if the wine was cooked for more than a few minutes.”

Gore’s science criticised

Big Al’s got an Academy award, his film has grossed US$46m, and he’s feted like a rock star, but the science in An Inconvenient Truth is under question. Not just around the peripherals and not just from extreme sceptics and political detractors. This is an extract from a report in the New York Times of 13 March. “Some of Mr. Gore's centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe's warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore's message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process. It estimated that the world's seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches -- down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.” The piece goes on to document the concerns of several other reputable scientists, particularly geologists and biologists that Gore is exaggerating the extent of change, and the impact of human behaviour on climate change.

Tui’s Verdict

I guess it had to happen – Rickards, Schollum and Shipton are on a mocked up Tui bill board headlined Not Guilty. You know the tagline. It’s doing rounds. Ask me for a copy if you haven’t seen it.

John Ansell named the cake tin

Ever wondered who named Wellington’s beloved stadium, “the cake tin”? It turns out that it was not some desperately jealous Auckland radio jock, or some monstrous Cantabrian living in the mist. It was Wellington’s very own John Ansell, or at least so he claims. John, the author of the famous National Party billboards at the last election, named himself as the inventor of the cake tin description at a conference in Auckland last week. Well at least we know.

From the web – more bad news for print

Just under a third of U.S. households have no Internet access, with most of these seeing little use for it in their lives, says a survey by Park Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm. Many respondents say: "I do all my e-commerce shopping and YouTube watching at work." As the 2008 presidential campaign gets rolling, Google is forming a political sales team. Political campaigns are expected to shift more of their advertising dollars to the Web. Also: The arrival of YouTube means that political parties' traditional monopoly on broadcast advertising "is over."

And in the print area, the San Francisco Chronicle is rumored to be in "big trouble." Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent "emergency meeting" that the news business "is broken, and no one knows how to fix it."Layoffs are expected, Levene Breaking News reports.

John Bishop - Communicator

Professional speaker, commentator, communications consultant, writer, trainer and facilitator

Web www.johnbishop.co.nz

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