For Your Approval

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?

Here's a short and belated report on my recent time in the Big Easy. Got waylaid by weather and had to spend half of Wednesday on the tarmac in Houston and half of yesterday in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport; not the most comfortable way to recover from three days in a city where drinking on the streets is encouraged.

So here are some memories, fuzzy as they may be:

1. The city hasn’t lost its sleazy charm, but one can tell it’s not what it used to be – the usual air of decay and decrepitude is much more pronounced, and the crowds on Bourbon Street are thinner and less attractive these days. But the spirit of the city, which is a heady mix of southern hospitality and fall-of-the-Roman-empire-style debauchery, is as strong and appealing as ever.

2. The food was superb, as always. I’ll never forget the 20-oz bone-in “cowboy ribeye” smothered with crawfish and washed down with vodka martinis at Frank Brennan’s Steak House, or the magnificently refreshing crab gazpacho at The Palace, or the damn-that’s-good jambalaya, fried catfish and turnip greens at Mother’s.

3. Oh yes. The conference. It was good, although some of the sessions were a bit on the dull side, at least for jaded old me. But the best sessions were just great. I heard some fabulous stuff on corporate applications of social media (General Motors is doing some ground-breaking things – their external blogging program is actually driving internal culture change). I learned about a program at Hewlett  Packard that connects front line employees directly with executives that’s driving measurable improvements in engagement. And I saw how Royal Bank of Canada completely revamped its internal communications to better serve the company’s business and meet the changing information needs of its employees (they ditched their print newsletter, not to save money or be cool, but because 91 per cent of their employees, who are all wired, said they prefer online communications).

4. My old pal and longtime IABC commentator David Murray predicted that attendees would be brought to tears by a keynote address, and his prophecy was fulfilled in the closing session, in which management guro and author of Go Put Your Strengths to Work, Marcus Buckingham, delivered an impassioned plea to all of us to understand and nurture our strengths rather than focus on our weaknesses (sounds trite, but it was extraordinarily powerful and I think, among other things, my parenting style will be influenced by his message).

5. In attending conferences like this, I am reminded of how proud I am to be a member of IABC. It's my extended family. And learning from my fellow communicators also reminded me of how much I love my work in employee communications.

Laissez les bons temps roulée!

On my way to New Orleans for the big IABC International Conference and looking forward to seeing all my IABC friends. If you're also going to be in town, leave me a comment on this post and we can get together for a hurricane or two.

Job opportunity

Business is booming at my firm, Longview Communications, and we're looking for a new member for our team. It's a great outfit, with fun, challenging work on blue-chip client accounts.  Here's a link to the job posting.

The attention crash

Uberblogger Steve Rubel's recent post reminds us that "human attention does not obey Moore's Law" -- in other words, we are limited in our ability to keep up with the steadily increasing flow of information that's being generated by the new social media. I agree with Rubel that there is going to be a crash. Interesting that an external trend is starting to crash well before it has much traction inside organizations.

The Chief Engagement Officer

A while back I mused about how enlightened companies will soon create a new executive position, the Chief Engagement Officer, whose primary role will be to nurture employee involvement, commitment and loyalty. It’s great to see that someone has taken my idea and run with it in a new book, The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer: Turning Hierarchy Upside Down to Drive Performance.

Seriously, though, it’s nice to know that someone has done more than muse about the idea. This morning I listened to a great interview with the book’s author, John Smythe, on the latest episode  of my favorite podcast, For Immediate Release (he's the first interview of the podcast, just a few minutes in).

The central idea of John's book is that the way to engage employees is to share power with them, and that, to accomplish this, the leadership model has to change so that leaders become guides rather than their traditional role as ultimate decision makers.

It's clear listening to John that we don’t really need a new executive position, but rather the Chief Executive Officer needs to take on the role. And there's lots we communicators can do to support him or her. For example, this whole engagement thing seems to just beg for the new social media tools. What better way is there to connect with employees and share power with them than by having an actual two-way conversation with them? And, beyond the obvious face-to-face communication (which in large organizations is impractical), the tool is there and ready to use: the internal blog.