Bloghound

Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli ’s poor communications judgment and skills hurt Home Depot’s reputation. But communications still doesn’t seem to be a priority for him. Rather than having corporate communications report to him, last month he put the organization under the human resources department, and the VP of communications resigned. ( I don’t blame him.)

This move signals that Nardelli doesn’t value communications — or thinks that he knows enough not to need a direct report in that function. Leadership is communications. Inspiring employees to act on ideas. Instilling confidence in partners. Building trust with the media and customers. Listening to disgruntled employees dealers and customers to get to root causes.

As Chrysler tries to make a comeback communication — not advertising — will be crucial. Methinks Nardelli is living in a bubble and when the bubble bursts he will again have egg all over his face.

How do you politely hijack a conversation when the talk starts to get heated and negative? Check out my guest post on the topic over at the IAOC blog, including an example of what happened when Cymfony’s Jim Nail questioned Joseph Jaffe about his widely-publicized conversational marketing study.

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And thanks to Wayne Hurlbut of Blog Business World for his review of Beyond Buzz. I’ll be interviewed by Wayne tonight at 8 EST/5 PST on his Blog Business Success Internet radio show.

The folks over at MIT Media Lab have created some interesting ways to assess whether someone is interested in or even paying attention to a conversation. In fact, using a machine that measures a person’s speaking style (activity, stress, empathy) the MIT researchers can predict the outcomes of a conversation with almost 90 percent accuracy – from just a few minutes of listening.

One tool is the Jerk-O-Meter, which measures how engaged you are with the other person on the phone and sends you messages, from “you’re a smooth talker” to “stop being a jerk” so you can alter your behavior.

Other tests include the The ElevatorRater, a program that analyzes charisma based on a speaker’s delivery, using non-linguistic speech features like pitch, speaking rate, pause durations. Another is the Human Interest Meter, measuring how interested people are in conversations.

I think tools like these hold some potential for communicators, giving us ways to more scientifically help people relax and be more genuine. They can also help us to crack the corporate speak syndrome, showing people just how engaged or unengaged others are when listening in to their podcasts, webinars, and in-person presentations.

One of the MIT researchers has suggested that perhaps people need to become better actors to be engaged in meaningful conversations. I say rubbish to that notion.

If we want genuine interest we need to be genuinely interested in what we’re talking about – and the people with whom we’re talking.

In today’s conversational world, whether online or in-person we have to learn how to find points of view – or help others in our organization find them – that are interesting to others and that we LIKE talking about. Points of view are an “also” to the traditional vision/mission/messaging basics; they’re beliefs, ideas, advice, and perspectives that are fresh, relevant and have a little emotion wrapped around them.

Harder than the usual “messaging” and best practices and feature/benefits? Surely. But if we don’t speak with conviction, research shows that people will tune us out in less than three minutes – despite the words themselves.

How a Point of View Differs

Nothing gets people talking (and thinking) like a contrarian or counterintuitive point of view. A good example can be seen in a post today over at the Running a Hospital blog by Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. There’s a local hospital in financial trouble that none of the Boston-area hospital groups have the money to acquire and fix. Levy suggests an alternative — that the Service Employees International Union take over the hospital as they have a strong interest in hospital management and lots of cash.

“So why not approach SEIU with a proposal to have the union purchase, own and operate Carney Hospital? Let the union show how it can handle the full panoply of issues of running a hospital and demonstrate how it can profitably operate a neighborhood facility without the kind of state aid that has been pouring into Carney for all these years. Let the union negotiate contracts with the insurance companies, encourage access for low-income patients, maintain high regulatory standards for patient care, and do all the other things required of hospital management, while, of course, providing excellent working conditions for staff members and physicians.”

An innovative idea or a friendly smack at the unions who so often complain about how hospitals are managed? Hard to say, but Paul’s post will certainly be the topic of conversations in the Boston healthcare community this weekend. And there’s nothing healthier for any industry than frank, open conversations about contrarian ideas. That’s where change so often begins.

Thanks to Howard Kain, managing principal of the healthcare group at PNC for turning me on to Running a Hospital, a great example of CEO blogging — and in a highly-regulated, conservative industry like hospital management no less!

Interrupting is a communication felony, says Jerry Seinfeld in an interview with Oprah. “If someone is talking — and I don’t care what they’re saying or how excited you are to say what you have to say — wait until he or she is finished. When you interrupt, you’ve stopped listening. People want to be heard.”

One of the upsides about online conversations is that we listen better because we can’t interrupt. And maybe the reason many people say more online than they would in-person is that they feel that they can have a say. MySpace’s “Never Ending Friending Study,” released this summer, found that 50% of those surveyed said that they are “less awkward when I communicate on this site than in person,” and “the site allows me to more social than I am in person.”

One of the challenges in getting people to believe in a new business concept is having the right words to describe the concept. At the BIF3 Innovation Summit CEOs Robin Chase of GoLoco, Jack Hughes of TopCoder, William Herb of Linear Air, and BIF3 co-host Bill Taylor talked about the importance of messaging to be able to talk about business concepts in ways that resonate –with employees, customers and investors. Without that messaging, it’s difficult to get people to believe in the idea.

How these execs have distilled their concepts to people “get it” quickly:

• GoLoco: personal public transportation system
• Linear Air: car service with wings
• Fast Company magazine: like Harvard Business Review and Rolling Stone combined

All expressed how difficult it is to hone in on those few words that capture the idea. Note how straightforward these concepts are – and how easy it is for other people to use the language.

A few days a go I was talking to a CMO about his company’s new messaging. “We’ve got it done, but I can’t really explain it to you over the phone,” he said. “I need to walk you through the deck.” Sounds like it isn’t done….

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Who are many CEOs and sales executives most similar to?

a) Al Gore

b) Bob Kerry

c) Bob Dole

The answer is all of the above. The reason is that most CEOs and sales executives, like unsuccessful political candidates, present litanies of facts, figures, and rational reasoning to try to persuade people, and they overlook (or dismiss) the power of emotions.

They rely on dispassionate logic. Yet, neuroscientists and psychologists have proven that the more “rational” a message, the less likely it is to trigger the emotional circuits in our brains that activate behavior and decisions.

The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation by psychologist and political scientist Dr. Drew Westen is a fascinating read about the science and practice of persuasion in American politics, particularly about how the Democrats, with the exception of Bill Clinton, have blown it so many times by relying on dispassionate reasoning and policy discussions rather than connecting with people on an emotional level.

People decide by how they feel about you. (Or your company or party.) Republicans and many consumer products marketers are masters at this; most Democrats, business-to-business and professional services are not.

Aside from being a political junkie from a communication strategy perspective, I found the book interesting because the principles of political persuasion are the same for business, and are becoming even more relevant in our video, podcasting, blogging world. Most companies obsessively talk about their products, capabilities, roadmaps, strategy du jour ( Six Sigma, anyone?), and obvious trends (“we’re all about helping customers reduce risk and cut costs.”). But they fail to first connect with people, be they customers or employees, in an emotional way that engenders feelings of competency, trust, and liking.

In my book Beyond Buzz, chapter 3 (“Make Meaning Not Buzz”) explores why emotion is the superhighway to making meaning and understanding. Westen’s exploration of scientific research goes much deeper in showing why the mind is hardwired to tune into emotionally compelling appeals vs. rational reasons, and offers strategies on how to appeal to that neural network of often unconscious decision making.

Here are some takeaways from the book that I found especially interesting for those of us in in business.

On getting attention

“We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest, enthusiasm, fear, anger or contempt. We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance.”

On driving behavior

“Emotion is one of the most potent sources of motivation that drives human behavior. It is no accident that the words motivation and emotion share the same Latin root, movere, which means to move.”

Thinking beyond the message itself

“The implications of these findings suggest that the choice of words, images, wounds, music, backdrop, tone of voice and a host of other factors is as likely to be as significant to the electoral success of a campaign as content.”

The right feelings vs. the best argument

“As decades of survey research demonstrate, people are driven in the voting booth by their feelings, and these feelings reflect the extent to which they believe a party of candidate is attending to their interests and values.”

“The data form political science is crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings, not the candidate who presents the best argument

Beware messaging by focus group

“Virtually every word that came out of his mouth [Gore, 200 presidential campaign] had been market-tested using focus groups and hand-dials indicating when listeners liked and didn’t like what he ways saying in practice debates. Unfortunately, the more his words seemed market-tested, the less genuine they seemed. And the less genuine he seemed, the less likable

The appeal of being clear

“Political scientist Larry Bartels found, as expected, that voters prefer candidates whose values and policies match their own preferences. But he also found that voters prefer candidates who are clear on what they believe, even if it is not what they believe.”

4 questions that matter in deciding

“Voters tend to ask four questions that determine who they will vote for…Candidates who focus their campaigns on the top of this hierarchy and work their way down generally win.

1. How do I feel about the candidate’s party and its principles?
2. How does this candidate make me feel?
3. How do I feel about this candidate’s personal characteristics, particularly his or her integrity, leadership, and compassion?
4. How do I feel about this candidate’s stands on issues that matter to me?

Now, take a look at the sales deck your sales reps are using, the speech your CEO recently gave to employees or partners, the marketing messaging “playbook,” the “look and feel” of your company’s PowerPoint style .

• How do they make people feel about your company?
• Do they tell a compelling story in words and images – or are they a rationale laundry list of capabilities, products, competitive advantages and other dispassionate facts and figures?
• Do people like telling your story? Or are they dispassionate and not genuinely engaged with the ideas?

Tomorrow the United States celebrates its independence and our love for democracy. But perhaps it’s time to reflect on democracy — and how conversations in non-political but highly participatory contexts can shape a civilization. Or how isolation and apathy can erode its soul.

My good friend and the brilliant director, playwright and Trinity Rep artistic director Curt Columbus recently talked about this notion with graduating students at Brown University, and shared his notes with me.

Curt explains that throughout history people have defined their selves and negotiated the rules of their societies by participating in raucous public forums, where all voting citizens participate. And these forums are theaters.

• Think of the influence of the play Persians on the Athenian culture – after the Athenians had just defeated the Persians. The play empathizes with the Persians rather than just hero worshipping the victorious Athenian warriors. And the Athenians choose to be a civilized society rather than ruthless conquerors.

• Or how Shakespeare influenced the culture during the Elizabethan era, helping people to understand what it meant to be English in that turbulent time.

Curt contends that today we need theater and its shared conversations and experiences more than ever. Here are his views:

“So you might say, Curt, these are interesting demonstrations of the theater’s historical importance, but what does this have to do with us in a 21^st century, technologically sophisticated American democracy.

Noam Chomsky said, ‘The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.’

I will go a step further. The most effective way to restrict democracy is to hand over decision making power, and then become increasingly isolated, increasingly unwilling to collect, to connect, and to converse.

I believe that we reached another of those historical moments when the culture needs the theater.

The media in our cultural has raised its volume to a deafening roar. People are starving for a genuine point of interaction, a way to fight the isolation of television and film and internet. They want to find meaning through conversation, through community. And they want to collect in a room with other people to find themselves engaged, enlightened and entertained. The theater is at the crest of a cultural tidal wave in America, if we will just take our place there.

The American archeologist Howard Winters said, ‘Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it.’

And University of Chicago educator Robert Hutchins said, ‘The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.’

I’m sure there is a small amount of self-aggrandizement in thinking that theater can save American democracy. But I know that the great Theater is a place where you see the other, walk in their shoes, which is the ultimate humanist act, and where you rub up against the rest of the world, outside your limitations, outside your comfort zone. And that is where the democratic impulse begins at the very least.”

Happy 4^th of July.

Several people have contacted me recently to learn more about the differences between buzz and meaning. (The second chapter in my book Beyond Buzz is “Make meaning, not buzz.” ) Here’s a quick explanation. I’ll share more in future posts.

[buzz] [meaning] [meaning making]

What do conversations have to do with innovation? Here’s an excerpt from a post by Chris Flanagan over at the non-profit Business Innovation Factory based on a talk I gave yesterday.

By definition, an innovation is something new and different. All too often, executives find themselves coming out of a sales meeting or vc meeting or employee meeting scratching their heads saying, ‘they just didn’t get it.” Creating interest and momentum around an innovation is all about conversational marketing. It taps into both the head and heart, and gets people to respond and perhaps accept a new way of doing things. As Lois says in her book, “intellectual food fights, candid debates, and frank perspectives help speed understanding. Don’t hide behind overly polite language, “safe” topics, and accepted business jargon. It clouds rather than clarifies.” Mastering conversational marketing just might be the hurdle between success and failure.