American-born but London based Barbara Cassani smashed through the glass ceiling in spectacular fashion. She is best known for making a success of British Airway’s entrance into the budget airline market with Go airline. More recently she has been involved with London’s successful 2012 Olympic bid. Cassani identifies communication as key to her success as a leader.
You have a reputation as a good communicator? What is your secret?
Bosses be warned. If your staff seem more attentive than usual and if they are hanging on your every word, then they are probably playing Buzzword Bingo.
The game is cunningly simple. Players make - or download - a bingo card. Instead of numbers they use corporate buzzwords. Each card contains 40 examples of current business jargon. Top ten gems include ‘portal site’; ‘out of the box thinking’; ‘incentivise’; ‘the big picture’; ‘win-win’; and ‘empower’.
At meetings they tick off these phrases as they emerge from the lips of unsuspecting bosses. The first person to complete a row by ticking off five buzzwords is the winner.
Buzzword Bingo blows a raspberry at the business establishment. It injects a little fun and excitement into what might otherwise be dull meetings. But there is a more troubling dimension to this.
Jargon over-kill is damaging the status of management as a profession. The excessive use of buzzwords undermines serious business ideas. “It’s part of the fad cycle”, notes MIT’s Peter Senge, whose book 'The Fifth Discipline' popularised the buzzword ‘learning organisation’. “People consume then drop fads and ideas all the time and corporations are no different.”
It is tempting to dismiss all buzzwords as so much stuff and nonsense. But the fact is that new ideas and concepts shape the role of managers. Today’s buzzword is tomorrow’s task. Managers need to penetrate the jargon. It’s the only way to tell the important ideas, the ones that will change the business world, from the detritus of consultancy fodder and other nonsense peddled by self-promoting ideas merchants.
In a business world riven with fads and fashions, managers need to be more selective and more articulate. Maybe we should all be playing a different sort of corporate bingo. One that involves putting a tick in a box every time the boss – or a management guru – says something useful.
Seth Godin, marketing guru and the man who popularised viral marketing offers six building blocks for blogs. They are, in no particular order: candour; urgency; timeliness; pithiness; controversy and utility.
Godin suggests that if bloggers can’t manage at least four of the above they might as well not bother, because no one will read the blog. Not when they’ve got hundreds of thousands to choose from. As Godin says it has got to be “short and sweet.”
Talking of blogs. Here’s one blog that is worth reading. And if truth be told it’s not particularly short (sorry Seth). The blog in question is that of Rakesh Khurana. click here to view
Khurana is a rising star in the academic firmament. A professor at Harvard Business School he knows a thing or two about leadership. And he’s happy to tell anyone who wants to know more.
The great thing is Khurana’s blog is not just about leadership. If you want an interesting analysis of the - Star Wars - movie Revenge of the Sith Khurana provides it. (Yes, Harvard professors watch Star Wars –- and enjoy it). He does what so many of the leaders he writes about fail to do. He makes a connection.
I think that is connected to the fact that I like the people I lead: I don't avoid them. In the airline, for example, I would make a point of communicating with people. Whether it was jumping on an airplane and having a chat with the cabin crew and the pilots. Or, as I did on every single flight I ever went on, making an announcement that I was on board, then walking up and down the aircraft and encouraging the customers to talk to me.
Employees need to know you understand their role and they are being listened to, that someone is taking action on the things they believe are important within the organisation. Otherwise they shut up and stop trying.
Can you think of any example of where this kind of communication has made a difference?
When Go first started it was hard to explain to cabin crew and pilots how the planes could be full but we were still losing money on a route. From their perspective, they were working their tails off, and the planes were packed. Whether you have 148 customers on board who paid £30 or £300 they were still 148 people that needed looking after.
I explained that discounting the seats dramatically to fill the planes was the best we could do at the time. But as we attracted more business people, the planes would begin to make money for us. Once you explained this, they were much more understanding of what we were trying to do and why., and how they fitted into the picture. Once they understood who we could attract, and much more about the basics of the business, they came up with some wonderful ideas about the routes we should fly.
In many companies the HR people are having a tough time of it. At a time when employees are increasingly mobile, and the psychological contract of loyalty and service has long gone, how can companies get their employees to give 110 per cent? One answer is to get them to understand and identify with what the company is trying to achieve. How? Corporate values could be the answer.
David Pottruck, former president and co-CEO of the brokerage firm Charles Schwab emphasises how important it is to nail what the company stands for to the corporate masthead in his book Clicks and Mortar.
Recalling the decision to write down the Schwab values, Pottruck says:
“Until then, it hadn’t dawned on us that the firm had gotten big enough that we needed to communicate the fundamentals of the culture explicitly. In a way it was like the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. It put in writing what we understood to be the truths of our company, truths that we had been operating with for a number of years, but that could now stand as a beacon to guide our actions not just as a company but as individuals within that company.”
The entire Schwab management team laboured to uncover five core values: fairness; empathy; teamwork; responsiveness; constantly striving to be worthy of customers’ trust. “We set out to etch the vision and values we believed to be our cultural DNA into the mind and heart of every Schwab employee”, Pottruck says.
Unlike the mealy-mouthed mission statements that many companies foisted on employees in the 1980s and 1990s, the power of values lies in capturing what is authentically believed within a company. As Pottruck understands, they are a powerful tool for preserving a company’s distinctive cultures, inspiring employees, and selling the company to the world.
Blogging is mainstream. Well it must be, surely, when senior executives are getting in on the act. Now anyone and everyone can discover the innermost thoughts, hopes and fears of the great and good of business, right? Well, not exactly.
CEOs are jumping on the bandwagon so fast there’s barely any room left. A lightning search around the Internet, courtesy of Google reveals that General Motors –yes that traditional non hi-tech auto industry company –has a blog, on which no less a person than Vice Chairman Bob Lutz posts. Chris Colón, CEO of GoTech has a blog –Bits & Bytes. Hmm. Where have we heard that before?
Joseph B. Wikert, a Vice President at publishing outfit Wiley blogs under the epithet The Average Joe - although this Joe seems anything but average. After all how many “average Joes” make it to VP in a major corporation.
And what do these senior execs write about? (Come to think of it when do they get the time to blog in the first place?) No prizes for guessing that Lutz is big on cars. And Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems is strong on logical partitioning and chip multi-threading - whatever they may be. Not that it is all shop talk. Average Joe tells anyone who wants to know how he’s loaded his MP3 player with every CD in his house and still has 30 gigs of drive space left. Oh no, there underneath is a plug for a Wiley book Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide.
In other words there are no surprises here. It may go by the name of blogging but don’t expect too many exciting revelations. Most senior exec blogs read like the conversation you have when the sales person sidles over to you in the store and gives you the pitch. It’s all communication, but no connection. But then what did you expect?
Blogging gives rise to expectations, not always realistic. Content should be authentic and uncensored. Blog readers have a mental image of the writer taking time out and letting go, getting things off their chest, maybe even letting their hair down - if they’ve got any.
There is a danger of blogging becoming just another element in the marketing mix – one more channel to promote your products or services. Perhaps B–schools should start running courses on blogging. There might also be a niche market opportunity for ghost bloggers who can do the business for the busy executive.
In a global economy, it's more important than ever to know how they do things in other countries. One key to successfully navigating cultural currents is by understanding how to communicate. Not all communication is verbal. Gesturing is a common practice in every culture. This can lead to misunderstandings. Inevitably, some gestures common in the western world have confusing or even opposite meanings in other cultures.
Take the "A-OK" sign: palm out, thumb and forefinger curled into a circle, while the other fingers are extended upwards. In North America and the UK this means OK or everything is fine. In France it means "zero" and in Denmark or Italy it can be taken as an insult. In most of Latin America it is considered obscene.
Or the peace sign (also known as "V for victory"): palm out, forefinger and index finger are pointed upwards and split into the shape of a "V." It is universally accepted as a sign indicating “peace”. If it is done backwards (with the palm in rather than out) it takes on an obscene meaning in the UK and some other countries such as parts of Canada and Australia and New Zealand.
Then there’s Thumbs up: with an outstretched fist, the thumb is extended straight up.
"Thumbs up" as a positive gesture quickly gained popularity in the U.S.A., especially as a visual signal in noisy environments. However, in most of the Middle East and parts of Africa (notably Nigeria), this symbol is obscene. In Japan, the thumb is considered the fifth digit; a raised thumb will order five of something!
