COMMUNICATING: BODY AND SOUL

Founder of the Body Shop, Anita Roddick, is probably the most famous social entrepreneur of her generation. In the Body Shop, she created a business that changed the face of cosmetics retailing, and popularised the franchise business model. A business that was both profitable and socially responsible.

Roddick relinquished her role as co-chair of the Body Shop in 2002, although she remains a non-executive director and actively involved with the company, particularly on the creative side.

One of Roddick's great attributes was her ability to get across her values and ethos, both in person and through the Body Shop brand. She instinctively understood the need for great and original forms of communication. No stultifying lectures for Body Shop staff from Roddick. She speaks to Idea-Log:

What are the key skills that a leader of an organisation requires?

I think the most essential tool is communication. You have got to communicate with passion. Passion, in terms of enthusiasm, is persuasive.

How do you do the communication aspect, especially in a large organisation?

When an organisation gets bigger, things turn into hierarchy. That is when rules and regulations become abundant. That is when creativity gets snuffed out and when intimacy goes out of the door.

It is really important that when the organisation gets bigger, you find more immediate, intimate ways of communication. In the Body Shop, it was #1 - the first buy is taken with the eye. So it had to be visual. We had a video that went to every store once a week in the UK, and once a month in the overseas shops. These were not about products, or finances. These were about the campaigns, the actions.

You have got to be inspiring. When you do a talk, use graphics, videos and music. My audience consisted mostly of women under the age of 25, whose ethics are care or social justice. They do not go home dreaming of moisture cream. They want a Monday to Friday living, not a Monday to Friday death. So everything had to be entertaining; big slides, great music videos. I mean that in a really honest way. Everything was about the emotions.

TALKING UPSTREAM

In his new book Personal Best, Paralympian swimmer and performance coach Marc Woods describes how he battled through cancer treatment and the loss of his leg, to become a multiple gold medal winner, and an ambassador for both his sport and the Teenage Cancer Trust.

In this passage from his book, Woods describes how Self-talk is a technique that can help someone overcome self doubt, stay calm under pressure, and improve performance.

"Self-talk is using strong positive statements as part of a private inner dialogue to boost an individual's self-esteem. We all carry on an internal dialogue from time to time; the more positive it is, the more our self-esteem and self-belief will be improved. The key is keeping self-talk and affirmations positive. Negative self-talk is more likely to lead to failure than success.

Self-talk is a technique that I used to good effect during my cancer treatment and swimming career. I still use it today. Recently I was on a difficult rock climb that I had failed to complete on previous attempts. Approximately two-thirds of the way up I reached the point where I'd fallen before. My toes were on a couple of tiny foot holds, and my left hand on another awkward hold. I needed to make myself safe and, with my right hand, clip the rope into a metal clip that was already attached to the rock face. It was a critical moment. As I took hold of the rope I repeated to myself: "You can do it, you can do it, you can do it." It helped me focus and stay calm. I completed the climb."

COMMUNICATING FOR THE FUTURE

C.K. Prahalad, Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Corporate Strategy and Business at the University of Michigan's Business School, is well known for his best-selling book Competing for the Future (1994), co-authored with Gary Hamel. In 2004 Prahalad revisited the competition and strategy arena with The Future of Competition, co-authored with Venkat Ramaswamy.

In Prahalad's vision of the corporate future the "customer" is more powerful and pro-active. Communication technology has transformed the role of the consumer and the way in which companies must interact with them. Largely because of the internet, consumers become agents, creating and participating in transactions.

In this new world of two-way communication between company and consumer, Prahalad believes that value must be co-created by companies, hand-in-hand with consumers. They must cut their cloth according to their consumers. Here are two key questions they address:

How is the relationship between corporation and consumer changing, in a way that shapes the future?

"For the first time in our history 1.5 billion people are connected through wireless, PCs, or some combination of both. Consequently the power that used to exist between consumers and corporations is being re-balanced.

Individuals want to decide for themselves how they want to be served. Therefore co-creation is going to take place, whether it's making your own pizza, managing your own musical archive, or designing your own clothes. It's going to take place. The question is: how do companies and managers prepare?"

What are the implications for the people at the top, the CEOs and business leaders? What does that mean for them? Is it a culture change?

"It is a huge culture change. It is mostly mental models that have to change. The big change for companies is to ask: how can we influence without ownership? What happens to the boundaries of the firm? How do we establish dialogue with the consumers? How do we create a level of transparency and access that allows people to work with each other?"

If we are to believe Prahalad, then we are heading for a very different future in which companies can no longer pay lip service to the notion of communicating with customers. Instead, the customer will be actively involved further up the value chain. They must help shape products and services. In the new bespoke economy only the sharpest corporate tailors will survive.

THE INNER DIALOGUE

Communication is not just external. Sometimes we talk to ourselves. We need to have that internal dialogue. The following segment shows exactly how important that internal dialogue can be.

Here is an extract from an interview between management guru Gary Hamel and Idea-Log contributor Des Dearlove. In it, Hamel explains how, if we are to make real progress as managers, we need to question some of the fundamental assumptions that we hold. We need to question our beliefs about the way we work.

How important is it for managers to have a historical context?

Very. In every other university discipline we've spent the last ten years deconstructing all of our beliefs, in linguistics, and in history, and in political science, to the point where we have no more foundations. In a way, everything is up for grabs. Management needs to be aware of that challenge.

How do you mean?

Let me give you an analogy. I grew up in a very religious, spiritual home, for which I'm extremely grateful. Yet, if you grow up with parents who have a great faith, and their parents also had a great faith, you could be in your 20s or 30s before asking some fundamental spiritual questions. Does God exist? If God exists, why is there suffering? Is it a personal God?

My parents and grandparents answered those questions to their satisfaction, at some point in their lives. Then it becomes a bed rock and they don't think about that any more. Yet, if you don't build that foundation for yourself as a child, you are never going to have a faith that will withstand the slightest bit of criticism.

It is the same with management: you have to know what you believe, and why you believe it, especially if you want to change it. I use an analogy with genetics -- you can't change the genome without understanding the genome. There is hardly a thing we believe about management that is unlikely to be challenged over the next 20 or 30 years. When you start unpacking all the management beliefs you find none of them are more than half right.

CREATIVE COMMUNICATIONS

You can tell people something in the same way only so many times. After that it ceases to be as effective. Business would do well to pay attention to the revolution taking place in some business school classrooms - or rather outside the classrooms. For some leading business schools have discovered that a more creative route to disseminating information pays dividends.

"Traditional MBA teaching is standing in front of a class and delivering a lecture, but that just doesn't work," says Dinah Bennett, a senior tutor at Durham Business School in the United Kingdom

"Research has shown in terms of learning, and retention of learning, that if you just stand up and talk at somebody they only retain four per cent of what is said. But if you encourage people to immediately apply that learning in practice, it jumps to a 90 per cent retention rate." Bennett calls this mix of practical and theoretical teaching style "pracademic".

Cass Business School in the City of London has introduced the Mystery of Business course. Based on the idea of not lecturing, the course is focused around five themes: business as art, business as play, business as story, business as theatre, and business as war.

During the five week elective students learn about decision making at the Churchill Museum in the Cabinet War Rooms beneath Whitehall in London. They also pay a visit to the National Portrait Gallery and, with the help of an art historian, decode images of leaders.

In one exercise they get an up-close and personal taste of conflict resolution and negotiation. "We got a leading theatre facilitator and a former hostage negotiator, went to a West End theatre, hired the rehearsal room, and dealt with the theme of conflict," says course designer Professor Clive Holtham, the director of the Cass learning laboratory.

It may seem like fun and games, but when it comes to unconventional approaches to learning there is method in the madness. Business should pay attention.

Out Takes

It's often said, usually after a row, that women and men don't speak the same language. In Ancient Sumeria they really did speak different languages: one for men the other for women. Imagine the potential for misunderstanding. To this day men and women in Siberia's Chukotka - Roman Abramovich's patch - still pronounce some words differently.

Out Takes

Communication can be costly. In the post enlargement European Union (EU) there are over 450 million Europeans, 25 member states, and 20 official languages.

Within the EU organisation itself it is estimated that the employment of over 100 translators and 40 interpreters is required for each of the nine new official languages. The cost of the post-enlargement translation budget? An estimated 140 million euros. The EU's own translation issues are a snapshot of the Europewide dilemma facing business. The size of the pre-enlargement EU translation market was estimated at US $2.45 billion.

Surely the simple solution is to have just one language for business worldwide. Alas, history suggests not. In 1887 Ludovic Zamenhof published details of a new language using the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. Esperanto, as the language became known, was described by the US government as: "far easier to learn and use than any national language".

Yet Esperanto never became a universal language. Nationalism prevailed. The French blocked a move to have Esperanto adopted by the League of Nations. Josef Stalin called it "that dangerous language". Governments across Central Europe obstructed use of the language. Esperanto speakers were persecuted in some countries and even shot.

When it comes to linguistics, it seems universal standards are out, and diversity is in, regardless of cost.

Multan dankon al tutaj niaj legitoroj cio jaro. Ni antaugojas al 2006 ke estos paca kaj pleno de prospero.