The next course of the Communications Cookout is Grilled Quesadillas with Smoked Gouda and Jack Cheese with Fresh Rosemary and Granny Smith Apples. An unconventional quesadilla to say the least, but addictively delicious and easy to prepare.

A soft flour burrito shell is layered with gratings of two cheeses, then a sprinkling of chopped rosemary and a layer of thinly sliced apple. After a pinch or two of salt and pepper, more of the cheese is spread over the apple layer, and the quesadilla is topped with another burrito shell. The whole thing is grilled for about three minutes per side over medium high heat and then cut into pizza-shaped slices. Served with a crisp, dry, fruity white wine, it’s a gluey, tangy, herbal piece of heaven.

For our purposes, the quesadilla is a metaphor for the communciation vehicle, the internal print publication in particular. It’s a classic format. Most of us have had a quesadilla in a Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurant, and it is usually filled with jack cheese, shredded chicken, some salsa, and maybe some refried beans. Fried on a griddle until the cheese turns gooey, it is served with some salsa, guacamole and a dollop of sour cream. And most of us have written, edited, or at least contributed to a company newsletter or magazine, with its stories about the latest corporate program, quarterly production numbers and financial results, information about changes to employee benefits, and so on.

This menu’s modern take on the traditional quesadilla nicely parallels the changing tastes and needs of today’s employees, and how the company publication needs to change with them.

In my new handbook, Writing and Editing the Internal Publication, I document a major shift in employee attitudes and values based on a great book called Values Shift: The New Work Ethic and What It Means for Business, by John Izzo and Pam Withers. In the book Izzo and Withers talk about how the workplace dynamic is shifting in a way that gives skilled employees more power and control over their destiny than ever before — and how reducing turnover and keeping employees is the biggest issue facing business today.

The new generation of employees has vastly different expectations of employers. Today’s workers detest the corporate heirachies and paternalism that have defined big business in the past. They are sick of the enormous stress of the modern workplace, they are oppressed by technological change, and they expect their employers to make things better. And they care more about their family, their health, and ethics than they do about power, prestige and money.

The greedy, selfish “me” generation has been overtaken by self-aware, moral, non-materialistic employees who expect a lot from their employers, and are more than ready to leave for more socially responsible pastures if their company doesn’t live up to their high expectations.

And so, although the vehicle or delivery mechanism might not need to change (the burrito shell or the print publication), the contents surely do.

Just as the new-age quesadilla reflects a more modern and sophisticated taste, we need our internal publications to reflect the changing values and expectations of employees. That means recognizing the stresses of the modern workplace and demonstrating what our organizations are doing to make life easier for their people. It means telling stories in human terms that make the vision of our companies real. It means breaking down barriers and encouraging real two-way communication that builds new connections between our company’s leaders and its employees. And it means creating shared experiences that create a true spirit of community. Finally, it means communicating with integrity — providing our organization with open, honest, timely and ethical communications that build trust, the most important building block for anything else in human life.

What it doesn’t mean is using the employee print publication as a vehicle for delivering hard news. News in big organizations happens at a pace that print just can’t keep up with, and is ideally suited to electronic communications. As my friend David Murray says, today’s print publication is less about news, and more about providing employees with a physical embodiment of a company’s brand, its values and its culture.

One more thing. If we think of the burrito shell as the physical container of the quesadilla, then paper, ink and staples are the shell that holds the contents of our employee publications. I’ll talk later about this as we progress through our menu, but I want to illustrate an important issue here. I believe that, by embracing new technologies like e-mail and intranets in the 1990s and abandoning print as a channel for employee communications, many big organizations have disenfranchised huge segments of their workforce. It’s as if we decided, collectively, that it’s just as effective to throw our cheese through the cooking grate and onto the fire below as it is to wrap it in a tidy shell. Shame on anyone for wasting food, and shame on our profession for wasting so much information by throwing away a perfectly good communciation format, the print publication.

The first course of the Communication Cookout is Grilled Asparagus with Roasted Garlic and Chipotle mayo, an amuse-bouche (French for mouth teaser) that will represent the simplicity and power of conversation.

The asparagus is treated simply: the spears are trimmed and tossed with extra virgin olive oil and kosher salt. They’re then placed on a hot grill and cooked for about two minutes, just until they’re slightly charred and they turn a brilliant green. They’re taken off the grill and given a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. That’s it. On the side will be a dollop of mayonnaise flavored with garlic, cumin and fiery chipotles. Simple and delicious.

And so it is with the most direct form of human communication, the conversation. No planning or approvals needed. A meaningful interchange, much like sharing a meal. And, just as the humble asparagus shoot can be ruined by overcooking or overwhelmed by a heavy sauce, we can second-guess and plan ourselves into oblivion, producing soft, sanitized communications that feel like they came out of a can.

Keep your communications simple and direct, in the spirit of a natural conversation. And, like our little mouth-teaser, you will have your audience paying full attention, and hankering for more.

Woo hoo! Let’s barbecue!

In a short series of posts over the next few days I hope to provide In Session readers with a preview of my Sunday pre-conference session, Communication Cookout: Everything I Know About Communication, I Learned From My Barbecue. As you can gather from the title, I intend to use barbecue as a metaphor for organizational communication. I figure, if others can use sailing, or mountain climbing, or golf as analogies for business, why not barbecue?

I’m uniquely qualified to lead the session on Sunday, which is sold out. As the chief cook of Rockin’ Ronnie’s Butt Shredders barbecue team, the Dean of Barbecue Academy, and the author of two barbecue cookbooks, I’m a self-proclaimed barbecue evangelist. And, as the author of the IABC Knowledge Bank’s new handbook, Writing and Editing the Internal Publication: Delivering Employee Communications with Impact, Integrity and Style, I’m well-versed in the ways of organizational communication.

On Sunday, my passions for barbecue and communication will collide, with what I hope will be tasty and entertaining results. Here’s the menu:

Grilled Asparagus with Roasted Garlic and Chipotle Mayo

Grilled Quesadillas with Smoked Gouda and Jack Cheese with Fresh Rosemary and Granny Smith Apples

Cedar-Planked Salmon with Whisky-Maple Glaze

Classic Barbecued Pulled Pork Sandwiches with Tidewater Coleslaw

Grilled Rack of Lamb with Balsamic Reduction

Mission Hill Planked Pears with Rhubarb Compote and Icewine Reduction

It sounds like lot of food, but the portions will be fairly small and it will be spaced out over the three hours of the session. With every course I’ll serve up some thoughts about organizational communication, using the food and how it’s cooked to represent the concepts I’m planning to present. There will be no PowerPoint show — just me and the food…and about five cases of superb Okanagan wine.

In my next post I’ll start exploring the menu, and its connections to great communication. Stay tuned.

IABC President Julie Freeman, ABC, APR, talks about the business of the association that is conducted during the international conference, including board meetings and the Annual General Meeting.

 

 ConferenceCast Episode #11 [13:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Elisabeth Tanguy has some clear objectives in mind for participating in this year’s international conference. A senior corporate communications manager at Nokia headquarters in Finland, Elisabeth shares her thoughts in this interview about her role at Nokia, why she’s going to Vancouver in June, and what she’s looking to gain from her participation as a conference delegate from Europe to learn and share with her colleagues. In our conversation, we also talked about social media (blogs, wikis, etc), its impact on internal communication and how it’s developing as a communication channel.

 

 ConferenceCast #10 - Elisabeth Tanguy, Nokia [11:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lynne Lancaster studies and consults on the impact of multiple generations of workers in our organization’s various workforces. Expectations, values, approaches to work and simple demographic numbers all are factors in how companies should address these individuals. At the sold-out IABC Research Foundation luncheon, Lancaster will present research and its implications for companies and communicators.

 

 ConferenceCast Episode #9 [16:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Vicki Yim, director of International Conference, begins planning as far as five years out, with most work getting intensive at the prior year’s conference. That’s right; even as Vicki pulls everything together for Vancouver, she’s also working on the 2007 event set for New Orleans. In this interview, Vicki takes us behind the scenes and provides an inside look at the logistics required to make the conference run seamlessly and look so effortless to the 1,500-plus communicators who will gather in Vancouver in just about 1-1/2 weeks.

 

 CC #8: An interview with Vicki Yim [17:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

There are a lot of reasons why the cancellation of my trip to Vancouver hurts, but high on the list is missing hearing Tom Keefe, Neville Hobson, Shel Holtz and John Gerstner, all of whom are speaking about issues that I’m deeply involved in right now. The emergence of ’social software’ and the gathering of this particular group of tools (no need to rehearse the list - you all know what they are or you wouldn’t be here!) under the Web 2.0 umbrella is a kind of validation of a mission that I was set early on in my tenure at the RSA.
My task was to “recreate the eighteenth-century coffeehouse on the internet”. How that came to be and what has happened over the last five years in pursuit of that goal - well, that’s another story. What I want to flag up right now is a question about how the specific nature of Web 2.0 (forgive the use of this term - it’s a convenient shorthand) is impacting offline behaviours.
This week the RSA hosted a conference entitled ‘Web 2.0 for Good’ - inevitably now dubbed W24G - which did two things: first, it set out to examine whether the ’social’ part of ’social software’ holds, or suggests, any inherent connection with the ’social’ part of the charity mission which, notwithstanding some philosophical debate, is ‘for good’ rather than for profit.
Sessions looked at, among other things, Web 2.0 and human rights, specifically whether social tools are helping people in repressive regimes or whether there are threats in an ‘architecture of participation’; using blogs as fundraising tools; improving non-profit accountability through social media; and managing relationships with volunteers.
But the twist here is that the event was organized to be like a Web 2.0 tool. There were no panels, no keynotes, no plenaries. The topics were not set in advance, but suggested by the delegates themselves - ahead of the event through the website, but mainly on the day. Everyone made their own badge on arrival and they used it to ‘tag’ themselves, by writing keywords for their interests under their name.
Every 45 minutes through a three-hour period there was a call for new topics, and folks arranged themselves into small groups according to their interests. And although it sounds like a recipe for total anarchy or, at the very least, disappointed paying punters, it worked incredibly well and feedback has been very positive.
I guess you can think of it as an ‘open source’ event - everyone was a presenter and a delegate simultaneously, and it certainly presented a challenge to my expectations about how a conference should be run.
Maybe this is a sign of things to come? What other offline aspects of business and professional life could be impacted by the growing use of Web 2.0?

Today, for the first time, I saw The IABC handbook of organisational communication, Editor Tamara Gillis. It’s the replacement to Inside Organisational Communication, a gem that’s been a valuable, standard text for communicators for a very long time.

I can’t wait to read it all because the collection of contributors is like a who’s who of leading practitioners around the world. I must quickly state that I say this with all humility about my own participation - Todd Hattori very generously asked me to help him with the chapter on “Public Relations and Ethical Conduct”.

If the First Edition is not an instant sell-out, I’ll be amazed. Getting a signed copy of the First Edition is going to be a real challenge - you’d have to stand in line for 46 signatures! Perhaps there should be some kind of award for the first person to achieve this feat.

What does this have to do with strategy and counsel? Obviously I have a vested interest in emphasizing the chapter on ethical conduct. All strategic communicators will have to deal with ethical dilemmas in their career. And you can feel very lonely when it’s you up against very senior execs driving the organisation’s strategy trying to give counsel. Todd and I tried to focus in the short chapter on a few things that might help communicators know how to behave in such a situation.

Every communicator should be interested in exploring this current and controversial topic, so I’m facilitating a conversation on this topic in a Think Tank session at the conference titled “Communicators behaving badly”. Think Tanks are as valuable as the people who attend and actively contribute their views. I’m looking forward to meeting lots of you in this session and getting a lively discussion going from which we will all take away some valuable learning. So come along and share your stories and info. And if you want to get yourself thinking about issues broadly have a read of “Bloggers are missing in action as Ketchum tests the conscience of PR“. See you there!

In this interview, Jane Sparrow, who chaired the Program Advisory Committee, talks about what it takes to put the program for an international conference together and what trends emerged from the committee’s research for the 2006 conference.

 

 ConferenceCast Episode #7 [17:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download