The Power of the Spoken Word

The best news of the month was the message from Pom at Marshall-Cavendish last week, fixing the publication date for the first two books in Tork & Grunt’s Guides to Business Skills. I should see the cover designs in the next few days, then the next task will be proof-reading and checking everything. That sort of detailed task isn’t my strong suit, but the prospect of finally getting to print will be worth working towards. You can already pre-order from Amazon, and in mid-June there’ll be a unique pre-order option on the Tork and Grunt website incorporating an audio CD-ROM based on Tork & Grunt’s Guide to Negotiations.

That’s my big project for April, getting into a local sound studio to lay down the audio tracks and choose some music to break up the sections of the recording. The CD will be available from the Tork and Grunt website, both as a CD and hopefully – if I can work the technology – as a downloadable podcast. I think people react well to hearing an argument put across by its author, in addition to having the printed word and being able to go back and re-read it.

Which is why I am using this week’s blog posting to highlight the beautifully eloquent speech of Barack Obama made on March 18th with the title of “A More Perfect Union.” There are no visuals, no video clips, and certainly no PowerPoint. There are also no attacks on either the other candidate or the other party. What you have is a superb piece of story-telling. Almost the entire speech is about Obama’s personal experiences, his background and his beliefs.

So, where are the policies and the political principles behind the man? The answer is that in this contest both candidates are representing the same party, and there will be few real differences in their policies. The question is whether the electorate can put their faith and confidence in the speaker. It is not until the last minutes of this speech that Obama comes to policy, by which time he has - I would suggest - won over the audience as far as trusting him and believing his sincerity.

When I looked on the Youtube "comments" on this piece of video, I came across a posting that encapsulates the essence of what is happening with politics, blogs, and the accelerating revolution in the communication of information.

This is what was written:

"The information war is the final war. This final war will be fought with weapons of mass cooperation. The enemy will be ignorance. Ignorance is not always a lack of good information. Ignorance is often an abundance of bad information. We are not born with this bad information. It is all learned behavior. Fear is the product of ignorance. Racism is one of the many byproducts."

Information is spread many ways, but when a CEO is speaking the key element is not the communication of information, it's about the individual and it's about the audience. If there are major policy changes to be communicated, then these are best done in interactive workshops, where people have the opportunity to probe, challenge, investigate, analyse and understand. Keynote speeches should be about giving the audience confidence in the speaker and hence, under the speaker’s leadership, confidence in themselves.

Which is where my day-job can help you. If you want me to work on your conference presentation, let’s start with the basics in establishing why you’re speaking, what outcome you want, and what stories you can tell that will unite your audience behind your messages. My task is to help you find those stories, and then help you deliver them convincingly.

Common Sense in Party Clothes

I had lunch today with Peter Hunter, founder of the "Breaking the Mould" movement. We met up at the Royal Society of Arts just off the Strand and spent an animated couple of hours sharing our views on management. Peter's website is the hub of his project, which is very much centred on the concept that change can only happen when the people who are at the base of an organisation take ownership of the opportunities and the initiative to do things differently. These are the people who will "break the mould," and without their wholehearted commitment nothing lasting will ever happen.

This thinking is also at the heart of the third book in the Tork & Grunt series, which deals with Change Management. Tork and Grunt rapidly come to the conclusion that Change is one thing which cannot be "managed" in the conventional sense of being autocratically controlled. They realise that once they brought their tribes to live together, everyone had to accept a common vision, with common values and a clear identity. You can see how easily that metaphor translates into mergers and acquisitions in modern commercial organisation.

The more I write the Tork & Grunt series, the more I am coming to realise that so much of all this management literature is essentially a blend of common sense and courage. It takes courage to discard the jargon and get back to basics: it's much easier to hide behind the rhetoric of management-speak with theory X, theory Y and a dozen truisms that masquerade as cutting-edge thinking. In reality, most of these new ideas are common sense in party clothes.

The delight of the unexpected

The unexpected always delights. Athens is Athens, but the real Greece is hidden in a side-road somewhere in the middle of the Peloponnese, or on one of the islands that has no airport and which you reach by ferry, along with the cartons of beer and the occasional goat or crate of chickens. I often find that it’s the places that are barely mentioned in the guide books that yield the most charming surprises, as I discovered once again this week.

I had rented a tiny cottage in Normandy for a week. I needed to get away and try to work out the structure for the third book in the Tork & Grunt series, which will be about managing change. For five of my six days I struggled and thought I would never get it sorted. I was going round in circles, lots of nice stories but no thread to my argument. Dismayed I closed down the computer on my penultimate evening and lost myself in French television, just about managing to follow the excellent adaptations of Guy de Maupassant’s famous short stories that were showing on Channel Two. Maybe the master of story-telling inspired me, and this morning I finally found my theme and guided Tork and Grunt through the first couple of chapters of book three.

As a reward for my achievement, I decided this afternoon that I would take a break from my hermit-like existence in Pirou-Plage and headed off to explore the village of Pirou itself where I had heard there was a 12th century chateau. And this was my unexpected delight, for not only is this an idyllic moated castle which is in the course of painstaking reconstruction and renovation; it also holds a hidden treasure.

Tucked away in a side building is project that represents a task of great magnitude and incredible attention to detail, a modern tapestry 58 metres in length, depicting the history of Pirou and the Norman conquest of Sicily. The treatment of the design is a painstaking copy of the style of the Bayeux tapestry (which depicts William the Conqueror’s invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings.) The full-length tapestry awaits permanent display until a suitable room in the Castle keep has been renovated with appropriate air-conditioning, but some 15 metres are on show in a climate-controlled cabinet for visitors to admire. It’s an incredible piece of handiwork, - one of those amazing unexpected surprises that awaits the inquisitive tourist.

The unexpected surprise is a powerful element in corporate events, too. Just when the delegates think they’re in for a couple of hours of Death-by-PowerPoint surprise them! Bring in actors, a magician, get them to create their own vision of the future of their organisation.

Anything is better than the CEO’s 15 minutes of fame… and let’s face it, he usually manages to stretch that to the best part of an hour!

Virtual weekends

Today, I came across a children’s website that trades in its own currency - Kinzcash®.

I’m not really into virtual worlds like Second Life, but I’m always interested in all types of social phenomena, and the idea of replacing the playground or back yard with a screen-based scenario is something I find both fascinating and frightening.

Kinzcash® is based around a range of soft toys each of which carries a code number that acts as a password to the Webkinz® world. Children register their pet and then start spending money to feed and clothe their pet and decorate their pet’s home. What caught my attention was the fact that Kinzcash cannot be bought with normal money, it can only be earned through time spent on the site.

I can see that by creating a virtual playground, children want to invite their friends and hence the friends need the product in order to gain access. It’s a nice twist on viral marketing. But wearing my “Negotiations” hat, I wonder what benefit this teaches children about working, earning and trading. The Golden Rule that Tork and Grunt learn in the first book in the series is that negotiations happen when someone’s got something you want. Generally you have to work out some sort of exchange that offers mutual benefit.

In the Webkinz environment, just as in the real world, you barter your time for their cash. However, the benefit to Webkinz isn’t the product of your labour, it’s the fact that you’ll enjoy the environment sufficiently to encourage others to purchase access and “play with you” on the site.

Is this the future of employment? Already we see this in creative industries, where the work environment is play-oriented. Here’s a quote from the Apple UK website page advertising job vacancies in Apple stores:

“Working in a place you used to go into and feeling a tingle in your body is amazing, because I get that tingle very day going to work for Apple, I am still waiting to wake up!”

Paul, Mac Specialist, Apple Store, Bullring, Birmingham

I believe that the need to belong, to participate in a community is a powerful element in many people’s approach to employment. Consequently the production-line work-house environment has long since given way to a less formal, more friendly and playful setting in which to work.

In some retail chains I sometimes think we’re getting to the point when the end-consumer is funding an environment that contributes little to the customer experience. Background music is more often aimed at the staff age-group than at the customer profile and the concept of retail service is often reduced to a checkout mentality. In the end the consumers are supporting staff remuneration and benefits packages that bear no relation to the skill level required for the positions.

In my real world it doesn’t work like that. Every freelancer knows that our world is more like a video game of survival than a virtual playground. And most of us live with the Thursday afternoon syndrome, when a job comes through late Thursday and is wanted early Monday.

What the self-employed sole trader needs is a website that creates a virtual weekend, and gives us time rather than burning it up...!

Hi, and welcome to the Tork & Grunt Blog

Everyone asks me the same question. How did I come up with the idea of Tork and Grunt? I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t remember.

It all started when Eric Yang in Korea asked me if I would write a series of business books. I owe him a huge apology for the fact that it took me so long to get around to it, and a big debt of gratitude for persuading me that I could do it. I wanted to write about inter-personal communications, and I started with communications, because I had a passion for the work of the Harvard Negotiation theory. It was great stuff, but I found it hard going, and I believed that such useful principles deserved a wider audience.

I had generally found that business books fell into one of two categories. They were either dull and boring - too reminiscent of the dry academic tomes I had to read when I was studying Economics at Sussex University, or else they were lightweight and didn’t really come up with anything new or enlightening. I wanted to create business books that were entertaining but at the same time based on solid academic theory.

So, somehow, I hit on the idea of my two cavemen arguing about food, needing to find a way to negotiate, and that’s where it all began.

Then the stories developed with other characters in modern scenarios like house purchase, holiday-planning and promotion at work.

In the course of the book Grunt's tribe decide to live with Tork's community and the two tribes decide to live together.

When Grunt is persuaded to stand for election as the new leader, Tork has to teach him how to make a presentation, which links into the second book on that subject.

Both books are based on sound academic theory, written in what I hope you will find to be an entertaining and accessible style.

There are details of special offers and corporate training courses to be found at the main website: http://www.torkandgrunt.com/ which goes live in mid-June - at which time this blog will also migrate to that location.

You’ll find more about my work as a writer and conference presenter at:-

http://www.messagesintowords.com/ and http://www.bobharvey.co.uk/