Thinking time

I'm about to head off for a week's vacation at a

villa on the island of Crete .

Many of you know I create all the photography for my publicity materials, and I'm hoping the Orthodox Easter celebrations on 25th - 27th will prove to be a rich source of visual material.

But - of course - it's essentially a holiday and an opportunity to recharge the batteries and take time out to reflect and do some free-form thinking. And that's something many of us don't do enough of...

I'm reminded of a TV programme about a senior professor of philosophy at Oxford or Cambridge who described part of her day as being thinking time - feet up on the desk, sitting back and thinking. That can be a challenge for a freelancer, when you charge by the hour or the day and need to allow "thinking time." And when you're a writer, there's not much scope for thinking time if the contract pays by the number of words.

One of the themes in Tork & Grunt's next book, on Change Management, is the importance of taking a pause, of assessing the situation before you complicate everything by rash, hurried decisions. It's sometimes difficult in our busy world to think about slowing down and spending time on evaluating all the options. Especially when a change in corporate structure demands realignments and new processes. But it's essential.

"Pause!" should be the motto for the decade, while we get used to our instant society. You can formalise it into meditation if you like, or you can just let your thoughts race in that strange silence that exists even in a crowd. Switch off the aural wallpaper and listen to what's going on in your head. Call it day-dreaming if you wish, but I assure you it's a worthwhile investment of your time.

London Book Fair

At last it almost feels real, my books will be in the shops soon!
I don't know what Marshall-Cavendish were playing at, but my publisher friend Marco assures me all publishers leave everything till the last minute. We were originally scheduled for publication in January and it's slipped month by month until we now finally have a publication date of June 26th. What makes this real is the news that the dummies will be on show at the London Book Fair starting this weekend.
No, the designs are not quite right yet, but the caveman idea is there, and I love the gentle colours. Of course the "Presentations" book follows the same overall style. There'll be changes before it goes to print, but the feeling's there - fun, whimsical, tempting...

Meanwhile, my own plans for the launch forge on, and I'm in the recording studio on Monday to make the audio CD introduction to Negotiation that will be one of the promotional tools that I can bundle with the books. Although it's the Presentation book that's been attracting the most initial interest, it's the Negotiation theme that first got me writing. I was - and still am - a huge admirer of the Harvard Negotiation Theory, which seemed to me to make so much sense when I first came across it. However, like so much that is academically brilliant, it seemed to me dry and boring, and a really tough read! That's why, when I wrote Tork and Grunt's Guide to Effective Negotiations I spent so much time putting all my theories across in what I hope is entertaining and accessible language. The truth doesn't have to be high-faluting to be any more credible - a principle that I carried straight into the Presentations book.

With my background, I can't stop seeking out news from Africa. The troubles in Zimbabwe haunt the fears of the world. Forty years ago, when I lived in Zambia, reactionary white Rhodesians and old-school Afrikaaners in South Africa were predicting precisely the sort of chaos that we are seeing this week.
That hurts, because I never wanted them to be right and I argued vociferously that they were wrong.
We are left with the bitter reflection of Dr Martin Luther King, that "A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard." Or worse, the words of Josef Stalin, when he said: "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."

One final note: GMTV are holding a competition for a TV presenter, based on a 15second mobile-phone video clip. Here's my entry - wish me luck!

The importance of a promise

As I work on Tork & Grunt’s guide to Change Management, I come across the critical issue of trust. Corporate communication relies on trust between the levels of an organisation, especially when one party makes a commitment to another.

As a child I could never properly come to terms with the idea of the Geneva Convention. I reckoned that if war was a last resort, and if war was – in my simple childlike terms at age 7 – bad... then it was a nonsense to talk about a convention that embodied rules of war. War was war, and it ended when enough of one side had killed enough of the other.... the concept of rules and criminal proceedings seemed ridiculous. I could understand anyone finding the idea of Rules of War to be quite absurd.

Not so with elections. These are held according to strict procedures and accepted conventions. Well, we hope they are. You have to admire the ingenuity of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe who positioned agents at every Polling Station across the country. These agents then texted or emailed the election results to South Africa as soon as they were posted locally. They then photographed the documentation and promise to make the full archive available on-line. You can check out the results as they stand here. Sadly the last activity on the site was on last Thursday afternoon, which may mean that there has been an intervention. What it does show, however, is clear example of the quote I mentioned last week that “The information war is the final war [and] this final war will be fought with weapons of mass cooperation.”

Having spent 4 years in East and Central Africa I have a profound connection with that part of the world and its wonderful, eternally optimistic people. My experiences both working as a volunteer and later working in the corporate world was that they relied heavily on trust and understanding in the way they organise their lives and all their inter-personal relationships.

I remember how I soon learned that my word was always taken as an absolute commitment, and I had to be very careful never to promise what I could not deliver. I know that’s a given anywhere in the world, but in Africa trust is everything.

To come back to Change Management, there is always much talk about the importance of communication, but perhaps not enough emphasis on the relative weighting that recipients attach to different messages. I have watched presenters at conferences make announcements on the specific instruction of their superior management, knowing that they might not be able to deliver the promise that they were then making. Result? Delegates learn not to trust what managers say..... and hence there is a climate of poor morale.

But even a worm will turn, and the most frightening – but reassuring news from Zimbabwe was to see the quiet patience of the people who have suffered so much that they have little left to lose. They know how close they are to change, and they also know that if Mugabe ignores them once again he risks losing his original reputation as the heroic freedom fighter who led Rhodesia to become Zimbabwe, and becoming remembered like Idi Amin of Uganda, as a tyrant whose brutal policies destroyed one of Central Africa’s most thriving economies.