How to Do What You Love

Gary Radford said he was going to be pointing the Executive Lectures students to my blog, so I thought I'd share this item, recently forwarded to me by a young colleague who, like so many of us, is still struggling with what he wants to be when he grows up.

I also recommend perusing the links under Free Books at right.

Schering-Plough Executive Lectures

The first session of the 2006 Executive Lectures Series at Fairleigh Dickinson University went off beautifully on Saturday. The speakers were all members of the board of corporate advisors for the MA Program in Corporate & Organizational Communications:

* Stuart Goldstein, Managing Director of Corporate Communications, The Depository Trust and Clearing Corp.

* Justin Lash, communications consultant, Metro New York region, Towers Perrin

* Marion Pinsdorf, Vice President, Hill and Knowlton (retired)

* Pamela Golgolab, President/Owner, PNA Associates Inc., Public Relations, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Advertising, Chester, NJ

and yours truly.

About 20 MA program students and alumni participated. It was a great first session that included formal lectures on strategic corporate communications, crisis management, and ethics; lively discussion among the students and speakers; and an eye-opening role-playing exercise, moderated by Stuart, based on a real-life crisis scenario.

If things go as well as they did last year, it will only get better as the series progresses. We have a wonderful line-up of speakers this year.

Schering-Plough Executive Lectures

The 2006 Schering-Plough Executive Lectures schedule is available. The series is part of the MA program in corporate & organizational communications at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Speakers will include journalists, marketing and PR executives, academics, and others. Questions about the series or the MA program can be directed to me or to Dr. Gary Radford, director of the program.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I just discovered that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be read for free online in its unabridged form. I keep hearing that the book continues to sell millions of copies every year, but so many people I meet in my professional life have never heard of it. This can only mean the folks who most need to hear what Pirsig is saying aren't. I don't know how many of these "busy" people will have the patience for a book of this length and depth that doesn't offer a quick fix for their professional and personal problems, but I do know that they talk a lot (mostly very superficially) about quality, and Quality (yes, with a capital "Q") is what ZAMM is all about.

For those who have read it, there's also a very good, very rare interview with Pirsig on NPR's website. The interview was conducted shortly after the publishing of Lila--the sequel to ZAMM.

End-of-Year Thoughts

The winding down of a year is a good time for summing up one's thoughts and impressions of the old year and aspirations for the new...

I started this blog in February 2005 to "help me get my thoughts in order about this field I've devoted 20 years of my life to, as well as provide a useful forum for others who are interested in communication theory, corporate and organizational communication, journalism and media studies." I started it as I was in the homestretch of writing my thesis; beginning a new job after two years of observing the corporate world from the sidelines while completing my coursework and serving as an advisor to the MA program in corporate and organizational communications at FDU; learning a new industry (telecom) after nearly two decades in the world of financial services; and growing another year older and experiencing the joys and difficulties of being a parent of a teenager and two pre-teens (talk about "communication challenges"!)

2005 has given me a lot to think about, only a small part of which has made it into this blog. Translating my academic voyage in the world of communication theory back into daily corporate practice has not always been easy. The process has generated a few answers, but it has led to better, more interesting questions, including:

• Is there any fundamental difference between corporate communication and human communication?
• Is the phrase "corporate communication" meaningful, or does it muddy the very specific, practical concepts of marketing, media relations, investor relations, government relations, etc.?
• Can communication ever be strategic, or are the two notions antithetical? This is a big one, as I've come to believe that "communication"--correctly understood--entails a willingness to give up some amount of control, while so much of what we call "corporate communication" typically involves "managing messages."
• What is the relationship between communication and ethics? Another big one. In an age of eroded authority, what is ethics, if not saying what you mean and behaving in a manner that is consistent with what you say?

These and other questions won't be easily answered, which brings me back to why I started this blog. I've described this as "An attempt to get beyond the 'discursive structures' of the university and the corporation and find out what the two have to offer each other." My work with FDU has been a major support and inspiration in this effort. Interacting with graduate students who are either beginning to explore this field or who have been in it for some time and (like me) have begun looking for a deeper understanding of what they've been doing and why has been invigorating (what an awful sentence! But it's early a.m. and, in the interest of authenticity, I'll let it stand). I learned yesterday that I have been accepted into a Ph.D program at Rutgers' School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies. I'm thrilled and humbled and, quite honestly, don't have a clue how I'm going to work it in to an already full and chaotic life--but I'm going to do it. I have made similarly crazy decisions in the past, and, looking back, they have always been the most fruitful.

Long ago, after finishing my undergrad work, I decided to pursue "some kind of writing career." I viewed my first corporate job as a necessary detour--"something to pay the bills." Then it was financial journalism--a place to "learn the ropes" until I could find "something real." And so forth...

Well, this has been real. Instead of trekking far outside the corporate mainstream, I've taken my explorations inside the corporate structure in which the vast majority of people live and work. I've found it endlessly fascinating. I turned an "involuntary hiatus" (layoff) into an opportunity to return to school and spend two years thinking about and discussing the field in which I've become an accidental expert--and I've been able to share these thoughts and discussions with academics, professionals, and students--as well as anyone else who stumbles upon my blog. The next step is to further develop the research tools I need in order to broaden and deepen my explorations; to study and to teach; and to remain engaged in this corporate world. I once envisioned an "escape into academia"; I now see that as a naive fantasy. For better and worse, the university and the corporation are intricately and intimately joined. Let's keep them honest and see what they have to offer each other.

Quantum Mechanics & Corporate Communication (continued)

As I have already written, communication is like light. I don't mean this poetically, although it is a fortunate analogy. I mean that, like light, it can validly be viewed in classical mechanical terms (information transfer from sender to receiver) or in what I'm referring to as quantum mechanical terms (distributed, imprecise, contingent upon the myriad disturbances and distortions that are inevitably involved in human communication).

Both modes of speaking about communication have their limitations.

The classical mode is best represented by the Shannon & Weaver model. It is primarily concerned with the engineering problem of accurate signal processing. It is utterly unconcerned with meaning.

I have not yet found a model that captures what I've been calling a quantum mechanical way of talking about communication (this analogy is, I'm sure, imprecise at best), but a good start is Gary Radford's book On the Philosophy of Communication. Radford provides a nice overview of how our "common sense" way of talking about communication as information transfer came about and a good argument for thinking about communication in alternative ways.

So, as long as we treat communication as information transfer and ignore meaning, we can hold the subject still and take it apart. Communication becomes sort of like the frog with all its organs pinned neatly to the dissecting table--good luck ever getting it to hop again. If all you're concerned with is--oh, I don't know--let's say conveying enemy positions to those operating the mortars, then a signal-processing model of communication is just dandy. Communication is an engineering problem.

In your personal and professional worlds, however, information transfer just isn't enough. There is no right answer to "Does this outfit make me look fat?" because the question is not really a question, even though it is constructed as such. It is an expression of anxiety by a particular person within a particular psychological or social or emotional context. The job interview question "Tell me what you think your greatest weakness is" is not concerned with what you think your greatest weakness is. It is a test of your ability to craft a plausible-sounding answer to that question (just as the SAT is not a test of the student's intelligence or mastery of a subject, but the student's facility at taking timed, multiple-choice tests).

Ignoring meaning is attractive because meaning is the messy, indeterminate part of communication. As soon as you venture off the well-worn trail of process or transmission theory, you risk becoming lost in a swamp of subjectivity. Swamps can be scary or beautiful, depending on what you bring to them, but two things are certain:

• There is much more in a swamp than first meets the eye; and
• If you focus only on the map of the swamp, to the exclusion of what's around you and directly under your feet, you will find yourself in trouble.

Resurrect Your Writing, Redeem Your Soul

This article from Digital Web Magazine was forwarded by a colleague with whom I share long, pleasant, frustrating conversations about corporatespeak. Writing is about soul, which is why it is no coincidence that just about anyone can fill in the blank in the following phrase: "The soulless _____________".

Some choice quotes from the article:

• "Bad writing that has been “Webified” can look great on screen and to search engines, but to human beings, it’s still just bad writing. Applying the new rules of Web writing to muddled thoughts is a bit like hiding dirty hands in clean gloves." (more later to tie this back to my Heisenberg posts);"
• "Corporate language—the monotonous native tongue of business—is manipulative and carefully constructed around psychological insights. It takes many forms, but always defies normal understanding in order to control. Politicians, managers, and the media toss it out like a net to drag in the public like helpless fish."
• "You know you’re on the Information Superhighway to Hell if crap like enhance, leverage, implement, context, driver, focus, core, actionable, outcome, and stakeholder crops up in your copy."

Good to see the webbies are on top of this. The war for your language and your soul is being fought at the margins of the corporate, academic, and technical worlds. Engage the enemy; reclaim your humanity (just don't get yourself fired).

FT's Lucy Kellaway on Business Jargon

Nice column by Lucy Kellaway in the Nov. 28 Financial Times: "Why There Has Been an Uptick in My Tolerance of Jargon". If you follow the link above, you can read the full column, but you'll have to take a 15-day trial subscription to the paper (worth it, in my mind--I love the FT, and Lucy Kellaway is particularly a joy).

After talking briefly about why she turned down an offer to add to the already vast pile of books decrying jargon by writing another one, Lucy makes some important distinctions among three types of jargon:

"Class A jargon," she writes, "is the lethal stuff, the verbal equivalent of crack cocaine. At an analysts' meeting given by a big drinks company recently one of the directors boasted of the company's `global front-end ideation resource'.... Any business person who talks this way has lost sight of what he or she is supposed to be doing. Had I been at that meeting, I would have advised selling the shares promptly."

At the other end, Lucy recognizes "Class C jargon", which consists of "business words that have now entered the language. These are the equivalent of cannabis but even less harmful -- which is just as well, considering that the spread is unstoppable." She provides some nice examples, but I'm sure you can think of your own.

"In between the two extremes," Lucy writes, "Class B jargon covers all those clunky phrases such as "pushing the envelope" and "blue-sky thinking".

After providing several examples that she finds particularly vexing, Lucy writes, "Despite these hateful phrases, I am not proposing a pointless war on Class B jargon. In fact, I am becoming increasingly tolerant towards it."

She attributes her growing tolerance, in part, to two recent books, one from the U.K. and one from the U.S.

The first is called Ducks in a Row, an A-Z of Offlish ("written by a frightfully nice man with a Ph.D. from Oxford"), whose "priggish" tone turned her off. The second is called Green Weenies and Due Diligence("written by a scrap-car dealer whose personal motto is `mission possible'.") Among the book's 1,200 terms (that enable readers to "talk the talk" so they can "walk the walk"), Lucy notes several that, as she puts it, are "fresh enough to be funny," eg.:

• "Chair plug" -- someone who sits in a meeting contributing nothing
• "Inbox dread"--what you feel before turning on the computer
• "Square headed girlfriend"-- your computer.

These are cute and probably will quickly catch on and become stale.

While I agree with Lucy that "people who are already heavy users are beyond help" and that other people's use of Class B jargon is "not the end of the world," I also have to agree with the priggish Oxford man who writes: "Offlish is highly contagious. It is vital that these people are mocked, ridiculed, and undermined in order to prevent its spread."

The trick, of course, is doing so without committing professional suicide. The "challenge" is to achieve sufficient status within your organization (and, ultimately, your industry) that imitating your use of the language becomes as important to underlings as imitating your clothing style and other superficial indicators of your success.

Less Than Words Can Say

Less Than Words Can Say--the classic eloquent rant by the late "Underground Grammarian" Richard Mitchell--is available on line and for free. More than 20 years ago, I saw Mitchell lecture at St. John's College in Annapolis. The title of his lecture: "Split Infinitives, the First Step Toward Moral Decay." The title of "Less Than Words Can Say" was a compromise with his publisher...Mitchell told us he wanted to call his book "The Worm in the Brain" (the title of Chapter 1).

I won't presume to summarize. Read it!