Daily Archive

“Steve Jobs doesn’t need sa sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.”

Mark Slada, CIO of a company in Johannesburg, in a Businessweek story about how more businesses are demanding Macs in the workplace.

“Journalistically, going alomng with such an arrangement would be completely inappropriate. I agreed immediately.”

E.J. Montini, columnist in the Arizona Republic, on not mentioning the name of someone selling T-shirt with the name of each soldier killed in Iraq, with the words “Bush lied, they died.”

“Pardon Our Dust“

Brian Lusk, Manager of Corporate Communication, at Southwest Airlines, on the relaunching of the blog Nuts About Southwest, this week.

“The final piece in the digital jigsaw.”

ITV chairman, Michael Grade, on FreeSat, the free digital television service from ITV and BBC, launching this week.

“It’s becoming clearer that paper is holding news delivery back in other ways … I’m about ready to admit that the Web isn’t just another outlet for newspapers; it’s becoming better than print.”

Seth Grimes, an analytics strategist, commenting on The NewYorkTimes.com use of a new form of visualization to show relationships in a graphic that’s interactive.

“The Internet is the shortest, hardest wall against which your voice will echo back.”

Stephen Colbert. Enough said!

Very happy to be able to break the story about a pandemic flu exercise we conducted here at the Decision Theater at ASU.

It was an exercise that worked on several levels:

• Strategic Planning
• Testing Scenarios
• Communicating with multiple groups
• Testing a plan through systems dynamic model

I am in the Communications business, so I was keenly observing how different players interacted, assumed leadership positions, and communicated from within the ‘crisis.’

I was lucky to be the fly on the wall (the camera-toting fly, that is) so it got me thinking of the parallels there were for businesses. How do organizations communicate and act in a crisis? As in any marketing campaign or business crisis, the war room is staffed by team members who are are suddenly confronted with the need to operate without the usual props. They may have Blackberries, but the information is coming at them fast and furious through other channels. They may have strong opinions, but so too do the people across the table.

Then there was the interesting irony of some having too much information (mock TV news updates, threat levels, a web cam feed, fact sheets etc) on one side of the room, and others deprived of the usual sources of information (CNN, RSS feeds, radio etc) –all this according to plan. We hosted this event in two areas. Emergency Ops was situated in the ‘drum’ -the high-tech room with a 260-degree panoramic screen, laptops etc. Incident Command and the Executive Policy Group were situated in an adjacent conference room, tethered to the drum via a live camera feed and a land line. No cell phone communication was allowed between the rooms.

Communicators often face situations like this, albeit not in the same life-threatening context. How does a team of those representing PR, Marketing, Advertising, Web Design, HR, IT and Legal Affairs work in crisis mode, in a compressed time frame, when they barely talk to each other in normal life? We seldom act out scenarios, assuming bad things won’t happen to us. History tells us otherwise.

Unless we plan for these hypothetical ‘pandemic’ events we won’t really know. That’s the deeper meaning of strategic planning, isn’t it?