Conference confidence

If I'm honest, I'd have to say that I hate the whole meet-and-greet merry-go-round that goes with conferences and seminars. And that's even though every rational bone in my body tells me they are unrivaled opportunities for meeting new people in an industry built on people, their ideas and opinions.

For me, they're the corporate equivalent of a high school dance – fun if you thrown yourself into the thick of it, but so easy to misjudge the mood and the moment as you break bread with strangers in a hotel ballroom that's seen better days.

Kinda crazy, really.

So I was curious to say the least when I noticed this tweet from 99%.

And with a tentative click, I decided to try my luck and follow the link to this post by Jodi Glickman Brown on the Harvard Business Review blog.

It did take me a couple of reads to get used to the idea of what she has to say, as well as interpret some of the cultural nuances in a more personal context, but deep down I know she's right.

The only question now is whether I attempt the Group Tackle or the Single Sideliner first.

Caught in a cliché

The past week's been pretty hectic – meetings, deadlines, missed deadlines, pitches, spreadsheets and other sundry items.

But the memory of one particular meeting still lingers.

Now, I understand as well as the next man that acronyms and jargon have their place in this world. If you're stood in a room full of people who know exactly what you mean when you say EPCM, there's absolutely no point in saying the words in full each and every time you use the term. In fact, in most cases, you would actually look a little foolish. As much as acronyms and jargon are exclusive and, quite literally, exclude the layperson, they can also serve just as positive a purpose by reinforcing communication between those already in-the-know (think of it as the modern day equivalent of the Freemason's handshake).

The clichés of the corporate world suffer a similar fate.

Time and place can play a pivotal role in whether they evoke the right response. But all too often they are mere victims of their own popularity as commonplace phrases – as well as the insincerity (or lack of imagination) on the part of those who invoke their expression.

And so it was that I found myself in a pretty swish boardroom in the CBD.

Stainless steel carafes of filtered water, carefully-placed corporate coasters, and individually-wrapped, no-name mints.

Handshakes, smiles, introductions.

And as the conversation wound into action, one particular person began to say how they had only been involved at certain points in the project. In their own words, they had simply "parachuted in, and then parachuted back out again".

After which point, I spent the remainder of the meeting – and the week – wondering exactly how you parachute out of anything.

I understand parachute in. It's possibly a little lazy, even surreptitiously belligerent (although I should say that military phrases have a nasty habit of popping up in the boardroom a little too often for my liking).

But parachute out? I'm sorry, but that's just dumb.

Anarchy on the Internet (or, God save the blog)

I often wonder if corporate blogs will ever be anything more for me than a curious contradiction in terms.

What I mean is that the infinite potential of the Internet, and in particular social media, seems at odds with the finite parameters that corporations like to put in place to protect their commercial interests. Downloading music is a good example of this – although the sensitivity of artist copyright makes this a far more complicated issue in reality.

That said, the broader evolution of music and its impact on culture is a useful benchmark to explain my point in full.

Specifically, the rise of punk.

Until relatively recently, if you wanted to play music in some sort of musical ensemble, you had to be a professional, trained musician. Music school was the only credible path to the stage, and any exceptions made for more of a novelty act than a noteworthy performance.

But then in the 1970s, punk happened. No longer did the old rules apply. In fact, no longer did any rules apply.

All of a sudden, anyone could play guitar. In many cases, the fewer chords you knew, the better. Bands like The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones and countless others grasped the opportunity with enough energy to catapult themselves beyond the status quo and its restrictive social more – and whether or not you could actually play your instruments had no real bearing on the final outcome.

In the 1980s, local scenes like the infamous Manchester scene erupted in the wake of punk, followed in the 1990s by grunge with its roots in Seattle on America’s northwest coast. More recently, the Arctic Monkeys are a band who, like many others before them, started by first having to teach themselves how to play the instruments that they’d managed to acquire.

And even though punk may have started on the stage, its impact soon spilled onto the streets, and the effects on our society and culture are still felt today. Over time, it may have changed shape as the world around us has also changed, but its basic tenets and DIY aesthetics survive.

Nowhere is it more alive and well than on the Internet.

In the same way that punk meant that anyone could play guitar, the Internet has created a new wave of thinkers and writers, a world where anyone can be an author, journalist or social agitator of some description or other.

Who needs record companies when you have MySpace? Likewise, who needs publishers when you have blogs? That isn't to say those institutions are dead in the water, it's just that they can no longer rely solely upon maintaining the bottleneck that has kept them in business up to this point. New ideas are now being shared more freely than ever, and they now need to look for new angles.

The Internet is the champion of the individual, the home of the one-man band. There are no corporate patrons to please, no commercial agendas to follow. Where punk broke down musical barriers, the Internet has bulldozed constraints on how we communicate – and both have worked in ways that rail against our reliance on the so-called big end of town.

Anything is possible on the Internet. And as history shows, giving the masses free rein is not always good news for your average corporation.

God save the blog.

Incest is wrong, right?

It goes without saying that incest is ill-suited to the human race.

I don't just mean legally, morally or ethically, but more so on physical or biological grounds. The make-up of our DNA demands diversity, although this is also tempered by natural selection: successful characteristics become more popular over successive generations – a fine-tuning effect, if you like.

But diversity is key.

And in the words of those towering pillars of pop philosophy, Groove Armada, "If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired looking at each other".

So forgive me the slight exaggeration, but then why do so many brands look as though they've been designed by one of the inbred hillbillies from the 1972 film Deliverance? Why do they seem so intent of denying themselves the necessary advantages of diversity, opting instead to settle for more of the same?

In their book Funky Business, published in 1999, Kjell Nordström and Jonas Ridderstråle wrote about what they termed the surplus society. In their words, "The surplus society has a surplus of similar companies, employing similar people, with similar educational backgrounds, coming up with similar ideas, producing similar things, with similar prices and similar quality".

Sounds like the commercial version of inbreeding if you ask me. People who are so scared of being different that their anxious conservatism tries to eradicate our fundamental need for diversity.

In business as in life, it is the drive for similarity that is unnatural. And our need for diversity is no less a necessity for brands.

But in spite of this, a brisk stroll down a supermarket aisle quickly becomes a blur of swooshes and swirls as brands seemingly decide it's easier to copy than compete. In the profile piece that appeared in B&T a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that most of the Australian packaging industry think "it's acceptable to regurgitate the same old boring ideas, year in year out. Even the smart people I know...can't seem to help themselves". As unfortunate as that might be – and assuming the inevitable standouts – that statement's true. The same goes for a catalogue of corporate brands, from law firms to the world of finance.

We all know that incest is wrong. Don't let diversity die.

More than words

Humans are an inquisitive bunch, demonstrated no less than when we wonder what such-and-such would say if only the baby-pet-car-thingamajig could speak.

More often than not it's a rhetorical question. Nevertheless, I wonder whether it may also be a question asked in vain, given the propensity of most of those blessed with the power of speech to default to the drearier corners of the English language. Words are no less a form of self expression than a means of communication, however, most people rely on their words for mere data transfer.

Like humans, many brands also try to strike up conversations with those around them.

Try me, buy me, cook with me, look at me.

Yet they seem to struggle just as much as humans when it comes to using their voice as a vehicle to convey emotion. Communications feel cold and corporate, jargon jockeying for position amid an avalanche of acronyms. You can have the most pleasant and rewarding conversation with the person in the call centre, only to receive the standard, automated letter from the call centre's computer. It may very well provide a neat summary of your discussion with word perfect precision, but you are now left wondering if you are really a customer to be cared for or simply a statistic to be served.

I read a piece earlier this week from The Writer, an agency in London that specialises in writing (not surprisingly), in which they were discussing the language of the car industry.

It started with Mercedes-Benz, that colossus of German engineering, and the way Mercedes describe the SL 65 AMG Black Series (a long name, I know!) in standard yet soulless fashion. "The new design reduces exhaust gas back-pressure. The acoustic side effect of this is to produce a distinctive 12-cylinder sound, from the two trapezoidal tail-pipes."

There's nothing necessarily wrong with what Mercedes have written, but you do have to wonder whether they've missed the point of a sports car at full speed. Especially when you consider the energy that Lamborghini inject into their language. "The exhaust in this car makes a sound that ranges from the heavy rumble of a stormy night, through the trumpeting of mighty elephants, through to the roar of a raging lion."

The difference is startling. It's not just what you say, but it's how you say it.

In some other bits and pieces I've read this week, I found a comparison of two famous authors, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemmingway, in the way in which they write about feeling tired.

In the words of Faulkner. "He did not still feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course."

Or, according to Hemmingway. "Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited."

Neither is right or wrong. For all that you feel from the words of Faulkner, each thought flowing freely into the next, the brevity of Hemmingway makes for an equally powerful statement, every word loaded with impact. If only brands recruited as many great writers as graphic designers, then maybe the best looking brands wouldn't feel like such a let down as soon as they started to speak.

A few years back, I remember reading an interview with Brett Anderson, lead singer of an English band named Suede who found fame in the 90s. He was talking about how, for better or worse, everything should create an emotional response. Love and hate were always better than an indifferent shrug of the shoulders.

The next week, arch rivals Blur released their latest album and, in another publication, Brett Anderson was asked for his opinion. Two simple words said it all. "It's ok."

I worry that most brands strike a similar note of indifference, to the point that the language they use becomes unnoticeable. Undifferentiated, uninspiring, unimpressive.

As much as humans can be inquisitive – as I wrote at the top of this blog – we are also reputed to use only a small percentage of our brain power. Likewise, brands often fail to take advantage of anything more than the bare minimum when it comes to the breadth of language available to them and the range of emotions that their words can explore.

Brands need to speak to their audiences. But that means more than words.