Of course they do. They have more power than any weapon.

Listen to what former Lib Dem leader David Steel’s father, who was a church minister in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau risings in the mid-1950s, had to say in a live radio broadcast in January 1955 about the British use of concentration camps:

“Of course we don’t kill babies: we only put their fathers out of employment and reduce them to starvation. There are 60,000 detainees detained in camps. Detained for what? It will be said that the church should not interfere with politics. That is a heresy. The church dare not and will not stand aside when Christian principles are abrogated and when our great traditions of Government based on those principles are being violated. Whatever the way to end this emergency may be, these are not the ways, because they are unjust ways and unjust and indiscriminate action never achieved anything but a disaster and a grief both for those who practise it and for those on whom it is practised.”

Talking about Pentagram, I’ve been re-reading Alan Fletcher’s last book, “Picturing and Poeting” (Phaidon 2006). Described by Emily King as “the father figure of British graphic design”, I had the pleasure of meeting him a number of times when I was a client of Pentagram (back in my brewery days). Ms King wrote a wonderful obituary of the great man in The Independent (26 September 2006) … but in his book she had this to say about him:

“”He had a newly ambitious understanding of the potential of design: its ability to engage and inform, to tease and amuse, and to confront and challenge… He had learnt that the best graphic design connects with what people already know at the same time as rendering that knowledge utterly news and fresh.”

Later in the book, Alan pens a typical throwaway line, one that says everything, simply and clearly: “You are obliged to go off at a tangent if you want to stop going round in circles.” Genius.

I had the pleasure of listening to Daniel Weil, Pentagram partner, talking about his work at an evening organised by the Design Business Association.

During the Q&A, Daniel expressed concern that young designers tend too much to move from college straight to setting up their own business, without having any iconic experienced designers to follow. He talked of how his own career was profoundly affected by the time he spent working in the shadow of the legendary Italian designer Ettore Sottsass http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Sottsass). Later, I put it to him that for graphic designers to break the rules, they must first know the rules. Trouble is, we agreed, too few of them do not learn the classical rules of typography, for example, by working with hot metal. The reason that Neville Brody was able to use computers to send magazine design into bold new directions was precisely because he knew which rules to break. And he understood that people bought the magazines, in general, to read the contents.

Weil’s opening slide typified the simple, lateral thinking style that is the hallmark of those within the Pentagram cosmos. In black Helvetica on white were the letters:

DWDBAABC

No heading, no introductory logo. But it said everything: Daniel Weil Design Business Association ABC – and he proceeded to offer a client or a comment through every letter of the alphabet. He gave the impression that he had thrown the slides together just before catching the train to Bristol. In effect, he had created a complete retrospective on his life and work. Impressive.

Business books are all too often based around the author guru’s latest recycling of common-sense logic. But Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordstrøm, the writers of ‘Funky Business: Talent Makes Capitalism Dance’ and ‘Karaoke Capitalism’, are worth anyone’s attention.

Example: “The time has come to stop re-engineering and start re-energizing our organizations. Competence is nothing without compassion. You may have a career, but do you have a calling? Future firms must become both co-creators of competence and providers of personality. Once it was money for mastery. Now, it must also be meaning for membership. Talent wants value and values. To thrive, organizations must learn how to combine skill and soul.

“The future, as always, does not lie in front of successful individuals, it must rest within them… Try to control the uncertainties of this world and you’ll go nuts. Perhaps, instead, the best thing that we can hope for is some stability and certainty inside ourselves. Forget about your weaknesses for a while. Find your strengths and use them. Be the person that you were meant to be. Reveal that best kept secret of yours to the rest of the world. Get real. Otherwise you are bound to get lost. And if that does not work for you, remember we always have Viagra and Prozac.”

Check out the books’ websites, www.funkybusiness.com and www.karaokecapitalism.com.
You can buy the book from Amazon, of course. Go to Karaoke Capitalism: Managing for Mankind (“Financial Times”)

The Swedish publishers, Bookhouse, also published ‘4D Branding’ by Thomas Gad (see the publisher’s blurb). The book “offers a revolutionary four-dimensional model for understanding brand strengths and weaknesses. It can be used to create a new brand or analyze the strategic options for established brands. The model enables companies to create their own unique ‘brand code’ or ‘mindspace’, the unique corporate DNA, which can be used to drive every aspect of a business from product innovation to recruitment. The 4-D model consists of:

• The functional dimension: describes the unique features of a product or service.
• The social dimension: speaks about the experience of the consumer as a user, as Starbucks did when it introduced European café culture into the US.
• The mental dimension: creates an individual experience through the brand, as Nike did with ‘Just do it’. Builds value in the minds of its users.
• The spiritual dimension: talks about what the brand stands for.”

Thought-provoking material – well worth the read…

How do you handle the culture of an organisation that employs 4,600 people of 140 nationalities, who speak 70 languages and work in 220 countries? Oh and there’s no national base and so no ‘parent’ culture underpinning everything.

This is the challenge that an outfit called SITA has faced since it was founded in 1949. It’s an extraordinary business, a co-operative with its legal bases in Belgium and the Netherlands, global offices in the UK, US, Czech Republic, Singapore and Lebanon and its administrative head office in Geneva. Nothing to do with the UK waste management company of the same name, this SITA stands for Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautique. It owned and operated the largest data communications network in the world, but few people have heard of it. SITA provides the crucial telecoms networks and IT applications for the air transport industry. Owned by more than 600 airlines, SITA has always kept its light hidden. Shame, because it pioneered a number of technical developments we now take for granted, including the first ever website (for the airline British Midland, now bmi) where you could both select and buy an air ticket.

SITA has just been through another re-organisation, an inevitable fact of life for any business today, but doubly so for a business such as SITA, which is at the meeting point of air transport, telecoms and IT. The challenge, of course, is to harness the extraordinarily rich cultural mix that has developed over the past 60 years, including a powerful sense of community and to ensure that SITA’s diverse family of employees are focused on common aims that are firmly fixed on the future. I have been working with SITA for a number of years on both corporate material as well as collateral, so I have a clear interest in what happens in the months ahead. That apart, SITA would make a fascinating subject for a detailed study of the impact of external and internal cultural change on organisations….

Over the years, I’ve handled a great deal of work with British Telecom, as have many writers and designers. We were governed for a while by a set of guidelines on how the BT brand should be communicated. They had this to say about words…

“Oddly enough, the world is not waiting with bated breath for the next communication from British Telecom. When we talk to our customers we must hit them straight away with a good reason for taking time out from their busy lives to listen to us…

“The truth isn’t the truth until people believe us. People can’t believe us if they don’t know what we are saying. They can’t know what we are saying if they don’t listen to us. They won’t listen to us if we are not interesting. And we won’t be interesting unless we say things imaginatively, freshly and with originality. That is why we have a core of professional copywriters for all our customer communications… Product managers and marketing managers will, of course, have a major role in steering and reviewing the copy, but they must not write the sales literature….”

Good stuff…

Remember the HP way? It was the style of running a business perfected by David Packard and Bill Hewlett of HP fame. Back in 2004, Business Week’s Peter Burrows reminded his readers of a plaque to be found outside a two-family house at 367 Addison St. in Palo Alto, California. It identifies the dusty one-car garage at the back as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.” This was where HP first set up shop, in 1938. But it was more than the birthplace of HP. According to Burrows, “it’s the birthplace of a new approach to management, a West Coast alternative to the traditional, hierarchical corporation. Seventy years later, the methods of Hewlett and Packard remain the dominant DNA for tech companies and a major reason for U.S. preeminence in the Information Age.

The two partners developed “an egalitarian, decentralized system that came to be known as ‘the HP Way.’ The essence of the idea, radical at the time, was that employees’ brainpower was the company’s most important resource”. They developed “…one of the first all-company profit-sharing plans… gave shares to all employees… Today, the behavior of the two founders remains a benchmark for business…”.

Sadly, the days of Hewlett and Packard are long gone. Today the company is being rocked by allegations of the company spying on Board members find out who was leaking privileged information to the media. Today the plot thickened when it was reported by the New York Times that “Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus of two major publications as part of an investigation of leaks from its board, an individual briefed on the company’s review of the operation said”. How are the mighty fallen.

It all started in about 1990. The new breed of service agents, instead of responding to customers who are tendering thanks for a service provided with something along the lines of “It’s a pleasure” started saying “No problem”. This is the ultimate example of the change in society for the “me” generation. What “No problem” is actually saying is that I, the recipient of the service, should be grateful that the provider of the service has been gracious enough to help me, rather than that the provider of the service should be grateful to me. It is an appalling statement of egotism on the part of the service provider and any customer service trainer worth their salt should ban its use… One other thing, my invariable experience is that as soon as a customer service provider says “No problem”, a problem arises. It’s pernicious and should be banned!

That said, perhaps all those who use the phrase should be sent off for a prolonged session to the “No Problem Bar” in Tokyo, which describes itself as “the only and best Romanian bar restaurant in Tokyo specializing in disco music and delicious Romanian cuisine”.

I’ve just finished updating and editing a style book for a client, a major company in air transport and IT. What makes this project particularly intriguing is that their 4,000 staff are based in more than 200 countries and, between them, they speak over 70 languages. So providing them with guidance over the use of English, the company language of choice, has been a strong test of the old maxim that simplicity is best.