In the beginning ...

A friend sent me an article from a recent edition of the Harvard Journal of Management, not my normal bedtime reading. It reports how a group of scholars and business leaders came together to consider the great challenges involved in reinventing management and making it more relevant to a volatile world.

They listed 25 ‘Moon Shots for Management’ (how business loves to borrow the imagery of what it sees as more glamorous activities), including this, at number 24: Humanize the language and practice of business.

Well, at least it made it onto the list, even if preceded by other such eye-catching items as : De-structure and disaggregate the organization, or Stretch executive time frames and perspectives.

‘Tomorrow’s management systems,’ the wise men propose, ‘must give as much credence to such timeless human ideals as beauty, justice, and community as they do to the traditional goals of efficiency, advantage, and profit.’ In all fairness, a right-minded and laudable manifesto, even though I defy anyone to find the nobility in Powerpoint training.

But ‘humanising the language and practice of business’ at number 24 out of 25? Until the language of the business world is humanised, nothing else about it possibly can be. The practice simply cannot begin to reflect ‘timeless human ideals’ while the words that describe it remain impersonal and alienating; in fact, the ideas themselves can scarcely even take shape.

So let’s not forget the Gospel According to St John and its opening phrase, In the beginning was the word. ‘The word’, note, not ‘the thought’. For it’s the word that gives form to the thought. And by this reckoning, omega should become alpha, and number 24 should surely be promoted to number one. A few kind words would be a good place to start.

Flying blind

Yesterday afternoon I ran a two-hour online training session with nine HR managers from a multinational corporation. I sat in my office in my garden in Birnam. They sat in their offices in various locations in seven different countries, from Sweden to Morocco. Only two of them were native English speakers. They were there to learn about their company’s new, more personable, tone-of-voice, and how to put it into practice when they write.

We could all hear each other, but not see each other. We could also all see the same screen which I, as the trainer, was supposed to be managing but which stubbornly refused to allow me to do so. I had to co-opt one of the invisible participants, who seemed to have the magic touch I lacked, into being my assistant and clicking through the presentation for me.

More by accident of technology than by design, it was a session about words in which words were literally the only resource available to us. There was no eye contact, no possibility of facial expression or body language or hand gestures. And there were the additional obstacles of English-as-a-foreign-language and, in some cases, soft or indistinct voices.

How did it work? Surprisingly well, in fact. To communicate in this state of semi-sensory deprivation, you have to do two things. First, pick your words extremely carefully and enunciate them very clearly. Second, invest them, or rather your voice, with as many as you can of the emotional signals that stream from all the other transmitters at your disposal in normal face-to-face contact. This might sound hard but it seems that it’s instinctive. Within a few minutes everyone had cottoned on.

In an odd, and unintended, way it was perfect – tone-of-voice training in which tone-of-voice was literally everything. It makes me think that in future writing workshops I’ll get people to speak to one another with their eyes closed. Because one way of thinking about writing is that it’s the equivalent of speaking blindfold; and yet, when it’s good, the writer can be as present as if you could see them.

The Birnam Quartet are playing a house concert in Edinburgh on Wednesday 17th March. If you'd be interested in coming to hear us, please email me as soon as you can (jamie@jauncey.co.uk) - numbers are very limited.

Stories for life

If you’ve never been there, Llandudno is a charming, and at this time of year extremely bracing, Victorian seaside town on the north coast of Wales. It’s also home to Venue Cymru, the national conference centre of North Wales. We were there, the Dark Angels, to run work-shops at a storytelling conference for public service managers from all over Wales.

The event was, in effect, a coming together of two domains which one of the speakers, borrowing from a contemporary German philosopher called Jurgen Habermas, described as ‘life world’ and ‘system world’ respectively.

On this occasion life world was represented by the storytellers, and that corner of each delegate’s heart that was ready to embrace the idea of stories as something that have a place at work. System world, on the other hand, was represented by the organisations the delegates came from, and their demand for a soulless obedience to a certain kind of logic.

We need both, of course. Without system world there would be anarchy or chaos. But Jurgen Habermas fears that it has got out of hand and is gradually colonising life world. In the face of this fear, stories are a vital line of defence.

Stories humanise and energise. They encourage their listeners to imagine, to feel, to connect. They allow people to lead through inspiration and persuasion. They help people understand change and each other, solve problems and come to terms with past difficulties. Most importantly, we don’t judge stories; they can’t be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. They are not the truth, merely a truth. And they challenge the view that logic offers the only proper way to think.

Llandudno, with its guest houses and sedate hotels, its broad sweep of promenade and slightly incongruous palm trees, is surely a place of countless stories: stories of holidays that went right, or wrong, or perhaps never happened at all; stories of local lives lived out to the sound of the waves rolling in from the bay. And now it has one more: how sixty public servants arrived at the conference from the cold domain of system world and left with at least a part of their souls restored, by the possibilities of stories, to life world.

Last week I mentioned our new CD The Music of Burns but not where to get it. It's now available from Shoogle Records www.shoogle.com

Words and music

I belong to that generation of Scots for whom, shamefully, Scottish culture played no discernible part in education. So I came to our national bard late and, oddly enough, through music rather than words.

Last night, a musical project I’ve been involved with for four years finally came to fruition with a performance at the official ‘end of show’ party for Scotland’s Year of Homecoming and the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’s birth. Alex Salmond sent along Jim Mather, his Minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism, to make a speech, Dougie Maclean sang a song and we, The Birnam Quartet – so called because we first met at the weekly session in the pub in my village of Birnam, played some tunes.

The project was to record instrumental versions of the beautiful old melodies that Burns set his lyrics to. In a year crowded with his songs, poems and letters, we wanted to look at the man through the lens of the music he loved rather than the words he wrote. Now we have a CD* and a small tour of concerts and workshops about to run through the spring.

In the show we intersperse the music with anecdotes from Burns’s life, as well as stories about the provenance of the ancient tunes he chose for his songs (and helped to immortalise in the process). This calls for a script – which I duly wrote, the music playing like a soundtrack in my head as I did so.

When I came to read it back I realised that my exposure to the music had subtly enriched my understanding of the man and my appreciation of his genius with words. It had also, I like to think, added something – rhythm, depth, colour, I’m not exactly sure what – to the words I had written myself.

Language flourishes when the other senses are stimulated. It may seem obvious, but it’s still very easy to forget, especially in the world of work. Yet go out to a great concert, movie, exhibition, play, even meal and there’s a fair chance that you’ll bring something extra to the letter or report you have to write next morning.

When Tim Smit founded the Eden Project he insisted that every member of staff had at least one cultural experience a month and wrote a review of it. He knew very well that creativity begets creativity. If only more people in the business world did.

* We’re launching The Music of Burns this Saturday, 6th Feb, 7.00pm at the Birnam Institute, Birnam, Perthshire. Come along if you can. And I can avidly recommend Robert Crawford’s recent, brilliant biography of Robert Burns, The Bard.

Sheep and goats

Tomorrow morning early I’m leaving for Geneva to see my 18 year-old son who’s working for the winter season at a French ski resort. I won’t pretend that I don’t envy him.

Last time I flew to Geneva I was struck by two advertisements along the walkway from the aircraft to the terminal. The first was for a Swiss merchant bank. It had no imagery, simply bands of burgundy, gold and black, along with a classic serif typeface, to intimate privilege and exclusivity. ‘Imagine a bank that combines strength with dedicated service…’ it exhorted us. That was all. It was banal and ineffably smug.

Imagine one that doesn’t, I thought, moved by irritation to apply the principle of opposites. It’s an old but handy trick for separating the sheep from the goats. If the opposite of what is stated raises a hollow groan or a weary sigh, then the writer is probably, to continue in agricultural vein, trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or at the very least a virtue out of the unremarkable. Strength and dedicated service, one would think, are the sine qua non of any Swiss bank. That copywriter should have been made to eat raclette till his giblets congealed.

Straight ahead, at the end of the walkway, was another advertisement, a huge and arresting photograph of the Dents du Midi raising their snowy ramparts into a clear blue sky. ‘Bienvenu à notre usine’ ran the copyline. ‘Welcome to our factory.’ In the bottom corner was the Evian logo. That was all. But what a difference…

Perhaps most tellingly, it was the advertisement that had not one iota of imagination behind it that used the word ‘imagine’, whereas the Evian ad had plenty, and it trusted that we’d use ours to get their message, witty and thought-provoking as it was. The ability to appeal to the imagination is one of the essential qualities of all good writing, but it also takes imagination to achieve it; you can’t simply command people to switch theirs on. But then one ad was for a Swiss bank, the other a French multinational…

Reading for survival

Last week I learned that my young adult novel, The Reckoning, has made it onto a government-sponsored list of 250 books for teenagers. Every secondary school in England will receive their choice of 15 titles from the list, free, as part of a scheme to encourage reading among an age group whose aversion to it is notorious.

To make it easier for school librarians to choose, the titles are arranged under themed headings: boggle, experiment, explore, fast forward, fear, go wild, imagine, indulge, investigate, laugh, look back, play, spy, survive, think, train. Mine, a thriller, comes under ‘survive’.

As I looked at the list, I found myself picturing the study in an executive home, as described to me by someone who had once been into one. It contained an empty desk and chair, an exercise bike, and a bookcase with two books in it: a computer manual and something along the lines of Marketing Made Easy. Today it might also have housed The Da Vinci Code.

It’s easy as a lifelong reader to be dismissive of non-readers, when there are plenty of other equally valuable ways of passing your time. But I can’t help thinking that if more people in the business world read good writing, they might become better at it themselves.

Picture Lord Mandelson dreaming up a similar scheme for British business. The list of headings would, in fact, be remarkably similar to the one for teenagers: experiment, explore, fast forward, fear and so on. And the titles themselves? I’d welcome suggestions (leave a comment), but under ‘survive’ I would certainly want to include Hilary Mantel’s magnificent, Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. It's a tough but enthralling read and, as a study of self-preservation, persuasion and the relentless pursuit of power, without equal. I’m sure the Business Secretary would heartily endorse it.

Sob story

‘The sob is in the story. It mustn’t be in the voice.’ So said Antonia Fraser on Radio 4’s Front Row this week. She was speaking of her difficulty in reading aloud the love poem by her late husband, Harold Pinter, with which she concludes her memoir of their life together, Must You Go?

She had been persuaded to read the book for radio, she explained. In the end it took her several attempts to master the neutral voice that concealed her personal feelings and left listeners the room they needed to discover the emotion in the poem for themselves.

I wrote last week about trusting that people will ‘get it’. This is the same. If the story’s strong enough and the writing good enough, no one needs another voice metaphorically holding up cue cards with exclamation marks or sad faces. But it’s a lesson many organisations still have to learn. The temptation to tell the world how innovative or robust or trustworthy or, most laughably, how passionate they are continues to seem irresistible. Yet it invariably sounds like a ham performance which at worst stretches credulity, at best provokes the response: ‘I think I’ll decide that for myself, thank you.’

‘Show, don’t tell’ is one of the first principles of fiction. Storytellers have known from time immemorial that an idea or message revealed has infinitely more power than one baldly stated. For many organisations, business case studies can be a nod in that direction; though even then the fear that people will somehow miss the point can result in the ‘lesson’ being spelt out at the end in bold type.

But the truth is that we learn from stories as naturally as we breathe, whether they hold sobs or laughter, facts or ideas; and we learn best when the author isn’t leaning over our shoulder pointing things out. The stories just need to be told with conviction – passion, if you prefer - for as the American poet Robert Frost said, in a nice corollary to Antonia Fraser’s bon mot: ‘no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’.