MBLog

'For God created the small things of the earth to confound the mighty...)

Listen to this short (50 seconds) radio message and see if you can guess what it is:

http://www.wholetruth.net/MP3/Hazelwood_audio.wav

It shouldn’t be too difficult as, despite the interference and the fact that Capt Hazelwood is drunk out of his brains, the words Exxon and Valdez are clearly audible as the inebriated skipper informs shipping control that his oil tanker has “fetched up hard aground,” that it is “evidently leaking some oil,” and “will be here for some time.” How very true!

I discovered this gem while conducting some in-depth research into the infamous 1989 oil spill. In addition to the radio broadcast, I found a reliable and in-depth account of how the grounding occurred:

Apparently, Hazelwood realised he was too drunk to command the ship and handed the wheel to an under-qualified third mate while he went below to sleep off his excesses. The mate should have refused but did not do so as his skipper was due to write his performance appraisal. Critically, the Valdez was outside the shipping lane by permission of the US Coast Guard because of an iceberg warning. In these circumstances, the Coast Guard should have been monitoring the vessel and alerting it if it was running into danger but failed to do so (nowadays, I would make sure they took a hit to deflect some of the blame and attention). When he realised they were heading for something nasty, the mate instructed the (also under-qualified) helmsman to alter course, blissfully unaware, as was the helmsman, that the ship was still, incorrectly, on autopilot - so it ignored the wheel and ran aground.

Never mind; contrary to the subsequent reports, Exxon was well-prepared for such an eventuality and immediately ordered up the containment booms that were on standby for just such an emergency. Or rather, they were supposed to be on standby, but were in fact out of commission for a maintenance inspection. The rest is history.

I tell all this as a powerful reminder that you can never plan for every contingency and that the more detailed such plans become, the less flexible and psychologically prepared are the management to be able to cope.

The other lesson is that actually it doesn’t really matter what went wrong; what destroyed Exxon’s reputation wasn’t the grounding itself, nor was it even the 11,000,000 gallons of oil that were spilled; it was the way they handled the subsequent PR that did the damage.

Moral: don’t sweat the small stuff in your plans but do make sure that your CEO understands the importance of visiting the site and appearing to care about what’s happened.

"If you can keep your head when all about you..."

Crises are like the buses: I haven’t handled one for months – then two came along at once. On the surface, they could not have been more different: one a large, bureaucratic organisation and the other a high-profile individual.

But what they had in common was that in both cases the biggest challenge was not so much managing the crisis itself; rather it was about calming the horses and helping to keep a sense of perspective for the people at the centre of the crisis.

When you have a large number of protesters turning violent and hurling abuse and threats, or when you’re all over the media being painted as a villain that you are not, the famous FFF (Fight, Flight or Freeze) survival mechanism kicks in and your instinct is either to want to “get the bastards” or go into hiding and/or denial and hope it goes away.

Whichever, our job as communication professionals is not only to make a strategic assessment of who are the audiences that actually matter and what damage is really being done, but also to act as sounding boards, mentors, psychotherapists, sympathetic shoulders, fight coaches and occasional firm parents to clients who are popping their corks under the strain.

Try finding that skill in a crisis manual. It really is worth giving some time and thought in advance to how you and/or your colleagues are best equipped to handle this vitally important aspect of managing a crisis.

Have a happy and crisis-free Christmas!

For many years, long ago, I had a Peanuts cartoon stuck to the cover of the portable typewriter that I carried everywhere. It showed Snoopy on top of his kennel in his “great writer” period, poring over his typewriter and clearly wrestling for ages with some huge conundrum. Then suddenly, a flurry of inspired action over the keys and the word “The” emerged. Exhausted but exuberant, Snoopy sits back and says with a satisfied smile:

“Sometimes we authors have to search for hours for the right word!”

I know the feeling. If we really want to convey a message and/or an emotion, time spent searching our word toolkit is time well invested. Just think how the Gettysburg Address would have sounded if Abraham Lincoln had started it with:

“Eighty seven years ago…”

instead of the immortal:

“Fourscore years ago and seven…”

In more recent times I came across the term “meretricious sesquipedalienism” in a book by HJ Eysenck. On inevitably looking it up in the dictionary, I found that it meant showing off by using long complicated words that no one else understands. Point made!

It may be time-consuming at first, but the brain soon warms to the task and it becomes second nature to select le mot juste and you develop your own personal list of favourite expressive words. Right now I’m looking for a suitable target for the word “scrofulous.”

I can think of a few already.

Time to preach what I practise

I've been teaching people how to speak in public for more than 30 years so it's somewhat daunting to find myself under the microscope - but that's where I'll be on Monday week. I'm in the final of the Corporate Speaker Challenge at St Mary le Bow Church, Cheapside on 28 September, kicking off at 18.45.

Visitors are welcome - and there's no charge - so do come along and cheer or jeer - and join me for a drink afterwards. There is some info on:

http://www.collegeofpublicspeaking.co.uk/Corporate_Challenge.html

Protecting a bad reputation

Heard the one about the guy who spots a pretty stewardess in an airline lounge. Not sure which airline she works for, he bounces some airline slogans off her by way of a chat up.

'Love to fly and it shows?' he asks her. She ignores him - OK, not Delta.

'Something special in the air?' Ignored again - not Singapore. He tries Thai Airways:

'Smooth as silk?' at which point she turns on him and says: 'Why don't you F*** off'

'Ah,' he says, 'Ryanair.'

I reflected on this last week when I did a return trip on Ryanair - for the first time and expecting the worst after all the dreadful things I've heard about them. So it was a pleasant shock to be treated with efficiency and courtesy by friendly staff at every stage of the journey, to sit in comfortable, modern seats with bags of leg room, and to land early into the bargain.

But the British media being what they are, Ryanair wouldn't get a fraction of the coverage it gets if the secret slipped out that it's really a good airline. So it's fascinating to see how they maintain a grunge image - an excellent example being chief executive Michael O'Leary's recent claim that he was looking at a plan to carry standing-only passengers.

Someone believed him.

The pregnant silence

I often make the point that silence is more powerful than sound when you’re making a presentation. Ditto when interviewing people. The best interviewers get the most out of their subjects by creating a vacuum, an embarrassing absence of sound that people feel impelled to fill.

The legendary Commander Burt of The Yard extracted numerous confessions from Nazi war criminals with barely a word being said or a question asked. And a colleague of one of the Sunday Times’s most successful investigative journalists tells me: ‘He just used to sit there making sympathetic noises down the ‘phone.

It’s a powerful tool because we don’t like silence between strangers (hence the inconsequential drivel that is talked at dinners and parties) but if a journalist uses it on you there is a very simple set of rules for coming out on top.

Say what you want to say in response to a question; then stop.

If the journalist/interviewer just sits there nodding and smiling, nod and smile back and see who cracks first.

A long silence might be an opportunity to deliver a new message

If you don’t have something to say, don’t say it.

One of the biggest names in PR, Shandwick, was named after an enterprise run by its founder’s dad, who was an enterprising vicar who printed off his old sermons and sold them to other vicars.

Now there’s a thought: I have scores of old blogs, guaranteed unread…

Three cheers to British Waterways for a brilliantly creative idea to slow down cyclists - they've painted a hole in the towpath.

And a great quote from a great man, Richard Feynman:

'For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled,'

The Curse of Bland Strikes Again

I've never sought revenge on those who have occasionally deliberately done me harm - the dirty work has been done for me.

My favourite was when a journalist who had been foul to me wrote something deerogatory about a PR consultant who had been maligning me behind my back. I watched on in bemused fascination as these two hell cats destroyed each other publicly in the law courts.

The latest thunderbolt of retribution has been 30 years in the coming - but come it has to a pompous ass of an MP who wrote a vicious and mendacious letter of complaint about me to the chairman of Ford when I was i/c government relations there. He had called me about his omission from a guest lilst and I had been a model of diplomacy and courtesy - yet the swine claimed I had been offensive and cavalier (my Ford bosses loved this term) and should not be in my job. Fortunately the chairman binned the letter and didn't even reply to it, but over the years I would see the same MP posturing and ninnying and would quietly think 'Later for you.'

Well he's gone. Had his snout in the expenses trough all along and now been sacked, his reputation in tatters.

Me, gloat? Perish the thought (snigger snigger).

We are sorry for the inconvenience

I rang the NHS Swine Fever advice line today but all I got was crackling.

Sorry folks, I'm taking a break for a few days so next blog in about 10 days time.

Thought for the Day

Great quote from St Francis of Assisi:

'Preach the gospel at all times - if necessary, use words.'

Old dog learns new trick

For someone whose first formal training in communication was an Army Methods of Instruction course 41 years ago, it was fascinating yesterday to do a dry run of my first webinar. The live show will be run by the Public Relations Consultants Association on 7 May on the theme of Crisis Management. If you want to be able to tell your grandchildren that you took part in Michael Bland's first webinar you can find information and booking details at

http://www.prca.org.uk/product.asp?cid=2&pid=261&sid=

Have a good weekend.

Only the names have been changed

As baseball coach Yogi Berra said: ‘This is Déja Vu all over again.’ A feature of getting older is the frequent realisation that what you think is a new concept is actually an old one under a new, trendy title. I’ve seen Auto-Suggestion become NLP and ten years ago I invented the term Power Napping as it sounded better than ‘snatching forty winks.’ Last week I felt disturbingly out of touch when a PR student was explaining the, to me, unfamiliar digi-term Boundary Spanning – until the penny dropped that she was talking about communicating with peers in other departments and disciplines. Some of us have been doing this all along but didn’t have a name for it.

Sometimes it’s catching. A couple of years ago I emailed a Bank of England director asking if there would be someone to capture the inputs at a seminar I was chairing. He replied: ‘Do you mean is someone taking notes?'

And now for something a bit different

I hadn't really given any thought to Jacqui Smith and her porn-viewing husband until a client asked me, in the middle of a crisis training day, what advice I would have given her. Normally, I'm in the instant grovel camp but on this occasion I found myself wishing that for a change she'd told her attackers: 'Look, it was a piffling amount of money and a simple error; there are more important things to worry about and if you don't like it, get a life.' There are times when public figures gain respect by telling people to f*** off or, like John Prescott with his egg-thrower, punching them on the nose.

Am I mad?

The Perception Gap

A core principle of crisis management is that your crisis is not what has happened but what people THINK has happened. I thought of an everyday analogy for this gap between perception and reality while waiting on the platform at South Ealing station the other day: as the frustrated commuters stood five deep waiting for a train that wasn’t coming, the Tannoy continued to bleat out the cheering news ‘A good service is operating on all London Underground lines.’