Left where the lights used to be

I spent last weekend visiting family outside Krakow, and wanted to drive to the local bus station. I asked my host for directions, and he started to explain. "Get onto the Katowice road," he started, obviously assuming that I knew how to get from his house onto the Katowice road, "and drive on straight, and keep driving on straight. You'll start passing Real on the right." I wondered if he meant the only Real I know in the area. "Is that the Real in M1?" "Yes, that's the one! Then you turn left" My host's wife interjected "At the set of traffic lights" "Yes," agreed my host, "turn left at the traffic lights. Then you drive straight, and you start driving uphill, then you drive straight to the top of the hill, and then you start to drive downhill, and you drive downhill, and you drive straight, until you come to a large crossing, quite a large crossing, at the local stadium. There is a large taxi rank beside the stadium, too." I summarized "So, I go left at M1, and then go straight on to the large crossing at the stadium." "Yes, and then you go straight on," he continued , "and keep going straight on, until you get to a roundabout" I was surprised at what came next "...and then you turn right. Then you take the second left, which is about 200 metres after the first" -he never mentioned how far from the roundabout the first left was- " and drive straight on. And drive straight on until you get to the end of the street, and then turn right, and the bus station is on the left."
My host had used a description that was a million metaphorical miles from the description I would have used ("Left at M1, right at the roundabout, and take the second left, then the bus station is the next left."), and I remembered the old joke about an Irishman giving directions (go down to where the old tree used to be, and then you'll come to a large white house. Ignore that, and go on until you come to a field where Paddy sometimes leaves the cows...).
I read once that, if you ask a woman where the mustard is, the likelihood is that she will explain that it is behind the butter, and below the cold meats, in front of the mayonnaise. A man will probably tell you it is on the second shelf from the top, on the left. Men generally explain with coordinates, along with the philosophy of 'A place for everything, and everything in its place' Women use landmarks and reference points, seeing the world and everything in it as being related to each other.
What is interesting is that this is not news to anyone. We always complain that someone gives directions in a certain, specific way. 'He just gives the street names', 'She has to repeat every important detail twice', 'He gives the direction at every crossing, whether you go left, right or straight' Why not use this information to you advantage in the future? If someone always gives only street names when giving directions, then the best way to give him directions is not to tell him which landmark to look out for, but to tell him which streets to use. If someone reports every important detail twice, then he will understand something is important to you if you repeat it twice. I, for one, will give directions to my host in the clearest way ossible, with as many details as I can give. Why? He has already shown that this is the way he analyses and remembers directions.
Get into the habit of doing this, and you will find yourself automatically listening better to people giving directions. The end result is you will get lost less, and people will appreciate your directions.

Michael Jackson's Death: A Historic Event -in Communication

Michael Jackson passed away, and for about three days, this was the ost important event in the world. At least it was the most important event in the news. Of course, in this day and age, the media are less concerned with politics, and more concerned with celebrities. Recently, 100 years of a national newspaper have been made available online, and the early editions have whole transcripts of debates from the House of Commons. Of course, people are still interested in the workings of government and the national and intenational economy, but if one compares the content of a newspaper today with the contect of a newspaper of the early 20th century, it is difficult to find so much gossip and descriptions of new celebrity couples from the earlier paper. What has changed in society? Well, society has changed. A wider demographic can read now, and they also have the money and time to buy material to read. The press must cater to wider tastes.
A bigger sign of social behaviour for me can be seen in how society reacted to the death of Michael Jackson. When Lady Diana (Queen of Hearts) died, thousands of people collected around Buckingham Palace to leave flowers and console each other over the passing of their icon. Within hours of Jackson's death, hundreds of facebook groups had been started to commemorate the King of Pop and to share the grief. Now, setting up a group on a social website is the equivalent of taking time off work and travelling to a focal grieving point to lay a wreath (I'm sure somebody has written a 'lay flowers on MJ's tomb' application for facebook already!) . Facebook and other similar social networking sites are not so much a sign of the times, more a sign of the people. This is what people want to do in their free time. We have alread had people meeting and marrying over the internet. People grieve through the internet. Although the Catholic Church officially opposes it, people with guilty consciences can confess online, too. It seems there is nothing we don't prefer to do online. If this is just another sign of the death of face-to-face contact between real, living people, then I'll meet you in the online grieving site.

Just find an English-speaking friend, and ask...

Every now and again, a new story comes along to be added to the great list of terrible brand names that have been used. Usually, the examples are given in business school case studies as warnings to double check everything.
The last example is of the Russian Gas concern, Gazprom, and their new joint venture with Nigeria's state oil company. The name of the new company is Nigaz.
Of course this is causing a lot of comment, and there were a number of articles looking at the fau pas. The deal between was supposed to show off the Kremlin's growing interest in Africa's energy reserves, and instead, it will be used to show how provincial businesspeople can be, and that it is very important to have a good grasp of English.
The mistake was first pointed out on the popular site twitter, (which I will definitely have to write about in the near future!), and before long, it had moved on to marketing website Brand Republic, and finally onto the Guardian website.
I wrote that it was a mistake, but is it a mistake? It is common practice in Eastern European languages to form a name by putting the first syllables of all the important words together (Some Polish building companies -budownictwo- in Krakow are called Krak-Bud, Budokrak, PolBud, Budopol, etc.)
Take the name of the country first -perhaps out of respect- and you have 'Ni'. Take the first syllable from the Russian company, 'Gaz', and you must get 'Nigaz'. Some people have laughed that President Medvedev didn't ask anyone what it might mean before announcing the company at a press conference in Nigeria, but who on the president's staff has such a role -Cultural Omniscient? Another question is why should he?
The word may be offensive in English, but here we have a company which has a final product that will be marketed in Nigeria, where the Nigerians were not upset by the word, and Russia, in whose language the word is not insulting.
And what about where people are proud of the name? I lived in Germany where the Real hypermarket chain had outsourced the butcher's section to a family company whose name was the surname of its founders. With every piece of steak I bought, I would receive a label with the price, and the friendly greeting "Vielen Dank, Fuck GmbH". What should you do if your name is offensive in another language?
I'm sure for every product that has a funny or taboo meaning in English, there are more English product names that have taboo or funny meanings in other languages.
For example, Osram lightbulbs sell their products with no shame in Poland, where the name means "I defecate all around it". There is also the famous story of Mistubishi's 4x4 vehicle, the Pajero ( a name in Spanish for someone who enjoys masturbating a lot), which some argue well defines the drivers of these vehicles! The car was renamed the Montero in some regions of the world. The fact that we see these multimillion dollar concerens making mistakes like this is, for some reason, comforting. It gives us the feeling that everyone makes mistakes, and we aren't so worried by it. I wanted to see if the president of the German meat merchant agreed with me, but when I put 'Fuck President" into Google, a lot of websites about George W. Bush came up.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire!

One Sunday recently, my wife and children and I went to visit family friends, and in the noise and chaos of the children's playing around us, we started talking about lying. Not lying in bed asleep (although for parents of young children this is what they frequently dream about!), but not telling the truth. We quickly reached the conclusion that lying generally receives bad publicity. Whether we like it or not, the ability to communicate false messages is a vitally important lifeskill. If you don't believe it, think about the last time your mother asked you if she looked nice in that horrible new dress she bought!
Our friend declared that he was quite proud of the fact that his children were able to lie, which, at first, was shocking, but when I listened to what he had to say about it, I understood better what he meant. When you think that a child learns absolutely everything through experience at the beginning, it is really a giant step forward when the child is able to tell the difference between real and unreal, true and false, and be confident enough to know that what is being described is not real. Then, added to that, the child knows that describing an imagined situation will bring benefits ('I already asked Mummy, and she said I could have a sweet', or 'Did you hit your brother?' -'No').
While I can also quite happily declare that I'm proud that my children possess this ability, I am more proud of the fact that thay choose to admit to what they have done wrong (at least for now -I'm sure that will change soon enough), and that they only tell untruths when they are playing ('Daddy I'm a motorbike!).
Our friend then said that lying is necessary in business, which I agreed with to a certain extent. A character in one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels came from a tribe where almost nobody had the ability to tell a lie. For this reason, the ones who had this gift were nominated to the position of tribal liers, and it was they who were sent to negotiate and trade with other tribes. The example our friend gave, however, was of a different situation. He claimed that when dealing with subordinates who have made mistakes, a manager had to lie, and praise them, although he'd really like to just shout and swear at them. I was also surprised at this theory. In all the years I have had people work under me, I don't think I have ever felt the need to lie to them.
Of course, there is the question of diplomacy -I would never tell anyone they were rubbish, but there is also the question of propriety -of discussing the proper topic with the proper person. If one of my subordinates -at any time in my career- asked me if I thought they were ugly, pretty, in good shape, a good singer etc., I don't think that would have any effect on our work relationship. I would answer diplomatically, as I would if anybody asked me.
There is a saying "The truth, however ugly, is good. A lie, however beautiful, is bad." With this in mind, I wonder just how successful you can be as a manager if you lie to your staff. I much prefer to tell my staff what I really think about their ideas, work and input. The trick, though, is to make sure they know that these are your feelings, and not facts. "I think that you could have done better" is a fact, explaining the way you think. Such a statement can lead to discourse, as youmay discuss how the work could have been better, and a next step (or steps) can be planned together. "That is hopeless" is a useless phrase which has no positive quality whatsoever. In addition, it is stating your -highly subjective- opinion as a fact. This, in its own way, is a big lie, and one that is definitely bad.

Forty Years in Search of an 'a'.

According to an article by BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh, Niel Armstrong slipped when he stepped onto the moon in 1969. Ever since the historic event, people have debated about whether the first words ever spoken on the moon were
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind", or
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind".
Armstrong himself was convinced that he had said the second sentence -which does in fact make more sense. However, the words of the first man on the moon have often been quoted in the first form, in which the word 'man' has roughly the same meaning as 'mankind', so making the sentence slightly more cryptic.
In an effort to solve this debate, Dr Chris Riley, author of the book Apollo 11, An Owner's Manual, and forensic linguist John Olsson carried out the most detailed analysis yet of Neil Armstrong's speech patterns.
Riley and Olsson studied archive material o Neil armstrong speaking, recorded throughout and after the Apollo 11 mission. They then took the original magnetic tape recordings made at Johnson Space Centre, Houston, which have recently been re-digitised to make uncompressed, higher-fidelity audio recordings.
These clearer recordings indicate that the "r" in "for" and "m" in "man" run into each other, leaving no room for an "a".
But there is a rising pitch in the word "man" and a falling pitch when he says "mankind", which suggests Commander Armstrong was contrasting using speech. According to Mr. Olsson, this indicates that Armstrong "knows the difference between man and mankind and that he meant man as in 'a man' not 'humanity'."
Mr. Olsson says that Armstrong may have "subconsciously drawn from his poetic instincts to utter a phrase that, far from being incorrect - was perfect for the moment."

Kuleshov -saying something by saying nothing

One Christmas, as a present, my brother got me a subscription to 'Empire', a British magazine about films. One of the issues delivered had a free book with it, 'The Empire Movie Miscellany'. Recently, I picked it up and read through it, and came across an entry titled 'The Kuleshov Effect'.
This name describes an experiment in film editing carried out by the Russian Filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. In the experiment, Kuleshov showed an image of the expresionless face of actor Ivan Mozzhukhin, and intercut it with shots of a plate of soup, a little girl and an old woman's coffin.
When the film was shown, audiences praised the mastery of the acting, and raved about Mozzhukhin's range, with his ability to display hunger, fatherly love, and grief with such finesse. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."
Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. However, the implications are much more interesting on a broader scale. The experiment worked because viewers brought their own emotional reactions to the sequence of images, and then 'projected' their own assumptions and emotions onto the actor. Mozzukhin's blank expression became a blank canvas on which viewers could not help painting over with their own subconscious feelings. In short, then, we have another in a long line of examples of people assuming, instead of verifying, and so, the next opportunity for misinterpretation arises.
Everybody who is interested in communication knows about Professor Albert Mehrabian and his statistic regarding message transmissions. Essentially, Professor Mehrabian found that

• 7% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in the words that are spoken.
• 38% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).
• 55% of message pertaining to feelings and attitudes is in facial expression.

While his findings relate only to emotions and feelings (as perfectly illustrated by Kuleshov's experiment), it is worth remembering that very often, more information is transmitted non-verbally than verbally. This is why we never see a country's President giving a 'state of the nation' speech in front of a burning car crash. A lot can be passed across (or, on the other hand, not) when the speaker allows the audience to assume. Of course, this may also be a good thing -the state of the nation may be that of a burning car crash!
When we want to deliver a message, we have to decide if we want to do it explicitly, in which case there is no doubt what we are communicating, or implicitly, allowing the audience to make its own conclusions. A student of mine told me of a case where she wanted to help a client who had asked for the e-mail address of her supervisor. She explained that she could not give out the e-mail address of John Smith, her supervisor at company, but the client could e-mail her at her address, which was the standard format of e-mail addresses for everyone in that company: Jane.Jones@company.com. The client, sounding offended, told her he was sorry she couldn't ooperate. Sometimes, we just have to hope our audience is clever enough to make assumptions.

Cocaine Gives You Wings!

About a year ago, the makers of energy drink Red Bull introduced a new cola-flavoured drink, Red Bull Cola, onto the market. Last week, a health institute in North-Rhine Westphalia found traces of cocaine in the drink, which led to authorities in six German states banning the drink. An article in TIME magazine reminds us that, until 1903 Coca Cola contained traces of cocaine, and explains that according to the analysis, the 0.13 micrograms of cocaine per can of the drink does not pose a serious health threat — you'd have to drink 12,000 litres of Red Bull Cola for negative effects to be felt! Indeed, officials confirmed that the cocaine levels were too low to pose a health threat but were not permitted in foodstuffs.
Stories like this come around from time to time, where a new product is found to have a harmful ingredient or effect. What interested me, though, is Red Bull's reaction to the report.
A Red Bull spokesman said "De-cocainized extract of coca leaf is used worldwide in foods as a natural flavoring", and Red Bull said its cola was "harmless and marketable" in both the US and EU.
It is quite easy to see that the authorities in question, while perhaps panicking, are just reacting to concerns that could be raised by the public. Red Bull's answer has two points that interest me. The first is that they seem to completely ignore that the findings are the result of research carried out by Institutes -accepted bodies of wisdom in society. Their statement also ignores the decisions of six German states (and, since the whole affair started, several countries which have called for the drink to be withdrawn), and so suggests that Red Bull are not concerned with what governments think.
I'm not suggesting they reinvent the drink, but often -as is the case in many differences of opinion- it's enough to say "We understand how you feel". Red Bull have shown no empathy whatsoever -a key factor in customer relations. They have decided that they would go ahead and do their own thing.
What is their thing? That is the next point. Red Bull's official statement claimed not that the drink was "harmless and acceptable", not that it was "harmless and drinkable", but that it was "harmless and marketable", not the warmest, kindest, most honourable characteristic of a drink. I can't help wondering if the attitude shown in the company's response didn't lose them some support, as they suggest that a) local governments don't know what they are doing, and b) they are able to market it, so it must be okay.
On the other side, given that Red Bull's website is full of videos and photos of extreme sports, high-energy racing machines and adrenaline-fuelled adventure, it may just be the reaction to what they see as great publicity!