One of the more interesting things about my job at Hewlett-Packard is meeting customers in the Executive Briefing Center. Sales teams from around the world bring customers to HP’s headquarters for a variety of reasons - to close a deal, discuss the latest technology with engineers or develop relationships with key executives.

Many of the meetings kick-off with a company overview and I’m one a number of HP employees called on to give the the ‘HP Today’ presentation.

Since many customers come from across the country and around the world this can often be as much an update on Silicon Valley as it is specifically about HP.

In the last couple of months I’ve spoken to Catholic priests from Korea; MBA students from China; Japanese bankers; spies from Sweden (OK, “signals intelligence operatives” from Sweden) and bureaucrats from Britain.

I’m struck by the fact that for many visitors to Hewlett-Packard the experience of seeing how business is done in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area must be as strange as, say, a trip to Haight-Ashbury was for Midwesterners in the Summer of Love, 40 years ago.

The visiting delegations are homogeneous: Chinese engineers come from China; Koreans come from Korea; middle-aged Caucasian males come from IT departments across the USA.

They fly in to one of the most ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, mongrel areas on earth.

Silcion Valley’s competitive edge is that it is a unique habitat for innovation and entrepreneurship. It all started with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tinkering in their garage in 1939 and the pace of change has been relentless ever since.

Unlike many regions, companies in Silicon Valley have access to a high quality and mobile workforce comprised of talented people from around the world. No one racial group is in a majority. This ethnic diversity fosters an equality of opportunity startling even by American standards — 39% of all residents were born in a foreign country. In contrast to the more rigid social hierarchies of Europe, the Valley operates a results oriented meritocracy where talent and ability are king. The region’s merit-based system of rewards encourages the best and brightest to knock themselves out in hopes of being part of the next new, new thing.

What is remarkable about the Valley is the lack of an identifiable landmark. Unlike instantly recognizable symbols such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris; Big Ben in London; Times Square in New York or the Ginza district in Tokyo, there’s no building or street which symbolizes the place. As Po Bronson remarks in his amusing book The Nudist on the Late Shift, it’s not the buildings or physical surroundings which distinguish Silicon Valley, it’s the people. And they are sometimes as wacky as the hippies in the Haight in 1968. There really was a programmer in one Silicon Valley company who chose to work the night shift so he could sit at his computer au natural.

Walk the corridors HP, or any company in the Valley, and you’ll hear as many accents from Asia, Europe and Latin America as you will from the United States. It’s something the visitors to the region would do well to notice. For it’s an undeniable fact that immigrants to the area are responsible for much of the wealth. Sun Microsystems was started by a German engineer getting together with an Indian businessman; Google billionaire Sergey Brin came from Russia, albeit at the age of six; dozens of other Silicon Valley companies were founded by Indian and Chinese immigrants.

Pascal Zachary argues persuasively that diversity defines the health and wealth of nations in today’s world. What he calls ‘mongrel’ mixes of people fare better than regions other regions, such as “the great monocultures of Germany and Japan.” Whereas Germany does have immigrants, they are mostly kept outside the mainstream, as guestworkers. The Japanese remain uneasy with the idea of absorbing outsiders into the mainstream.

There’s an amusing story when, back in the Summer of Love, Grey Line (aptly named!) started bringing mid-western tourists through the Haight to gawp at the hippies, the flower children held up mirrors to the bus windows. The mirrors reflected back upon the tourists the wonder, shock or fear they experienced when they saw the free thinkin’, free lovin’ tripped-out voyagers of the new culture (some of whom, like Cap’n Crunch, inspired Jobs and Wozniak; others like Stewart Brand were early into the web.)

It may be that, by visiting Silcion Valley, businesspeople from elsewhere have a mirror held up to their own culture.

One of the lessons from Dick Bruso’s weekend workshop in branding was the importance of consistency in a brand image. A brand is a promise. Customers recognize the brand not just by the name of that organization, but by the shape, color, size and location of the brand logo.

Many small businesses and independent entrepreneurs are sloppy with their brand image. They buy a QuickPrint business card, use stock paper from Kinko’s and download a standard template for their blog or website. Nothing matches. There is no brand consistency. Not so with large corporations. Their brands are instantly recognizable and consistent. Coke uses the same shade of red on its cans of soda worldwide.

But what about a company which owns an image in its market, but other companies, in other markets, use the same name and project a very different brand image?

Consider my employer, Hewlett-Packard. Legend has it that Bill & Dave decided whose name was to come first by tossing a coin. Heaven knows the confusion if the coin had come up tails! Anyone care to explain what acidity and alkalinity has to do with computer equipment? But were they aware that since the 1880’s the British had been slathering their breakfast sausage with HP Sauce?

Of course, overlapping corporate logos with very different brand images are usually not a problem. No-one would mistakenly pick up a bottle of sauce instead of a computer. Although I’m sure some computer user in the UK must by now have spilled HP sauce on their HP computer.

Another computer company, my previous employer Sun Microsystems, competes for people’s attention worldwide with a British Newspaper and a brand of French detergent.

Trouble is caused when previously unrelated markets collide, as seen in the Apple vs. Apple controversy which pits Steve Jobs against the Fab Four.

Try as they might, companies will run into potential brand confusion, as these examples of various companies other than Hewlett-Packard who use an “HP Logo” show.

The 800-lb gorillas of the Fortune 500 probably don’t lose sleep over this (unless they work for McDonald’s who are famously aggressive in closing down any enterprise started by descendent’s of the Clan McDonald anywhere, any place, at any time.)

But for small businesses it should be a matter of some concern. If you are starting a small company and someone else on the web has one with a similar name, be sure to aim for maximum consistency with your logo, printed matter and other branding elements.

However, the ultimate validation of a brand’s popularity might be when your customers start tattooing it on their bodies. Here’s a couple of examples from competing side of the computer industry.

One can only wonder what would happen if they started dating.

Moving quickly on from my novice experience with Facebook, I’ve now discovered Second Life (SL).

I heard SL CEO Philip Rosedale present at the Stanford AlwaysOn Conference. This was remarkable because he used his SL ‘avatar’ (the descended incarnation of a deity - or the persona you create to represent your SL ‘presence’) to conduct a tour of the virtual reality. Thanks to some nifty translation software he was able to chat with Japanese vistors to SL (only 30% of the 8+ million people who’ve registered are from the US). He also mentioned 5,000 IBM employees have a presence on SL and use it for virtual meetings. Other companies like Dell and Sun Microsystems have online stores. More to the point, there are people making thousands of real dollars selling virtual things to others in SL. Sounds like the early days of Ebay.

So, off I went to check it out. There’s a number of steps to set up a basic free SL account. The first that tripped me up was choosing a name for my avatar. Shouldn’t be a big deal - just find a unique name and off you go, right? Well, SL only allows you certain last names such as Akina, Back, Ebbage, Price. Some odd, some ordinary. I eventually chose Fouroux since it sounded French but when twinned with the first name ‘Three’ had a certain wit. Then my wife suggested mimicking the way phone numbers are given out in the UK, and so I switched to Double3 Fouroux (as in 3340, geddit?).

That out of the way I soon downloaded the app and was off to my first experience of virtual reality. It is like being reborn - into an environment where you have to learn to walk, run, sit, fly, turn, speak and so on. Somewhat frustrating, but the compelling presence of other novice avatars keeps things amusing.

Once the basics are handled (in an environment called ‘Orientation Island’) then one can teleport to other areas of SL. Somewhere in the 30,000+ people online at any one time are fascinating people I can chat to. Somewhere there are instructive conversations, presentations and people with expertise to share. But there’s also a lot of porn, trivia and timewasting. Not much different from RL (Real Life) in that regard.

It’s lilely that SL will appeal to some and not to others. People who communicate for a living (professional speakers, trainers, consultants) should find it a valuable way to extend their RL relationships. And, who knows, when Avian Flu hits, a virtual meeting place might have compelling advantages.

The British Daily Telegraph newspaper reports that, surprise, surprise, German executives are not known for delivering inspirational speeches.

It seems Teutonic boss’s rely on statistics and charts at the expense of compelling rhetoric:

German managers are generally good at their jobs in a technical sense, but preparation for public appearances seldom goes beyond a series of PowerPoint charts. These are often prepared by somebody else, and there are far too many. When the number is truly overwhelming, the presentation is nothing but a slide show and not a speech at all.

There is simply not a presentation culture in Germany, and the saying goes that “German manager’s work better than they talk”. Der Spiegel complains of an excessive concentration on facts and figures at the expense of charisma and conviction. It seems that the mentality and ideology of dealing with hard facts in a depersonalised manner is at odds with a healthy emphasis on giving impressive presentations in public. Voice and the use of both talk and body language tend to be neglected.

I can’t help but think of the John Cleese Fawlty Towers sketch where he goose-steps around the dining room instructing his staff “Don’t mention zee war!”. For while it may be tasteless to refer to the Second World War in relation to contemporary German managers, it’s undeniable that many British and American executives (and politicians) openly admire Winston Churchill and ape his rhetorical style and freely quote him.

This puts modern German executives at a severe disadvantage. After all, the Holocaust aside, their wartime leader was a renowned public speaker. He used his public speeches to persuade his audiences and, one could argue, never forgot to include a call to action (it just happened to be one the world would have been better without). But I doubt German managers can freely quote or mimic the rhetorical style of ‘Corporal Hitler’. So who do they use as a model for their speeches? Apparently no-one. Stripped of all emotion (since their role models are negative ones) they face down their audience with facts and figures.

The Telegraph article concludes with a plea for effective presentation coaching for German executives:

They should rely less on manuscripts and charts and more on presenting well. A successful presentation will grab the attention of the audience and ensure that they believe in what they are told and in the person telling it.

There are many executives in the English-speaking world who would do well to heed that advice.

My favorite FT columnist Harry Eyres writes in the Weekend Edition (subscription required) about the tragic lack of diversity in the modern world. The march to a monoculture extends from crops (all maize all the time) to literature (all Harry Potter all the time) to language (all English or Mandarin all the time).

Language loss is a topic addressed anthropologist Wade Davis at the wonderful TED Conference. His 2003 talk on endangered cultures argues language isn’t just a collection of vocabulary and grammatical rules. In fact, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.” The languages of the planet are being lost at the rate of 6 a week - 50% of the world’s 6,000 languages, he says, have disappeared in our lifetime and “are no longer being whispered into the ears of children.”

This lack of diversity removes different ways of making sense out of the world, forever. Whole networks of living relationships disappear. Those of us left inhabiting the vast monocultures of English, Spanish, Mandarin and French must work harder to capture different ways of seeing. Different cultures create different realities. Different realities of lead to different discoveries.

A monoculture sows and sees the same thing, everywhere.

Eyres concludes by quoting the Emperor Charles V, who on seeing the cathedral his architect had constructed in the middle of the great mosque of Córdoba, stated “You have destroyed what was unique to replace it with what could be found anywhere.”

So what differentiates your discoveries?

I’m ploughing through an excellent book on Britain in the 1950’s. Having It So Goodby Peter Hennessy chronicles the decade I arrived on the scene in the UK. There’s wonderfully detailed stories about coal fires; the Suez Crisis; early television and more. A unique cast of characters parade across the pages with names like Mountstuart Elphinstone; Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (known to the Welsh as Dai Bananas); Meta Strachan; Glubb Pasha; Walter Monckton and, last but not least, Supermac - the British Prime Minister Sir Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan attributed his superior public speaking skills to decades of practice in the House of Commons and acknowledges the role of a particular mentor. David Lloyd George had been Prime Minister during the First World War. In 1924 he came to Macmillan and congratulated him on his first speech in Parliament, but advised him ‘you have no idea how to make a speech’. The great orator offered the following advice:

Never say more than one thing. Yours was an essay, a good essay, but with a large number of separate points. Just say one thing; when you are a Minister two things, and when you a Prime Minister winding up a debate perhaps three…Of course you wrap it up in different ways. You say it over and over again with different emphasis and different illustrations. You say it forcefully, regretfully, even perhaps threateningly; but it is a single clear point…there must be continual variation; slow solemn phrases, quick, witty amusing passages…Finally, don’t forget the value of the pause.

Having It So Good p. 567

Thanks to a comment by The Friendly Ghost I’ve been made aware of the current series running in The Guardian Newspaper in the UK on Great Speeches of the 20th Century. The newspaper is doing more than merely reprinting the speech text:

Each day for two weeks you can collect a free booklet containing a historic address and the Guardian’s coverage of the speech from the time. The speeches are introduced by prominent figures ranging from FW de Klerk on Nelson Mandela’s statement to the Rivonia trial to Mikhail Gorbachev on Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. Complete your collection with a CD featuring extracts from 10 great speeches free with the Guardian on Saturday May 5.

The series kicked off with Churchill’s We Shall Fight on the Beaches; moved on to JFK’s Ask Not what Your Country Can Do For You and covers the following list:

• Nelson Mandela An ideal for which I am prepared to die April 20 1964
• Harold Macmillan The wind of change February 3 1960
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt The only thing we have to fear is fear itself March 4 1933
• Nikita Khrushchev The cult of the individual February 25 1956
• Emmeline Pankhurst Freedom or death November 3 1913
• Martin Luther King I have a dream August 28 1963
• Charles de Gaulle The flame of French resistance June 1940
• Margaret Thatcher The lady’s not for turning October 10 1980
• Jawaharlal Nehru A tryst with destiny August 14 1947
• Virginia Woolf A room of one’s own 1928
• Aneurin Bevan We have to act up to different standards December 5 1956
• Earl Spencer The most hunted person of a modern age September 6 1997

I’m planning to bookmark the speeches and the debate around them for future reference, as well as asking my Dad to pick up a copy of Saturday’s Guardian and send over a copy of the CD.

Spotted a fascinating article detailing options for professional speakers to sell spoken advice and support via per-minute phone calls. Think of this as a legit spin on the psychic advice and phone sex biz model.

Four services are highlighted.

Ether

Enables you to sign up for a free Ether (1-888) number, which is forwarded to a phone number of your choice, be it cell, home or work. You then decide how much your time is worth, per hour per minute or per call. Customers will only be able to call you when they’ve prepaid the set rate. Ether bills their credit card and sends you this fee minus a 15% commission. There’s no monthly fees, no setup fees, and no connection fees. It would be your responsibility to advertise this service on your website or blog. Of course 888 numbers are only valid in the USA, so you’re limiting your potential market to 300 million Americans (bummer!).

BitWine

Is a Skype-based directory of service providers which offers “Trusted Advice from Real People”. Ideally for bloggers, there’s custom code to advertise the service on your blog. Rankings are posted so customers can see the reputation of the seller (as on eBay). Sellers charge from zero (free) to $3.00 a minute or more depending on category. Since it is Skype-based your services can be marketed globally.

Wengo

Is an on-line expert community, similar to BitWine except everything I accessed seemed to be in French. Maybe I’m missing something. Is there an English-language version out there somewhere?

Skype Prime

The 800-Pound Gorilla of the online telephony world with 171 million VoIP subscribers has launched their beta service which is similar to Ether. You can create a Skype Prime ’snippet’ to advertise the service you provide on your blog. Billing and the back-end details are handled by Skype for a 30% commission. But you can market to anyone in the world with a Skype account. The calls start as free, then switch to the paid calling plan, with you charging either by the minute or a one-off fixed fee for the privilege.

These four plans indicate the beginnings of a new business model for professional speakers and information brokers. Right now they’re a nice-to-have experimental way of leveraging your time and expertise. But when Avian Flu hits and the conference halls empty, they might be indispensable.

I’d love to hear from anyone with experience of these services. Good or bad. Please leave your comments below.

Thanks to Brady for sending me a link to a thought-provoking YouTube video created by a high-school teacher at the Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. If you’ve got six minutes to spare click on the link below and ponder the implications:

Teacher Karl Fisch has scrupulously documented the sources for the video and the process he created it (in PowerPoint, natch) on his blog. The video was adapted by Scott McLeod.

As with all run-away successes on YouTube, it’s spawned a number of remixes (one nice mash-up ends with a clip from The Matrix).

I don’t have the skills or time to create a re-mix, but I do have a couple of thoughts to share.

One. The reference to Gilder’s Law 4:37 into the video, where the explosion in bandwidth is highlighted:

Third generation fiber optics has recently been separately tested by NEC and Alcatel . . .
That pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.
That’s 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second.

reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s prophetic words from the era before glass-fiber sharded the earth in circles of light:

The cable is carrying a lot of information back and forth between Hiro’s computer and the rest of the world. In order to transmit the same amount of information on paper, they would have to arrange for a 747 cargo freighter packed with telephone books and encyclopedias to power-dive into their unit every couple of minutes, forever.

p.20 Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash, 1992 (yes, 1992)

Two. The soundtrack took me back to the west coast of Clare, and old pubs where fiddlers love to play, imagining the text as one half of a conversation between two Irish lads nursing their pints of Guinness on a soft evening with the turf fire lazily warming their shins:

Did you know . . .
No, what, Pat?
Sometimes size does matter.
Get away, why’s that?
If you’re one in a million in China . . .
You’d find it hard to stand out in a crowd I’d imagine. It’s a terribly crowded place, China. So I understand…
There are 1,300 people just like you.
Get away. Imagine that. That’s very mathematical. Cases of mistaken identity must be fierce common.
In India, there are 1,100 people just like you
Really? Who’d have thought there were that many identical Chinese living in India? Do they clone them in Bangalore? Ah. Globalization, ’tis a wonderful thing. Your round?

A recent podcast of the wonderful BBC Radio 4 programme, Start The Week, featured an interview with Bamber “Your Starter For Ten” Gascoigne, host of the long-running TV quiz show University Challenge. This was a fixture on British television during my formative years. I’m still embarrassed to admit I failed the qualifying rounds at Leicester Univeristy in 1972 and so never appeared on the show along with the other scruffy undergraduates of the era.

Gascoigne is an established author and historian who has launched a fascinating Web 2.0 venture - Timesearch - an intelligent search tool that organizes results on historical time lines.

Timesearch is an invaluable tool for the professional speaker or speechwriter. Suppose, for example, you are an executive at the Hewlett-Packard Company scheduled to speak in Sydney at a Chamber of Commerce event. A simple query in Timesearch focussed on Australia in the 1930’s would show the major events that occurred at the time Bill & Dave were establishing HP:

you can immediately see that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was only seven years old when HP was started in the Palo Alto garage in 1939. Robert Menzies became Prime Minister that year. Both useful local references to build into your notes. Icons to the left and right side of each reference link to Google Images and other website search results to enable easily building your speech content on this topic. So far, so good.

But what if Timesearch allowed wiki-like user generated content to be added to the 10,000 entries Gascoigne has entered into the current database? Now that would be way cool. It would, for example, allow HP’s archivists to add the company timeline and show the intersection of HP’s history with world events. Family histories and details of individual lives and locations would enrich and extend the tool. Gascoigne revealed plans on Start the Week for this exciting option as the next stage of development for Timesearch.

For now, the tool offers a valuable source of ideas for your next speech.

Consider one more example, using fascinating historical cross-references to demonstrate cultural sensitivity. Say you were addressing a visiting delegation from Korea:

How impressed would they be to hear you quote the fact that Koreans invented bronze movable type 60 years before Gutenberg built his press in Germany?

Use Timesearch today to enrich your presentations. And check back shortly to see if it allows you to load your own data into it so your biography becomes a part of world history. Timesearch: when things happen to good people.