As I’ve confessed on this blog before, my own transition from the UK to the USA included a number of years as an illegal immigrant. I’ve never made this a central aspect of my professional identity, rather treating it as something along the lines of Bill Clinton’s ‘I didn’t inhale’ approach to some of his youthful indiscretions. But I did what I did. Amnesty in 1987 took care of my legal status, and I’m now a naturalized citizen.

In a fascinating article in today’s Financial Times, legal counsel Patti Waldmeir writes about the “massive absurdity” that the current laws immigration reform proposals are attempting to deal with – on the one hand US companies employ millions of illegal workers (ya can’t get no stinkin’ welfare if ya ain’t legal!) and the US government pretends it does not notice.

This is about to change. The Bush administration wants to end the charade. US employers will be asked to match 8 million workers with “woefully inaccurate Social Security databases” and be held liable if the numbers don’t match. Corporate America says the rules will cost $100m to implement.

Waldmeir concludes that the proposed rules are “an absurd new hindrance to the American dream” and “the US economy will continue to stand or fall by the hard work of its illegal immigrants”.

Hear hear.

Of all the ‘elephants in the room’ in the USA, the underclass of the undocumented workers and the crucial services they provide is one of the more obvious. Together with gays in the military; social security entitlements; a nuclear arsenal which can destroy all life on Earth many times over; 40m citizens with no health insurance and the bloated size of many automobiles and the bottoms which sit therein. All issues which define an age, but sit unexamined as part of the taken-for-granted world we inhabit. Not discussed in polite society and often too politically ‘hot’ for serious debate. Yet future generations may wonder “What were they thinking?”

Well, what do you think?

Social Media (blogs, podcasts) are all over the news these days. I took the opportunity to interview The Social Media Guru about what it all means.

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 of 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.

Silicon 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 Silicon 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.

I won’t be able to make the trip, but the National Speakers Association are holding a Technology Jam Session in Seattle, September 28-30.

Read all about it in the blog. The blog includes some free stuff – such as .mp3 files from teleseminars they’re holding prior to the event. I plan to download one tonight and check it out.

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.

I’ve been busy building out my identity on Facebook. Until a month ago I thought this was just something my 18-year-old daughter and her friends used to stay in touch as they head off the college. They do. But so do 10,000+ employees of Hewlett-Packard. And hundreds from Sun Microsystems, tens-of-thousands from Silicon Valley. A handful from the National Speakers Association. These are all Groups and Networks I’ve joined within Facebook.

It’s not just for college kids any more. Facebook has moved into the workplace.

Facebook is a great business networking tool. More dynamic than LinkedIn, less cliquey than Ryze. And a whole lot less thought-policed than the British ecademy. There’s the risk that some of your colleagues may share a little too much information (you might not be able to look at them in a meeting with a straight face now you know that about them). But the risk in not being current with the latest networking and Web 2.0 tools, is far greater than, say, someone finding out you were once an illegal alien.

Facebook – check it out.

Up to now I’ve kept my postings on Professionally Speaking walled-off from my day job as a speech writer and member of the Corporate Communications team at Hewlett-Packard. But, since this this blog is now listed on HP’s website, and there’s a ton of cool stuff happening in the communications area at Hewlett-Packard, I figure I can tear down the wall from time to time and share some HP material.

One aspect of my job involves presenting the HP Today Corporate Overview at the Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino. Visitors to the center are often there for a full day of briefings on specific HP products and solutions. My job is to give them a preliminary 45-minute overview of the company. Given that HP is now the largest computer company on the planet with 156,000 employees and $100B in revenue, this is no small challenge.

I like to break away from the PowerPoint slides and show videos which illustrate some of HP’s major growth trends. One trend which HP sees of increasing importance is for the static, isolated use of technology to be replaced by Always Connected, Mobile Experiences (perhaps paralleling the move away from onanism to relational enjoyment most of us experience as we mature sexually?)

The computer market is evolving toward what CTO Phil McKinney calls ‘liquid’ media – where content moves from the desktop to the laptop to the hand-held device. This frees people from having to be in a certain place at a certain time to enjoy things (and we all remember what a bummer that was when we lived at home with our parents.)

Take computer gaming.

The stereotype computer gamer is a pudgy teenager sitting on a couch playing videogames with the only exercise they get being stronger thumbs. Soon to be history, if HP’s vision of mobility shakes out.

The R&D being done at HP Labs has resulted in radical innovations which allow creative, immersive experiences to take place in city streets, galleries, museums and public spaces. These ‘Mediascapes’ allow teenagers the freedom to escape from the confines of the couch when they play video games and exercise their whole bodies, not just their thumbs. A Mediascape blends digital images, video, audio and interactions with the physical landscape.Take a look at the 90-second video Roku’s Reward to see one implementation:

This is not yet a product from HP. But if you want to experiment with the technology and build your own Mediascape, go to www.mscapers.com to download the free software and have at it!

An interesting article by Stefan Stern in today’s Financial Times highlights the reluctance of senior executives to be coached. In contrast to their role models on the golf course (why do all golfers look so darned corporate?) who maintain their elite status only with the help of experienced golf coaches, those guys (and gals) in the C-Suite often get to the top in business and then feel no need of further advice.

Stern notes, however, that executive coaching is slowly entering the mainstream.

Reporting on his brief experience with a coach, he notes that a key skill is listening and playing back answers to the client. Surely this is a common enough skill and one readily available without paying coaching fees. Not so.
“The ability to listen sensitively is depressingly rare,” notes Stern.

Quoting Myles Downey, director of the London-based school of coaching, Stern lists the concrete steps necessary to have coaching take effect:

“My job is to cause the other person to think,” says Mr Downey. He certainly achieved that with this coachee. The experience felt like a mental “spring clean”, in which vague and semiconscious concerns were brought into sharp relief. But, crucially, the coach is also there to get the subject to commit to specific actions. This is not therapy: coaching is about raising people’s performance.

There’s an obvious case to make that coaching is of most value to those who’ve risen so far into the upper echelons of an organization that no-one else in the company feels able to fulfill this service. Most of us who have halfway decent manager get feedback and goal setting from them. But who will set goals for a CEO? Who will give honest feedback to a top manager? If there are employees willing to do this they should be honored for their courage and commitment to the company and service to the person at the top who they support. Most employees are too chicken to step forward when an honest critique is needed. Or is your experience otherwise?

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.