Appearance is everything at this weekend’s Group of Eight food crisis meeting. Delegates from the eight leading northern hemisphere economies met in Italy to discuss world hunger.

Adverse publicity in advance of an “aperitif and gala dinner” caused the lavish dining arrangements to be replaced with a working dinner and no wine tasting.

The Financial Times report concludes with a reminder that a 2002 UN Food and Agriculture Organization meeting was embarrassed when a lobster and foie gras menu was offered at a forum on global hunger.

Executives and politicians (and their PR handlers) need to maintain constant vigilance as contradictions in lifestyles between the have’s and have not’s threaten the legitimacy of their words if undermined by their actions. The 21st Century is as rich as breeding ground for this hypocrisy as ever was the France of the Sun King or Victorian England.

The Detroit auto executives maladroit arrival in DC in “the jet” (as corporations refer to their private aircraft fleets) is but one example of the speed with which the current crisis is undermining previously non-problematic behavior in the C-Suite.

Executive communicators should be aware of the overall context of a spokesperson’s actions, not just the content of their speech or PowerPoint slides taken in isolation.

Authenticity is a valuable commodity.

Gourmand tastes should be indulged in private. You are what you eat.

Word is that American’s are not feeling quite so brave these days. At least not down in Texas. Many of them are buying guns and lobbying to be allowed to carry firearms on their morning commute. They fear an increase in crime sparked by the economic downturn. This according to the Financial Times:

In November last year there were a record 1,529,635 background checks for gun licences in the US, up 42 per cent from the same period a year earlier, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In January 2009 the number of background checks re­quested was 1.21m, up from 942,556 in the same month last year, and rose in February to 1.3m, up from 1m in February 2008.

In 2004 over a third of American households reported owning a gun. In 2005, 10,100 homicides involved firearms in the US of A.

In this economic downturn, firearms are a growth industry.

A week into the Financial Times’ “major new series” on the future of capitalism and my head is about to explode.

What is it called – cognitive dissonance – when two contradictory ideas live side-by-side?

That’s what reading the FT feels like these days. They still print on pink paper. There’s still the stock, commodity and currency quotes on the inside pages. The weekend edition still has the ‘How to Spend It’ color magazine with full-page adverts for Swiss timepieces and exclusive real estate.

But in light of this series I’m expecting to soon see survival gear and guides to communes in the Oregon woods.

The paper reads like the Marxist sociology texts I inhaled at Leicester University in the 1970’s. Consider:

• “Another ideological god has failed.” (Seeds of its own destruction, Martin Wolf, 8 March)
• “The idea that unfettered, unregulated capitalism would invariably produce the good outcomes was a wrong economic theory regarding how capitalist societies behave and what causes their crises.” (A failure to control the animal spirits, Robert Shiller, 8 March)
• “Our world is broken – and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone.” (Bernie Sucher, head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operations, quoted in Lost through destructive creation, Gillian Tett, 9 March)
• “No one can read the chronicles of those earlier crashes without sensing – with a chill – that history is repeating itself. The story of the modern capitalist economy is a rhythmic repetition of cycles, syncopated by eerily similar crises …This is not the bankruptcy of a social system, but the intellectual and moral failure of those who were in charge of it: a failure for which there is no excuse.” (Editorial, 9 March)
• “Ideologically, the manifest failure of market fundamentalism is the starting point … The financial crisis has turned (the) old political logic upside down. As the recession deepens, cultural issues pale in significance next to economic ones. Public anger towards Wall Street … has transformed the Masters of the Universe from heroes to villains.” (The audacity of help, Chrystia Freeland, March 11)
• “…executives and their companies have been caught in the grip of a storm that will revolutionize business. The deep freeze of capital markets, the implosion of financial groups and the resulting rise in governments’ sway over the private sector have called into question some of the foundations of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” (A need to reconnect, Francesco Guerrera, 12 March)

So, if the FT is right, the ideology has failed; the economic theory is wrong; the compass we steer by has gone; history is repeating itself; financiers are moral and intellectual failures, villains even; the storm of revolution is upon us (emphasis added).

Which means?

Well, (dusting off the texts from Leicester) an alternative was once proposed:

“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32, Karl Marx, 1867)

“In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10, Karl Marx, 1867)

However, that alternative came up short in a few places over the last 150 years.

One thing to consider is the transcendence of the whole panic and crisis mentality; the dialetical thesis and antithesis; winner and loser; boom and bust. Rather than looking for a solution in political economy or the labor theory of value, perhaps a more radical (or root-source) alternative is needed in this time of crisis:

“The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is not a financial crisis, or the crisis of global warming and extreme weather, or the problems that arise with the migration of people to everywhere, or the breakdown of the international system in the United Nations, or the epidemic nature of disease and poverty.

The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is the (by-now-paradigmatic) presumption that human beings exist in the world merely in order to consume, to acquire, to luxuriate in conditional experience of all kinds, to exploit the possibilities of enhancing their own “self”-interests — with no other principle or countering force to which they must be accountable.
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The present world-chaos must be clearly and thoroughly understood – not only as the total and final collapse of all past civilizations (or of ego-culture and the “tribalization” of separate and opposing human socities), but as the consummate critical moment of opportunity for humankind as a whole and single order of mutual responsibility on Earth.
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The old moral, social, and political “order” of humankind is now dead. A new and true and right order of humankind is, now, and forever hereafter, necessary.
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Only everybody-all-at-once can change the current chaos.”

Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da Samraj.

…would you read an interview conducted over lunch in Ljubljana with a provocative Slovenian Marxist philosopher called Slavoj Zizek. After munching on medallions of veal and lamb with thyme the “perpetual thought machine in manic motion” offers his interpretation of the current financial crisis:

The ruling ideology is trying to shift the blame from the global capitalist system as such on to its accidental deviations – such as overly lax regulation or the corruption of big financial institutions. In some respects this has allowed capitalists to assert their values even more aggressively: while bailing out Wall Street they are shredding collective bargaining agreements at General Motors and relegating the problems of global warming, Aids and hunger.

“The problem is today that when you have chaos and disorder people lose their cognitive mapping. So it is an open struggle as to whose interpretation will win,” he says. “Never forget that this is how Hitler won.”

According to Zizek, the reason Hitler came to power in the 1930s was because he offered the most attractive interpretation of disastrous events. He simply flattered the Germans by claiming that their army had been betrayed in the first world war and by laying all the blame at the feet of the Jews.

We order fruit salad.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

– Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Answer: They are, according to the International Labour Organization, the only four nations on the planet with no paid maternity leave.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports, countries not run on twisted draconian principles of 19th Century capitalism, are debating whether to increase government mandated paid maternity leave. Imagine. The UK is considering an increase from nine to twelve months. Sweden offers 480 days of paid parental leave.

The FT considers the ‘cost to employers’ argument that some 3rd World countries (and these United States) claim is too burdensome, but concludes:

Maternity leave provides clear benefits to society. Apart from the advantages of babies spending their early months with their mothers, breast-fed children have lower rates of infections, childhood diabetes, eczema, obesity and asthma.

Companies benefit from maternity leave by allowing women to return to work when their children are a little older, rather than forcing them to resign if they want to be with their babies. Employers hold on to people and escape the additional costs of having to replace those who leave.

Little wonder President Obama saluted “the hardest-working people on Earth” in his recent address to Congress. With family values like these, Mom has no choice.

I noticed in my blog stats page that the search terms ‘financial crisis explained’ and ‘current financial crisis explained’ were showing up in the top 10 search key phrases for my blog. When I entered them in Google I couldn’t believe my eyes:

I mean, if this is the #1 search result on Google for something of this magnitude?

Not that the article I posted is really what I think, it’s just a recommendation to two articles in the Sunday New York Times which struck me as appropriate to the subject of my blog (executive communications) since, I noted:

Both articles shed light on the dynamics of executive communications when group-think rules. Thinking outside the box before the box imploded was not encouraged or rewarded. Pity.

But c’mon people, this can’t be the #1 explanation of the current financial crisis, can it? Say it ain’t so.

Continuing the tradition began three years ago and the year after, I can reveal that in the past 365 days I have, surprise, become another year older.

I fully embrace the transparency senior executives and politicians tolerate in regard to their age and biographical details. These days it’s only the plebs who have no online identity where anyone who is interested can find out your age, marital status and similar ‘private’ data points. As Sun Chairman Scott McNealy once remarked “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

I’ve now reached the age where 57 years of variety is the spice of life. It’s not only policemen who look younger, suddenly President’s do. As my Irish father-in-law once remarked, you’re not really old until the Pope is younger than you are.

A new venture by NSA Northern California past-president Scott Q. Marcus looks interesting. Scott lives up in the redwoods in Eureka and is turning his geographical isolation to an advantage with a blog on Long Distance Marketing.

Scott writes of the challenge of finding and developing a customer base that is not located near your base of operations:

The question is “How?” That is one foundation on which this site is built. How do you reach potential clients and customers who live far away from you? What works? What doesn’t? In this “new” age of marketing, what are the most effective tools to find your clients? Of even more import is how do they find you?

His blog will document creative approaches to that challenge. One approach is to publish a quarterly magazine called ‘Two Words’.

For a ringside seat at the birth of a new business venture, bookmark Scott’s blog and join in the conversation as he launches himself into cyberspace – WOOOOSH!

Professional speakers are used to being introduced at large events by the disembodied announcer “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome…” known in the business as the VOG or Voice of God.

The idea that God speaks in an amplified, authoritarian, disembodied baritone is central to the Judeo-Christian tradition. It goes with the misogyny and long white beard.

However, there seems some basis in human development for this belief. Consider the opinion of Robert Lepage:

“the first voice that a child hears when it is in the womb is not the voice of the mother, because the child is part of the mother. The important voice that the child hears is the voice of the father: that’s the voice that changes where the child lives because it excites or stresses the mother. So when we come out we desperately try to put a face on that voice. And that’s intimately connected to the voice of God – or the absence of the voice of God.”

Lepage is the director of Lipsynch, “an epic nine-hour performance which spans 70 years and explores the voice as a compelling metaphor for human expression and interaction” currently playing at the Barbican theater in London. Sounds fascinating.

Coverage of the Summer Olympics has included television reports of wonderful varieties Chinese cuisine. As the 2008 Games approached the Chinese government took it upon themselves to provide approved translations of menu options on offer in local restaurants.

This, according to an article by the wonderfully named Fuchsia Dunlop (a name I’ll never tire of!) in the Weekend FT.

She lists the literal translations of many Chinese dishes found on restaurant menus:

“Chicken without sexual life” (a young chicken)
“Iron flooring cremation” (cookies baked on an iron griddle)
“Pock-marked old women’s bean curd” (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce)
and “the fragrance explodes the cowboy bone” (no other translation given – my imagination runs wild…)

Lost in translation

At the root of these amusing lists is not some Chinese inability to grasp the basics of English translation. Rather, the lack of congruence between Chinese characters and roman script impedes clear communication:

You can only go so far in borrowing from Chinese because beyond a certain level you have to know the actual Chinese characters to understand precisely what you are talking about. In Sichuanese cuisine, for example, there are two cooking methods that would both be transliterated as kao, but you can’t tell them apart unless you see the actual characters. The different characters for “salty” and “umami” are both rendered in the Roman alphabet as “xian “

The inability of one civilization to render the finer points of its culture into words that would be clearly understood by another is not limited to cuisines. Many social and cultural nuances are lost in translation – business arrangements; educational systems; humor, love, marriage and death. It’s made apparent when we see the literal English used in these menus. Official attempts to provide a standardized alternative are equally limited. Fuchsia Dunlop explains how these are:

…a pale reflection of one of the world’s most marvellous cuisines. Lyrical descriptive terms – like feicui (jadeite) for greenish foods, and guaiwei (strange-flavour, used for an intriguing combination of tastes) have been lost in the translation, and mapo doufu has severed its connection with the lovable pockmarked old dame of Chengdu. As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China Daily, this standardised translation is “a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humour . . . But it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavour”.

As with food, so with business. Corporate communications either lose their flavor or suffer unintended mis-translations in the journey from West to East and back. This is all part of the rich tapestry of human life. Give me an exploding cowboy bone any day over the stark accuracy of the standard translation.