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.

In one of the kookier news stories to come out of the mountain-top retreat at Davos this week, a German DJ proposes to subject executives to sensory deprivation in a totally dark room for an experiment in communications called Dialog in the Dark.

Participants will enter a totally dark room where they will only be able to communicate by sounds. All visual stimulation will cease. The man behind this experiment, Andreas Heinecke, notes that

The environment is nothing special for the blind people who are there to help them, but it’s a real shock for executives who rely on their egos and physical presence. . . They will have to listen closely, something most powerful men find difficult to do.

In what will obviously be a PowerPoint free zone one can only hope executives will experience what audience members at tedious keynotes have long enjoyed: a few moments without unnecessary visual stimuli. It’s known as a nap.

Yesterday I heard the wordsmith of the Republican Party, Frank Luntz, on PBS’s Fresh Air extol the virtues of George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. He begged anyone interested in the real meaning of Orwellian to read it.

Ignoring the delicious irony of a master of propaganda twisting the common use of Orwellian away from the Newspeak of 1984 (of which he is a modern practitioner, advising phrases such as “Responsible Exploration For Energy” over “Drilling For Oil”) I enjoyed the ruthless clarity of Orwell’s essay.

It has a lot in common with more recent indictments of political and managerial cant found in books such as Why business people speak like idiots and Gobbledygook.

Orwell discusses why “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. He shows how, especially in political and business speeches, “prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse”. Dying metaphors, meaningless words and a preference for the passive voice over the active are listed as common ways we avoid the real mental effort involved in writing clear prose.

Corporate communicators will recognize this passage describing the tired familiarity with which many executives speak from the podium:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases … one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.

Orwell challenges us to make a difference.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?

2. What words will express it?

3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?

4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?

2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

His rules of composition are clear and uncompromising:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never us a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

3. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

4. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

5. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Would that it were so.

Fascinating interview in today’s Financial Times (subscription required) with Takafumi Horie, the Japanese internet tycoon who spent three months in police detention after his company Livedoor was raided on fraud charges. He’s now awaiting trial and faces a possible 5-year sentence.

He quotes the old Japanese adage The nail that sticks up will be hammered down to explain his treatment at the hands of the Japanese bureaucratic establishment, claiming they were resentful of his overnight success in stark contrast to their own measured progress up the ranks.

This might just be the rants of an entrepreneur who finds himself on the wrong side of the law. We’ve seen chaps in similar pickles make improbable claims in this country. Back in the late 80’s Charles Keating blamed government regulators for the failure of Lincoln Savings. Ken Lay blamed a conspiracy of news media and short sellers. Lord Conrad Black, the Canadian/British newspaper magnate blamed “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised” journalists who worked for him for part of his downfall.

I’ve yet to read about a Western businessman who blamed socially sanctioned extremes of egoistic behavior for their misdeeds. Yet, many senior executives must seem, in terms of Japanese cultural norms, as suffering from this very disease. We are all, from the C-suite to the soup line, sorry egos, perennially seeking for elusive and transitive happiness. As Adi Da notes, we spend our lives involved in “usual round of obsession, fear, and seeking — in which the egoic self is the actor and the meaning of the drama.”

However, the theaters in which our egoic dramas are enacted do have significantly different stage sets to prance in front of and scripts to learn by heart. You better find out early on if you’ve been cast in a 75-80 year run at the Kabuki or Radio City Music Hall and know how to play the game accordingly.

As Richard Lewis reports, the rigorous way in which Japanese society deals with nonconformity starts in early childhood. Rather than encouraging expressions of individuality, Japanese parents and teachers reinforce the primacy of the group and chastise those who stand out. While they might not literally use the hammer, they enforce a web-centered social order where the individuals needs are subsumed by the groups with extensive moral and social obligations recognized up and down the hierarchy.

I can only assume the older Japanese bureaucrats must regard Horie-san with the same degree of incomprehension as Westerners regard occasions of extreme of group-oriented behavior among Heaven’s Gate cultists or Stepford Wives.

It’s straightforward enough to ID an actor from the extreme ends of the spectrum – the Japanese saleryman and the Texan oilman. Where things get interesting is in the fuzzy edges of culture.

Consider Australia. Who would’ve thunk that the same country which produced rugged individualists like Crocodile Dundee and Ned Kelly could have anything in common with Japan?

Lewis struggles to classify a society where there are echoes of Japan in a rough n’ tumble bushwhacking world:

Too much praise raises expectation and puts the high achiever under insufferable pressure — and Australians hate being pressured.

This tortured form of modesty is greatly respected by most Australians and if it is not observed by the successful, they will rapdily fall victim to the “tall poppy syndrome.” Australians are totally cynical of people in power or with too much wealth; they respect the little person, the “battler”, rather than the winner.

The conundrum is the many reports that plutocrats like Kerry Packer were “widely respected” and the evidence that dysfunctional Murdoch clan continues to avoid poppy-whackers, suffering more from self-inflicted sibling rivalries (similar to the Pritzker battles over the Hyatt fortune here in the US).

So, at the end of the day, we are left wondering what lasting constraints cultural norms play in today’s Flat World. If Horie-san had hightailed it to Texas and the Stepford Wives relocated to Roppongi Hills everyone might have lived happily ever after.

How about you? Are you culturally suited to the time and place you find yourself in?

A recent trip to see my parents in the UK highlighted a unique dilemma for altruistic expat Brits around the world.

My Dad is suffering from a rare bone marrow disease which requires frequent blood transfusions to keep his red blood cell count up. I was motivated by the lifesaving benefits he’s received from the kindness of dozens of anonymous donors to take advantage of my brief visit and donate blood myself.

I used to donate blood regularly back the 1980’s and 1990’s. But for the last half-dozen years I’ve been prevented from making donations in the USA since I did not emigrate to California until August 1980. This means I am disqualified since the rules state:

You are not eligible to donate if:
From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK)

This is because of a fear that British Blood might be infected with Mad Cow Disease. The irony is that I was a vegetarian in 1980 and, indeed, have not eaten beef since at least 1970.

Oh well, rules are rules.

So it was with a sense of being on a mission that I set off one Sunday on a 45 minute drive from Nantwich to Northwich Cheshire to visit the donation center that was open that morning. I met with a kindly nurse who gave me a donor form, all looked good, I had my sleeves rolled up. Then I was asked when I was last out of the country. On finding I’d just left California, and would be returning there soon, my donation was refused. This was because we have West Nile Virus in mosquito’s in California and there is a minimum 28 day quarantine period for anyone coming from a visit to a West Nile infected area.

I can’t claim never to have been bitten by a mosquito since 1970. Indeed, there are mosquito’s in our backyard in the early summer. They’re well gone by November. No matter. Rules are rules.

It’s interesting to see how the world is trying to cope with disease vectors. Those of us who straddle continents are sometimes made aware of what lies beyond the known edge of medical knowledge, where doctors struggle with the lack of tests for certain diseases and rely on the honesty of strangers to prevent their spread outside of national boundaries.