That’s exactly what Deborah Fallows – wife of famed journalist James Fallows – describes in her recent interview on NPR and writes about in her new book Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.  When Fallows accompanied her husband to China, she had taken a few semesters of Mandarin. But when they arrived, she found it a real challenge to communicate.

Fallows is no stranger to foreign tongues. She earned her Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half-a-dozen languages.  But she learned there’s an art to mastering a tonal language in which one syllable can have many, many meanings. And more often than not, Fallows felt she was mastering the art of miscommunication.

In one humorous anecdote, the author describes her effort to order “take-out” – or “dabao” from a Shanghai Taco Bell.  She tries every possible tonal combination, but the server couldn’t understand her request. He finally retrieved three other employees from the back, and Fallows continued to repeat dabao, dabao, dabao to them.  Finally – finally! – one of the men said “ah, dabao!”  And, just like that, she struck the chord and got her tacos to go.

For Fallows, hitting the right note was a cultural journey. But in communications, being on-key is everything.  You just can’t afford to be tone-deaf.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about Levi Johnston – the twice almost son-in-law of Sarah Palin – and how he could benefit from some communications guidance.  The father of Palin’s grandson has made a career out of extending his fifteen minutes of fame – posing for Playboy, appearing in music videos, and now announcing he will run for the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

While his quest for fame is not unusual, his communications style makes his chances of success unlikely, at best.

In an interview with CBS’s The Early Show, Johnston apologizes for apologizing. In case you’ve been busy with life outside of the Palin-Johnston saga, he recently apologized for lies he spread about the Palin family. But in this forthcoming interview, he recants that apology, adding, “I don’t really regret anything. But the only thing I wish I wouldn’t have done is put out that apology ‘cause it kind of make me sound like a liar. And I’ve never lied about anything.”

Confused? Well, that’s communications problem number one. Johnston can’t seem to stay on message. Which brings us to communications problem number two: what is Johnston’s message?

Johnston would be wise to consider candor. As Al Ries and Jack Trout write in their famous book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, “Every negative statement you make about yourself is instantly accepted as truth. Positive statements, on the other hand, are looked at as dubious at best.”

That certainly seems to be the case with Johnston. Does anyone really believe that he’s “never lied about anything”?  (Don’t forget, this is a guy who was forced to end his second engagement to Bristol Palin after news broke that he fathered another baby with a different young woman in Alaska during their time apart.)

Ries and Trout make the point that sometimes, it’s OK to poke a little fun at yourself. They like to use the example of Smucker’s Jam. Instead of ignoring the less-than-perfect family name, the company uses humor: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.”

If Johnston can be a bit more self-deprecating, he might actually get elected Mayor of Wasilla.

What is especially impressive about Parsons’ win is that his character was not originally planned as the series lead. Rather, he was the break-out character (a la Kramer on Seinfeld, or Dwight on The Office). But his characterization of Sheldon stole the show. Some even say he has made geekiness cool. If so, that’s the acting equivalent of splitting the atom.

As a practical matter, this means that labor unions as well as major environmental organizations and other political activists will soon be organizing to win seats. At stake will be whether boards reflect the interests of shareholders as a whole or those political interests. Many corporate managements will feel compelled to run the equivalent of internal political campaigns in order to protect the integrity of their boards.

Last November I co-authored an article on this topic in The Wall Street Journal. You can find it here.

]]> http://www.whwg.com/2010/08/access-to-proxy-and-the-integrity-of-corporate-boards/feed/ 0 http://www.whwg.com/2010/08/shot-heard-round-the-world-was-the-sound-of-baseballs-spirit/ http://www.whwg.com/2010/08/shot-heard-round-the-world-was-the-sound-of-baseballs-spirit/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:38:30 +0000 Allan Golombek http://www.whwg.com/?p=1380 I was surprised that it didn’t get more attention when Bobby Thomson passed away the other day. In October 1951 he was probably the most celebrated person in America (and the most cursed in Brooklyn.) Thomson blasted what was known as the ’shot heard round the world’ — a 3-run homer off Ralph Branca to lift the New York Giants to a 5-4 ‘miracle’ victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers in the special National League tie-breaking playoff series.

Thomson’s home run was one of the most famous in baseball history. More than anything else, I think, what gave it such appeal among baseball fans is that it demonstrated that, in baseball, it truly ain’t over till it’s over (as Yogi Berra would say). The Giants had been trailing the Dodgers by 13 1/2 games on August 11. While the Dodgers seemed to try to coast after that, barely playing .500 ball over the last month-and-a-half of the season, the Giants won 37 of their last 44 games, including their last seven in a row.

Even with that extraordinary streak, the Giants just barely edged their way into a tie with the Dodgers, necessitating a three-game tie-breaking season. (That was before league playoffs became an annual event.) On the afternoon of October 3rd, the two teams found themselves tied at 1 game each. The Dodgers had a 4-1 lead going into the 9th, causing a lot of Giants fans to leave in despair. (Although I’m sure they all claimed later to still have been in the stadium when history was made.)

But the Giants rallied to pull to 4-2 with runners on 1st and 3rd. That brought up Thomson, who hit the 1-1 pitch over the fence and into baseball history.

It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening in any other sport. Oh sure, teams come back in football, basketball, hockey. And it can be quite exciting. But in all of those sports, teams that are trailing don’t just face their opponents. They face a clock. In baseball, the game doesn’t end until one team records 27 outs. It could go on forever.

I think that’s why Thomson’s home run was so celebrated — it signified baseball’s never-say-die spirit.

Perhaps it signified something else as well. The post-war belief that anything was possible, and nothing was impossible.

It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. These — shall we call them misspeakings — were coupled with more of the administration’s increasingly off-putting crisis default setting: That everything bad was Bush’s fault. Our son was two when we stopped accepting that kind of excuse in our house. This administration is almost two, but it’s been talking for longer than our son when we told him to stop the excuses.

Here is a list of questions that occurred to me during the speech and that even the most junior White House speechwriters should have seen as implicit in the text and hit the delete button:

* The speech suggested that the Administration was on top of the oil-spill situation from day one, with the Energy Secretary (co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”) heading the effort to trap oil gushing from the Gulf floor and floating toward our southern shores. Doesn’t that mean that hundreds of elected officials in the states involved, thousands of journalists, and millions of Americans failed to notice this all out effort until last night?

* The speech started by saluting our “brave men and women in uniform” who are “taking the fight to al Qaeda”. But part of that fight is diverting American oil dollars from the Middle East so they can’t fuel terrorism. In shutting down deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn’t the White House gone AWOL in that part of the battle?

* The speech outlined a course of action that sets aside current laws for dealing with oil spills. Some may say that this emergency is too big to worry about the law, but out of curiosity, what is the White House’s legal authority for demanding that BP put money into an independent escrow account controlled by the government, and insisting that BP pay the wages of those affected by the White House ordered shutdown of deepwater drilling? Other than making the administration look in charge, why was the carefully crafted oil spill law (developed after the wreck of the Exxon Valdez) simply ignored in the week prior to the address in favor of huffing and puffing and threats of boots on the neck and kicked rear ends?

* The speech said that “we are running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water… [a]nd that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean.” Aren’t there hundreds, even thousands, of such sites, but few, if any, for which the U.S. government is willing to issue permits? Wasn’t the speech’s message that the government is going to stick to, not change, that status quo?

* The speech talked about “costs associated with the transition” away from dependence on foreign oil and decried those who say we can’t afford those costs. By halting deep water drilling and pushing all liability onto the oil company involved wasn’t the speech saying that the government would pay no price and bear no burden — even those costs and burdens that its regulations and ineptness impose — to achieve energy independence?

* And to repeat, the speech employed the metaphor of war throughout. In what way is cleaning up a lot of oil like a war, unless the speechwriter intended to suggest KP duty? Is not our real war against global forces that are funded in large part via Middle Eastern money, money that comes from the oil trade? Isn’t using the accident as an excuse for policies that will push drilling out of the United States a form of surrender in that war, the real war?

Here is a lesson I learned writing speeches in the Reagan White House: Public communications is a highly sensitive, delicate thing. If the logic of your text is not tight, if you deviate even slightly from what your audience knows to be true, if in making your case you seem to look down on your audience and try to play slight of hand with their concerns, you are dead in the water.

Last Tuesday night, President Obama was dead in the water.

That’s certainly the perspective American Public Media’s Marketplace holds toward American business. A recent report looked at the effect the BP oil spill has had on socially responsible investing.

At the heart of the conversation was the notion that oil and gas companies are inherently bad and therefore any direct – or indirect – investment in them is inherently irresponsible.

Host Kai Ryssdal even said at one point: “Socially responsible investment in oil and gas companies — help me understand that.”

The absurdity of this report, however, did not go unnoticed by listeners. And, as it turns out, pointing fingers at oil and gas didn’t go over so well. One listener described the segment as “naïve, inflammatory, and absurd,” adding, “your article portrayed this entire industry as an investing pariah.”

Apparently, American investors are more skeptical of the notion that industry has to give back to society in some way other than by providing their goods and services. Almost all the criticisms of the report centered on Marketplace’s fuzzy definition of “socially responsible.”

One listener added this comment:

“Since when are oil and gas companies by their very nature not environmentally responsible? Alternative energy sources can tend to be arguably more damaging to the environment than oil. And ‘socially responsible’ used to be more concerned with things like not sending money to oppressive [sic] African dictatorships than with the environment, anyway.”

Attention NPR: It looks like you’re going to have to be a lot more responsible in your reporting.

Today the discussion over women’s equality continues, with national groups on the left pushing for more government protections through legislation like the Lilly Ledbetter Act. And conservative women claim greater freedom – not more government intervention – is the key to advancing women’s rights.

Often lost in the crossfire is an honest consideration of women’s accomplishments today.  Nearly a century after securing the vote, women flaunt some fabulous figures:

•    Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 59 percent of master’s degrees.

•    Nearly a third of PhD’s are awarded to women.

•    Women are the majority of graduates in every professional school, except business school, where they still account for a third of graduates.

•    75 percent of veterinary classes are women.

•    Businesses with more senior female managers make more money.

•    Women make up 16 percent of the corporate officers of Fortune 500 companies – up 50 percent since the mid-1990s.

•    In the 2010 midterm elections, 239 women are candidates for the House; 31 for the Senate.

•    Women control 83 percent of consumer spending; 9 out of 10 women are the primary shopper in the household.

•    Women now buy the majority of cars.

New scientific research found that children who watched Popeye shoveling spinach into his mouth before fighting his rival Bruto, doubled their vegetable intake. Watching episodes of the cartoon was just part of a larger experiment, conducted by researchers at Mahidol University.  Children also engaged in planting vegetable seeds, fruit and vegetable parties, and cooking with vegetables.

The research concluded that the 26 child volunteers maintained a more visibly healthy diet following their exposure to Popeye.  Experts recorded the four and five year olds eating two portions of vegetables in the days before the study and four portions after watching the cartoon.

Popeye the Sailor Man is credited with saving the spinach industry during the Great Depression. Perhaps re-runs of Popeye is just the policy prescription we need today.

Certainly some bad calculations were made.  Taking a trip overseas, rather than visiting some much-needed tourist destinations in the states (like the Gulf coast), seems at best careless and more likely thoughtless. And her public exposure, often being caught by cameras flaunting haute couture, suggests a serious rift exists between the Obama’s and mainstream America.

At the very least, the picture of an extravagant vacation during a serious economic recession was not politically savvy.  And it’s a perfect example of how quickly public opinion can turn.  Just last month, Gallup released a favorability poll, in which Michelle Obama “outshines all others,” including her husband, Hillary Clinton, and several Republican presidential hopefuls. I’m waiting for the next round of poll numbers to be released, but I suspect this is a trip that has tarnished the First Lady’s shine.

In the end, however, Republican pollster Steve Lombardo (h/t NRO) is probably right, “The backlash over the First Lady’s trip is a trap for GOP. Ignore it. Focus on jobs.”