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The executive’s guide to better listening
Strong listening skills can make a critical difference in the performance of senior executives, but few are able to cultivate them. Here’s how.
FEBRUARY 2012 • Bernard T. Ferrari
A senior executive of a large consumer goods company had spotted a bold partnership opportunity in an important developing market and wanted to pull the trigger quickly to stay ahead of competitors. In meetings on the topic with the leadership team, the CEO noted that this trusted colleague was animated, adamant, and very persuasive about the move’s game-changing potential for the company. The facts behind the deal were solid.The CEO also observed something troubling, however: his colleague wasn’t listening. During conversations about the pros and cons of the deal and its strategic rationale, for example, the senior executive wasn’t open to avenues of conversation that challenged the move or entertained other possibilities. What’s more, the tenor of these conversations appeared to make some colleagues uncomfortable. The senior executive’s poor listening skills were short-circuiting what should have been a healthy strategic debate.Eventually, the CEO was able to use a combination of diplomacy, tactful private conversation, and the bureaucratic rigor of the company’s strategic-planning processes to convince the executive of the need to listen more closely to his peers and engage with them more productively about the proposal. The resulting conversations determined that the original deal was sound but that a much better one was available—a partnership in the same country. The new partnership presented slightly less risk to the company than the original deal but had an upside potential exceeding it by a factor of ten.The situation facing the CEO will be familiar to many senior executives. Listening is the front end of decision making. It’s the surest, most efficient route to informing the judgments we need to make, yet many of us have heard, at one point or other in our careers, that we could be better listeners. Indeed, many executives take listening skills for granted and focus instead on learning how to articulate and present their own views more effectively.This approach is misguided. Good listening—the active and disciplined activity of probing and challenging the information garnered from others to improve its quality and quantity—is the key to building a base of knowledge that generates fresh insights and ideas. Put more strongly, good listening, in my experience, can often mean the difference between success and failure in business ventures (and hence between a longer career and a shorter one). Listening is a valuable skill that most executives spend little time cultivating. (For more about one executive’s desire to be a better listener, see “Why I’m a listener: Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer,” forthcoming on mckinseyquarterly.com.).The many great listeners I’ve encountered throughout my career as a surgeon, a corporate executive, and a business consultant have exhibited three kinds of behavior I’ll highlight in this article. By recognizing—and practicing—them, you can begin improving your own listening skills and even those of your organization.
1. Show respect
One of the best listeners I have ever observed was the chief operating officer (COO) of a large medical institution. He once told me that he couldn’t run an operation as complex as a hospital without seeking input from people at all levels of the staff—from the chief of surgery to the custodial crew. Part of what made him so effective, and so appealing as a manager, was that he let everyone around him know he believed each of them had something unique to contribute. The respect he showed them was reciprocated, and it helped fuel an environment where good ideas routinely came from throughout the institution.The COO recognized something that many executives miss: our conversation partners often have the know-how to develop good solutions, and part of being a good listener is simply helping them to draw out critical information and put it in a new light. To harness the power of those ideas, senior executives must fight the urge to “help” more junior colleagues by providing immediate solutions. Leaders should also respect a colleague’s potential to provide insights in areas far afield from his or her job description.Here’s an example: I recall a meeting between a group of engineers and the chief marketing officer (CMO) at a large industrial company. She was concerned about a new product introduction that had fallen flat. The engineers were puzzled as well; the company was traditionally dominated by engineers with strong product-development skills, and this group had them too. As the CMO and I discussed the technological aspects of the product with the engineers, I was struck by their passion and genuine excitement about the new device, which did appear to be unique. Although we had to stop them several times to get explanations for various technical terms, they soon conveyed the reasons for their attitude—the product seemed to be not only more efficient than comparable ones on the market but also easier to install, use, and maintain.After a few minutes, the CMO, who had been listening intently, prompted the engineers with a respectful leading question: “But we haven’t sold as many as you thought we would in the first three months, right?”“Well, actually, we haven’t sold any!” the team leader said. “We think this product is a game changer, but it hasn’t been selling. And we’re not sure why.”After a pause to make sure the engineer was finished, the CMO said, “Well, you guys sure seem certain that this is a great product. And you’ve convinced the two of us pretty well. It seems that customers should be tripping over themselves to place orders. So assuming it’s not the product’s quality that’s off, what else are your customers telling you about the product?”“We haven’t spoken to any customers,” the engineer replied.The CMO blanched. As the conversation continued, we learned that the product had been developed under close wraps and that the engineers had assumed its virtues would speak for themselves. “But maybe not,” said the team leader. “Maybe we ought to push it a little more. I guess its good traits aren’t so obvious if you don’t know a lot about it.”That engineer had hit the nail on the head. The device was fine. Customers were wary about switching to something untested, and they hadn’t been convinced by the specs the company’s sales team touted. As soon as the engineers began phoning their counterparts in the customers’ organizations (an idea suggested by the engineers themselves), the company started receiving orders.Had the CMO looked at the problem by herself, she might have suspected a shortcoming with the product. But after some good listening and targeted follow-up questions, she helped to extract a much better solution from the engineers themselves.
She didn’t cut the conversation short by lecturing them on good marketing techniques or belittling their approach; she listened and asked pointed questions in a respectful manner. The product ultimately ended up being a game changer for the company.Being respectful, it’s important to note, didn’t mean that the CMO avoided asking tough questions—good listeners routinely ask them to uncover the information they need to help make better decisions. The goal is ensuring the free and open flow of information and ideas.I was amused when John McLaughlin, the former deputy director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, told me that when he had to make tough decisions he often ended his conversations with colleagues by asking, “Is there anything left that you haven’t told me . . . because I don’t want you to leave this room and go down the hall to your buddy’s office and tell him that I just didn’t get it.” With that question, McLaughlin communicated the expectation that his colleagues should be prepared; he demanded that everything come out on the table; and he signaled genuine respect for what his colleagues had to say.
2. Keep quiet
I have developed my own variation on the 80/20 rule as it relates to listening. My guideline is that a conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while I speak only 20 percent of the time.1 Moreover, I seek to make my speaking time count by spending as much of it as possible posing questions rather than trying to have my own say.
A field guide to identifying bad listeners
The Opinionator
The Opinionator listens to others primarily to determine whether or not their ideas conform to what he or she already believes to be true. Opinionators may appear to be listening closely, but they aren’t listening with an open mind and instead often use their silences as opportunities to “reload.” While Opinionators may have good intentions, the effect of this listening style is to make conversation partners uncomfortable or even to intimidate them. Opinionators routinely squelch their colleagues’ ideas.
The Grouch
Grouches are poor listeners who are blocked by a feeling of certainty that your idea is wrong. One typical grouch, a top executive I worked with at an industrial company, made no secret of his contempt for other people’s ideas. He approached conversations as a necessary evil and sent the implicit message: “You’re full of it. You’re a fool. Why did you think I’d be interested in this?” Through perseverance, people could get through to him in conversations, painful though that was. However, many of his colleagues simply didn’t have the energy to break down his barriers every time they needed to express an idea to him.
The Preambler
The Preambler’s windy lead-ins and questions are really stealth speeches, often intended to box conversation partners into a corner. Preamblers use questioning to steer the discussion, send warnings, or generate a desired answer. I remember a meeting with one Preambler, the chairman and CEO of a medical complex, who (by my watch) spent 15 minutes posing slanted questions and making rhetorical assertions that all supported a recommendation he wanted to make to his board. Such behavior epitomizes one-way communication.
The Perseverator
Perseverators talk a lot without saying anything. If you pay close attention to one of these poor listeners, you’ll find that their comments and questions don’t advance the conversation. As often as not, Perseverators are editing on the fly and fine-tuning their thoughts through reiteration. Perseverators use the thoughts of their conversation partners to support their own prejudices, biases, or ideas. When talking to one, you may feel that the two of you are having completely different conversations.
The Answer Man
Everyone wants to solve problems, but Answer Man spouts solutions before there is even a consensus about the challenge—a clear signal that input from conversation partners isn’t needed. Answer Man may appear at first to be an Opinionator. But the latter is motivated by strong feelings of being right, while the former is desperately eager to please and impress. You know you are speaking to Answer Man if your conversation partner can’t stop providing solutions and has ready answers for any flaws you point out, as well as quick rejoinders to all the points you raise.
The Pretender
Pretenders feign engagement and even agreement but either aren’t interested in what you’re saying or have already made up their minds. The worst Pretender I ever met was the CEO of a health care company who had all the right moves: he seemed to hang on every word uttered, for example, and frequently won people over with a knowing, empathetic smile. That gave his conversation partners every indication that he was processing their words and agreeing with them. Yet eventually his colleagues would realize that he had not acted on anything they’d said or, worse, didn’t have access to that information when it came time to make decisions or take action.
That’s easier said than done, of course—most executives are naturally inclined to speak their minds. Still, you can’t really listen if you’re too busy talking. Besides, we’ve all spent time with bad listeners who treat conversations as opportunities to broadcast their own status or ideas, or who spend more time formulating their next response than listening to their conversation partners. Indeed, bad listening habits such as these are ubiquitous (see sidebar, “A field guide to identifying bad listeners”).I should know because I’ve fallen into these traps myself. One experience in particular made me realize how counterproductive it is to focus on your own ideas during a conversation. It was early in my career as a consultant and I was meeting with an important client whom I was eager to impress. My client was a no-nonsense, granite block of a man from the American heartland, and he scrutinized me over the top of his reading glasses before laying out the problem: “The budget for next year just doesn’t work, and we are asking our employees to make some tough changes.”All I heard was his concern about the budget. Without missing a beat, I responded to my client and his number-two man, who was seated alongside him: “There are several ways to address your cost problem.” I immediately began reeling off what I thought were excellent suggestions for streamlining his business. My speech gained momentum as I barreled ahead with my ideas. The executive listened silently—and attentively, or so it seemed. Yet he didn’t even move, except to cock his head from time to time. When he reached for a pen, I kept up my oration but watched with some annoyance as he wrote on a small notepad, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed it to his associate. A smile flitted almost imperceptibly across that man’s face as he read the note.I was already becoming a bit peeved that the executive had displayed no reaction to my ideas, but this little note, passed as though between two schoolboys, was too much. I stopped talking and asked what was written on the paper.The executive nodded to his associate. “Show him.”The man leaned across the table and handed me the note. My client had written, “What the hell is this guy talking about?”Fortunately, I was able to see the humor in the situation and to recognize that I had been a fool. My ego had gotten in the way of listening. Had I paid closer attention and probed more deeply, I would have learned that the executive’s real concern was finding ways to keep his staff motivated while his company was shrinking.
I had failed to listen and compounded the error by failing to keep quiet. Luckily for me, I was able to get a second meeting with him.It’s not easy to stifle your impulse to speak, but with patience and practice you can learn to control the urge and improve the quality and effectiveness of your conversations by weighing in at the right time. Some people can intuitively grasp where to draw the line between input and interruption, but the rest of us have to work at it. John McLaughlin advises managers to think consciously about when to interrupt and to be as neutral and emotionless as possible when listening, always delaying the rebuttal and withholding the interruption. Still, he acknowledges that interrupting with a question can be necessary from time to time to speed up or redirect the conversation. He advises managers not to be in a hurry, though—if a matter gets to your level, he says, it is probably worth spending some of your time on it.As you improve your ability to stay quiet, you’ll probably begin to use silence more effectively. The CEO of an industrial company, for example, used thoughtful moments of silence during a meeting with his sales team as an invitation for its junior members to speak up and talk through details of a new incentive program that the team’s leader was proposing. As the junior teammates filled in these moments with new information, the ensuing rich discussion helped the group (including the team leader) to realize that the program needed significant retooling. The CEO’s silence encouraged a more meritocratic—and ultimately superior—solution.When we remain silent, we also improve the odds that we’ll spot nonverbal cues we might have missed otherwise. The medical institution’s COO, who was such a respectful listener, had a particular knack for this. I remember watching him in a conversation with a nurse manager, who was normally articulate but on this occasion kept doubling back and repeating herself. The COO realized from these cues that something unusual was going on. During a pause, he surprised her by asking gently, “You don’t quite agree with me on this one, do you? Why is that?” She sighed in relief and explained what had actually been bugging her.
3. Challenge assumptions
Good listeners seek to understand—and challenge—the assumptions that lie below the surface of every conversation. This point was driven home to me the summer before I went to college, when I had the opportunity to hang out with my best friend at a baseball park. He had landed a job in the clubhouse of the Rochester Red Wings, then a minor-league farm team for the Baltimore Orioles. That meant I got to observe Red Wings manager Earl Weaver, who soon thereafter was promoted to Baltimore, where he enjoyed legendary success, including 15 consecutive winning seasons, four American League championships, and one World Series victory. Weaver was considered fiery and cantankerous, but also a baseball genius. To my 18-year-old eyes, he was nothing short of terrifying—the meanest and most profane man I’d ever met.Weaver wasn’t really a listener; he seemed more of a screamer in a perpetual state of rage. When a young player made an error, Weaver would take him aside and demand an explanation. “Why did you throw to second base when the runner was on his way to third?” He’d wait to hear the player’s reasoning for the sole purpose of savagely tearing it apart, usually in the foulest language imaginable and at the top of his lungs.But now and then, Weaver would be brought up short; he’d hear something in the player’s explanation that made him stop and reconsider.
“I’ve seen that guy take a big wide turn several times but then come back to the bag. I thought maybe if I got the ball to second really fast, we could catch him.” Weaver knew that the move the player described was the wrong one. But as ornery as he was, he apparently could absorb new information that temporarily upended his assumptions. And, in doing so, the vociferous Weaver became a listener.Weaver called his autobiography It’s What You Learn After You Know It All That Counts. That Zen-like philosophy may clash with the Weaver people thought they knew. But the title stuck with me because it perfectly states one of the cornerstones of good listening: to get what we need from our conversations, we must be prepared to challenge long-held and cherished assumptions.Many executives struggle as listeners because they never think to relax their assumptions and open themselves to the possibilities that can be drawn from conversations with others. As we’ve seen, entering conversations with respect for your discussion partner boosts the odds of productive dialogue. But many executives will have to undergo a deeper mind-set shift—toward an embrace of ambiguity and a quest to uncover “what we both need to get from this interaction so that we can come out smarter.” Too many good executives, even exceptional ones who are highly respectful of their colleagues, inadvertently act as if they know it all, or at least what’s most important, and subsequently remain closed to anything that undermines their beliefs. Such tendencies are, of course, deeply rooted in human behavior.2 So it takes real effort for executives to become better listeners by forcing themselves to lay bare their assumptions for scrutiny and to shake up their thinking with an eye to reevaluating what they know, don’t know, and—an important point—can’t know.Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, is one such listener. He believes that his listening improves when he has strong, tough people around him who will challenge his thinking and question his reasoning. If he’s in a meeting, he makes sure that everyone speaks, and he doesn’t accept silence or complacency from anyone. Arne explained to me that as a leader, he tries to make it clear to his colleagues that they are not trying to reach a common viewpoint. The goal is common action, not common thinking, and he expects the people on his team to stand up to him whenever they disagree with his ideas.Duncan uses a technique I find helpful in certain situations: he will deliberately alter a single fact or assumption to see how that changes his team’s approach to a problem. This technique can help senior executives of all stripes step back and refresh their thinking. In a planning session, for example, you might ask, “We’re assuming a 10 percent attrition rate in our customer base. What if that rate was 20 percent? How would our strategy change? What if it was 50 percent?” Once it’s understood that the discussion has moved into the realm of the hypothetical, where people can challenge any underlying assumptions without risk, the creative juices really begin to flow.This technique proved useful during discussions with executives at a company that was planning to ramp up its M&A activity. The company had a lot of cash on hand and no shortage of opportunities to spend it, but its M&A capabilities appeared to have gone rusty (it had not done any deals in quite some time). During a meeting with the M&A team and the head of business development, I asked, “Listen, I know this is going to be a little bit shocking to the system, but let’s entertain the idea that your team doesn’t exist. What kind of M&A function would we build for this corporation now? What would be the skills and the strategy?”The question shook up the team a bit initially. You have to be respectful of the emotions you can trigger with this kind of speculation.
Nonetheless, the experiment started a discussion that ultimately produced notable results. They included the addition of talented new team members who could provide additional skills that the group would need as it went on to complete a set of multibillion-dollar deals over the ensuing year.Throughout my career, I’ve observed that good listeners tend to make better decisions, based on better-informed judgments, than ordinary or poor listeners do—and hence tend to be better leaders. By showing respect to our conversation partners, remaining quiet so they can speak, and actively opening ourselves up to facts that undermine our beliefs, we can all better cultivate this valuable skill.
About the Author:
Bernard Ferrari is an alumnus of McKinsey’s Los Angeles and New York offices, where he was a director; he is currently the chairman of Ferrari Consultancy. Elements of this article were adapted from his upcoming book, Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All (Penguin, March 2012).
Notes:
1 Once, after I had explained this formula in a university lecture, a clever MBA student asked, “What if the conversation is between two good listeners?” My answer: “Congratulations! You folks will have productive—and short—conversations.” This response, while firmly tongue in cheek, hints at an important truth about what the priority should always be in conversations: to gather information. If more executives followed the 80/20 rule, I’m convinced we’d have shorter, sharper, and more productive meetings.
2For more about cognitive biases and decision making, see Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, “The case for behavioral strategy,” mckinseyquarterly.com, March 2010.
Source: www.mckinseyquarterly.com
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
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MKTG-Let the brand tell the story
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Let the brand tell the story
Russ Lidstone with Rebecca Moody, Anthony Edwards and Zoe Decool
Euro RSCG
The best advertising has always been entertaining and the transmedia age offers brands a golden opportunity to create captivating content with a brand narrative.
In a 1930 speech to the Association of National Advertisers, American President Herbert Hoover celebrated a gold standard for the advertising industry: "At one time, advertising was perhaps looked upon as an intrusion, a clamour to the credulous. But your subtlety and beguiling methods have long since overcome this resentment. From all of which the public has ceased to deny the usefulness of advertising and has come to include you in the things we bear in life. "
More than 80 years later, this remains the Holy Grail. The quest is still the same, to be invited into consumers' lives by providing them with 'branded entertainment', in other words, amusing or stimulating them with a brand sales message at heart (our beguiling methods). And this is truer than ever. We are entering a world where, as The Atlantic wrote in April 2011: "Audiences' ability to filter out advertising from their lives… may one day result in all content becoming branded. "
Consumers have always had a chance to filter out our work (as the UK's tea kettles and national grid will testify), but never has the contest for share of attention span been as fierce as now in this new transmedia age. If the advertiser of the 1930s had to learn to harness the growing power of radio, outdoor and film, we must now harness the complexities of the cross-screen world. Diversified content is king – the custom content council showed the total spend on branded content grew to the highest level ever in 2011 – $1,914,000 per company.
With the race on for brands to forge ever deepening engagement with consumers, we will argue that, in order to continue our industry's success, we simply need to reaffirm our innate storytelling credentials, while staying true to our role as brand guardians; much in the same way as our predecessors of old. And it is our belief that, if we properly harness the opportunities of the digital age, our industry could reach yet another gold standard era. And, as ever, branded entertainment will be at its heart.
Since its origins, the advertising world has produced great populist entertainment. Katie and her Oxo family gripped us in the 1960s, and kids of the 1980s still remember with nostalgia tuning into the ads between shows because it was made known that a new instalment in the Gold Blend Couple series was about to air. From the yearly Super Bowl gold spots to the now eagerly awaited John Lewis Christmas TV commercials, ads have long provided kindling for the cultural campfire. The best are anticipated, commented upon and memed.
At the heart of great entertainment lies great storytelling: successful brand stories touch an emotional chord and, in 'entertaining', can become powerful tools of persuasion. John Sadowski (Admap, October 2011) demonstrated why in four points: our brain is more likely to embrace a story than a rational demonstration; stories reach the entire brain – both the rational and emotional parts; human beings love to share stories; and stories unify communities.
Julian Saunders' example of the war of the yellow fat in the 1980s (Market Leader, Q3 2011) illustrates quite literally the power of a great story. Margarine brand Krona went beyond the war on taste between marge and butter to build a myth: it was subsequently purchased by the caseload by Australian housewives. This particular brand story elevated the brand above the rational and complex, 'deja-vu', discourse on taste. Again, Saunders' argument is that great brands best persuade consumers at an emotionally engaging level. And, it seems, the people want more.
The Global Web Index in its 2011 Annual Report shows a clear evolution in the consumer/brand relationship: "Consumers are extremely open to brand engagement and, in the age of entertainment, this goes beyond information and conversation. The lead motivation for younger consumers is for brands to 'entertain them'; with up to 66% of 16-24 year olds stating this as a way they would like a brand to act towards them."
So, if branded entertainment is a practice that advertising has championed since its origins, how do we successfully continue to deliver it in a brave new digital world?
With the advent of new content creation opportunities, numerous brands spotted a refreshing way to connect with consumers. BMW pioneered with 'The Hire' and others followed. Initiatives such as Eurostar's Somers Town cinema venture and Absolut's partnership with Spike Jonze were innovative, surprising and risky approaches to branded content. But we can learn from these pioneers.
The risk is that branded entertainment becomes simple product placement created by brilliant content producers – in other words, the intersection where Cubby Broccoli, Aston Martin (plus Heineken, Sony, Omega, Coke Zero, Smirnoff, Ford) and a suitcase containing £50 million-worth of product placement meet for a ten-second sneak peek, as in Quantum of Solace.
In order to keep the commercial savvy at the heart of our content output, advertisers, as brand guardians, must stay true to three key areas of good practice/expertise.
1. Placing brand truth at heart
The best brand stories have, above all, a quest or 'controlling idea': a universal truth that chimes with the audience; a truth that resonates with our state of mind as a society. So, love conquered all with Gold Blend; Christmas presents are best shared with John Lewis; and ladies always fall for 'the man your man could smell like'.
With Dulux 'Let's Colour', we recognised 'the regenerative power of colour', an organising thought that ran through the very heart of our TED award-winning campaign. With V05 Extreme Style, we play to every rebellious teenage boy's desire to 'Break the Mould' with the funkiest hair-do in the pack to get the girl.
When challenged to drive global consideration for Chivas Regal 12 among 28-40 year old 'Modern Gentlemen', our start point was to identify a clear role for the brand in the target audience's social life. In our campaign 'Here's to Real Friends', we reinterpreted the Chivas concept of chivalry in a modern way, celebrating true brotherly friendship in a unique style. We developed a simple, yet compelling, purpose for Chivas: a toast to honour your real friends.
If a story lacks a 'controlling idea', brands risk falling into self-indulgence, creating content (albeit quality content) for its own sake. This is where a split between content and entertainment can arise; entertainment associates value with a cause. The audience not only demands quality but a reward for its engagement, a take-out, which is inherent in the brand's cause. So the first learning is that content, like any piece of communication, should always live to serve the brand.
Dulux campaign in India
Dulux campaign in UK
2. Creating compelling narratives
While it's vital to pinpoint the 'controlling idea', every story needs a narrative, a constructive format, a reason to stick with it from start to finish. Especially in a world of viewing 'drop-offs'. We want twists, turns, action and resolution: does the V05 boy get the girl? Did they stay in the oppressed, mythical village of Pliktisijiteur or run off into the distance? What obstacles got in their way?
Narrative is core to the entertainment value of a great story. And again, it's in our DNA. Let's not forget the linguistic craftsmanship of the great long-form DPS press ads of the David Abbott era or the beauty of the prose Nike used to communicate the notion of surpassing oneself in the late Steve Prefontaine campaign:
"Where are all the rock star runners? He was this kid from Coos Bay, who wanted to run faster than any other human being in the world. A kid that was too small and not fast enough. A kid everyone kept telling to give up a foolish dream. They called him 'Pre'. The man who ran like fire every day, every race, wire to wire. The man who caused people to stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before'. A runner who never paced himself, slowed down or quit. But Pre wasn't a runner. He was a rebel who happened to run. Where is the next Pre?"
The digital age now places a vast number of new tools at our fingertips to help us embellish the advertising narrative and drive even deeper engagement beyond pure prose and the confines of the traditional TVC or eight-word poster. Just click onto Moonbot Studio's Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore for inspiration.
Where once we relied on ingenious pieces of CRM, or physical brand experiences, to deepen the narrative, we can now offer our audience 'behind the scene peeks', back stories, character profiles, opportunities to take part in the story, and so on.
With the latest V05 Extreme Style campaign iteration, 'The Pliktisijiteur Pageant', we have been able to take Unilever beyond the world of the classic 30-second TV ad for the first time. The Facebook page offers fans the chance to see the untelevised 90-second director's cut, a behind-the-scenes 'mockumentary', hair-styling tips from the main protagonist, and so on. For Dulux 'Let's Colour', we filmed a series of five-minute documentaries in São Paulo, Paris, Jodhpur and Tower Hamlets to live online and underpin how the 'regenerative power of colour' touches different cultures' lives at a community level.
In 'Here's to real friends', we produced two short films, Twinkle and Big Bear, with Oscar-winning director Joachim Back based on a series of wild tales that four close friends recount one night over a bottle of Chivas.
Simply put, new technology means we can become even greater storytellers. No longer are we bound to traditionally linear narratives; now's our chance to become multi-dimensional bards, offering multiple rewards to the audience.
3. Managing transmedia access
Media and entertainment brands, like Lost, already recognise the value of transmedia storytelling. They are good not only at broadcasting, but connecting with consumers seamlessly at every touchpoint, inviting them into their stories, building up to more magical experiences and converting the story trail into hard cash.
Transmedia storytelling is about creating a patchwork of content in a variety of channels, whereby the consumer, not the storyteller, is encouraged to join the dots of the broader brand narrative. It requires a clear understanding of media planning (where consumers interact with different platforms), and media habits (how and why people use them) and, of course, the narrative you are trying to create. For the launch of the Peugeot 205 Envy, we created a transmedia 'whodunnit' with the consumer cast as the hero detective. The investigation took place across many platforms – hacking into the suspects' messages via a mobile number, watching interviews on video platforms, exploring an interactive crime scene via a URL and a daily release of new clues via social media.
So, while we are all accustomed to creating message hierarchies across media, greater emphasis must be placed on detailed channel planning and the entire user experience we are looking to create for consumers.
Now back to Herbert Hoover. When the 31st US President made his speech to the Association of National Advertisers, they were exciting times: radio's popularity was spreading, the first TV broadcasts were being made, and there were huge advancements on the big screen as we moved to talkies and Technicolor.
Today's media landscape is changing even more dramatically. These are defining and exciting times in the history of advertising. In the 1930s, Hoover congratulated an industry that had managed to grab hold of the opportunities presented to it. And today, we again have the chance to ensure advertising remains a vibrant part of pop culture.
To do this, we must remember that we have always been in the branded entertainment game. Let's not excitedly drop the ball but simply look to our skills as brand storytellers and take advantage of the ever more compelling platforms and channels to market. Here's to a new golden era of advertising.
About the Author
Russ Lidstone is chief executive at Euro RSCG and one of only a handful of strategists to become CEO. He has led planning at a number of UK advertising agencies, including JWT and Lowe.
russ.lidstone@eurorscg.com
© Copyright Warc 2012
Let the brand tell the story
Russ Lidstone with Rebecca Moody, Anthony Edwards and Zoe Decool
Euro RSCG
The best advertising has always been entertaining and the transmedia age offers brands a golden opportunity to create captivating content with a brand narrative.
In a 1930 speech to the Association of National Advertisers, American President Herbert Hoover celebrated a gold standard for the advertising industry: "At one time, advertising was perhaps looked upon as an intrusion, a clamour to the credulous. But your subtlety and beguiling methods have long since overcome this resentment. From all of which the public has ceased to deny the usefulness of advertising and has come to include you in the things we bear in life. "
More than 80 years later, this remains the Holy Grail. The quest is still the same, to be invited into consumers' lives by providing them with 'branded entertainment', in other words, amusing or stimulating them with a brand sales message at heart (our beguiling methods). And this is truer than ever. We are entering a world where, as The Atlantic wrote in April 2011: "Audiences' ability to filter out advertising from their lives… may one day result in all content becoming branded. "
Consumers have always had a chance to filter out our work (as the UK's tea kettles and national grid will testify), but never has the contest for share of attention span been as fierce as now in this new transmedia age. If the advertiser of the 1930s had to learn to harness the growing power of radio, outdoor and film, we must now harness the complexities of the cross-screen world. Diversified content is king – the custom content council showed the total spend on branded content grew to the highest level ever in 2011 – $1,914,000 per company.
With the race on for brands to forge ever deepening engagement with consumers, we will argue that, in order to continue our industry's success, we simply need to reaffirm our innate storytelling credentials, while staying true to our role as brand guardians; much in the same way as our predecessors of old. And it is our belief that, if we properly harness the opportunities of the digital age, our industry could reach yet another gold standard era. And, as ever, branded entertainment will be at its heart.
Since its origins, the advertising world has produced great populist entertainment. Katie and her Oxo family gripped us in the 1960s, and kids of the 1980s still remember with nostalgia tuning into the ads between shows because it was made known that a new instalment in the Gold Blend Couple series was about to air. From the yearly Super Bowl gold spots to the now eagerly awaited John Lewis Christmas TV commercials, ads have long provided kindling for the cultural campfire. The best are anticipated, commented upon and memed.
At the heart of great entertainment lies great storytelling: successful brand stories touch an emotional chord and, in 'entertaining', can become powerful tools of persuasion. John Sadowski (Admap, October 2011) demonstrated why in four points: our brain is more likely to embrace a story than a rational demonstration; stories reach the entire brain – both the rational and emotional parts; human beings love to share stories; and stories unify communities.
Julian Saunders' example of the war of the yellow fat in the 1980s (Market Leader, Q3 2011) illustrates quite literally the power of a great story. Margarine brand Krona went beyond the war on taste between marge and butter to build a myth: it was subsequently purchased by the caseload by Australian housewives. This particular brand story elevated the brand above the rational and complex, 'deja-vu', discourse on taste. Again, Saunders' argument is that great brands best persuade consumers at an emotionally engaging level. And, it seems, the people want more.
The Global Web Index in its 2011 Annual Report shows a clear evolution in the consumer/brand relationship: "Consumers are extremely open to brand engagement and, in the age of entertainment, this goes beyond information and conversation. The lead motivation for younger consumers is for brands to 'entertain them'; with up to 66% of 16-24 year olds stating this as a way they would like a brand to act towards them."
So, if branded entertainment is a practice that advertising has championed since its origins, how do we successfully continue to deliver it in a brave new digital world?
With the advent of new content creation opportunities, numerous brands spotted a refreshing way to connect with consumers. BMW pioneered with 'The Hire' and others followed. Initiatives such as Eurostar's Somers Town cinema venture and Absolut's partnership with Spike Jonze were innovative, surprising and risky approaches to branded content. But we can learn from these pioneers.
The risk is that branded entertainment becomes simple product placement created by brilliant content producers – in other words, the intersection where Cubby Broccoli, Aston Martin (plus Heineken, Sony, Omega, Coke Zero, Smirnoff, Ford) and a suitcase containing £50 million-worth of product placement meet for a ten-second sneak peek, as in Quantum of Solace.
In order to keep the commercial savvy at the heart of our content output, advertisers, as brand guardians, must stay true to three key areas of good practice/expertise.
1. Placing brand truth at heart
The best brand stories have, above all, a quest or 'controlling idea': a universal truth that chimes with the audience; a truth that resonates with our state of mind as a society. So, love conquered all with Gold Blend; Christmas presents are best shared with John Lewis; and ladies always fall for 'the man your man could smell like'.
With Dulux 'Let's Colour', we recognised 'the regenerative power of colour', an organising thought that ran through the very heart of our TED award-winning campaign. With V05 Extreme Style, we play to every rebellious teenage boy's desire to 'Break the Mould' with the funkiest hair-do in the pack to get the girl.
When challenged to drive global consideration for Chivas Regal 12 among 28-40 year old 'Modern Gentlemen', our start point was to identify a clear role for the brand in the target audience's social life. In our campaign 'Here's to Real Friends', we reinterpreted the Chivas concept of chivalry in a modern way, celebrating true brotherly friendship in a unique style. We developed a simple, yet compelling, purpose for Chivas: a toast to honour your real friends.
If a story lacks a 'controlling idea', brands risk falling into self-indulgence, creating content (albeit quality content) for its own sake. This is where a split between content and entertainment can arise; entertainment associates value with a cause. The audience not only demands quality but a reward for its engagement, a take-out, which is inherent in the brand's cause. So the first learning is that content, like any piece of communication, should always live to serve the brand.
Dulux campaign in India
Dulux campaign in UK
2. Creating compelling narratives
While it's vital to pinpoint the 'controlling idea', every story needs a narrative, a constructive format, a reason to stick with it from start to finish. Especially in a world of viewing 'drop-offs'. We want twists, turns, action and resolution: does the V05 boy get the girl? Did they stay in the oppressed, mythical village of Pliktisijiteur or run off into the distance? What obstacles got in their way?
Narrative is core to the entertainment value of a great story. And again, it's in our DNA. Let's not forget the linguistic craftsmanship of the great long-form DPS press ads of the David Abbott era or the beauty of the prose Nike used to communicate the notion of surpassing oneself in the late Steve Prefontaine campaign:
"Where are all the rock star runners? He was this kid from Coos Bay, who wanted to run faster than any other human being in the world. A kid that was too small and not fast enough. A kid everyone kept telling to give up a foolish dream. They called him 'Pre'. The man who ran like fire every day, every race, wire to wire. The man who caused people to stop and say, 'I've never seen anyone run like that before'. A runner who never paced himself, slowed down or quit. But Pre wasn't a runner. He was a rebel who happened to run. Where is the next Pre?"
The digital age now places a vast number of new tools at our fingertips to help us embellish the advertising narrative and drive even deeper engagement beyond pure prose and the confines of the traditional TVC or eight-word poster. Just click onto Moonbot Studio's Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore for inspiration.
Where once we relied on ingenious pieces of CRM, or physical brand experiences, to deepen the narrative, we can now offer our audience 'behind the scene peeks', back stories, character profiles, opportunities to take part in the story, and so on.
With the latest V05 Extreme Style campaign iteration, 'The Pliktisijiteur Pageant', we have been able to take Unilever beyond the world of the classic 30-second TV ad for the first time. The Facebook page offers fans the chance to see the untelevised 90-second director's cut, a behind-the-scenes 'mockumentary', hair-styling tips from the main protagonist, and so on. For Dulux 'Let's Colour', we filmed a series of five-minute documentaries in São Paulo, Paris, Jodhpur and Tower Hamlets to live online and underpin how the 'regenerative power of colour' touches different cultures' lives at a community level.
In 'Here's to real friends', we produced two short films, Twinkle and Big Bear, with Oscar-winning director Joachim Back based on a series of wild tales that four close friends recount one night over a bottle of Chivas.
Simply put, new technology means we can become even greater storytellers. No longer are we bound to traditionally linear narratives; now's our chance to become multi-dimensional bards, offering multiple rewards to the audience.
3. Managing transmedia access
Media and entertainment brands, like Lost, already recognise the value of transmedia storytelling. They are good not only at broadcasting, but connecting with consumers seamlessly at every touchpoint, inviting them into their stories, building up to more magical experiences and converting the story trail into hard cash.
Transmedia storytelling is about creating a patchwork of content in a variety of channels, whereby the consumer, not the storyteller, is encouraged to join the dots of the broader brand narrative. It requires a clear understanding of media planning (where consumers interact with different platforms), and media habits (how and why people use them) and, of course, the narrative you are trying to create. For the launch of the Peugeot 205 Envy, we created a transmedia 'whodunnit' with the consumer cast as the hero detective. The investigation took place across many platforms – hacking into the suspects' messages via a mobile number, watching interviews on video platforms, exploring an interactive crime scene via a URL and a daily release of new clues via social media.
So, while we are all accustomed to creating message hierarchies across media, greater emphasis must be placed on detailed channel planning and the entire user experience we are looking to create for consumers.
Now back to Herbert Hoover. When the 31st US President made his speech to the Association of National Advertisers, they were exciting times: radio's popularity was spreading, the first TV broadcasts were being made, and there were huge advancements on the big screen as we moved to talkies and Technicolor.
Today's media landscape is changing even more dramatically. These are defining and exciting times in the history of advertising. In the 1930s, Hoover congratulated an industry that had managed to grab hold of the opportunities presented to it. And today, we again have the chance to ensure advertising remains a vibrant part of pop culture.
To do this, we must remember that we have always been in the branded entertainment game. Let's not excitedly drop the ball but simply look to our skills as brand storytellers and take advantage of the ever more compelling platforms and channels to market. Here's to a new golden era of advertising.
About the Author
Russ Lidstone is chief executive at Euro RSCG and one of only a handful of strategists to become CEO. He has led planning at a number of UK advertising agencies, including JWT and Lowe.
russ.lidstone@eurorscg.com
© Copyright Warc 2012
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Transcript:David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer-the legal guy at Google
NICK BILTON: I'm here at Documented@Davos with David Drummond, who is the chief legal officer for Google and a senior vice president. And what does that even mean, David?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yes. A little complicated and unclear. Chief legal officer means what it means. I'm the chief legal guy, lawyer guy at the company. But I also oversee government relations and public policy teams around the world, our communications PR teams, M&A-- that's our acquisitions team. And also started up a couple years ago Google Ventures, which is our venture capital arm, which I also oversee. So working on a few things.
NICK BILTON: So how long have you been at Google?
DAVID DRUMMOND: 10 years I've been at the company. I go back to the very beginnings. I was a partner in a law firm in Silicon Valley-- Wilson Sonsini, which some of your folks seeing this probably know. And I got a call from another client in the firm who said, hey, there are these two guys at Stanford who had built a search engine and they're going around and thinking about starting a company and need a lawyer to help them set it up.
NICK BILTON: Did you have to go live in the dorm room with them.
DAVID DRUMMOND: No, I did not, thankfully. But we did a fair amount of driving around Stanford to get all this going. This was in 1998, so I actually helped them set up the company.
NICK BILTON: So what are you doing at Davos, that's from a Google standpoint?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, Google, we're global. We have an impact. We are part of the internet, which is, of course, changing the world. And it's a good place for us to be to understand what's going on, to connect with other folks in industry, and clearly folks in government. It saves me a fair amount of travel, actually to come here, because I can meet with lots of government officials who are really interested in what Google's up to and what the internet is doing. And I can meet with them here.
NICK BILTON: So one of the things that happened this week was there's the EU data privacy directive that's been floated [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] actually. And although it's exclusive to companies in Europe, it would affect you guys drastically, right?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, it would affect us, clearly, because we're here in Europe. And it's obviously one of the places-- one of our biggest and most important markets. And we have lots of people here. So clearly affects us. And so let me say, we're happy about what they're doing to streamline and simplify this whole privacy sort of regulatory infrastructure.
NICK BILTON: Because right now there's 27 different rules that each apply--
DAVID DRUMMOND: Right, each member state has in its own-- not just the different implementations of the EUI privacy directives, but also sort of the whole different processes and different people you have to talk to. So the idea that you can designate one data protection authority that you work with, where you're sort of based, which in our case is Ireland, we think is really good.
NICK BILTON: But one of the things that they're presenting is the ability that people would have to be able to-- companies would have to allow people to be able to remove their data from a company to be able to be forgotten online. How would you even implement that?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, that's one of things that I think is going to require a lot more discussion, is try to figure out what this really means, because it's one thing--
NICK BILTON: And so, are you guys pushing back on it?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I think that the notion of right to be forgotten that is so broad that it threatens public discourse and the public record, and the historical record. It's a problem, right? We've always had an internal policy at Google that goes back to the early days of web searches, if you're a webmaster, you can decide to tell us not to crawl your site if you've posted content.
We operated the old-- with Google Groups-- was the old bulletin board. And if you had a post up there and you decided to pull it down, you can pull it down. So it's sort of, you control that. But if someone else, say, commented on your post, and it became part of a discourse, a conversation-- if someone's quoting you and now in today's parlance is following that and is adding to the discussion, I think that's really problematic.
So we have to figure out whether we really need to talk about right to be forgotten or are we talking about data portability, which is a related concept, but not necessarily the same. In other words, you can move your information around. So I think there's some distinctions that we need to make. And to do this in a narrow way that respects this tradition in Europe, but also doesn't squelch discourse on the web.
NICK BILTON: Well, but at the same time, I understand what you're saying about being able to say to a webmaster, don't crawl our site. But a lot of times people don't have control over the things that are on these sites. If Gawker, for example, writes something negative about you, you don't have control over that. And it shows up in Google. So how would you propose that you guys find a solution to that beyond being able to remove the data completely?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, again, I think even as it is written, I think the concept is not that you can pull down things that are written about you, necessarily. Because that's just kind of censorship where you're being able to censor other people. But I think if you're out there contributing with your own content, the notion is you can decide. I wanted to be open to the world with all of my thoughts before. I've changed my mind. I want to pull that back. And so the questions is just if, once it becomes intertwined with the expression of lots of other people, what do you do? And that's a challenge for this legislation. There's no question. And a lot of us are concerned.
NICK BILTON: So at Davos, have you seen a lot of themes around privacy and have you had questions around this, around the EU directive?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, I think it's one of the topics for discussion, clearly. It's sort of the timing was interesting. While not engineered at all, that we sort of revamped our privacy policies. And I think the thing that's underlying both strands-- and if you talk to Commissioner Reding and I know she's got a couple panels. She'll be talking about this later in the week-- is this notion of well, OK, privacy's important and has to be protected online, but we're now realizing more the power of this data. Like what it can do for the social good, right? In terms of building better products that do things for people, that they care about, and that are interesting.
And so in terms of an economic value, in terms of just a public utility and user happiness, there's lots of things you can do to create value if you have the data and you can combine it in interesting ways. Not just what Google does, but with what other people do. And then you set rules. The point is that if you're going to regulate-- and we need to have regulation to make sure there are rules of the road-- you don't want to do it by having edicts that ban certain practices, and say thou shalt not do x. Because that's the kind of thing that's going to squelch innovation.
NICK BILTON: But there has to be a balance in the middle, without a doubt. Because we've seen several instances where things have gone wrong. And even with Google, with Buzz and so on. So leading to that, you've had a lot of blowback from the Google+ integration into Google Search recently. And Twitter and Facebook are unhappy, to say the least. Were you expecting this? Did you have any idea this was going to happen?
DAVID DRUMMOND: It's not an enormous surprise that those two companies, in particular, are upset. But the point here is, as we said when we launched it, this is about making search better. This is about improving the user experience. Google is not just about, back in the old days of search, it's 10 blue links, right? And it just goes out and searches the web and finds the best information. We don't have to be limited to that.
A search engine should know a lot more. It should be delivering you results that are about you and that matter to you. And that's going to mean things that your friends, places, people that are important to you. And it should be able to know that and to integrate it in. And to do it in a way that's interactive. So if I get this link that shows me a social graph, or groups of people that are interesting, I should be able to instantly interact with them and all that kind of thing.
So it requires the social signals and the graphics created, in the case of Google+, or whether it's Twitter or Facebook, wherever the data comes from. There does require a level of integration that's not trivial to do that. And so, as we've said, we once had Twitter data and Facebook in our search.
NICK BILTON: But you still do.
DAVID DRUMMOND: And obviously, we still crawl whatever is exposed. But those companies have not been interested in allowing us to have access to the data that would allow us to do the kinds of things we do in Search Plus Your World. And we're happy to talk to them about doing it. But we're not going to sort of not do something that we actually think is really important for us to do to improve the user experience.
NICK BILTON: One of the things-- an example that Twitter gave, was if you search for WWF, for example, the wrestling organization, and right now the Google+ page shows up on top even though it has a tenth of the followers that they Twitter--
DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, this is going to evolve. And so you can take little snapshots about celebrities and well known--
NICK BILTON: I mean, I've done it with the New York Times.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Sure. Again, but my guess is that if you actually starting doing it about people you know who maybe aren't famous, it's a lot different because you're now able to interact with those people immediately and so forth. So in the following cases, we understand how people are saying, well, why don't you just have the Twitter thing up there?
Well, again, we don't have the level of data that allows us to do the kinds of things we're actually trying to do with them. And so, again, we're not going to not do it because of that. And so I think this is going to evolve. This is the first steps of what this is all going to look like. And the idea that somehow when you can immediately toggle, go back to the old way anyway, that this is some kind of evil thing to keep--
NICK BILTON: No, I'm not saying it's an evil thing. I question, I mean, it's putting Twitter and everything aside. You said that the whole goal of this is to make search a better experience. If I search for the New York Times, the Google+ New York Times shows up above the New York Times website in the search results.
DAVID DRUMMOND: The New York Times website is certainly there. You're going to get it.
NICK BILTON: But it's not the top thing. And if you're looking for a better search experience, I would say that that--
DAVID DRUMMOND: I'm sure that-- I don't have the search in front of me, but we're not going to do things that are going to-- we've always been about search quality. We believe this is going to increase search quality overall. And I think it's easy to take snapshots in individual cases right now and to make arguments about it.
NICK BILTON: So you see it all changing?
DAVID DRUMMOND: But I think this is an evolution. There are lots of other services that we want the signals from, too, that we're going to integrate. And I think that over time, people will understand better that this is making search overall better in trying to get the signals that are going to make it relevant to-- A lot of people, I think, have the mindset of search is kind of the same for everybody. It's just the broad web.
NICK BILTON: Oh no, I don't think that's the case.
DAVID DRUMMOND: But there's a vision of that of what Google has always been that I think makes it hard for people to understand where we're headed.
NICK BILTON: I think social search is different for different people. Some people use Twitter more, Facebook, Google+, things like that.
DAVID DRUMMOND: That's right. And over time we should be able to understand that. We can't do it when people won't give us the data.
NICK BILTON: So how much of this do you think is a response to the pressure of Facebook right now, and the social things that they're doing?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I think all this is about us making search better. We've known for a long time that we've needed to incorporate those kind of signals about people that you care about, your friends, your relatives, all those kinds of things. And that's what we're doing. Google+ is better understood as making Google social, understanding those relationships, as opposed to some kind of competitive separate service.
NICK BILTON: So as the legal counsel that's been there for 10 years, do you look back at some of the things that have happened with Buzz and things like that, do you see those as mistakes? Are there things that you regret as far as data privacy and things that you've done?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, we've made our mistakes. We've made our share of mistakes like everybody. They're well documented and we talk about them. And we learn from them. And if you look at what we're doing with this privacy launch, which really isn't about changing really anything that we're doing. And certainly isn't about disclosing more of your information to the public, but just telling you what we're going forward, and making it more simple.
If you look at how we're notifying people, I think it's kind of unprecedented for a company to go out and say, in the ways that we are doing it-- homepage. Everyone telling you this is about our privacy. It's not the usual yada yada. This is important. And I think that we've learned over time that those are the kinds of things that you need to do. And we're putting those things into practice. So we've made mistakes in various areas, but we actually feel like we learn from them.
NICK BILTON: Can you tell me a little bit about the new privacy policy that Google's pushing forth?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, the idea is just that we've had-- the way sort of Google developed, lots of different products and they all have their own privacy policy or privacy notice. And it got to the point where, from a user perspective, you can't even figure it out, what really is going on. And also, it created the implication that-- it made it hard to share across the different services. Which really are the features of Google, as opposed to standalone products.
And again, in the same vein as Search Plus Your World, what we're trying to do is to make the product much better. And using the signals we have from your use of different products can improve all the products. And so we wanted to be clear with people that that's the direction we're going in to improve Google. And we wanted to be transparent about it, and notify people, make it clear. And give them control over what those settings are going to be. Give them the ability to take the data out if they want to. So that's really what this is all about. It's about sort of the Google of the future. And we wanted to be very clear with users about where we're headed.
NICK BILTON: So does the Google of the future allow me to have more control over my data? To be able to go in and know what you're doing with it or be able to remove things and so on?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, I think so. We already currently have through our dashboard and the ads preference manager, we tell people far more about the data we have and what we're doing, and the ability to turn things off and so forth, than pretty much any other company out there. And so we're going to continue that and give the user that kind of control. Also data portability and being able to it to take your data out. Those are our core principles that we'll continue to have.
NICK BILTON: When Google first started, there was this mantra of don't be evil. Do you think that Google might be a little bit too big not to be evil sometimes?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I don't know about that. We still aspire to that. And I think we live it. That doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. To some extent, by having that saying, it's a high bar. But we also open ourselves up to any time we make a mistake or someone thinks we've made a mistake, then they can apply the evil sort of label to it. I think it's important for us to have that viewpoint, because it does continue to cause us to look at things and to do things. It reflects the focus on the user. That's really what we're all about. That's why we're doing this.
And there could be things that would lead to more short term financial gain, or might be easier, and in the absence of a clear mindset that you might be tempted to do. But I think that that really keeps us, [? concerts ?] our focus. And even if we do make mistakes from time to time, which we do, I think we think it's really important for us to continue with that mindset and that aspiration. And even as a big company, we think it's doable. We think it's possible.
NICK BILTON: Cool. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. And I hope you enjoy Davos.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah. You too.
NICK BILTON: Thanks.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Thank you
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Documented@Davos: David Drummond, Google interviewed by Nick Bilton, New York Times from Michelle Laird on Vimeo.
Transcript:David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer-the legal guy at Google
NICK BILTON: I'm here at Documented@Davos with David Drummond, who is the chief legal officer for Google and a senior vice president. And what does that even mean, David?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yes. A little complicated and unclear. Chief legal officer means what it means. I'm the chief legal guy, lawyer guy at the company. But I also oversee government relations and public policy teams around the world, our communications PR teams, M&A-- that's our acquisitions team. And also started up a couple years ago Google Ventures, which is our venture capital arm, which I also oversee. So working on a few things.
NICK BILTON: So how long have you been at Google?
DAVID DRUMMOND: 10 years I've been at the company. I go back to the very beginnings. I was a partner in a law firm in Silicon Valley-- Wilson Sonsini, which some of your folks seeing this probably know. And I got a call from another client in the firm who said, hey, there are these two guys at Stanford who had built a search engine and they're going around and thinking about starting a company and need a lawyer to help them set it up.
NICK BILTON: Did you have to go live in the dorm room with them.
DAVID DRUMMOND: No, I did not, thankfully. But we did a fair amount of driving around Stanford to get all this going. This was in 1998, so I actually helped them set up the company.
NICK BILTON: So what are you doing at Davos, that's from a Google standpoint?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, Google, we're global. We have an impact. We are part of the internet, which is, of course, changing the world. And it's a good place for us to be to understand what's going on, to connect with other folks in industry, and clearly folks in government. It saves me a fair amount of travel, actually to come here, because I can meet with lots of government officials who are really interested in what Google's up to and what the internet is doing. And I can meet with them here.
NICK BILTON: So one of the things that happened this week was there's the EU data privacy directive that's been floated [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] actually. And although it's exclusive to companies in Europe, it would affect you guys drastically, right?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, it would affect us, clearly, because we're here in Europe. And it's obviously one of the places-- one of our biggest and most important markets. And we have lots of people here. So clearly affects us. And so let me say, we're happy about what they're doing to streamline and simplify this whole privacy sort of regulatory infrastructure.
NICK BILTON: Because right now there's 27 different rules that each apply--
DAVID DRUMMOND: Right, each member state has in its own-- not just the different implementations of the EUI privacy directives, but also sort of the whole different processes and different people you have to talk to. So the idea that you can designate one data protection authority that you work with, where you're sort of based, which in our case is Ireland, we think is really good.
NICK BILTON: But one of the things that they're presenting is the ability that people would have to be able to-- companies would have to allow people to be able to remove their data from a company to be able to be forgotten online. How would you even implement that?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, that's one of things that I think is going to require a lot more discussion, is try to figure out what this really means, because it's one thing--
NICK BILTON: And so, are you guys pushing back on it?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I think that the notion of right to be forgotten that is so broad that it threatens public discourse and the public record, and the historical record. It's a problem, right? We've always had an internal policy at Google that goes back to the early days of web searches, if you're a webmaster, you can decide to tell us not to crawl your site if you've posted content.
We operated the old-- with Google Groups-- was the old bulletin board. And if you had a post up there and you decided to pull it down, you can pull it down. So it's sort of, you control that. But if someone else, say, commented on your post, and it became part of a discourse, a conversation-- if someone's quoting you and now in today's parlance is following that and is adding to the discussion, I think that's really problematic.
So we have to figure out whether we really need to talk about right to be forgotten or are we talking about data portability, which is a related concept, but not necessarily the same. In other words, you can move your information around. So I think there's some distinctions that we need to make. And to do this in a narrow way that respects this tradition in Europe, but also doesn't squelch discourse on the web.
NICK BILTON: Well, but at the same time, I understand what you're saying about being able to say to a webmaster, don't crawl our site. But a lot of times people don't have control over the things that are on these sites. If Gawker, for example, writes something negative about you, you don't have control over that. And it shows up in Google. So how would you propose that you guys find a solution to that beyond being able to remove the data completely?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, again, I think even as it is written, I think the concept is not that you can pull down things that are written about you, necessarily. Because that's just kind of censorship where you're being able to censor other people. But I think if you're out there contributing with your own content, the notion is you can decide. I wanted to be open to the world with all of my thoughts before. I've changed my mind. I want to pull that back. And so the questions is just if, once it becomes intertwined with the expression of lots of other people, what do you do? And that's a challenge for this legislation. There's no question. And a lot of us are concerned.
NICK BILTON: So at Davos, have you seen a lot of themes around privacy and have you had questions around this, around the EU directive?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, I think it's one of the topics for discussion, clearly. It's sort of the timing was interesting. While not engineered at all, that we sort of revamped our privacy policies. And I think the thing that's underlying both strands-- and if you talk to Commissioner Reding and I know she's got a couple panels. She'll be talking about this later in the week-- is this notion of well, OK, privacy's important and has to be protected online, but we're now realizing more the power of this data. Like what it can do for the social good, right? In terms of building better products that do things for people, that they care about, and that are interesting.
And so in terms of an economic value, in terms of just a public utility and user happiness, there's lots of things you can do to create value if you have the data and you can combine it in interesting ways. Not just what Google does, but with what other people do. And then you set rules. The point is that if you're going to regulate-- and we need to have regulation to make sure there are rules of the road-- you don't want to do it by having edicts that ban certain practices, and say thou shalt not do x. Because that's the kind of thing that's going to squelch innovation.
NICK BILTON: But there has to be a balance in the middle, without a doubt. Because we've seen several instances where things have gone wrong. And even with Google, with Buzz and so on. So leading to that, you've had a lot of blowback from the Google+ integration into Google Search recently. And Twitter and Facebook are unhappy, to say the least. Were you expecting this? Did you have any idea this was going to happen?
DAVID DRUMMOND: It's not an enormous surprise that those two companies, in particular, are upset. But the point here is, as we said when we launched it, this is about making search better. This is about improving the user experience. Google is not just about, back in the old days of search, it's 10 blue links, right? And it just goes out and searches the web and finds the best information. We don't have to be limited to that.
A search engine should know a lot more. It should be delivering you results that are about you and that matter to you. And that's going to mean things that your friends, places, people that are important to you. And it should be able to know that and to integrate it in. And to do it in a way that's interactive. So if I get this link that shows me a social graph, or groups of people that are interesting, I should be able to instantly interact with them and all that kind of thing.
So it requires the social signals and the graphics created, in the case of Google+, or whether it's Twitter or Facebook, wherever the data comes from. There does require a level of integration that's not trivial to do that. And so, as we've said, we once had Twitter data and Facebook in our search.
NICK BILTON: But you still do.
DAVID DRUMMOND: And obviously, we still crawl whatever is exposed. But those companies have not been interested in allowing us to have access to the data that would allow us to do the kinds of things we do in Search Plus Your World. And we're happy to talk to them about doing it. But we're not going to sort of not do something that we actually think is really important for us to do to improve the user experience.
NICK BILTON: One of the things-- an example that Twitter gave, was if you search for WWF, for example, the wrestling organization, and right now the Google+ page shows up on top even though it has a tenth of the followers that they Twitter--
DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, this is going to evolve. And so you can take little snapshots about celebrities and well known--
NICK BILTON: I mean, I've done it with the New York Times.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Sure. Again, but my guess is that if you actually starting doing it about people you know who maybe aren't famous, it's a lot different because you're now able to interact with those people immediately and so forth. So in the following cases, we understand how people are saying, well, why don't you just have the Twitter thing up there?
Well, again, we don't have the level of data that allows us to do the kinds of things we're actually trying to do with them. And so, again, we're not going to not do it because of that. And so I think this is going to evolve. This is the first steps of what this is all going to look like. And the idea that somehow when you can immediately toggle, go back to the old way anyway, that this is some kind of evil thing to keep--
NICK BILTON: No, I'm not saying it's an evil thing. I question, I mean, it's putting Twitter and everything aside. You said that the whole goal of this is to make search a better experience. If I search for the New York Times, the Google+ New York Times shows up above the New York Times website in the search results.
DAVID DRUMMOND: The New York Times website is certainly there. You're going to get it.
NICK BILTON: But it's not the top thing. And if you're looking for a better search experience, I would say that that--
DAVID DRUMMOND: I'm sure that-- I don't have the search in front of me, but we're not going to do things that are going to-- we've always been about search quality. We believe this is going to increase search quality overall. And I think it's easy to take snapshots in individual cases right now and to make arguments about it.
NICK BILTON: So you see it all changing?
DAVID DRUMMOND: But I think this is an evolution. There are lots of other services that we want the signals from, too, that we're going to integrate. And I think that over time, people will understand better that this is making search overall better in trying to get the signals that are going to make it relevant to-- A lot of people, I think, have the mindset of search is kind of the same for everybody. It's just the broad web.
NICK BILTON: Oh no, I don't think that's the case.
DAVID DRUMMOND: But there's a vision of that of what Google has always been that I think makes it hard for people to understand where we're headed.
NICK BILTON: I think social search is different for different people. Some people use Twitter more, Facebook, Google+, things like that.
DAVID DRUMMOND: That's right. And over time we should be able to understand that. We can't do it when people won't give us the data.
NICK BILTON: So how much of this do you think is a response to the pressure of Facebook right now, and the social things that they're doing?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I think all this is about us making search better. We've known for a long time that we've needed to incorporate those kind of signals about people that you care about, your friends, your relatives, all those kinds of things. And that's what we're doing. Google+ is better understood as making Google social, understanding those relationships, as opposed to some kind of competitive separate service.
NICK BILTON: So as the legal counsel that's been there for 10 years, do you look back at some of the things that have happened with Buzz and things like that, do you see those as mistakes? Are there things that you regret as far as data privacy and things that you've done?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, we've made our mistakes. We've made our share of mistakes like everybody. They're well documented and we talk about them. And we learn from them. And if you look at what we're doing with this privacy launch, which really isn't about changing really anything that we're doing. And certainly isn't about disclosing more of your information to the public, but just telling you what we're going forward, and making it more simple.
If you look at how we're notifying people, I think it's kind of unprecedented for a company to go out and say, in the ways that we are doing it-- homepage. Everyone telling you this is about our privacy. It's not the usual yada yada. This is important. And I think that we've learned over time that those are the kinds of things that you need to do. And we're putting those things into practice. So we've made mistakes in various areas, but we actually feel like we learn from them.
NICK BILTON: Can you tell me a little bit about the new privacy policy that Google's pushing forth?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, the idea is just that we've had-- the way sort of Google developed, lots of different products and they all have their own privacy policy or privacy notice. And it got to the point where, from a user perspective, you can't even figure it out, what really is going on. And also, it created the implication that-- it made it hard to share across the different services. Which really are the features of Google, as opposed to standalone products.
And again, in the same vein as Search Plus Your World, what we're trying to do is to make the product much better. And using the signals we have from your use of different products can improve all the products. And so we wanted to be clear with people that that's the direction we're going in to improve Google. And we wanted to be transparent about it, and notify people, make it clear. And give them control over what those settings are going to be. Give them the ability to take the data out if they want to. So that's really what this is all about. It's about sort of the Google of the future. And we wanted to be very clear with users about where we're headed.
NICK BILTON: So does the Google of the future allow me to have more control over my data? To be able to go in and know what you're doing with it or be able to remove things and so on?
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, I think so. We already currently have through our dashboard and the ads preference manager, we tell people far more about the data we have and what we're doing, and the ability to turn things off and so forth, than pretty much any other company out there. And so we're going to continue that and give the user that kind of control. Also data portability and being able to it to take your data out. Those are our core principles that we'll continue to have.
NICK BILTON: When Google first started, there was this mantra of don't be evil. Do you think that Google might be a little bit too big not to be evil sometimes?
DAVID DRUMMOND: I don't know about that. We still aspire to that. And I think we live it. That doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. To some extent, by having that saying, it's a high bar. But we also open ourselves up to any time we make a mistake or someone thinks we've made a mistake, then they can apply the evil sort of label to it. I think it's important for us to have that viewpoint, because it does continue to cause us to look at things and to do things. It reflects the focus on the user. That's really what we're all about. That's why we're doing this.
And there could be things that would lead to more short term financial gain, or might be easier, and in the absence of a clear mindset that you might be tempted to do. But I think that that really keeps us, [? concerts ?] our focus. And even if we do make mistakes from time to time, which we do, I think we think it's really important for us to continue with that mindset and that aspiration. And even as a big company, we think it's doable. We think it's possible.
NICK BILTON: Cool. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. And I hope you enjoy Davos.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah. You too.
NICK BILTON: Thanks.
DAVID DRUMMOND: Thank you
Source: www.es.scribd.com
Documented@Davos-Interview Sessions-Bob Moritz-PwC
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript: Bob Moritz, Chairman & Senior Partner at PwC
PETE CASHMORE: I'm Pete Cashmore, the founder and CEO at Mashable. And welcome back to Documenting Davos with Scribd and Mashable. #DavosDocs. And so we're talking to technology leaders and business leaders at Davos, the World Economic Forum, trying to figure out how technology is changing the economy, changing the world. So I'm very, very pleased to be here with Bob Moritz. You are the chairman and senior partner at PwC. So it's a privilege to speak with you today.
ROBERT MORITZ: Great. Happy to be here.
PETE CASHMORE: I think we could kick off and speak about this CEO survey. It's your 15th annual CEO survey, trying to get the temperature on what CEOs are thinking. What are they thinking about technology?
ROBERT MORITZ: Well, when you look at the CEO survey we've done in the last 15 years, we interviewed about 1,200 CEOs around the world, 60 different countries.
Most of the CEOs are actually thinking about the future in terms of how to actually enhance their own business proposition. How do they do that? They've got to reach out to their customer base. And it's through innovation locally. It's not going to be through M&A activity.
One of the survey findings was, in fact, M&A activity was going to go down this year because their confidence to do that isn't there. As a result, they are going to actually focus on their local customer base, leverage technology to do that.
How do you action leverage technology to engage your consumer base? How do you engage your workforce? And how do you think about innovation, so you can move things around the world as quickly as possible? So that's one piece.
The second piece is they've got to be cost efficient. And the only way they do that is invest. Have some R&D around technology, technology enablement, to actually pass information across the organization to better manage, make decisions day-to-day. Those two findings are key as successful CEOs think about the future and [INAUDIBLE] capture the opportunity.
PETE CASHMORE: How optimistic are they about the future?
ROBERT MORITZ: It's mixed. It depends very much on where you sit and what country you may be in. And there's a dichotomy. We talk about decoupling around emerging markets and developed markets. I would say that's nonsense. The economy actually has come together as one. The decoupling is around people's confidence for performance in a company versus their confidence in the overall economy. So what does that mean?
48% of the CEOs today believe the economy is going to decrease over the next year, compared to 15% thinks it's going to increase. However, the number of CEOs that actually believe they will have confidence, relative confidence that they can grow in the next 12 months is a high percentage. It's more like 85% that either have strong or neutral confidence.
PETE CASHMORE: Is it possible for those two things to be true?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. But you've got one leading the other. You've got a lagging indicator here. And the question becomes, how do you actually then bring together, I'll call business priorities, versus more macro policy discussions? And at some point in time, these two things catch up. It very much depends which country you're in, which sector. The technology sector is a great example.
They had the highest confidence overall in terms of what they think the future is. No surprise to this audience.
When you think about technology organizations around the world, they are thinking more so around, am I going to go hire more people? The answer from the survey was absolutely yes.
Are we going to actually have bigger impact in the social community? The answer was yes.
And now the question is, how do you get the leadership team's attention to work with policy makers to actually bring that gap together?
PETE CASHMORE: What's your level of optimism about technology's role in turning around the economy and creating jobs? I mean, I was reading a report in the Times last week about how Apple is obviously making of all its products in China. Is technology going to create more jobs, or is it going to great jobs elsewhere?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, I think it's going to help create jobs. And maybe better said, it will help in a number of different ways. One of them is actually matching or developing skill sets.
When I think about technology-- and I'll use us as an example right now-- the amount of training that we do virtually, leveraging technology, social media, ideas, et cetera, has just gone exponential for us. So what we're trying to do is get people the skill sets, just in time skill sets to do just in time training, and leveraging technology to deliver that. So this way, people are better equipped to do their job. And that allows them to be more relevant day in to day out. So they do the job they're assigned. But more importantly, give them an opportunity to do another job that's totally different. And why is that important? Because technology will give them more insight on what life may be in the US. And if they are thinking about going to India or China, they'll have a better perspective of what's that all about.
So to me, technology is a huge enabler for everything we do. We've got major stakeholders, our employees, our consumer, our clients, our investors, the social environment in terms of politicians and regulators. I've got to leverage technology to better connect with them, talk to them, and listen to them to say, how do I become more relevant?
PETE CASHMORE: Well, let's talk a little bit more specifically, I guess, about social media, as you were hinting. What do you see as the role of social media in corporations, and at PwC in particular?
ROBERT MORITZ: At PwC, it's a huge enablement to help with the conversation and the engagement of our people. I came into this role about 2 and 1/2 years ago. And I had a theory that was, I need to turn the place upside down in terms of, how are we making decisions? And in order to do that, I had to make sure I was listening carefully to what our employee base was saying.
We've got 35,000 people in the US. We've got about 165,000 people around the world. And what we wanted to do is, how do we engage them in our strategy? First, explain it to them. And then get their reaction to that. Should I tweak it? Should I change it? And then, ultimately, if I've got a couple of key points to be made or executed on, how do I engage them? Because if I can get all 35,000 people engaged, we'll be better, faster than my competition out there.
PETE CASHMORE: Is that the new leadership? Because that's almost a crowd source leadership where you're saying, let's listen to what all the employees are saying and then almost synthesize. Is that the new leadership style to say, rather than it's coming from the top down, we're going to say exactly what's right? Is that something you're seeing?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. And I would say that leadership has a responsibility to listen carefully to all of the stakeholders that make decisions. Then leadership has to make the decisions. Not necessarily that the leader has to do the consensus view. Because some of these decisions are hard. But I think you've got to be able to do that first piece before you ever get to the second piece. If you don't do that, you're never going to have a chance to actually accomplish what you want to accomplish. So engaging in terms of not only what you want to do, but why you want to do it is really important. And I think the crowd sourcing, I think the social media aspects helps enable that.
I talk to our people quite regularly. I respond to every email I get. We have webcasts that we do virtually to the entire firms, three, four times a year where my leadership's right in front of everybody. And I don't actually just talk. I actually have our second year people interview me. No holds barred. Ask any question you want.
PETE CASHMORE: Are you out there tweeting and facebooking?
ROBERT MORITZ: I'm actually doing that inside the firm, not outside the firm. But it is something we're actually thinking about outside the firm. I've got people on my leadership team that are doing that outside the firm right now as well.
PETE CASHMORE: Great. What about any kind of risk or perceived risk of having-- if your employees are out in the social media. Is there some kind of limit to the freedoms that people can have? Because we see in the corporate world sometimes there's certain information you don't want out there. Is there any kind of policy around that that you guys have?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, our policy comes back to some of our value chain in terms of what we do. So we do audit services, tax services, consulting services. The one major policy is we don't talk about client-specific information. We've got to protect that. There's a greater privacy that's necessarily that we have to adhere to.
Second is we want to make sure that there's not personal information. So again, respect the privacy issues. But I work under the assumption that everything I send out or communicate is going to go virtual anyway. So let's just operate that. Rather than fight it, accept it. And in fact, I'm happy to have my competition see what my strategy is. That's the reason we sent it out. Everybody was worried about, OK, what's the competition going to do? It's not around whose strategy is best. It's who can execute best. The only way I execute best is to have all of the people engaged, which comes back to this transparency point.
So my mindset is, get the word out there. This way you're better understood, not only what you're doing and why you're doing it.
PETE CASHMORE: Well, everything you post online is going to get out there, eventually. That's a good motto to live by.
ROBERT MORITZ: Absolutely.
PETE CASHMORE: It was great talking to you. It's time to wrap. Thanks so much, Bob Moritz at PwC. And thanks everyone for joining us. We're at Documented@Davos. We've got more interviews coming up. Hashtag is #DavosDocs on Twitter.
Documented@Davos: Robert Moritz, PwC from Michelle Laird on Vimeo.
Transcript: Bob Moritz, Chairman & Senior Partner at PwC
PETE CASHMORE: I'm Pete Cashmore, the founder and CEO at Mashable. And welcome back to Documenting Davos with Scribd and Mashable. #DavosDocs. And so we're talking to technology leaders and business leaders at Davos, the World Economic Forum, trying to figure out how technology is changing the economy, changing the world. So I'm very, very pleased to be here with Bob Moritz. You are the chairman and senior partner at PwC. So it's a privilege to speak with you today.
ROBERT MORITZ: Great. Happy to be here.
PETE CASHMORE: I think we could kick off and speak about this CEO survey. It's your 15th annual CEO survey, trying to get the temperature on what CEOs are thinking. What are they thinking about technology?
ROBERT MORITZ: Well, when you look at the CEO survey we've done in the last 15 years, we interviewed about 1,200 CEOs around the world, 60 different countries.
Most of the CEOs are actually thinking about the future in terms of how to actually enhance their own business proposition. How do they do that? They've got to reach out to their customer base. And it's through innovation locally. It's not going to be through M&A activity.
One of the survey findings was, in fact, M&A activity was going to go down this year because their confidence to do that isn't there. As a result, they are going to actually focus on their local customer base, leverage technology to do that.
How do you action leverage technology to engage your consumer base? How do you engage your workforce? And how do you think about innovation, so you can move things around the world as quickly as possible? So that's one piece.
The second piece is they've got to be cost efficient. And the only way they do that is invest. Have some R&D around technology, technology enablement, to actually pass information across the organization to better manage, make decisions day-to-day. Those two findings are key as successful CEOs think about the future and [INAUDIBLE] capture the opportunity.
PETE CASHMORE: How optimistic are they about the future?
ROBERT MORITZ: It's mixed. It depends very much on where you sit and what country you may be in. And there's a dichotomy. We talk about decoupling around emerging markets and developed markets. I would say that's nonsense. The economy actually has come together as one. The decoupling is around people's confidence for performance in a company versus their confidence in the overall economy. So what does that mean?
48% of the CEOs today believe the economy is going to decrease over the next year, compared to 15% thinks it's going to increase. However, the number of CEOs that actually believe they will have confidence, relative confidence that they can grow in the next 12 months is a high percentage. It's more like 85% that either have strong or neutral confidence.
PETE CASHMORE: Is it possible for those two things to be true?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. But you've got one leading the other. You've got a lagging indicator here. And the question becomes, how do you actually then bring together, I'll call business priorities, versus more macro policy discussions? And at some point in time, these two things catch up. It very much depends which country you're in, which sector. The technology sector is a great example.
They had the highest confidence overall in terms of what they think the future is. No surprise to this audience.
When you think about technology organizations around the world, they are thinking more so around, am I going to go hire more people? The answer from the survey was absolutely yes.
Are we going to actually have bigger impact in the social community? The answer was yes.
And now the question is, how do you get the leadership team's attention to work with policy makers to actually bring that gap together?
PETE CASHMORE: What's your level of optimism about technology's role in turning around the economy and creating jobs? I mean, I was reading a report in the Times last week about how Apple is obviously making of all its products in China. Is technology going to create more jobs, or is it going to great jobs elsewhere?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, I think it's going to help create jobs. And maybe better said, it will help in a number of different ways. One of them is actually matching or developing skill sets.
When I think about technology-- and I'll use us as an example right now-- the amount of training that we do virtually, leveraging technology, social media, ideas, et cetera, has just gone exponential for us. So what we're trying to do is get people the skill sets, just in time skill sets to do just in time training, and leveraging technology to deliver that. So this way, people are better equipped to do their job. And that allows them to be more relevant day in to day out. So they do the job they're assigned. But more importantly, give them an opportunity to do another job that's totally different. And why is that important? Because technology will give them more insight on what life may be in the US. And if they are thinking about going to India or China, they'll have a better perspective of what's that all about.
So to me, technology is a huge enabler for everything we do. We've got major stakeholders, our employees, our consumer, our clients, our investors, the social environment in terms of politicians and regulators. I've got to leverage technology to better connect with them, talk to them, and listen to them to say, how do I become more relevant?
PETE CASHMORE: Well, let's talk a little bit more specifically, I guess, about social media, as you were hinting. What do you see as the role of social media in corporations, and at PwC in particular?
ROBERT MORITZ: At PwC, it's a huge enablement to help with the conversation and the engagement of our people. I came into this role about 2 and 1/2 years ago. And I had a theory that was, I need to turn the place upside down in terms of, how are we making decisions? And in order to do that, I had to make sure I was listening carefully to what our employee base was saying.
We've got 35,000 people in the US. We've got about 165,000 people around the world. And what we wanted to do is, how do we engage them in our strategy? First, explain it to them. And then get their reaction to that. Should I tweak it? Should I change it? And then, ultimately, if I've got a couple of key points to be made or executed on, how do I engage them? Because if I can get all 35,000 people engaged, we'll be better, faster than my competition out there.
PETE CASHMORE: Is that the new leadership? Because that's almost a crowd source leadership where you're saying, let's listen to what all the employees are saying and then almost synthesize. Is that the new leadership style to say, rather than it's coming from the top down, we're going to say exactly what's right? Is that something you're seeing?
ROBERT MORITZ: I think it is. And I would say that leadership has a responsibility to listen carefully to all of the stakeholders that make decisions. Then leadership has to make the decisions. Not necessarily that the leader has to do the consensus view. Because some of these decisions are hard. But I think you've got to be able to do that first piece before you ever get to the second piece. If you don't do that, you're never going to have a chance to actually accomplish what you want to accomplish. So engaging in terms of not only what you want to do, but why you want to do it is really important. And I think the crowd sourcing, I think the social media aspects helps enable that.
I talk to our people quite regularly. I respond to every email I get. We have webcasts that we do virtually to the entire firms, three, four times a year where my leadership's right in front of everybody. And I don't actually just talk. I actually have our second year people interview me. No holds barred. Ask any question you want.
PETE CASHMORE: Are you out there tweeting and facebooking?
ROBERT MORITZ: I'm actually doing that inside the firm, not outside the firm. But it is something we're actually thinking about outside the firm. I've got people on my leadership team that are doing that outside the firm right now as well.
PETE CASHMORE: Great. What about any kind of risk or perceived risk of having-- if your employees are out in the social media. Is there some kind of limit to the freedoms that people can have? Because we see in the corporate world sometimes there's certain information you don't want out there. Is there any kind of policy around that that you guys have?
ROBERT MORITZ: Yeah, our policy comes back to some of our value chain in terms of what we do. So we do audit services, tax services, consulting services. The one major policy is we don't talk about client-specific information. We've got to protect that. There's a greater privacy that's necessarily that we have to adhere to.
Second is we want to make sure that there's not personal information. So again, respect the privacy issues. But I work under the assumption that everything I send out or communicate is going to go virtual anyway. So let's just operate that. Rather than fight it, accept it. And in fact, I'm happy to have my competition see what my strategy is. That's the reason we sent it out. Everybody was worried about, OK, what's the competition going to do? It's not around whose strategy is best. It's who can execute best. The only way I execute best is to have all of the people engaged, which comes back to this transparency point.
So my mindset is, get the word out there. This way you're better understood, not only what you're doing and why you're doing it.
PETE CASHMORE: Well, everything you post online is going to get out there, eventually. That's a good motto to live by.
ROBERT MORITZ: Absolutely.
PETE CASHMORE: It was great talking to you. It's time to wrap. Thanks so much, Bob Moritz at PwC. And thanks everyone for joining us. We're at Documented@Davos. We've got more interviews coming up. Hashtag is #DavosDocs on Twitter.
INTAFF/POL-How Israel might strike at Iran
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
27 February 2012
How Israel might strike at Iran
By Jonathan Marcus
For all the myriad challenges facing Israel over the past decade it is the potential threat from a nuclear-armed Iran that has preoccupied the country's military planners.
It is this that in large part has guided the development of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) over recent years.The IAF has purchased 125 advanced F-15I and F-16I warplanes, equipped with Israeli avionics and additional fuel tanks - tailor-made for long-range strike missions.In addition, Israel has bought specialised bunker-busting munitions; developed large, long-endurance, unmanned aircraft; and much of its training has focused on long-range missions.Israel has a track-record of pre-emptive strikes against nuclear targets in the region.
In June 1981, Israeli jets bombed the Osirak reactor near the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. More recently, in September 2007, Israeli warplanes attacked a facility in Syria that Israel, the US and many experts believed was a nuclear reactor under construction. However, a potential strike against Iran would be nothing like the attacks in Iraq and Syria. These were both against single targets, located above ground, and came literally out of the blue. An Israeli attempt to severely damage Iran's nuclear programme would have to cope with a variety of problems, including range, the multiplicity of targets, and the nature of those targets. Many of these problems are daunting in themselves, but when put together, they only compound the difficulties facing Israeli military planners.
How to get there?
For a start it is a very long way from Israel to Iran. As a rough estimate many of the potential targets are some 1,500km (930 miles) to 1,800km (1,120 miles) from Israeli bases. Israeli warplanes have to get to Iran and, equally important, get back. At least three routes are possible.
• There is the northern one where Israeli jets would fly north and then east along the borders between Turkey and Syria, and then Turkey and Iraq
• The central, more likely route would take Israeli warplanes over Iraq. With the US military gone, the Iraqi authorities are far less able to monitor and control their air space, effectively opening a door to an Israeli incursion
• The third, southern route would take Israeli jets over Saudi air space. Would the Saudis turn a blind eye to such a move given their own concerns about Iran's nuclear programme? Could this route be used by Israeli aircraft on the return leg of their journey? We just do not know
What we do know, given the range, is that Israeli aircraft will have to be topped up with fuel en route.Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, says that "air-to-air refuelling will be critical".
"Israeli aircraft," he says, "need not just to get in and out of Iranian air space; they need to have enough fuel to provide time over their targets and they need sufficient fuel to cover any contingencies that might arise during the mission."The initial tanking, Mr Barrie says, might be done over the Mediterranean or even in Israeli airspace. "One option," he notes, "would be to take off with a full bomb load and drop tanks containing additional fuel; to climb to cruising altitude and then at this point to replenish their tanks, before setting course for their targets in Iran." Israel is believed to have between eight and 10 large tankers based on the commercial Boeing 707 airframe, but experts believe that tanking capacity will prove one of the limiting factors in the scope of any operation.
What targets to hit?
The problems of range, the nature of some of the targets, and the availability of tanker aircraft will determine the nature and scope of any Israeli operation.
Iran nuclear sites
Natanz - Uranium enrichment plant
Fordo, near Qom - Uranium enrichment plant
Arak (pictured) - Heavy water plant
Isfahan - Uranium conversion plant
Parchin - Military site
Douglas Barrie, of the IISS, says that "Israeli planners will be looking for where they can do most damage with the limited number of platforms at their disposal"."They'll be asking where the main choke points are in the Iranian programme. Clearly, striking enrichment facilities makes a lot of sense from a military point of view," he adds.So the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz, south of Tehran, and Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, would almost certainly be prominent on the target list.The heavy-water production plant and heavy-water reactor under construction at Arak, in the west, might also figure, as would the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.
It is unclear whether Israel would have the capacity to strike a range of other targets associated with Iran's missile programmes and explosives testing.But this target list raises another set of problems. The enrichment facilities at Natanz are underground and the new plant at Fordo is buried deeply into the side of a mountain.
Can Israel destroy buried targets?
For an attack like this, says Douglas Barrie, you need good intelligence information. "You need to know", he says, "about the geography of the target site; its geology; the nature of the earth; and the details of the design and construction of any buried reinforced concrete chambers." "You can assume," he asserts, "that the Americans and the Israelis have been watching these sites closely over time."
“Start Quote
The target would have to be attacked from relatively close range, meaning any attacking force will have to fight its way in and out of heavily-contested airspace”.To reach buried targets you need special kinds of munitions. Deeply-buried facilities are not exclusive to the Middle East. There is a kind of race between the diggers and the weapons designers and it is one where the Americans have considerable experience.The main weapon in Israel's arsenal is the US-supplied GBU-28. This is a 5,000lb (2,268kg) laser-guided weapon with a special penetrating warhead. For an assessment of its capabilities I turned to Robert Hewson, the editor of IHS Jane's Air-Launched Weapons."The GBU-28," he told me, "is the largest penetrating weapon available for a tactical aircraft and, since it was first used by the US in 1991, it has been improved with better warheads and more accurate guidance."However, Israel's use of this weapon would be hindered by several key operational factors. Realistically, the F-15I - the only delivery platform - can carry only one bomb, so a sizeable attack force would be required - demanding tanker and other support assets that Israel does not have in large numbers."The target would have to be attacked from relatively close range, meaning any attacking force will have to fight its way in and out of heavily-contested airspace."Furthermore, he says that "very accurate targeting data is required to use a weapon like GBU-28 to best effect"."The potential for success of a GBU-28 attack is not determined by the 'book' performance of the weapon alone."Of course, the great unknown question is how capable these weapons would be against buried Iranian enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo.
Israel's 'Bunker Buster' bomb
1. The bombs are carried by Israeli F-15Is - but only one per aircraft, which would mean a large attack force for multiple attempts on numerous targets
2. Bomb is released almost vertically over the target, and guided by lasers
3. The bombs can penetrate up to 6m of concrete or about 30.5m of earth before detonating the 4,400lb warhead
Mr Hewson says that the GBU-28 is "effective against any hardened or deeply buried target - up to a point". "For a weapon like the GBU-28, velocity and angle of impact determine the penetrating effect, so the ideal drop is made from high altitude at maximum speed and hits the target at a near vertical angle," he explains."This is less easy to do against a cave or mountainside, so the weapon will be less effective - but still more effective than pretty much any other available munitions."Indeed, as Douglas Barrie notes, one weapon might be insufficient. "You could", he says, "attempt to 'dig your way in' using several weapons on the same impact area to try to get through the soil, rock and concrete. Or you could try to block access to the facility by destroying tunnel entrances."In addition," he says, "all of these facilities are power hungry, so you could attempt to destroy power supplies and any buried cabling.
"The aim would be to present the Iranians with a compound problem of blocked entrances, no power and collapsed underground chambers."
Does Israel have other military options?
So far we have discussed only the known elements of Israel's capabilities, mainly US-supplied aircraft and munitions. But Israel has a hugely advanced aerospace and electronics industry of its own and this may well have produced systems relevant for an attack against Iran. Douglas Barrie says that there is much about Israel's capabilities, especially its home-grown technology, that we do not know. "Israel's long-range Heron or Eitan drone could be used to gather an assessment of the damage done by any strikes, but perhaps could also be put to use helping to spoof air defences," he adds."Indeed, this kind of deception or cyber-operation will likely be an integral part of the mission with the aim of blinding radars or generating a false picture of what was going on."
What about Iran's air defences?
Iran's air defences are largely Russian-supplied systems familiar to Israeli pilots, though Iran also deploys the US-built Hawk system dating back to the days of the Shah.
Iran's defences
Surface-to-air missiles - Hawk system
For high altitude targets - SA-5 or S-200
For low level targets - Tor-M1/SA-15 Gauntlet
Long-range systems - S-300
Iranian Air Force - Russian-built Mig-29s, US-built F-14 Tomcats
Some of its most capable defences are Russian SA-5 missiles intended to target high-altitude threats, while it also deploys the mobile Tor-M1/SA-15 Gauntlet system optimised to engage targets at lower level.Russia has consistently refused to supply Iran with the much more capable S-300 long-range system, though the Iranians claim to have procured some batteries elsewhere.
Iran's surface-to-air missile force may be old but still represents a threat. Look at how much effort Nato and the US put into taking down Libya's similar vintage air defences last year. Israel will not have the time or the resources to embark upon this kind of protracted air campaign and thus the electronic element of any strike to suppress Iranian defences is likely to be as important as the actual dropping of weapons. Israel's small submarine force could potentially play a role here too. Douglas Barrie says that "there must be a reasonable assumption that Israel has an operational sea-launched cruise missile capability based upon their German-built Dolphin submarines". "These could be used to go after older but capable SA-5 air defence sites and big search and surveillance radars." But, he notes: "Adding a naval dimension complicates the co-ordination of any attack."Iran's air force is seen by experts as being totally outclassed by its Israeli counterpart.It has a small number of US-built F-14 Tomcat fighters and a significant number of relatively more modern Russian-supplied MiG-29s.But the potential threat from Iranian aircraft again complicates Israeli planning and any air-to-air combat might place additional strains on the limited fuel supplies carried by the attacking aircraft.
Would an Israeli strike succeed?
Most experts agree that Israel could hit multiple targets in Iran and do considerable damage to its nuclear programme. They would, however, do much less damage than a full-scale US attack using all of the resources at Washington's disposal. Even if successful, it would only delay Iran's nuclear programme”. The Israelis would be operating at the very limits of their capabilities. "If they pulled it off," says Douglas Barrie, "it would be an impressive display of power projection against a difficult and dispersed set of targets." Only a small number of air forces in the world, he notes, could mount such an operation. But, Mr Barrie stresses: "Even if successful, it would only delay Iran's nuclear programme."It is a point echoed by IHS Jane's Robert Hewson. "Israel does not have the mass of forces and will not be given the operational freedom [by Iran] required to destroy Iran's nuclear complex," he says. "If you bury enough stuff deep enough, enough of it will survive. Any Israeli attack can only damage and possibly not even slow the Iranian effort."The consequences of such an attack would be dire and global. It is impossible to see any up-side to this venture."That's a view shared for now by Israel's most important ally.
Only a few days ago, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said that an Israeli attack would not be prudent. Such a strike, he said, "would be destabilising and would not achieve their long-term objectives". However Israel's calculus is very different. Knowing all their operational limitations, might they launch such an operation anyway?
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
27 February 2012
How Israel might strike at Iran
By Jonathan Marcus
For all the myriad challenges facing Israel over the past decade it is the potential threat from a nuclear-armed Iran that has preoccupied the country's military planners.
It is this that in large part has guided the development of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) over recent years.The IAF has purchased 125 advanced F-15I and F-16I warplanes, equipped with Israeli avionics and additional fuel tanks - tailor-made for long-range strike missions.In addition, Israel has bought specialised bunker-busting munitions; developed large, long-endurance, unmanned aircraft; and much of its training has focused on long-range missions.Israel has a track-record of pre-emptive strikes against nuclear targets in the region.
In June 1981, Israeli jets bombed the Osirak reactor near the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. More recently, in September 2007, Israeli warplanes attacked a facility in Syria that Israel, the US and many experts believed was a nuclear reactor under construction. However, a potential strike against Iran would be nothing like the attacks in Iraq and Syria. These were both against single targets, located above ground, and came literally out of the blue. An Israeli attempt to severely damage Iran's nuclear programme would have to cope with a variety of problems, including range, the multiplicity of targets, and the nature of those targets. Many of these problems are daunting in themselves, but when put together, they only compound the difficulties facing Israeli military planners.
How to get there?
For a start it is a very long way from Israel to Iran. As a rough estimate many of the potential targets are some 1,500km (930 miles) to 1,800km (1,120 miles) from Israeli bases. Israeli warplanes have to get to Iran and, equally important, get back. At least three routes are possible.
• There is the northern one where Israeli jets would fly north and then east along the borders between Turkey and Syria, and then Turkey and Iraq
• The central, more likely route would take Israeli warplanes over Iraq. With the US military gone, the Iraqi authorities are far less able to monitor and control their air space, effectively opening a door to an Israeli incursion
• The third, southern route would take Israeli jets over Saudi air space. Would the Saudis turn a blind eye to such a move given their own concerns about Iran's nuclear programme? Could this route be used by Israeli aircraft on the return leg of their journey? We just do not know
What we do know, given the range, is that Israeli aircraft will have to be topped up with fuel en route.Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, says that "air-to-air refuelling will be critical".
"Israeli aircraft," he says, "need not just to get in and out of Iranian air space; they need to have enough fuel to provide time over their targets and they need sufficient fuel to cover any contingencies that might arise during the mission."The initial tanking, Mr Barrie says, might be done over the Mediterranean or even in Israeli airspace. "One option," he notes, "would be to take off with a full bomb load and drop tanks containing additional fuel; to climb to cruising altitude and then at this point to replenish their tanks, before setting course for their targets in Iran." Israel is believed to have between eight and 10 large tankers based on the commercial Boeing 707 airframe, but experts believe that tanking capacity will prove one of the limiting factors in the scope of any operation.
What targets to hit?
The problems of range, the nature of some of the targets, and the availability of tanker aircraft will determine the nature and scope of any Israeli operation.
Iran nuclear sites
Natanz - Uranium enrichment plant
Fordo, near Qom - Uranium enrichment plant
Arak (pictured) - Heavy water plant
Isfahan - Uranium conversion plant
Parchin - Military site
Douglas Barrie, of the IISS, says that "Israeli planners will be looking for where they can do most damage with the limited number of platforms at their disposal"."They'll be asking where the main choke points are in the Iranian programme. Clearly, striking enrichment facilities makes a lot of sense from a military point of view," he adds.So the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz, south of Tehran, and Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, would almost certainly be prominent on the target list.The heavy-water production plant and heavy-water reactor under construction at Arak, in the west, might also figure, as would the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.
It is unclear whether Israel would have the capacity to strike a range of other targets associated with Iran's missile programmes and explosives testing.But this target list raises another set of problems. The enrichment facilities at Natanz are underground and the new plant at Fordo is buried deeply into the side of a mountain.
Can Israel destroy buried targets?
For an attack like this, says Douglas Barrie, you need good intelligence information. "You need to know", he says, "about the geography of the target site; its geology; the nature of the earth; and the details of the design and construction of any buried reinforced concrete chambers." "You can assume," he asserts, "that the Americans and the Israelis have been watching these sites closely over time."
“Start Quote
The target would have to be attacked from relatively close range, meaning any attacking force will have to fight its way in and out of heavily-contested airspace”.To reach buried targets you need special kinds of munitions. Deeply-buried facilities are not exclusive to the Middle East. There is a kind of race between the diggers and the weapons designers and it is one where the Americans have considerable experience.The main weapon in Israel's arsenal is the US-supplied GBU-28. This is a 5,000lb (2,268kg) laser-guided weapon with a special penetrating warhead. For an assessment of its capabilities I turned to Robert Hewson, the editor of IHS Jane's Air-Launched Weapons."The GBU-28," he told me, "is the largest penetrating weapon available for a tactical aircraft and, since it was first used by the US in 1991, it has been improved with better warheads and more accurate guidance."However, Israel's use of this weapon would be hindered by several key operational factors. Realistically, the F-15I - the only delivery platform - can carry only one bomb, so a sizeable attack force would be required - demanding tanker and other support assets that Israel does not have in large numbers."The target would have to be attacked from relatively close range, meaning any attacking force will have to fight its way in and out of heavily-contested airspace."Furthermore, he says that "very accurate targeting data is required to use a weapon like GBU-28 to best effect"."The potential for success of a GBU-28 attack is not determined by the 'book' performance of the weapon alone."Of course, the great unknown question is how capable these weapons would be against buried Iranian enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo.
Israel's 'Bunker Buster' bomb
1. The bombs are carried by Israeli F-15Is - but only one per aircraft, which would mean a large attack force for multiple attempts on numerous targets
2. Bomb is released almost vertically over the target, and guided by lasers
3. The bombs can penetrate up to 6m of concrete or about 30.5m of earth before detonating the 4,400lb warhead
Mr Hewson says that the GBU-28 is "effective against any hardened or deeply buried target - up to a point". "For a weapon like the GBU-28, velocity and angle of impact determine the penetrating effect, so the ideal drop is made from high altitude at maximum speed and hits the target at a near vertical angle," he explains."This is less easy to do against a cave or mountainside, so the weapon will be less effective - but still more effective than pretty much any other available munitions."Indeed, as Douglas Barrie notes, one weapon might be insufficient. "You could", he says, "attempt to 'dig your way in' using several weapons on the same impact area to try to get through the soil, rock and concrete. Or you could try to block access to the facility by destroying tunnel entrances."In addition," he says, "all of these facilities are power hungry, so you could attempt to destroy power supplies and any buried cabling.
"The aim would be to present the Iranians with a compound problem of blocked entrances, no power and collapsed underground chambers."
Does Israel have other military options?
So far we have discussed only the known elements of Israel's capabilities, mainly US-supplied aircraft and munitions. But Israel has a hugely advanced aerospace and electronics industry of its own and this may well have produced systems relevant for an attack against Iran. Douglas Barrie says that there is much about Israel's capabilities, especially its home-grown technology, that we do not know. "Israel's long-range Heron or Eitan drone could be used to gather an assessment of the damage done by any strikes, but perhaps could also be put to use helping to spoof air defences," he adds."Indeed, this kind of deception or cyber-operation will likely be an integral part of the mission with the aim of blinding radars or generating a false picture of what was going on."
What about Iran's air defences?
Iran's air defences are largely Russian-supplied systems familiar to Israeli pilots, though Iran also deploys the US-built Hawk system dating back to the days of the Shah.
Iran's defences
Surface-to-air missiles - Hawk system
For high altitude targets - SA-5 or S-200
For low level targets - Tor-M1/SA-15 Gauntlet
Long-range systems - S-300
Iranian Air Force - Russian-built Mig-29s, US-built F-14 Tomcats
Some of its most capable defences are Russian SA-5 missiles intended to target high-altitude threats, while it also deploys the mobile Tor-M1/SA-15 Gauntlet system optimised to engage targets at lower level.Russia has consistently refused to supply Iran with the much more capable S-300 long-range system, though the Iranians claim to have procured some batteries elsewhere.
Iran's surface-to-air missile force may be old but still represents a threat. Look at how much effort Nato and the US put into taking down Libya's similar vintage air defences last year. Israel will not have the time or the resources to embark upon this kind of protracted air campaign and thus the electronic element of any strike to suppress Iranian defences is likely to be as important as the actual dropping of weapons. Israel's small submarine force could potentially play a role here too. Douglas Barrie says that "there must be a reasonable assumption that Israel has an operational sea-launched cruise missile capability based upon their German-built Dolphin submarines". "These could be used to go after older but capable SA-5 air defence sites and big search and surveillance radars." But, he notes: "Adding a naval dimension complicates the co-ordination of any attack."Iran's air force is seen by experts as being totally outclassed by its Israeli counterpart.It has a small number of US-built F-14 Tomcat fighters and a significant number of relatively more modern Russian-supplied MiG-29s.But the potential threat from Iranian aircraft again complicates Israeli planning and any air-to-air combat might place additional strains on the limited fuel supplies carried by the attacking aircraft.
Would an Israeli strike succeed?
Most experts agree that Israel could hit multiple targets in Iran and do considerable damage to its nuclear programme. They would, however, do much less damage than a full-scale US attack using all of the resources at Washington's disposal. Even if successful, it would only delay Iran's nuclear programme”. The Israelis would be operating at the very limits of their capabilities. "If they pulled it off," says Douglas Barrie, "it would be an impressive display of power projection against a difficult and dispersed set of targets." Only a small number of air forces in the world, he notes, could mount such an operation. But, Mr Barrie stresses: "Even if successful, it would only delay Iran's nuclear programme."It is a point echoed by IHS Jane's Robert Hewson. "Israel does not have the mass of forces and will not be given the operational freedom [by Iran] required to destroy Iran's nuclear complex," he says. "If you bury enough stuff deep enough, enough of it will survive. Any Israeli attack can only damage and possibly not even slow the Iranian effort."The consequences of such an attack would be dire and global. It is impossible to see any up-side to this venture."That's a view shared for now by Israel's most important ally.
Only a few days ago, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, said that an Israeli attack would not be prudent. Such a strike, he said, "would be destabilising and would not achieve their long-term objectives". However Israel's calculus is very different. Knowing all their operational limitations, might they launch such an operation anyway?
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
TED Talks-Chris Bliss: Comedy is translation
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript: Comedy is translation
Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose. And whether it's the opening line from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or the fantastical stream of consciousness in "Autumn of the Patriarch," where the words rush by, page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle, reading Márquez is a visceral experience. Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation.
Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world. And as great as these books were, you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect. But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment.
So when I heard that the translator, Gregory Rabassa, had written his own book on the subject, I couldn't wait to read it. It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, "If This Be Treason." And it's a charming read. It's highly recommended for anyone who's interested in the translator's art. But the reason that I mention it is that early on, Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight: "Every act of communication is an act of translation."
Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light. Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion. Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else. So no ego problems. It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics -- and I mean littered with them -- once said to me, "Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God. I don't need a husband who wants to be."
(Laughter)
Anyway, as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was, it was that second part, being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining, where the futility of my quest really set in. Time after time, whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient, it had the opposite effect. Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, "Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you," it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad.
Finally, after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike, I finally got it, a new personal truth all my own, that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining, I'd better find a different way of going about it. And that's when I discovered comedy.
Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language. If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum, I'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies. And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel. What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives -- comedy as the philosopher's stone. It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world. Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation. That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change. Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest. Now I'm big on speaking to people's self-interest because we're all wired for that. It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level. And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond our repsonsibility to the rest of the world.
Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire, I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity. Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating. Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today. And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers. They were lifted verbatim from Palin's own remarks. (Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word. Now that's honesty and integrity, and it's also why Fey's performances left such a lasting impression.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit. Now it's not often that I'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh, but it's really hard to argue with that punchline. The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity. And guess what? That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career.
Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most -- (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy. Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows.
(Applause)
Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts -- not because his intent is to inform. It's not. His intent is to be funny. It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true. And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media. Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection.
A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here. And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest -- race, religion, politics, sexuality -- only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.
Now let me give you an example from my act. I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda? Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family. (Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life. (Laughter) Have at it you radical bastards. The field is yours.
(Laughter)
And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption? Why is this remotely controversial? If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption. (Laughter) You have given birth to an abomination. Remove it from your household. Now by taking the biblical epithet "abomination" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity.
Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve. Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy. There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline. Bill Hicks -- and if you don't know his work, you should really Google him -- Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground, where finally the other kid says to him, "Huh? Well my dad can beat up your dad," to which Hicks replies, "Really? How soon?" (Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words. (Laughter) Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who's speaking them.
And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral. People can't wait to pass along that new great joke. And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world. Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV. Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that. And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts -- something about the Ignited Negro College Fund. Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue. And my guess here -- and I have no research on this -- is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession. First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes.
(Laughter)
But it's when you put all of these elements together -- when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation. Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy. I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009. And Joel was explaining to me that, because USA Today was one of America's four papers of record, it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference, which meant that, if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday, the opening day of the conference, it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers.
So we started talking about climate change. And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point. Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists. Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire. And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain. Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science.
(Laughter)
But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science. So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this. Cartoon: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" (Laughter) You've got to love that idea. (Applause) How about that? How about we create a better world for nothing? Not for God, not for country, not for profit -- just as a basic metric for global decision-making.
And this cartoon hit the bull's eye. Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on. And not long after that, he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year. And it didn't stop there. To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe. And earlier this year, he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world. (Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words.
So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny, because you might just find the question that you've been looking for.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript: Comedy is translation
Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers, for his storytelling, but even more, I think, for the beauty and precision of his prose. And whether it's the opening line from "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or the fantastical stream of consciousness in "Autumn of the Patriarch," where the words rush by, page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle, reading Márquez is a visceral experience. Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable, vivid journey in translation.
Now I was a comparative literature major in college, which is like an English major, only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months, we got to read great literature in translation from around the world. And as great as these books were, you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect. But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator's versions as being better than his own, which is an astonishing compliment.
So when I heard that the translator, Gregory Rabassa, had written his own book on the subject, I couldn't wait to read it. It's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward, "If This Be Treason." And it's a charming read. It's highly recommended for anyone who's interested in the translator's art. But the reason that I mention it is that early on, Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight: "Every act of communication is an act of translation."
Now maybe that's been obvious to all of you for a long time, but for me, as often as I'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis, I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light. Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things, communication has been my central passion. Even as a child, I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else. So no ego problems. It's funny, my wife, Daisy, whose family is littered with schizophrenics -- and I mean littered with them -- once said to me, "Chris, I already have a brother who thinks he's God. I don't need a husband who wants to be."
(Laughter)
Anyway, as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was, it was that second part, being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining, where the futility of my quest really set in. Time after time, whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient, it had the opposite effect. Interestingly, when your opening line of communication is, "Hey, listen up, because I'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you," it's amazing how quickly you'll discover both ice and the firing squad.
Finally, after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike, I finally got it, a new personal truth all my own, that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining, I'd better find a different way of going about it. And that's when I discovered comedy.
Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language. If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum, I'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies. And I'm not talking about all comedy here, because, clearly, there's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel. What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives -- comedy as the philosopher's stone. It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world. Because that's what I take from the theme of this conference: Gained in Translation. That it's about communication that doesn't just produce greater understanding within the individual, but leads to real change. Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest. Now I'm big on speaking to people's self-interest because we're all wired for that. It's part of our survival package, and that's why it's become so important for us, and that's why we're always listening at that level. And also because that's where, in terms of our own self-interest, we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond our repsonsibility to the rest of the world.
Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire, I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity. Now if you think back on Tina Fey's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, they were devastating. Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate's fundamental lack of seriousness, cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today. And the key detail of this is that Fey's scripts weren't written by her and they weren't written by the SNL writers. They were lifted verbatim from Palin's own remarks. (Laughter) Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word. Now that's honesty and integrity, and it's also why Fey's performances left such a lasting impression.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he'd made a direct hit. Now it's not often that I'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh, but it's really hard to argue with that punchline. The description perfectly captured Edwards' personal vanity. And guess what? That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career.
Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most -- (Applause) (Laughter) it's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy. Survey after survey, from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows.
(Applause)
Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart's viewers, the larger point remains that Stewart's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts -- not because his intent is to inform. It's not. His intent is to be funny. It just so happens that Stewart's brand of funny doesn't work unless the facts are true. And the result is great comedy that's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media. Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection.
A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here and then all of a sudden you're transported over here. And there's this mental delight that's followed by the physical response of laughter, which, not coincidentally, releases endorphins in the brain. And just like that, you've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses. This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic, all of the flight-or-fight responses, operate. Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin, which throws our walls up sky-high. And the comedy comes along, dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest -- race, religion, politics, sexuality -- only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin, we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows, revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view.
Now let me give you an example from my act. I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda, which starts off by asking, how radical is the gay agenda? Because from what I can tell, the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military, get married and start a family. (Laughter) Three things I've tried to avoid my entire life. (Laughter) Have at it you radical bastards. The field is yours.
(Laughter)
And that's followed by these lines about gay adoption: What is the problem with gay adoption? Why is this remotely controversial? If you have a baby and you think that baby's gay, you should be allowed to put it up for adoption. (Laughter) You have given birth to an abomination. Remove it from your household. Now by taking the biblical epithet "abomination" and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence, a baby, this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity, through their laughter, to question its validity.
Misdirection isn't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve. Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy. There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline. Bill Hicks -- and if you don't know his work, you should really Google him -- Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground, where finally the other kid says to him, "Huh? Well my dad can beat up your dad," to which Hicks replies, "Really? How soon?" (Laughter) That's an entire childhood in three words. (Laughter) Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who's speaking them.
And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it's inherently viral. People can't wait to pass along that new great joke. And this isn't some new phenomenon of our wired world. Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet, social media, even cable TV. Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident, I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that. And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts -- something about the Ignited Negro College Fund. Clearly, it didn't come out of a Tonight Show monologue. And my guess here -- and I have no research on this -- is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it, you'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession. First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes.
(Laughter)
But it's when you put all of these elements together -- when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that's crafted from honesty and integrity, it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation. Now I have a close friend, Joel Pett, who's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy. I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009. And Joel was explaining to me that, because USA Today was one of America's four papers of record, it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference, which meant that, if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday, the opening day of the conference, it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers.
So we started talking about climate change. And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing, which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn't, which, to both of us, seems somewhat intentionally off point. Because first of all, there's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists. Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, proclaiming over and over that the science wasn't complete at the same time that 250 out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire. And Perry's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain. Personally, I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science.
(Laughter)
But back in 2009, the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science. So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this. Cartoon: "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" (Laughter) You've got to love that idea. (Applause) How about that? How about we create a better world for nothing? Not for God, not for country, not for profit -- just as a basic metric for global decision-making.
And this cartoon hit the bull's eye. Shortly after the conference was over, Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on. And not long after that, he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year. And it didn't stop there. To date, Joel's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups, in the United States, Canada and Europe. And earlier this year, he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world. (Applause) That is a lot of punch for 14 words.
So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny, because you might just find the question that you've been looking for.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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