The scene: a secret location deep inside a global broadcaster’s HQ. Outside the windowless room, the sky is dark and amid the howling wind the voice of Karren Brady can be heard. ‘It is an outrage’, she says. ‘They must go.’
Inside the skyless room, a lawyer, a chief executive and an ashen-faced football pundit are gathered. As the impassioned voice of Brady permeates the walls of their secret room, they groan.
Chief Executive: Is there nothing we can do? After all, The Sun didn’t even mention the story.
Lawyer: I am afraid The Sun’s failure to mention the dastardly, but highly respected, duo’s evident sexism is of no avail. They must go, as Ms Brady says.
Ashen-faced football pundit: But why should we listen to her? Let’s face it, she doesn’t even understand the offside rule.
Lawyer: I’m not sure that’s relevant. This is an issue of sexual politics, equality and gender in the early 21st century.
Ashen-faced football pundit: But in my profession, if you don’t understand the offside rule, you’re rubbish. Simple. Why can’t she be sacked instead of me?
Chief Executive: He has a point, you know. I’d wager that if we asked Ms Brady to explain the offside rule her entire business empire would collapse.
Ashen-faced football pundit: Exactly.
Lawyer: That’s as maybe, but in strictly causal terms, I am not convinced that her failure to comprehend that when an attacker receives the ball beyond the last defender, he is offside, would be the reason for said business collapse.
Ashen-faced pundit: Idiot! That’s the kind of definition of offside that a woman would come up with.
Chief Executive: He’s right, you know. It’s more complicated than that.
Lawyer: Go on, explain it then.
Chief Executive: It all depends on whether the attacker is active or not.
Ashen-faced football pundit: And you can’t expect a woman to understand that. Or maybe you can, eh boys?!
All fall about laughing but their mirth is interrupted by the arrival of Sir Alan Sugar.
Sir Alan Sugar (for it is he): Sexism has no place in the British workplace. You’re all fired.
Chief Executive: I was going to resign anyway. After all, when sexism becomes the talking point, the offside rule means nothing.
Lawyer: I agree. We are dinosaurs. It is time for new blood.
Ashen-faced football pundit: Fancy a pint, boys? There’s a game on tonight and I’ve heard the lino’s a looker.
Exeunt all, cackling all the way to the pub.
In the pub, mid cackle, the gents are hurriedly approached by Ron Atkinson. The mood darkens quickly. Before Ron has the opportunity to open his mouth, all three stand up, lawyer slaps Ron across the mouth;
Ashen-faced pundit: Please leave our company now………….racist pig!
Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.
If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.
In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.
What, then, should Barton do? Should he:
(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or
(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and
(c) Add an apology to said statement, or
(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.
The answer is not (d).
The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.
A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.
But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:
Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.
Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index. But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.
We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.
The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.
Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.
Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.
Is there a geek inside all of us?
Excellent Nike ad
Memo to would-be hacks: good writing is no longer a tool of your trade
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
This bank is so well designed that many of its staff never go home (allegedly)
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
If you become a star, you don’t change – everyone else does. Kirk Douglas, 1916 – present, American actor.