Page 191 - The Voice of Authority

Make Your Motto:
“Who Else Needs to Know?”

Clients cancel orders. Suppliers change delivery dates.
Partners change their capabilities. Salespeople leave the
company. Accounting miscalculates invoices. Products get
damaged in shipment. Things happen. And when they do,
those “things” typically affect somebody else’s paperwork,
due date, delivery time, schedule, costs, budget, priority,
work assignment, or staffing.
Make it a motto to ask “Who else needs to know,” and
a practice to notify all appropriate people right away when
changes occur.

Publicize Your Point: Blog, Blast, or Blab

If you have kids, you understand that saying things once
doesn’t always do the trick. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Capture
your message in a memorable slogan so that people pass it
on—as they do a favorite movie or book title.
Also, make the media work for you: videoconferencing,
Webcasts, print media, press releases, intranet postings,
Web sites, voice-mail blasts, blogs, banners in the cafete-
ria, closed-circuit TV in the lobby, signs in the parking lot.
Just get the word out. Of course, with people talking, blog-
ging, and blasting, you’ll expect to hear both agreement
and disagreement with what’s going on inside your orga-
nization. That’s good.
Regardless of disagreement, Microsoft insists that blog-
ging is one of the best things they’ve ever done to get their
message out. Lenn Pryor, Microsoft’s former “director of
platform evangelism” tells of his earlier irrational fear of
flying. A United Airlines pilot told him to tune in to Chan-
nel 9 from his plane seat, where he could listen in to the pi-

Is It Circular? 179