Judette Coward-Puhglisi

Michael Jackson is dead!

June 25 at 5:51pm ·  

Six seconds later I corrected my facebook post

 Judette Coward-Puglisi at 5:57pm June 25

I should have said Twitter reports are announcing that he has died. According to the streams its cardiac arrest. Have not seen major news organisation announce his death.

Maria C. Mohammed at 5:57pm June 25

TMZ is saying he is dead

 Judette Coward-Puglisi at 6:02pm June 25

Don't find TMZ credible though. Let's wait and see. We know he was rushed to hospital. Know paramedics state a cardiac attack.

That's an actual conversation that happened  in real time  between my friend, Maria Mohammed and I,  moments after the first streams  from Twitter had  the words 'Michael Jackson' as  a trending topic. 

For those  of you not yet in  Twitterverse, when you're a trending topic it means that the world is buzzing with something new about you. When the buzz on Michael Jackson (MJ)  started, I thought  it was just another concert announcement, turns out it was so much more. 

The  the King of Pop was gone.

Maybe it was my   journalism  training  (to second source information and make sure your sources are accurate )   but TMZ ‘s  online  story was   not credible  enough for me and I waited for CNN and BBC to make the confirmation before reposting the news of  Jackson’s death on my facebook page.

Time magazine had a brilliant article today on why my initial instinct was  the correct one.  According to the article:  (and I hope you’ve clicked the link to read it)...

“Jackson's death was  the first of its kind to occur in the new media world, where news can come from anywhere and gets passed around the Web on Twitter feeds and Facebook updates and story comments with millions of individuals volunteering their particular insight or spin or emotion. Instead of a few media monoliths speaking for us all, Jackson's fans, detractors and impartial observers all spoke for themselves. This story should have provided a blueprint for how new media has overthrown old. But what it actually did was shine a white hot spotlight on the myths of the current media landscape.”

I agree.

A week after Jackson's death, he may  still  the No. 1 and  top trending topics on Twitter but it was to MTV  that I turned when I wanted to get the complete retrospective of his musical genius. Not Twitter. 

 And facebook may have strained under the weight of the volume of searches  on the very  evening of the  MJ announcement but it was NBC, trustworthy and familiar like an old friend  who scored big with the most comprehensive reports of MJ’s  life and times. And then when  actor Jeff Goldblum became a trending  topic on Twitter and I feared  the worse, it was CNN that I watched to  for reassurance that he too had not passed.

Time magazine  surmised it the best. 

"What the story of Jackson's demise might have actually proved is that each type of media —new, social, mainstream — has a part in the news ecosystem and one does not replace the other. The new media provides the speed, the social media provides the emotion, the mainstream media provides the heft. And Goldblum, well, he brings the weird." 

It is low tide.  A huge white seagull glides over the blue island waters and settles down gently, taking up his post at the mouth of the bay. Standing guard on his thin elegant legs, he picks off the trespassers who naively swim too close to the shore. When he is full and the water begins to intrude again he takes off, a large flap of wings arcing over the bay. 

Every day since I've arrived in Barbados the great bird has followed this pattern, like clockwork -and yet nothing like clockwork. This was my first real vacation in four years.  But like any good machine I was programmed to behave in a particular way.  In my  bright yellow  suitcase I had stuffed my laptop and an Alice Walker novel. On my schedule were days to be spent lounging under the sun's rays, but also penciled in were appointments with prospective clients. On my balcony I ate frighteningly fattening breadfruit chips as I scoured over notes for my meetings. I had unconsciously turned my first real vacation into a stiff of a working one.

How unlike the seagull I was, it belonging to a world of creatures who followed a natural course; I belonging to a world of creatures who have fractured continuity into quarter hours and micro seconds.

The seagull reminded me how  much being an entrepreneur had taken away from my ability to relax.  For four years my life had been wrapped around a certifiable, managed event: business building. There was certainly no cosmic timing or internal logic to that. Business meeting, receivables, employee issues, billings, have nothing  in common with the shifts worked by the seagull. The contrast was jarring.

In that moment of observing the seagull, really observing, I closed the cover of my laptop and made a different resolve. I canceled my appointments, I finished my Alice Walker novel, sipped on Pina Coladas. My vacation became a vacation again. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired -and when I was not ,- I made friends with Bajans in the bar.  I did a great deal of the things we call nothing. I hadn't done it in four years.

The most basic of  human rhythms can disappear in our workday lives , the way I suppose the sounds of birds disappears in a city. Another columnist once gave a pedestrian, probably accurate explanation. "From the time we are small," she says, " we tend to wake up with alarms and work to someone else's schedule. We have lunch when its lunchtime we go to bed at bedtime. Sunrise and sunset are less relevant to our lives than 8 to 4 and 9 to 5.  Most of us work for fifty weeks a year in order to have two to ourselves. There is very little room on shopping lists and weekly calendars for being natural. We need literally to vacate the premises of our ordinary life." 

It has to be something of a miracle that given the time, this period of our global history that any of us can find the time reconnect, to go in and out of our own nature. But in the midst of numbers crunching and keeping up with the latest trends, there is a centre waiting to be rediscovered and it can be done only when the body is at rest. That may be what a real vacation is all about. Yet I don't know if I can take the simplicity and the rhythms of nothingness back home. Like fragile sea shells, layered in a glass jar, it does not travel well. By the time I get from aircraft to office the subtlety will have been jarred if only by the sharp ring of the telephone and a client's demand.

But in my list making, schedule arranging, clock abiding life, I can retreat -at least in memory-to the image of a seagull on a bay.

It seems that Fortune 100 CEO’s just aren’t into social media. New research out today from the Web site UBERCEO has found that only two of those CEOs have Twitter accounts and none write blogs. While Berkshire Hathaway CEO,Warren Buffett now has more than 8,000 Twitter followers on his Twitter account, he only posted one tweet on February 20. Procter & Gamble CEO Alan Lafley now has 55 followers on his Twitter account but no updates.

As for LinkedIn, 13 CEOs have profiles but only three have more than 10 connections. The most connected CEOs on LinkedIn are Michael Dell with more than 500 connections, Gregory Spierkel at Ingram Micro with 213 connections and John Chambers at Cisco with 82 connections.

There are about 19 CEOs on Facebook but those who lead the pack don’t have very many friends. Kenneth Lewis at Bank of America has 13 friends, John Strumpf at Wells Fargo has 12 friends and Vikram Pandit at Citigroup has only 8 friends. And, Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, doesn’t have any Facebook friends.

The research was conducted between May 29 and June 16 and UBERCEO tried to weed out fake Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts in its analysis but notes that some might have been unintentionally counted.

So why do so few CEOs engage in social media?

While regulations affect how and when CEOs communicate, I suspect the real reason is a lack of time. This post from the blog Museum 2.0 details the time required to engage in social media and estimates that it takes 1-5 hours per week to be a participant using Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites. But, starting a blog or podcast is a much bigger time investment of about 5 to 10 hours per week. This may explain why none of the Fortune 100 CEOs blog.

Still, UBERCEO makes the point – and rightly so – that since CEOs aren’t communicating in the same way as their employees, partners, executives and customers that it makes them seem distant, disinterested and disengaged. At the very least, CEOs could delegate the task of managing their social media accounts. It’s not ideal, but at least it would help keep people from hijacking their identities online.

# Article re-blogged from Business Week.

Used to be that we worked for corporations where there was plenty of time. Time to complete tasks. Time to eat lunch. Time to spend moments with colleagues in the rumour mill next to the water cooler. The gossip, the business, the game took place in our own backyards and we were happy for it to be so. 

But things changed. 

The game no longer occurs on familiar turf. Instead, its created  in a globally linked village, in virtual time,  in the virtual world. That document you’re working on was needed in marketing, oops, since yesterday. The boss wanted your  proposal on his desk  two seconds ago. Deals are now brokered  only in real time.  The economy is knowledge based. And the twentieth century corporate myth that big is good is no longer valid. 

Enter then the corporation that is set up to compete in this evolving world and suddenly the first thing that disappears is time. 

There now never seems to be enough of it. People want instant information and instant gratification. Can’t provide it? Can’t arouse the market’s interests?  Can’t answer their questions now?  Then the consumer, the supplier, the people will simply switch to someone else. 

Welcome to the microwave, remote controlled society.

In this scenario, corporations have little option but to shrink to compete.  They have to become leaner, flatter, and smaller. The casualty of all this though is the human resource, not only those who are shown unceremoniously to the bread line but also the ones that are left behind. For them the workload increases ten-fold  and adjustments are mandatory because it is common knowledge that there are thousands more  looking for work.

Time becomes the new religion.  Not there to be relished, cherished and celebrated for its very existence.  What used to take  four months, now takes  four weeks, then four days, and then four minutes and ultimately four seconds. Multi tasking is the buzzword for success. The typical employee works on project A, stops it before it is completed to brainstorm with someone from finance to get statistics for project B even as the boss storms into the  office demanding the proposal for project C. 

Multi tasking means doing it all; all at once, all the time. It is deemed the core competence of the 21^st.Century employee.

But is it really? 

Or is it just another overrated skill? Designed by corporations pinching on their human resource?  This may be a perennial debate but I just met someone who goes counter to this norm. 

This particular person has done her soul searching, she knows that she is better than anyone else at doing her job, and is aware of the way her competence adds value to the firm. Super smart and super confident she insists on performing singular tasks, completing them before moving onto another. She recognises that much of her projects are not isolated and is willing to perform the tasks of getting information and working with a variety of sources, but only on one project at a time

While working on several things at once may be a natural response to the world in which we find ourselves, I doubt it is the only answer, if it was, the ultimate winners would be people that were all stressed out, over wired,  with no work/life balance and no job satisfaction. 

Instead of multi-tasking how about uni-tasking? 

That is, devoting the time and energy to completing a job and savouring the feeling of having done it well before moving on to something else. Instead of working harder how about just working smarter? Doing what you are really good at 100 times better than anyone else. 

It may be one of those unique moments where the end perfectly justifies the means.

Think for a minute. 

How much time do you really spend in silence, just thinking?  I am not talking about the kind of reflecting  that you do on your drive to work, in the shower or even on your 1-mile afternoon jog. I am referring  to the kind of reflection that you do on a day’s retreat, ensconced in a space where there is silence. 

You are not listening to music, you are not reading Fortune 500, you are not watching the news, you are not twittering. You are simply thinking.

How much time do you spend doing that? 

A quick survey of my friends indicate that too few do.  It’s easy to understand why. Who has the time?  In our treadmill society where everyone (family, friends, employees) wants their needs taken care of at the same time, it seems that modern day thinking demands that we be always be in motion. The quiet, reflective kind of pondering appears to be a luxury for which few of us  have the coins.

But is it really? Thinking is the way we actively develop new ideas, invent strategy and get creative. It’s  one of the hardest things for people to do, let alone do well. 

Recently a friend who owned  a small  technology firm told me that he was going to close up  shop and take a sabbatical. I was green with envy. Not many of us are willing and able to make such a complete mental shift. But it was only after speaking with him  that I realised the process of thinking requires a kind  of discipline that allows you to see that  it’s real value lies in asking yourself questions relevant to your life  and then considering the range of possible answers. 

“I had been thinking of  making a switch for a year,” my friend said, “every month I took half-day to see how it would work, the impact  it would create.   and to examine my  options.”

My friend never found easy answers.

“At first, most of my questions led to other questions, but I trusted the process .”

Turns out that generating definitive, single-pointed answers is the result of only one kind of thinking. The second, perhaps more powerful kind of reflection,  as in the case of my friend, leads to less answers and more, you guessed it,  questions. And that’s okay. 

To help his process my friend gave himself  a timeframe.  He accepted the answers at the end of a 12 month process.  Another way to come to a conclusion, I suppose,  is  to ponder upon something until your original question yields no further questions. In my case, I accept an answer only when it profoundly illuminates my original question. It’s must be a true light bulb moment.

I am still a big believer in my Ideas Jam Day, even after 11 years in business.  On that day I switch off my cell,  I close off all the external noise  and I think. Who do I want to be? What would I like to have? What should I share more of? How can I be more effective? What is the bigger meaning  to my life?

These are my questions.  I hope they get you thinking.

It’s okay to pick up the phone.

Sometime ago I found  online  a gorgeous  pair of high heeled spectator pumps but before I  clicked the purchase button I wanted details about  the colours  that  were available.

Turns out that the site had  all kinds of information  except what I wanted. The cost of the shoes was there, so too information on the height of the heel  and the discount I could get if  I  purchased  another  pair as a gift. 

But no information on the colours was available.  And then, as if to compound my frustration, when I sent off an email inquiry the  site promised to respond to me in 3 working days. I suppose that had  I called the store’s  number  which was splashed across the site, it  would have taken me  3 minutes to get the information I wanted.

I remember this  online shopping fiasco only because last week a colleague mentioned that  she wanted to make a fast decision about whether to proceed with organising  an event  but  needed the consent of  her committee members.  

“ I sent an email,” she said, “ but no one responded.”

Nowadays sending an email no longer  guarantees that  you’re going to get the quickest response. Here’s what you’re doing when you send one.  

You assume that everyone has a blackberry, is connected to the internet the same time as you are  or has the time or inclination  to open the email, digest the information  and respond.

That’s a tall order. 

Sometimes, as in my experience with the shoes, or in my colleague’s need for a quick time decision, high tech isn’t always the most efficient.  The dazzle and convenience of it sometimes  blinds us to the dowdy but perhaps speedier solutions. 

So tell me again, why don’t you just pick up the phone?

I have  a picture of my friend Brian fishing on the lakes of New Hampshire in New England and each time I have to  write a business proposal I take it out of my photo album, pinch out the creases and place it on my desk. 

It serves as inspiration.

I remember the summer of my contentment when  the photograph was taken, and my wonder at how Brian could rake in  fish after fish while my line remained inert and lifeless. "It's all in the attitude," he laughed rolling  in another whopper of a salmon. 

That was the Kodak moment I captured. And that is the moment I have framed on my desk. I defer to that picture because I think that attitude  is also the secret of  writing a winning business proposal. Like fishing, I suppose it requires a bit of hope and a whole lot of unyielding  faith  in the enterprise; that the proposal you spend hours hammering out will be as enticing for the client as any good bait.

That's not always the case and I learnt this lesson the hard way. In the early days, I used to chase every piece of business that came my way. I was selective-how do I say this tactfully- like a dog in heat. For days after I sent out a proposal I would stew in anticipation. Hopeful, I would wait for the call back sometimes even jumping the broom and calling the client  myself but that was until  two earthquakes hit my psyche all within the same month. 

At the time a prospective client called requesting a proposal for a PR strategy. It was a large company with a successful product and a stale image. I was overjoyed at the prospect of winning this potentially lucrative contract.  Naively -okay I confess stupidly,- I  responded by writing a detailed account of my ideas.  15 hours and 4 boxes of mixed Chinese chicken later, I had conceptualized  what I  instinctively knew was an exciting and  targeted PR proposal.  The client called the following week, and I was told that the  proposal they had wanted asap  was being placed on hold. "The budget is tight now, but we'll give you a call when we're ready."  Three weeks later the very same company started a campaign that bore a horrific twin-like resemblance to my own and I knew I had been taken for the worst kind of ride. The incident shattered  the last bastion of my innocence.

It is never easy to take the long view of things, especially  in a culture of 10-second sound bites and  instant messaging service. But in  a process as slow and complex as growing my  own business, I know that the ability to  learn from my mistakes would always have to be my anchor.

Writing winning proposals will forever be an important part of acquiring new  business and retaining old clients. I understand its importance: a good proposal sets apart from my competition, it  increases my hit rate on getting the businesses I want, it allows the name of my business to get out there, and it position me as a consultant of choice. 

But I no longer believe that the proposals I write should be  a detailed blueprint that contains all my ideas, but something more like an artist's sketch, a  document that is sufficient to sell the idea -the concept of what I am  proposing. 

Before I start writing,  I try to  gather information about the clients needs, expectations and  problems. Then I write briefly the project's objective statement, developing  in turn the project's concept, time line, evaluation plan, and  budget. Most importantly in all my proposals I let my client know  that I understand what they are trying to achieve. Armed with the proposal I develop the attitude-or maybe it is in  writing the proposal  that the attitude comes-, and this is my favourite 'go get 'em' line; "we have the solution to your problems, our proposal demonstrates this, now can we do business?" 

Thankfully, now, the answer is invariably yes!

State of Play is a wonderful political thriller made more dramatic by the superb work of Australian actor, Russell Crowe, who plays  a long-haired, overweight, whiskey loving  reporter investigating the murder of  a young boy.  

What's great about this movie is that it is set in the office of a big city newspaper and it rolls out the  tensions that  are currently  being played out in newspapers across the globe between the editor and reporter,  the journalist  and blogger.  As a newspaper junkie, these interesting dichotomies are  reasons enough to go see this incredible movie.

In the subplot the tense relationship between bloggers and traditional journalists  is depicted. 

Young bloggers work in the same building but the context is  entirely different.   The traditional newsroom is overcrowded, dirty and old.  The reporters use computers that look like they been through several wars.  Crowe's character has an  office for instance that looks exactly like the  one my father  occupied over  his  five decades in the media.   It is stacked with paper, pin-ups of important but ancient stories and dusty, thumb-marked books that are never to be thrown away.

Rachel McAdams, is Crowe's nemesis. She's from new media and as if to make the contrast more startling  between herself and Crowe, the director makes her character crisp,  fresh, young. Her work area is certainly more modern than Crowe’s.  At first, when Adams asks Crowe for help, he resists. They are wary of each other, but in the end work together on a story of Watergate proportions. 

Their work ends up in print - before it makes it online.  

"When people read this story, they should have newsprint on their hands," explains McAdams' character.

I won't give much more of the plot away but there are some important  lessons  about journalism  that can be gleaned from what is clearly the best newspaper- themed movie to hit the screens in a very long time.

Investigative reporting is the bane of good newspapers: The movie's depiction of journalists as skeptical, resolute, and not easily duped was amazing. Stories and facts are checked and rechecked and then checked again.  That's a good lesson for anyone trying to spread information in our evolving media world. Traditional journalists maintain that the reason why  bloggers can never replace them is because  blogs come with hidden agendas and  facts are rarely ever second sourced. Editors, they claim, raise the right questions, launder  issues through the legal washing machine and send stories back  to be cross referenced. In the State of Play when the Crowe’s sources reveal a connection deeper than the murder of a young thief, his editor wants to assign him another experienced journalist to work on the story. The blogger is not experienced enough. The tactic  is later discarded but it still points scrooge like fingers to this question:  are bloggers resourced enough to do the kind of stoic detective grunge work  that made Woodward and Bernstein so respected? This  is a  genuine and  important question. In State of Play we have reason to believe that the answer is yes. But this is  still  a movie and I don’t think this is quite true ( as yet) in the real world.  

Can the divide be bridged?: At the end of the movie when  Crowe and Adams  exit the final scene there are several cutaways of how newspapers get printed and then distributed. The production is fascinating but you can't help but think it is a process whose time has come. State of Play movie paints a clear print versus online scenario, which in the end works because the print wins. This is not what's happening in the real world though.  Newspapers are folding by the dozens and the only way to stop the hemorrhage  is to have  more integration between the online and print world. One way to do so is for  journalists -print and online-  to see themselves as one.  Every reporter should be an online journalist, equipped  with the knowledge of how to upload stories, write headlines for search engine optimisation and work in online ecosystems. Bloggers ought to take a page or two of experience from traditional reporters in the areas of cultivating sources,  and investigating stories. What I am really trying to get at is there shouldn't be print people and online folks in one news operation. Each one should have one name, journalist. Editors have to begin to cultivate the mutual cordiality.

What to do before the real convergence?  In the movie there is an excellent  background story of the paper’s new owners trying to stop its  financial collapse.  They want the controversy and the  editor (the wonderful and ageless  Helen Mirren)  is under pressure to deliver  sensational news that will sell. While this part of the story remains obscure and only a secondary sub plot, in the  real world of journalism this issue is  on the front burner. Editors are under pressure to deliver and if they don’t then the fear of  job loss and business closure is real. But perhaps the real fear is that  editors  are now forced to spend so  much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that they aren’t able to devote the time  needed to  invent a new prototype that works better for everyone. We see that is Mirren’s worry in the movie as she struggles to  discover the right balance.

Make State of Play a must see movie. If you work in journalism or the media, I am interested in your comments. 

It’s smart to be alert to the recent marriage between communication and social media.

This is not a shot-gun wedding, the nexus is being built to last.  But  while the rules of engagement are still being written in many corporations, some  have decided to throw caution  to the wind. 

Surprisingly a lot of the interest in new media is  coming from the government, not exactly known for their fast adaptation of anything. Several  ministers are on facebook including Conrad Enill, Karen Teshiera  and Gary Hunt. Last week in the Newsday, Parliament announced their Twitter presence  and some months ago, the Ministry of Health  advertised their embrace of facebook and the micro blogging site with a series of newspaper ads.

Smart move? The jury is still out.

While not every new mode of new media communication lends itself to politics, where speed and complexity rarely coexist,  I think to its credit, the Ministry has been searching for the right balance  between the long and short format means of communication that  social media permits.

For instance, on Saturday  I learned  that the 2nd case of the H1N1 virus  had been confirmed in Trinidad  from the Ministry’s facebook. The press release was considered and addressed the relevant questions that any journalist or blogger would ask in the short-term. 

However, when I decided on Saturday to subscribe to the Ministry's  RSS feeds on Twitter I had a hell of a time finding them on the platform. 

The Ministry does not call itself by its official name but by an MOH acronym that is made further obscure by an underscore sign followed  by the words TT (MOH_TT).  The Ministry’s  Twitter account also has no official logo or brand   so the  first question you ask when you land on the page  is: “ Am I in the right space?” What’s even more disconcerting is that while the Ministry has 52 followers, it follows only one, PAHO, which suggests that a fundamental rule of engagement ( speak clearly but  listen  deeply) is not being followed. 

On Saturday, on the Ministry's  facebook account, I urged the administrator to remember that social media is about community, engagement  and two-way conversation. 

I'll wait and see what comes out of my recommendation.