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Connect, Lord Browne’s latest book poses serious questions for the aspiration of public relations in the boardroom.

Lord Browne’s latest book Connect was published last week. You can’t have missed hearing about it. He had a column in The Sunday Times, an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and a smattering of other coverage. It was very well promoted.

Browne’s publicist did a great job, but if they were to read the book, their heart might sink at some of the implications its ideas have for the future of public relations. In particular, for the corporate public relations functions that run Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and external relations programmes.

This isn’t a book review so I’m going to summarise Browne’s core argument, present three salient points and recommend that you read the book.

CSR is so last century

Lord Browne’s core argument is that business needs to take account of the wider social context within which it operates and, in doing so, the most successful businesses will be those that contribute to society through the core of what they do. He calls it Connected Leadership. He believes that CSR, the tool currently used by business to engage with society is too detached from actual business functions.

None of what he says is revolutionary. The idea that businesses should have a purpose beyond profits is pretty popular these days. Most of us will advise clients that the best CSR comes from doing things that align closely with what a business does, that philanthropy unrelated to what you do is pretty pointless from a commercial perspective.

His conclusions, however, call for a step change. He argues for rolling back CSR teams, that those managing business units take control of engaging with stakeholders, that the business value of societal goals be built into business planning and that businesses become radically transparent. All of this, he says, should start from the CEO and work its way down a company. It takes corporate communications and calls for it to be stripped down and its responsibilities to be spread across operational teams.

A fifth and a third

The book’s findings are underpinned by a McKinsey study among 2,000 executives from around the world. Its two key findings are that, “less than 20% reported frequent success in influencing state and civil society decisions.” And yet, the, “value at stake from plausible government intervention alone represents approximately one third of corporate profits.”

The message is that external relations as it currently stands is underperforming. The book details other data that indicate business leaders believe there is a lack of capacity and capability in their external relations at present.

J&J

Johnson & Johnson’s response to the Tylenol crisis is well known. It is well known for a reason. It is the standout example of how to handle a crisis. But the Tylenol crisis happened in 1982. I was only a year old. It is still the go to case study when discussing crisis communications. This isn’t because of a dearth of crises in the intervening period. It is telling (and somewhat depressing) that there are few other case studies of best practice.

Smarter Planet

On a similar theme, IBM’s Smarter Planet and Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan are used as examples of the importance and power of having a purpose. These are examples that are used time and again in various books, conference presentations and pitches. They’re used because they are good and, crucially, successful examples. However, the issue, again, is that there are too few examples.

These three points coupled to Browne’s broad point about the need for purpose and engagement to be more closely meshed within businesses, point to a failure to inspire, and demonstrate value to senior executives. They point to disconnected communications.

Read the book. There will be bits you agree with and others with which you will strongly disagree. Crucially, it poses difficult questions about the way businesses operate and engage with their stakeholders.

This was originally published as a guest post here on Stephen Waddington’s blog.

As the summer draws to a close, it feels like a good time to take stock of where we are with Poetry by Numbers.

A lot has been achieved. Working with economists, pollsters, programmers and tech founders, our poets have created art. More than that, we’ve created art that has a purpose and enthused our audience.

People have sent me emails saying they’ve used some of our turns of phrase in their presentations and meetings. We’ve created images with words that are now being used outside of high-minded art. That’s a real sign of success.

One of the best parts of running this project is how quickly poets have engaged with it. We’ve had submissions sent in independently, completely unsolicited but very gratefully received. We’ve not published every poem we’ve received but have tried in every instance to provide constructive feedback.

We couldn’t have got this far without the backing of our growing list of contributing poets. I believe poets have embraced the project because data analysis is, at its heart, a search for patterns. Poetry, at its technical core, embraces patterns too.

Whether it’s the rhyming schemes so prevalent in Western poetry or the tight meter structure of ghazals from the Middle East and Indian Sub-Continent, patterns of rhythm and rhyme are found in different cultures of poetry. The language of numbers is present too, referenced in terms including the classic couplets, quatrains and octaves. There’s probably a blogpost to be written on this topic. Keep your eyes peeled for it.

Anyway, we’ve been scheming all summer to make sure we have a stand out autumn. We’ll be publishing more poems, including some created through conversations with data specialists. We’ll also be spreading the word at events and by producing videos of performance poetry. The first event outing for the project will be at The Tech Off on 30 September. I’ll be pitching the value of bringing poetry to data against competing creative technology ideas. Come along and support us, sign up here.

If you’d like to get involved with Poetry by Numbers, either by helping us scheme or by contributing syllables, then please get in touch.

Another trip to India. Many more thousands of kilometers covered. I’ve been jotting down thoughts as I’ve gone along. As before, some are mere whimsy, others are deeper

Nature abhors a vacuum
There needn’t be a vacuum for nature to overrun something
There needn’t be a vacuum for nature to overcome someone
Humans decimate nature on a whim
A stranger giving self-serving advice can be right
Unsought advice can be valuable
Motives cloak value
Price is a poor substitute for value
A memory rekindled is a memory in HD
If you must haggle, win
Inhibition is a barrier to friendship
Enthusiasm can be scary
Confidence is bred by perception
Context is king
There is no good kind of myopia
Culture is rich where civilisations meet
Religion is a poor vessel for culture
Food is culture
Food is history
Flavour is money
Complexity and subtlety are not mutually exclusive
Economic progress has four wheels
Too many wheels halt progress
Slow walking cities drive fast
A Delhi minute is shorter than a New York one
Responsibility forges strength
Responsibility is personal growth
Earn your thrills
Luxury comes at a price; it’s usually in the laundry bill

Prior to publishing our first data poems, it seemed only fair to let the data have its say. In this post, we’ll look at some poetry that’s been generated by data.

A quick Google search for algorithmic poetry returns a strong crop of projects that have generated poetry from data using algorithms. However, quality is the key, so here are three of the better algorithms that generate poetry.

New York Times Haiku

The New York Times Haiku Generator is an absolute gem. It uses an algorithm to search within The NYT’s website and pull out poems that conform to the broad rules of haiku poetry, namely the five-seven-five syllable structure for which haikus are most famous.

A few factors combine to make this a successful project. The scale of copy generated by NYT is an obvious bonus — the more copy you produce, the likely it is that suitable haikus can be sourced from your content. The US journalistic style’s tendency toward punctuation heavy, slightly traditional sentence structures and the general use of simple, short, direct words also helps.

Finally, the superficially simple five-seven-five structure is relatively simple from a programming point of view; the starting point is essentially searching through data for a single pattern.

Swift-speare

This was an experiment by J Nathan Matias, a genius at MIT, who created an algorithm that learns through experience. Matias fed his algorithm poetry by Shakespeare, Milton and others. He then asked it to produce a sonnet and achieved some pretty impressive results.

This project is an excellent example of the potential of machine learning and the work it produced was quite complex. However, in working to produce a Shakespearean sonnet, the parameters guiding what needed to be produced were pretty specific.

Poetweet

A much more interactive project, if not as pleasing in output, is Poetweet, launched by cultural centre b_arco, based in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Poetweet takes a Twitter account’s entire tweet archive and turns it into poetry.

The project is incredibly ambitious, allowing users to choose to create a sonnet or two rarer forms, a rondel or indriso. It works for tweets in both English and Portuguese.

The results are mixed but a great achievement when you factor in the complexity involved and that fact that users can generate poetry from any twitter account.

These three projects show the amazing possibilities provided by data in terms of creating poetry. They also show the limitations and the derivative nature of what’s currently possible. The next step in our journey is to create poetry from data.

Learn more about the Poetry by Numbers project here.

Can you have brown skin and a beard?

Beards mean different things to different people, but even in the cultural melting pot of London, beards on brown skin have a very specific meaning.

For most of my life, fashion trends have passed me by. My look has never really been of-the-moment and that’s never bothered me. When beards became fashionable, all of a sudden a trend appeared that I fully bought into. I grew a mighty beard.

I loved my beard and treated it well; I had it regularly trimmed and shaped and moisturised it every day (yes, really). I was really into it. Others, sadly, were not.

First came the jokes from friends and acquaintances, “Don’t expect to get on a plane any time soon.” Or, “You look like the Taleban.” And even, “You look like a terrorist.” These comments were a little hurtful but, ultimately, I chalked them down to ‘banter’ from friends. To be fair, when I told people the jokes were a little too much, they apologised and stopped. I’m lucky, I have brilliant friends.

Then came more subtle reactions. On public transport people stared at me much more. As anyone knows, staring at anything other than your phone, the Metro or into the distance is pretty unusual on the Tube. Worse still, almost all the time, the seat next to me became the last to be taken. In shops, assistants who were chatty to the customers before and after me weren’t chatty with me. At parties and drinks, people I was introduced to were less friendly at first. Less friendly until they saw me drink or had a chat with me.

All of this adds up to very little. However, anyone who has grown up in a place where they’re in the minority will know that most prejudice isn’t overt. It’s simple things and low-level barriers. Barriers that are easy to overcome, but the onus is on you, the other, to overcome them.

Growing up in London, and being part of a minority ethnic group, I’ve spent my whole life overcoming these minor things. Proving to people that I’m ‘alright’, that I’m ‘one of them’. Growing a beard made the barriers a little higher, the isolation a little greater, the hurt a little more bruising.

So I had it shaved off.

Now, I’m lucky, I didn’t grow my beard for religious reasons. It was vanity. Shaving it off wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And now I’m back where I was. The barriers are a little lower again, but they’re still there.

I’m not a Muslim, but I’ve had a small insight into the challenges Muslims face. We ask them to integrate and be part of British society but we eye them with suspicion until they prove it explicitly. We do it to all minorities but for Muslims we’ve moved the bar up. It’s hard having brown skin and a beard in the UK, but the real problem is this: it’s becoming harder to be Muslim.