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Bevan  re-visited

501   4 November 2002   

E-Message from Chris Rowe

Morning, Roger

Thanks for your prompt response - my apologies for not giving a fuller picture!  I am Mum to five children, and I'm studying for a BA Honours Degree in Public Relations (2nd Year).  My current assignment is to assess the value of internal communications within a large corporate structure.

On your Website, I've noticed an article - "The Great Western Railway Paddington Band" which commented on "long-term employment relationships" - this is something I regard as internal communication.

So that's where the seed was sown - to contact you to see if you could name me a corporation or two that you know practise effective internal commmunication, that I could cite in my text.  I'm trying to research electronically - as I'm working from home (kids on half term), and although I've looked at a couple of web sites, companies don't seem to publish details about their "Human Resources" Departments!

I hope this provides a little more clarity - and that you can offer some
direction - Cheers

Chris Rowe

..this was my reply...


Dear Chris

That's a difficult question - because I am no longer in the big-company mainstream myself, and I know little about the current management styles of specific corporations. 

But there is definitely a basic distinction to be drawn between

(a) corporations (whether public or private) which seek to cultivate personal/social "communities" within their workforce, supplementing the employment relationship, and

(b) those that do not, consciously preferring to retain the employment-relationship as a "bare, contractual" link, avoiding any intrusive extension of the relationship into employees' private lives.

There is in my view important research work to be done -

(a) exploring the management practice of cultivating such wider networks of social/communal relationships and

(b) asking whether such a management strategy is effective or ineffective (e.g. in reducing staff turnover, strengthening staff loyalties, reducing severe staff conflicts, weakening or strengthening trade union networks)

One possible approach would be to collect (say) a dozen big-company in-house staff magazines/newspapers and analyse their content - John Lewis is obviously outstanding as a community (with its weekly magazine) - I suggest you take the FT list of quoted companies, use a pin and select 25 - then write to each of them (Directory Inquiries would be your best bet) getting the Chief Executive - NOT the HR animal, who will be too defensive) and base a project on the publications you get back - my impression (for example) is that Sainsburys and Waitrose (John Lewis) are "communal companies" but that Tesco is not.

These are certainly all matters (in your sense) of "Internal Communications"
.
Roger Warren Evans
 

Drop me a line

502   4 November 2002   

Blair wrong-footed

Blair's spat with Chirac was significant.

French diplomacy had been running rings around Britain, for weeks. Blair had been wrong-footed by France over Iraq, trapped into a position widely rejected throughout Europe. The French UN double-motion tactic was brilliant, and won many friends for France throughout the Islamic world, while the UK had been pinned-down by
its subservience to the US. France had found of way facilitating EU
enlargement, by removing CAP obstacles - in a separate deal with Germany, cutting out Britain. France had wrong-footed Britain by launching an unannounced public challenge to the "Thatcher Rebate", a budgetary device which is deeply resented by other EU countries. These moves have all won back, for the French, the political initiative.

This is not the work of the rogue Chirac, still less his self-effacing Prime Minister Raffarin. This is the legendary brilliance of professional French diplomacy at work - imaginative, subtle, courageous. The French diplomats are softening everybody up for the "Constitutional" negotiations which lie ahead - so that they can get their way.

For my part, I remain apprehensive about those negotiations, not because I disagree with the le projet constitutionnel, but because I fear that the French diplomats will run rings around us. I expressed my worries earlier in the year, in March.  The French lawyers and diplomats have much more experience of formal "constitutional reasoning" than we have, and our chaps will be at a real disadvantage.

Having said that, the real loser from recent events is Tony Blair -
personally. It is now difficult to imagine his ever being taken seriously as a contender for the EU Presidency - a position which will be the subject of secondary election by other politicians. He has suffered a crippling loss of personal credibility over Iraq and his personal subservience to Bush. He has lost face by failing to secure British entry to the Euro, for being insufficiently communautaire. And now he has shown himself to be a petulant, bad loser.

Sadly for Blair, these are defects which he cannot rectify because -

      There can be no Euro-Referendum without threatening the very future of his Government (Denis MacShane's elevation to FO Europe Minister is not a prelude to a Referendum: it is instead of a Referendum);

      He has no distinctive leverage on the Common Agricultural Policy, now that France and Germany have reached a bilateral settlement; and

      Even if  there is no attack on Iraq, he will find it impossible to live down the memories of his seeming weakness and lack of independent judgment.

Blair is kebabbed - by his own particular cocktail of action and inaction.

Small wonder, then, that he is very annoyed indeed...

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The originating content of this website is my own work, and subject to my copyright. But on one condition only, I hereby give my consent to its unrestricted reproduction for any purpose: the condition is that its source is subject to proper acknowledgment, giving my name, my assertion of copyright, and the name of this website as its source, namely: www.warrenevans.net - is that a deal?  Roger WE