The anonymous blogger Cassandra has a new blog entry at MyRagan.com in which she hatches a whereby employee communication people charge a few dollars for every all-employee e-mail they're asked to send out, and they "earn enough money to deliver a gift-wrapped video iPod to each employee and hire the cast of 60 Minutes to do daily news broadcasts for you. You could even throw in a full-color, employee annual report written by John Updike and photographed by Annie Liebovitz."

Her satire makes me think about what I'd do with an unlimited budget for communicating with employees. The possibilities are dizzying, but I'd start by spending at least one week per month my first year, one week per quarter every year after that buried in an important part of the organization. (Some of which, I'd hope, would be in far flung locales.)

I'd come away scads of great print and online and video stories, important and deep contacts, and a real understanding of how the organization works, and how its various people think.

The more I think of it, the less that seems like a pie-in-the-sky idea, the more it seems like the bare minimum orientation process for an employee communicator.

What would you do with a million-dollar budget?

Vancouver communication consultant and Writing Boots regular Ron Shewchuk interviews Petro Canada communicator Kevin Heinrichs, who edits the oil company's brand new employee magazine, inDepth.

Click on the PDF and see if you don't get a funny feeling in your loins.

"We wanted a tone with the text and layout that would appeal to younger
readers, but not so edgy that it's inaccessible to older readers," Heinrichs tells Shewchuk. "We
treat our magazine as though it is a newsstand magazine that just
happens to cover one company. The same editing discipline and attention
to layout detail apply."

This is pornography for employee communicators.

Sometimes over the last four presidential terms it has seemed that presidents and other politicians get away with their lies. They may. But their country doesn't.

MSNBC's Chuck Todd astutely pointed out that one of the reasons the bailout package just failed is that it was sold by the president and by Congress, neither of whom Americans trust.

Just about every member of Congress in a tight race voted no because they thought they'd be beat up by their constituents, who hate the bill.

Why do they hate the bill? Because they hate the people who are telling them, probably honestly for once, that it's necessary.

"This is a crisis in leadership," Todd pointed out, "and the American public just doesn't trust anybody right now."

When you have a country where nobody trusts anybody, do you have a country at all?