Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

IABC: WTF?

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I want the IABC story to go away. Just for awhile, so I can do other stuff, and then maybe come back to it later. But it won't.

I wrote on Dec. 18 that the International Association of Business Communicators is being radically changed by two people who know little and care less about its culture.

After that post and one more in January, I thought I’d give the association a few months to get its shit together. I figured some of the more wizened board members would come to the rescue of the flailing volunteer chairman Kerby Meyers and uncommunicative paid executive director Chris Sorek.

They would apologize for their early missteps, explain the rationale for the changes they're making, and by the time the World Conference rolled around in New York in June, I could interview them about how they turned the thing around—I was even thinking of pitching The New York Times on the story—and then everyone would live happily ever after.

That's not just what I hoped would happen, it's what I assumed would happen. Too many people in this association know too much about communication and culture change for someone not to step up and knock the proper heads together and start making the place make sense. Don't they?

For a moment, that's how it seemed to be playing out.

In a post on IABC’s LinkedIn forum last month titled, “I’m here. And I’ve been listening,” Meyers started making the right sorts of sounds. “I feel a little like the kid who steps outside expecting to play and is bombarded with snowballs from all directions instead,” he wrote. “There’s nowhere to hide. And no idea where to throw his first snowball in response. In this case, your snowballs have been well-deserved, and most of them are on target.”

He went on to admit that IABC had “done a miserable job of communicating these changes and reaching out to you and all of our members. You shouldn’t have to learn about this through the grapevine or social media. I’m embarrassed by our failure to lead by example—with timely, candid communication—and I’m determined to make this episode a catalyst for turning a bad start into a success story.”

That’s what I’m talking about!

For the first time, Meyers also made explicit the bleeding business need for all this change. Basically, member retention sucks; the attrition rate is 25 percent, meaning IABC has to replace a quarter of its membership every year, which makes it hard to grow. Also, fewer people were entering the once-lucrative Gold Quill Awards, and IABC was having a hard time finding volunteers to administer its labor-intensive accreditation program. So it needed to rethink some of those activities and outsource a bunch of operations.

So far, so good.

Except, Meyers didn’t address members’ actual beefs about how they were going about making those changes. The most controversial issue is the wholesale overhaul he and Sorek are proposing to make to the accreditation program, but there are others.

And so on the IABC LinkedIn forum, the association continues to be hammered—squarely and fairly—by some of the heaviest hitters in the business: Roger D’Aprix, Moses Kanhai, Angela Sinickas, Shel Holtz, Jim Shaffer, Liz Guthridge and Mike Klein just to name a few. 

And though one game board member, director Kristen Sukalak, has attempted to defend the changes IABC is making, and Accreditation Chair Gloria Walker has been an active, if beleaguered, participant in the conversation—most of the rest of the board remained embarrassingly silent.

As has, most conspicuously, the paid executive director of the association, Chris Sorek.

"Kerby, Kirsten, et al, you remind me of staff functionaries who have to face the criticisms of the news media while those who are getting paid to lead are hiding in the backroom in a fetal position," wrote Shaffer. "Whatever happened to the guy who was hired to lead the place? Is he still around? Has he ever led a business through significant change? What's he being held accountable for?"

And then yesterday, Meyers wrote a post titled, “You’re right. It’s time for Chris Sorek to speak up.”

Over the past few weeks, a number of posts have referred to the absence of Executive Director Chris Sorek from IABC discussions here and elsewhere. Many have explained that his insights would be valuable during this time of change.

All who posted have been right. His perspectives are important. The thing is, he was focused on doing the job the board and I were asking him to do—lead the implementation of IABC’s strategic direction.  

At the same time, the board was so focused as a leadership body on getting Chris to work on implementation and improvements, we didn’t handle the communication side of it well. As the leader of the board, I take the blame for that. I'm sorry. I believe we've taken some positive steps, but as has been pointed out, there are still some gaps.

We now realize that request from the board was unfair—to both Chris and IABC members. You deserve to hear from him directly, and he deserves to have his own voice in the conversation.

Going forward, Chris will have a voice, and you will begin to see and hear more from him in the very near future.  

I called IABC headquarters to see if I could hear Sorek’s own voice for myself—I haven't spoken with him since the Friday night back in November when the shocking word began to spread that IABC had sacked half its headquarters staff—but I got the automated switchboard and when I punched in Sorek’s name it didn’t send me to his extension.

Presumably Sorek will address a 90-minute town hall meeting scheduled for this Friday on “IABC’s Strategic Direction” at IABC’s Leadership Institute meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Writing Boots will have reliable ears in the room, and as soon as I get my report, I’ll give you yours.

And we'll hope to answer the question on everyone's mind: "WTF?"

What if we stopped trying to reinvent IABC, and just started making it a better version of what it has always been?

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Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. … The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow. … Let us take a look, say, at the so-called drink problem, a small subdivision of the larger problem of saving men from their inherent and incurable hoggishness …. —H.L. Mencken, writing in the 1920s

And so I had to laugh at the beginning of an interview published yesterday by the communication industry's premier podcasters, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. They spoke with Chris Sorek, the new paid president of the International Association of Business Communicators.

Before they asked him about his big schemes for solving ancient problems at IABC—as I also did last month—Holtz and Hobson got Sorek talking about his last job at a nonprofit in England, called Drinkaware. The mission was to get Brits to drink less. "Under Chris' leadership the charity's website now attracts nearly three million unique visitors a year, the logo is featured on over 5 billlion products and Drinkaware campaigns have started to show 'green shoots' of behavior change," said Drinkaware chairman Derek Lewis in a release announcing Sorek's departure.

You know Mencken would love that term, "green shoots."

In the course of the Holtz and Hobson interview, Sorek identified a number of persistent problems that he hopes to attack:

• The "ABC" accreditation designation: The association needs to make sure it "is objective, is professional, is defensible," Sorek says. This, more than 15 years after the accredited communicator Dan Danbom quipped that the only effect his "ABC" has had is people squinting at his name tag at conferences and calling him, "Mr. Abick." Come on, folks: How is accreditation ever going to mean any more than it does now? It is what it is: credible to the gullible, suspect to the cynical, and a total nonentity to everyone in between. But if it gives the cowardly lion courage, who's gonna complain, or investigate the rigor of the secret test? Not me.

• The Gold Quill Awards. "It should be seen as being the best of the best" in communication awards programs, Sorkek says—and not just by communicators, but by top leaders in business and government. My response? Ibid.

• Communiation World—since 1970, the blandest and most useless magazine ever published on any subject. (I admit, I've missed a few issues: At the World Conference last month, I had a super embarrassing meeting the "new" editor at the World Conference in Chicago. "Wow, when did you take over?" I asked. "Six years ago," she said.) Sorek says that what this publication needs is a focus, on the half dozen issues that members really care about. No, what it needs is an editor who does not work in the hushed IABC headquarters in San Francisco, and who is charged with generating compelling columns, surprising stories and lively conversations about communication. (IABC once had a magazine like that—Reporting, it was called, and it was done by a freelancer named Larry Ragan, out of Chicago, until he quit to start Ragan Communications, in 1969. Sorek ought to look at those back issues, and draw some inspiration.)

Sorek strikes me as a good, smart, in-touch guy, who I believe will make IABC more rational and efficient and user-friendly. "Watch this space," he told Holtz and Hobson. "We're going through a review of what we're doing as an organization … of what we're offering in terms of IT and IT support—basically our digital presence and how we deliver that for members." He told them to check back after the first of the year, and I'll bet he'll have done some stuff by then.

Also to his credit, Sorek doesn't appear to believe for one minute, as some members allow themselves to do, that IABC will ever become a ballsy political "advocacy" organization on behalf of Communication Goodness. Neither does he seem to go in for the fantastical notion that IABC could ever issue revokable, CPA-like "licences" to communicators, a idea that Holtz periodically fondles.

But Sorek did allow his lips to form words to the effect that IABC needs to help communicators get taken seriously in the C-suite.

I'll keep an equally vigilant eye on that, and the flow of ale England.

IABC: Same as it ever was—but maybe ready to “get shit done”

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It's been a few years since I last attended an IABC World Conference. Ragan used to send me to cover the show, but I don't work for them anymore, and now they don't send anybody—even the few blocks from their heaquarters in Chicago, where the conference wraps up today.

That's a mistake, I think, because just as every sport needs a culminating annual event, so does a profession. And if the corporate communication biz has a World Series, that would be the IABC World Conference.

I've covered the World Conference many times, but not since … geez, 2007, was it? I wondered if maybe I'd lost touch with the soul of the event, and of the 15,000-member association that puts it on. In the hallways and sessions, I realized I hadn't missed a thing. But later, in an interview with IABC's new top brass, I got the sense that maybe I shouldn't wait another five years to return.

You look great!

Business is great!

My clients are amazing!

That sort of b.s. is as expected at annual conferences as at high school reunions. But the lying should stop when the sessions start.

Alas: The opening keynote Sunday was an utterly content-free motivational speaker named Kevin Caroll, who shared the spit-shined story of his hard upbringing and his subsequent unlikely rise to become … a motivational speaker traveling the country with a trunk full of red rubber balls. If he could only reach one person in IABC's audience of 1,300-plus with his message of—what was that darned message again?—then it would all be worth it, he said. So, still alive is the IABC tradition of using members' money to pay for speakers to condescend to members by telling them not too convincingly that they have the power to change the world through the use of red rubber balls and stuff. And of course Caroll got a big ovation here, just as he probably will next week, at the National Convention of Industrial Battery Salesmen.

Other signs that plus ça change, plus IABC la meme chose: Sprinkled liberally among useful breakout sessions, dull or sheister-ish conference presenters giving purposely foggy presentations to passive and credulous audiences. In one full day at the conference, I attended two sessions, both from "IABC All-Star Presenters" that were so clearly without value that I fruitlessly searched the eyes of fellow attendees for signs of life.

In another session, a friend of mine caused a stir when he questioned a the consultant/speaker's unsupported claim that mobile apps would be "pivotal" in creating employee engagement in organizations. My friend reported that he was fairly shouted down—not by the consultant, but by the crowd, who resented any tarnishing of The Next Shiny Thing.

I spoke at this conference, too—did my Speechwriting Jam Session—and there were tense moments as I waited for a "Conference Orientation" session to end, so I could get my projector set up. I paced around the speaker ready-room speculating loudly about what sort of adult fetus could require training in order to attend a fucking business conference. Finally I forced my way into the conference room, but then had to wait until the "instructor" finished singing an apparently original song, sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells."

Yes, "Mingle Well."

What the hell?

But before I fully gave over to the idea that IABC, like Trix cereal, is for kids, I had a sitdown interview with incoming volunteer chairman Kerby Meyers, and brand-new paid executive director Chris Sorek. These guys gave me hope that IABC's culture could change to become a bit more rigorous, more open to critical thinking and more nourising to people who already know how to mingle.

Sorek has deep and long experience as both a communicator and a business guy, and he brings the smarm-free bearing of a fellow who hasn't worked in an association all his life.

Meyers, compared to many of his over-polite predecessors, is a goateed assassin. He and the board have directed Sorek to review all IABC events, programs, products and services to see if they still make sense financially. Even IABC institutions, like Communication World? "I think it's fair to review the value of a print vehicle in 2012 and beyond," Meyers said, though he hastened to add that a change to CW might amount to no more than making it into a printable PDF.

Meyers and Sorek hinted at changes to Gold Quill judging, which they acknowledge hasn't been up to snuff in recent years. They're considering improvements to the ABC accreditation program, perhaps beginning to require accredited members to do continuing education in order to maintain their IABC status (like, by attending local chapter meetings, which often ache for senior members). And they're even thinking about creating a separate accreditation designation for senior communicators.

There's actually a 25-page strategic plan organized under three pillars—Content, Career and Business—but Meyers knows nobody's listening to that jazz—not even veterans like Wilma Mathews and Mary Ann McCauley, who he said listened to his plans and said, "We've heard all this before."

"We gotta get shit done," Meyers told me—not once but three times, prompting Sorek and Meyers to joke about creating buttons for the next conference that read, GSD.

Meyers and Sorek: Will they add some GSD to IABC? I guess we'll see.