During my two months in Stagis, I´ve participated in several business meetings. Some have been interesting, some have been educating and yet some have actually been fun. But what these meetings all have in common, is the presence of what I call The Ego Game.

The Ego Game is a game of lies and deception, of selfishness and opportunism! A bit dramatical, agreed, but these feelings and expressions can be found in every formal meeting, especially in business meetings and director´s board meetings. In this world of finances and economics, it is accepted and expected that everyone acts for their own benefit at all times, as many economists have stressed during the years. This understanding of human behaviour is deeply founded in the western form of society.
In Denmark we have a long history of bureaucracy, especially in the public sector, which of course inflicts on our meeting culture. Our meetings tend to be very formal with a clear "chain of command". We have to follow the speaking order, and I think, that this is damaging to the both the productivity of the meeting, the outspread of knowledge and the creation of creative solutions.

The traditional form of a meeting is very well suited for a certain kind of people - the daring, outgoing employee, executive og member of the board. These peoble have a personality which allows them to function in the tradicional meeting culture - in short, they can play the Ego Game to perfection! But what about the rest? What about the more quit ones, that don´t play the Ego Game so well?
The fact, that our meetings generally favours the outgoing persons, is a risk of losing valuable knowledge. Of course the ideas and creativity of a more withdrawn person isn´t of lower value than others. The challenge is to get these ideas out in the open. This will dramatically reduce the effects of the Ego Game, and that way increase the productivity of the meeting and the value for the companies involved.
But how can we do this? Is it possible to design a meeting culture, that makes it possible for everyone to participate equally in the discussions? And what would this meeting be like?

I´m looking forward to hear your thoughts on this subject! Meanwhile I´ll try to work out a suggestion of my own...

The other day at Stagis a colleague came back from a meeting and said that someone called him an advertising man (reklame mand). Its safe to say that he didn' t see it as a compliment because we who live and work (maybe in a bobble?) in this world of communication and consultants think advertising in its traditional form of one way communication is dead. We felt that an advertising man set us back to the days where consultants would rate a company as either being a, b, & c and then regulate the companies culture and business practices accordingly. But the discussion followed on to the fact that the word advertising migth have had a revival (?) and that it isn' t a faux pas to use it as we in communication sometimes think. Is advertising in again? And what does it exactly cover? It is a really interesting discussion because if our clients think we are advertising men (and women!) is there any point arguing over what to call us - as long as we can convince them that one way communication isn' t the only way forward I don't care what people call us. I would like to hear your opinion on this. Do you work in communication or advertising - and why have you chosen one category over the other. Is it a conscious choice? And what about people who don't work in the industry - do you ever make the distinction?

Last monday Nikolaj and I went to a meeting in Billund with LEGO System A/S. I don’t know if any of you have visited the place – not “Legoland” but the “Headquarter”? It is possible to be mistaken about the two. When arriving you enter a large hall with a desk where it’s actually difficult to tell the receptionist from the lego-pirate standing in full size beside her. In the middle of the large hall you’ll find a huge sandbox – only with LEGO in it instead of sand. Beside the LEGO-pool small chairs for children are placed. One might just add: How many children visit LEGO System in a day? Right. So the pool must be for everyone – even grown-ups. We were a little early for our appointment so we sat down by the LEGO-pool and began to build. Another guy – also waiting in the hall – did not come around to join us. Instead he waited in the grown-up area, reading a paper. We decided to build the project we were to present at our meeting.

- Isn’t it just typical for our business? “Oh let’s tell it in colors. Let’s make it visual.”

But we actually thought it was a splendid idea – and we were pretty serious about it:

“Are you crazy!?! What kinds of colors are that you are mixing!?!” and… “You’ll have to secure that roof now!”

The person we were supposed to meet went out in the hall twice and walked straight by us, while we were trying to keep balance on our tiny chairs while almost reaching the throwing-LEGO-at –each-other-point. Why didn’t he look by the LEGO-pool? At last he found us and we followed him to a large room which looked like a giant showroom. And there we were talking about serious business with a very serious man surrounded by airplanes, robots and farms with chickens you could easily transform into ducks. Our “fine piece of work” build in splendid colors and with a top secure roof seemed a bit old fashioned among all the boxes with airplanes, and really didn’t seem to impress him at all.  He had exactly the look of a parent receiving a blue ashtray made of clay: It is…what is it?

After the meeting he gave me his card. It was yellow and had a yellow LEGO-pirate printed on it.

In writing my thesis I am getting under the skin of the corporate bloggers in Denmark. I have just talked to a guy from a big Danish council about how blogging could be interesting for them as an organization - but he wasn´t convinced;-) The feed back Im getting from the corporate bloggers I interview as part of my thesis is that all businesses could benefit from blogging - but this guy seemed to think that a coucil is to un sexy and that your average Joe dosnt want to speak to his council about their plans but only contact them if you need a new doctor or the likes. Is this true... what about the crisis in Århus with the angry parents - they seem to have a lot to say to their council. Does Århus council have a blog? I dont know... maybe I should give them a call tomorrow. I will leave you with a quote from one of my interviews that give you a brilliant image of why some business leaders personally dont find it easy to expose themselves on a corporate blog: "I have discussed this with colleagues and many of us in this organization are the types of people who were quit happy playing the tree in the school comedy when we were kids"

Friday I spoke with Jonas Kjær, who is writing his master-thesis on the effect of corporate blogging. He is researching to what extend the relations created through corporate blogging are connected to the company or to the individual writing the blog-posts. So he's interviewing me and discussing stagisblog.com as well as the corporate blogging-issue in more general terms.

Our talk was more than an hour - here's the first 22 minutes. I'll go over the remains and upload them during the week. And by the way: This one is in danish!

Hear The Talk: STAGISTALKS Jonas og Nikolaj [22:27 min, 15,8 mb]

Phew... Another bussy week whizzed by. It's difficult to find time to blog when everything is going fast. I am working on my master-thesis about authenticity in organizational identity and trying to help clients use their potential as well as they possibly can and then we're running fast trying to get our being-space-project going (you may or may not have heard of this - it's still in development but will be open to everyone soon).

Today I had a long talk with Jonas about his blog-thesis and we made a podcast out of it which will be online sometime over the weekend. Right now I think we'll wind up the week in the sunshine - apparently summer has decided to come back for another few days before everything fades to black and turns into rainy fall and winter.

Last fridays wind-up in our backyard

Hi!
So, this is my first time writing a real blog on Stagis and I'm very excited about it. I'm looking forward to this whole blooging experience, which is something I've never tried before, and I suspect I'll be posting more or less regularly on Stagisblog. However, you will all have to hold your breath for at least another week, because I'm leaving for Spain tomorrow. A flight I look forward to with great anxiety, seeing as I am flying alone for the first time. Anybody up for a weekend in Spain?

I went to the movies the other night and saw United 93 a highly recommendable piece of work directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy 2004, Bloody Sunday 2002 and Theory of Flight back in 1998). The movie is about the flight united 93 that was hijacked by terrorist and later crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania when passengers foiled the terrorist plot. The movie tells the story of what happened in the hours before the attack and is reconstructed by phonecalls made by the passangers before the crash. No one survived. Yesterday it was five years since the World Trade Center was demolished by terrorist attack and several thousands were killed. I can only recommend you all to go see this movie. In remembrance of the passengers on the flight united 93 and of course in memory of all the people who died on September 11, 2001.
A friend of mine travelled home from New York on September 10, 2001.

A few days ago I was watching "Operation X" on TV2. The program exposed the "safe-chat" consultant Rudy Frederiksen as a cheat who appeared publicly as a consultant counselling children and parents about how to navigate safely around the internet without meeting scary old men wanting to meet teenage girls while at the same time abusing teenage girls and producing pornographic material with them.

There's plenty already said about him and his behaviour which I'll leave others to go into details with. The story is definitely generating viewers and talk of the town. What I find interesting is the role that the media is taking on to an increasing extend; it was journalist Morten Spiegelhauer and his colleagues who made the investigation, set up the guy and proved him guilty. He was also the one talking to the police to confirm to what degree the act of Rudy Frederiksen was violating the law and finally took him to public court being a brief interview moments after exposing the guy explaining a young girl how he wanted to have sex with her. All of it is usually taken care of by the police and the justice system but not in this case. Of course there'll be a criminal case held against Rudy Frederiksen but a large part of his punishment has already been installed; after receiving the sentence of TV2 and the public he will have a hard time getting around his home country for a very long time.

To the best of my judgement he seems guilty. The proof was substantial. And one may think that he is getting what was coming to him. But lets imagine a different scenario: Let's say the story was better than the evidence. That the person portrayed came off a lot worse than what was fair. In that case it would be difficult to correct the sentence cast by the media and the public. But is that what democracy is coming to? Media-driven courts delivering the main character guilty as charged "right after these messages"?

One Google-search led me to an article with the title "Operation X a little bit too fast" about a program aired earlier this year.

Back in april I wrote a post about the site Arto with the title "Who is on the other end when your kids are surfing Arto?" and I mentioned Rudy Frederiksen in his professional right (well, the public profession, that is!). During the past week the visits on stagisblog.com has increased by about 1000% from Google-searches on "Rudy Frederiksen" alone. Briefly after the program had ended there was a comment from a TV2-viewer commenting on my old post. The professional media and public journalism (being us who write what we think about everything in us and around us and commenting on one anothers blogs etc.) is smelting together and the debate is ongoing. Everyone is part of the conversation as not only markets but also the public order is becoming democratic to an extreme degree.

I have just finished a really interesting phone interview with Maja Møller from Arla. I asked her the difficult question; why are we in Denmark lacking behind when it comes to companies using blogs in their communication? We could not find one answer but agreed that it might have been a slow start - but before long company blogs will explode - and we will not know what hit us;-) Earlier this year I asked Jonas from Synkron the same thing and he had the interesting view that maybe it has to do with our culture. Us Danes are not the best in the world to participate in "show & tell" and are (in my view) maybe a bit afraid of confrontation, which is part of being in the blogosphere. I dont have the answer - so I promised Maja that I would ask around, so thats hereby done - what do you think could be the reasons?