Logos team blog posts

That Was The Week That Was

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What a week for crises!

Forget about the financial melt-down, the transition to the new president, or any of the really old news.

Last week was one for the record books.

The curtain rose Monday, December 8, on the usual tired old economic meltdown crises, particularly  the prospect of an auto bailout (that still hasn’t happened).

Then things got curiouser and curiouser…

Not Available on E-Bay

Tuesday Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich was arrested for trying to sell his appointment of President Elect Barack Obama’s vacant senate seat to a high bidder.  He’s still governor (as of 3:30 PM Monday, December 15).

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Update: Humility, Humiliation, and Self-Inflicted Harm: Illinois Governor Rod R. Blagojevich

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‘Nuff said….

Fred

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When a Tweet From Mumbai Reaches Around the World

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Mumbai by karmadude, under a Creative Commons license

Mumbai by karmadude, under a Creative Commons license

Like many people in the U.S., I was out of town for Thanksgiving when I heard about the Mumbai attacks last week. After a Wednesday afternoon spent grocery shopping in Denver, CO, my family and I returned to my relatives’ house, turned on the news, and saw our first reports about the horrific attacks on CNN. Trying to learn more, I pulled up Twitter on a laptop, and searched for reports about what was happening. A flood of information started coming in.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in using Twitter to follow the crisis. Twitter is a social networking tool that allows users (“Twitterers”) to post 140-character updates (or “tweets”) to their followers (or the public – over 80% of the 6 million users have public pages), either online, via text message or through other tools. This New York Times article notes that, “At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word ‘Mumbai’ in it was being posted to Twitter.” Approximately 80 tweets were sent via SMS (text message) every five seconds (CNN).
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A Call For Global Leadership

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When the U.S. economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches cold.
When the U.S. economy catches cold, the rest of the world faces an outbreak.

The credit crisis that started in the U.S. and traveled around the world had already made French, German and British economies suffer massive bailouts, forced the government of Iceland to seize its three largest banks, deepened economic deterioration in Hungary, Poland, Ukraine and questioned economic stability of emerging markets in China, Brazil, Russia and South Korea. Read more

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Journalism Isn’t Dying, but It Will Never Be The Same Again – It Will Be Better

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First In a Series: The State of Journalism Today

I’ve had a lover’s quarrel with journalism most of my adult life.

As in any lover’s quarrel, I get pretty heated when journalism lets me down.  But only because the love burns deep within me.

I so want journalism to thrive; to prosper; to fulfill its stated mission, and to deliver the value it promises.  But too often, and seemingly with increasing frequency, journalism fails to live up to its stated ideals.

I’ve made a pretty good living helping people navigate the vagaries of journalism – protecting them from its excesses, helping them capture the best of journalism to mutual advantage when they can.  In the process I’ve gotten to know a lot of journalists and to care deeply about their craft.  And to lament the deteriorating state of the business.

Today I begin a multi-part look at the state of journalism, its role in our democracy, and the challenges it faces.

My first post is about the future.

The Conventional Wisdom is Wrong

The conventional wisdom is that journalism is dying.

I think the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Journalism isn’t dying, but it is in the throes of a revolution that will transform it —  for the better. Read more

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A Sea Change in Political Communication

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David Katz via Obama for America

David Katz via Obama for America

It’s been a little over a week since the 2008 election came to a dramatic close with Barack Obama as our new President-elect. There’s been a lot of discussion and agreement about how the Obama campaign was significantly better at harnessing the power of social media to drive support, action, donations, votes, and eventually victory, remapping the way a campaign communicates with supporters along the way.

The Internet has certainly been used in previous political campaigns (notably Howard Dean’s). But the tools, the candidates, and the rate at which constituents consume various social media channels have evolved tremendously since 2004

The younger generation voted heavily for Obama (the NYTimes notes that “more 18-29-year-olds went to the polls this year than in any election since 1972,” with 66% voting for Obama). As noted on another blog, “this group is likely to engage in two-way conversation with staff, volunteers, and clients, rather than one-way broadcasts, the style of communication most often used by organizations now.”

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Managing Fear

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No, this is not a post on the financial markets or political campaigns

A month ago, I paused to digest the report out of Pakistan that a truck bomb had destroyed the Islamabad Marriott, killing 55 people and wounding more than 250.

The news unnerved me. I had stayed at the Islamabad Marriott for five nights in February 2007 while on an ILO mission to evaluate the Soccer Ball Project. I remember the modern, glitzy lobby, the Thai restaurant, and the “foreigners only” club in the hotel basement that played cosmopolitan Hindustani dance mixes and served alcohol outlawed for most Pakistanis. Read more

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Crisis Management: Thinking Clearly

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The Global Financial Market Melt-Down

I’ve been at a loss about whether or what to blog about the financial crisis, for several reasons.

  • First, our firm’s largest sector is finance/investments/insurance, and we’ve been up to our eyeballs, on things we can’t talk about.
  • Second, the policy prescriptions for solving the problem have become embroiled in the presidential election campaign.  We try very hard not to be overtly political in our work, and opining on the policy prescriptions risked getting into the presidential election scrum.

But today there’s a teachable moment, so I’ll pounce.
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A Firm of Foodies

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It can be hard to describe what characterizes the personality of a firm, what with different personalities, areas of expertise and converging (and sometimes diverging) passions. But here at Logos, one thing that brings us all together is FOOD.

Yes, food. All of us came to Logos with an interest in food, but we really discovered our mutual obsession in Japan. I was working for a client of Logos at the time, and Anthony, Fred and Barbara were all in Kyoto as part of the team. Over our long, sleep-deprived days (and during our few and fleeting moments of down-time), we talked food. And of course, being in Japan, we talked Iron Chef.

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Maturing Multi-Stakeholder Programs

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Voluntary “multi-stakeholder” programs have been a prominent feature of the corporate responsibility landscape for more than a decade. Launched by companies, industry groups, NGOs, governments and international organizations, programs like the UN Global Compact, the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights, and the Fair Labor Association, bring together diverse actors to tackle common problems on the corporate responsibility agenda: human rights, labor standards, environmental standards, and transparency. Many of these pioneering efforts established best practices for subsequent multi-stakeholder collaborations.

But as the corporate responsibility field matures, many of these multi-stakeholder programs are struggling to remain relevant. Initial successes have been followed by substantial challenges. Stakeholders are questioning programs over the scope of their mandates, participation levels, and accountability and governance mechanisms. Some multi-stakeholder efforts face credibility and sustainability concerns with the potential to scuttle the programs altogether.

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