There’s been a huge transfer of power to oil producers. Even at $100 a barrel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will earn almost $8 trillion in oil revenues between now and 2020, estimates the McKinsey Global Institute. More troubling are the political implications. “This has really strengthened the Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans to be more provocative in the world,” says Larry Goldstein of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. Although governments control crude supplies, private companies have dominated distribution. Anyone can buy oil at a price. Now oil could become a political commodity offered to friends at a discount, withheld from rivals.

How can we retrieve some of our lost power? The first thing is to get out of denial. Stop blaming oil companies and “speculators.” Next, we need to expand domestic oil and natural-gas drilling, including Alaska. Although we can’t “drill our way” out of this problem, we can augment oil supplies and lessen price strains. It might take 10 years or more, because new projects are huge undertakings. But delay will only aggravate our future problems.

Finally, we need to realize high prices may stimulate new biofuels from wood chips, food waste and switch grass. Production costs of these fuels may be in the range of $1 a gallon, says David Cole of the Center for Automotive Research. If true, that’s well below today’s wholesale gasoline prices. To assure new producers that they wouldn’t be wiped out if oil prices plunged, we should set a floor price for oil of $50 to $80 a barrel, says Cole. This could be done with a standby tariff that would activate only if prices hit the threshold. Oil prices are unpredictable and should a price collapse occur, Americans wouldn’t be deluded into thinking we’ve returned permanently to cheap energy. We’ve made that mistake before.

It’ll be a good thing when the election is over and the winner is in his honeymoon phase.  A lot of old thinking about energy is ready to be discarded. But it’s about to get a long, last dance.

We were mindful of the 1984 Olympics traffic experience, when just an 8 percent drop in the amount of cars on the road resulted in traffic that flowed like midnight.  Small changes can have a big impact on the traffic.  Less traffic idling was another anti-smog strategy.  So, we thought it should be possible for City Hall to set an example for the business community.

It was a vain hope.
Both management and labor perceived telecommuting as a threat.  Department heads didn’t want anyone out of their sightlines for any longer than was absolutely necessary.  They assumed the worst of their employees.  The unions demanded that telecommuting become a bargaining issue.  Typical of how city unions work, the labor appointee to our task force missed the first two meetings, then came late to the third and asked to speak with me privately.  She said, “We’re not sure if telecommuting is a way for managers to unfairly reward or unfairly punish our members, but either way, we’re going to oppose it.”  Then she sat at the table with the rest of the task force, repeating a few platitudes, knowing she’d killed the idea.

Perhaps things are about to change.   In Southern California, every weekday there are tens of thousands of commuters who drive epic distances to get to work centers in LA and Orange counties.  In the 1990s, the Inland Empire land boom was just beginning.  Now gas prices are four times higher, and many people are driving west from places like Temecula.

Temecula is almost 90 miles from downtown LA, and more than 65 miles from Santa Ana. Do the math.  If your car gets 20 miles per gallon, pretty good for a beep-n-creep voyage on crowded freeways, it’s costing you nine gallons per day to go back and forth from work = $36 per day just for gas.

I can’t imagine that at least some of those people, and the merciful among their bosses would want to alleviate that.  So, all of a sudden, telecommuting looks less scary, maybe necessary, and perhaps something that will be embraced in a rush.

That’s what Computerworld’s blogger Mike Elgan thinks:

One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with “casual Friday” — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, “extreme telecommuting” — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?

The last remaining barrier to the general acceptance of “extreme telecommuting” is purely cultural — it’s our irrational clinging to obsolete rules for how we work. As the cultural barriers fall, more of us will be freed to work from wherever we please, something which mobile technology and Internet communication already enables.

To me, that’s the silver lining in high gas prices.

Seth Godin, writing about the higher standards business meetings and conferences must meet to make it worth the (increasingly expensive) trip puts the onus on managers to make going to the office a value-added experience, or else:

If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip. She needs to provide you with resources or interactions or energy you can’t find at home or at Starbucks. And if she does invite you in, don’t bother showing up if you’re just going to sit quietly.

I’ve worked in three companies that had lots of people and lots of cubes, and I spent the entire day walking around. I figured that was my job. The days where I sat down and did what looked like work were my least effective days. It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

How long before companies in places like Los Angeles adopt this kind of thinking?  I’m not sure they have a choice.

There’s probably money to be made in telling managers how to manage a virtual workforce, because a lot of companies will need to make this shift soon or they’ll lose valuable employees.

(A different version of this post appears on my personal blog, From the Desert to the Sea…)

According to the rules of celebrity marketing, the timing is a little off.  The Eagles have been touring since March.  Their new album, Long Road out of Eden, came out last October and has already sold more than 6 million copies. Usually cover stories are timed around the launch of new entertainment product when they’re news, not a few months later.  True, they just played New York.  Perhaps that aroused the interest of provincial Manhattanphile Jann Wenner, the magazine’s founder and publisher.

I suspect the Eagles pushed to have the story written, offering as an irresistible enticement to allow access to a writer from the magazine’s peak years, with whom they later feuded. The cover appearance, a PR coup, was surely negotiated.  What was the Eagles’ agenda?

My instincts tell me that despite the new album’s financial success, it hasn’t had the kind of cultural impact the Eagles expected. It was a much bigger deal in the media when the band first reformed back in 1997, toured and put out a live album.  And, of course, in the 70s, the pop-music spotlight was always on the Eagles.  They refined what became known as the California sound: Laid-back, countrified, introspective and a little sinister. Their Hotel California album was treasured not just as a set of songs, but as some kind of literary masterpiece.

The reason for the new disc’s muffled impact has to do, I think, with the band’s decision to sell it via a partnership that seems to run counter to the left-wing political stances with which the band is usually associated.  You can’t buy Long Road Out of Eden anywhere but at Wal-Mart. Until recently, you could only download it off Wal-Mart’s website or the Eagles’ own, although you can now get a download from Amazon. It’s still not on iTunes, and if you find a copy at another music store, it was probably purchased at Wal-Mart and marked up for resale.

Since I don’t live near a Wal-Mart, I was only vaguely aware that the Eagles had ended a nearly 30-year break from making a new studio album.  I don’t listen to much pop music on the radio anymore, but if I did, I’d have been unlikely to hear a single from it.  When other acts from the same era put out new music — Bruce Springsteen, the Who, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones — it seems like a much bigger deal because you see their promotion everywhere, online, in stores and on TV. The consequence of selling Long Road to Eden exclusively through Wal-Mart is that the album is a kind of hiding-in-plain-sight secret to many music fans.

Undoubtedly some fans (and detractors, of which the Eagles have always had many) avoid Wal-Mart, because that’s what progressive-minded people are supposed to do. From WakeUpWalMart.com, a labor-sponsored site:

Well, there are two visions for America: Wal-Mart’s America, where profits come before people, and our vision, where people come first.

• In Wal-Mart’s America, workers are paid poverty level wages even when they work full-time.
• In our America, workers are paid a living wage with proper health and retirement benefits.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, wealthy companies shift their health care costs onto taxpayers like you and your families.
• In our America, corporations live up to their responsibility and provide their employees with adequate and affordable health care coverage.
• In Wal-Mart’s America, suppliers are forced to make their goods cheaper even if it means shipping U.S. jobs overseas.
• In our America, we value U.S. jobs and companies that buy and sell “Made in America.”
• In Wal-Mart’s America, women are paid less than men.
• In our America, women and men are treated equally - fair pay for everyone.

Rolling Stone has also worked hard over the years to burnish its progressive image, with at least one political article per issue, 99 percent from a hard-line left-wing perspective.  This 2006 Paul Krugman piece, which cites Wal-Mart’s low wages and benefits as an example of economic inequality, is typical.

Today, Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation, with 1.3 million employees. H. Lee Scott, its chairman, is paid almost $23 million — more than five times Roche’s inflation-adjusted salary. Yet Scott’s compensation excites relatively little comment, since it’s not exceptional for the CEO of a large corporation these days. The wages paid to Wal-Mart’s workers, on the other hand, do attract attention, because they are low even by current standards. On average, Wal-Mart’s non-supervisory employees are paid $18,000 a year, far less than half what GM workers were paid thirty-five years ago, adjusted for inflation. And Wal-Mart is notorious both for how few of its workers receive health benefits and for the stinginess of those scarce benefits.

But the magazine’s take on the Eagles’ Wal-Mart deal is surprisingly sympathetic and unironic.  In a portion of the article not available online, the deal is explained this way:

Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager for four decades, figured out that the band was an established brand with an established audience with a habit of buying albums, not downloading. The Eagles therefore had no need of a record label’s starmaking machinery. He cut a deal directly with Wal-Mart to sell the double album for $11.88 — less than a normal first-run single CD — while the Eagles collected twice the normal royalty rate (four dollars)….

“Whatever you might think, the money is secondary to the Eagles,” says Azoff.  “They’re going to cash the checks, but they don’t sit around at night plotting to go with Wal-Mart because we’re getting more money. It’s great to see the record company relegated to the back seat. We make more money for 45 minutes of one show in Kansas City than our entire iTunes royalty.”

And that’s all Rolling Stone has to say about the Eagles and Wal-Mart — a kudo for sticking it to the record companies.  The rest of the magazine story is about the band’s history and how its members interact.

So, tell me if you think I’m wrong, but I suspect the Eagles now feel like the Wal-Mart deal cost them a chance at respect and influence.  The title song for the new album is a full-on protest song, with lyrics that squarely attack the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq.  I’m sure they had high ambitions for it:

Music blasting from an SUV
On a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate
In the good ol’ USA
Having lunch at the petroleum club
Smoking fine cigars and swapping lies
“Gimme ‘nother slice of that barbecued brisket!”
“Gimme ‘nother piece of that pecan pie”

Freeways flickering, cell phones chiming a tune
We’re riding to Utopia; road map says we’ll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it’s a long road out of Eden…

Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage, and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we’re driving dazed and drunk

Went down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way
He said, “It’s hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste”

Behold the bitten apple - the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it’s a long road out of Eden 

Wal-Mart is generally not where shoppers go to hear that kind of invective.  And I think that bothers the Eagles, not financially, but in their egos.  So they reached out to Rolling Stone, I  suspect, in hopes of having their pecan pie and eating it, too; to make the new album’s release more of an event. I wonder if it’s going to work out like they hope.

President Bush’s current spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Bush “he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years; and (is) disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts he never came to him or anyone else on the staff that we know of.”

Perhaps that’s because McClellan sees things differently now.  Perhaps he was always repulsed by the “deception,” but was just too chicken to say anything.  McClellan seems unwilling to take a clear stand either way.  Instead, from what I’ve read so far, he wants to be able to analyze the Bush Administrations failings from afar, like a pundit.  As if he was never personally involved with it.

McClellan’s memoir is not a particularly flattering portrayal of the role a public relations professional plays in a high-profile organization.  He seems to feel that, as a spokesman, he can excuse himself from responsibility for his clients’ deeds and his own words, as if his participation didn’t matter. In McClellan’s view, he’s at liberty now to join with the same critics of the Bush Administration’s honesty that he used to parry at daily press briefings.  In trying to go easy on himself, however, he is undermining whatever remaining credibility the PR industry can claim for itself.

From the excerpt in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal:

As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured.

My friends and former colleagues who lived and worked or are still working inside that bubble may not be happy with the perspective I present here. Many of them, I’m sure, remain convinced that the Bush administration has been fundamentally correct in its most controversial policy judgments, and that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it is undeserved.

Only time will tell. But I’ve become genuinely convinced otherwise.

His use of the word “genuinely” is revealing.  Before he’s 100 words into his story, he’s defending himself from a charge he knows is coming:  That his publisher and his publisher’s publicist convinced him to manufacture controversy and disagreement with his former boss because that would sell more books than another dime-a-dozen White House memoir.

Does McClellan persuade us that the scales “genuinely” have fallen from his eyes?  The test I would apply to his words is to compare what he claims to believe now with what he would have had to believe when he was in the White House.  If this is a genuine conversion, his own mistakes, misjudgments and areas of ignorance would be central to his case.

Unfortunately, what I found in the WSJ excerpt was an unwillingness to look at himself critically.  McClellan writes:

Most of our elected leaders in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, are good, decent people. Yet too many of them today have made a practice of shunning truth and the high level of openness and forthrightness required to discover it.

Is this what “good, decent people” do?  If they shun the truth, doesn’t that make them liars?  No, says McClellan, because

Most of it is not willful or conscious.

Yikes.  Our government is run by a bunch of sleepwalkers? Robots programmed to lie?  What he’s describing is epistemologically tricky.  If you’re not conscious of lying, then by definition you’re not lying.  A liar must have intent to deceive. According to Scott McClellan, neither he nor anyone he knew acted with such intent.  He could have been lied to, and innocently conveyed the lie; but if someone has lied to you and callously used you as an instrument to convey the lie, you can hardly call them “good and decent.”

You could say, “I should have checked out the story more. I thought I was telling the truth, but I ignored information that was available that would have shown me that I was transmitting lies.” That would at least suggest he bore some responsibility for the deception, by choosing to avert his eyes from an easily discernable truth.

But that’s not what McClellan says.  Instead he comes up with this:

Rather, it is part of the modern Washington game that has become the accepted norm.

As I explain in this book, Washington has become the home of the permanent campaign, a game of endless politicking based on the manipulation of shades of truth, partial truths, twisting of the truth, and spin.

He uses the metaphor of “a game” to describe various manipulations of the truth.  Can you play a game you don’t know you’re playing?  No.  Games have rules.  Games have strategies.  You can’t play a game successfully if you aren’t following the rules and aren’t aware of the strategies.  You don’t play a game, any game, without intent.

What this almost sounds like is the kind of excuse liberals are accused of making for inner-city criminals; that they’re a product of their environment, that the culture is to blame.  In Scott McClellan’s view, therefore, personal responsibility is out the window, especially his own.

Let’s look at how he analyzes this culture, this set of social norms encouraging deception, this “game.”  He apparently sees it as something new:

Governing has become an appendage of politics rather than the other way around, with electoral victory and the control of power as the sole measures of success.

What did he think before writing this book? It’s not as if he was a budget analyst or a flood-control engineer. He was a flack.  Very few flacks work for government who don’t come out of politics or at least have a rudimentary comprehension of it.  They wouldn’t survive otherwise.  And anyone who knows anything about the relationship between government and politics would know that there hasn’t been a president since George Washington who successfully divorced his political interests from the act of governing.

For McClellan to claim this as a new insight is disingenuous.  His mother was an elected official in Texas.  When he went to the White House, he knew exactly what he was getting into.

McClellan tries to define the “permanent campaign,” a political innovation he claims came out of the Bill Clinton years.

That means shaping the narrative before it shapes you. Candor and honesty are pushed to the side in the battle to win the latest news cycle…

So many buzzwords, so little time:  Narrative and news cycle.

I find McClellan’s use of the vogue word “narrative” as grating as I find it when Daily Kos uses it.  All it really means is telling a coherent story, and trying to prevent your opposition from telling theirs by undermining it.

Political pundits and operatives have been talking about the “news cycle” since before Bush’s father took office.  The idea was born around the regular cycles of daily publication and nightly news, in which new batches of news were released 24 hours after the previous batch. You wanted that day’s headline or top TV story to be the story you hoped to tell. You wanted your quotes near the top, and your adversary’s quotes in paragraph 16.

Nowadays, no one is sure what the frequency of a news cycle is.  It has become fashionable to say “the news cycle is 24 hours now,” but what does that mean?  That there is a news cycle in each of those 24 hours?  For all practical purposes, there is no “news cycle” anymore, just a continuous stream of information and political posturing.

The news cycle is a particularly irrelevant metaphor when it comes to political news.  Political news consumers live in a kind of virtual reality battlefield, a World of Warcraft in which the various news and commentary sources each occupy different parts of the landscape.  Each outlet reacts differently to particular news events, depending on their style and political bias. Rush Limbaugh will say one thing, but Keith Olbermann will say another, and both will ignore or distort stories that don’t conform to their ideology.

The so-called “mainstream” news sources are hemorrhaging viewers and readers, and their credibility is under continual attack. Some traditionally objective news outlets seem to have given up any pretense of even-handedness. It now makes more commercial sense to target a partisan audience with news that matches their preconceptions, rather than trying to be fair, which ends up annoying and alienating half your audience.

The buzzword for this is “cocooning.”  Blue people want to read blue news that reaffirms their blueness, and red people want to live where the sea and sky are red.  When a red person sees a blue news source, and vice versa, they expect to get outraged.  But since they would prefer not to be outraged, cocooned news consumers usually don’t venture out, and instead swap legends about what the other color says and does.  It’s all rather reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss book.

I digress, except to demonstrate that McClellan’s view of the political media climate–the one that’s so awful and  liable for our political woes–is strangely out of date.

After expressing his disappointment that Bush practiced the “permanent campaign” just as much as Bill Clinton did, McClellan discusses the press’ role:

The permanent campaign also ensnares the media, who become complicit enablers of its polarizing effects. They emphasize conflict, controversy and negativity, focusing not on the real-world impact of policies and their larger, underlying truths but on the horse race aspects of politics – who’s winning, who’s losing, and why…

This is true as far as it goes.  But any news editor would tell you, and would have told you 100 years ago, conflict and controversy excite the audience, and the absence of conflict and controversy bores them and makes them go elsewhere.   Without conflict, you don’t have a story and stories are what all news outlets are comprised of.

Is McClellan, whose entire career has been as a press spokesman, trying to suggest the media’s preference for conflict is a surprise to him?

The press amplifies the talking points of one or both parties in its coverage, thereby spreading distortions, half-truths, and occasionally outright lies in an effort to seize the limelight and have something or someone to pick on. And by overemphasizing conflict and controversy and by reducing complex and important issues to convenient, black-and-white story lines and seven-second sound bites the media exacerbate the problem, thereby making it incredibly hard even for well-intentioned leaders to clarify and correct the misunderstandings and oversimplifications that dominate the political conversation.

There’s lots of information out there, especially now, for anyone who wants it.  Every federal department has a website packed with information from which good stories could be extracted.  Scott McClellan’s job involved providing extensive daily briefings, during which he had every opportunity to enlighten us. But despite all this information and all this attention, he couldn’t make “complex and important issues” interesting enough.  Is that the press’ fault, or was he, perhaps, an incompetent flack?

At this point, you can almost hear McClellan’s editor saying, “okay fine, Scott, all this high-minded crap is okay, if not particularly original.  But when are you going to trash Bush?”So here’s his first shot: (more…)

Amid waves of foreclosures wrecking the financial fortunes of his customers, Mozilo zeroed in on the most important problem facing these soon-to-be ex-homeowners: Lack of originality.

Apparently clicking “reply” when he meant to hit “forward,” Countrywide Financial Corp. Chairman Angelo Mozilo ignited an online furor Tuesday by describing a mortgage customer’s plea for help as a “disgusting” example of form letters inundating the Calabasas home lender.

Mozilo’s e-mail rocketed back to the customer, Daniel Bailey Jr., who had asked Countrywide to modify the terms of his loan so he wouldn’t lose his home of 16 years.

Bailey said he took out the adjustable-rate mortgage without realizing how it worked and had been told incorrectly that he could refinance after a year. Instead, he wrote, “the bottom fell out” of the home-loan industry, and he was stuck with unaffordable payments.

Much of the language in Bailey’s message to Countrywide was borrowed from a form letter available at the website LoanSafe.org, a coaching service for troubled borrowers. Bailey, who says he operates a photo studio, posted his e-mailed exchange with the lender on a LoanSafe forum.

His original e-mail was sent to 20 Countrywide addresses, including Mozilo’s. Such mass e-mails have overwhelmed e-mail boxes at Countrywide, disrupting its operations and prompting Mozilo’s heated response, the company said.

“This is unbelievable,” Mozilo said in his e-mail. “Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting.”

So keep that in mind, Mr. Bailey and all you other pending bankrupts. In your desperate pleas for help — no copying!

Obama has deftly embraced — and been embraced by — the Internet. His campaign has deputized soccer grandmoms and hipsters alike to generate new heights of viral support. And he has been exceptionally successful at converting online clicks into real-world currency: rallies in the heartland, videos on YouTube, and most important, donations and votes.

The question is how. Social networking poses challenges for marketers, no matter what — or whom — they’re selling. Traditional top-down messages don’t often work in an ecosystem where the masses are in charge. Marketers must cede a certain degree of control over their brands. And that can be terrifying. (Remember that “I got a crush on … Obama” lip-synched YouTube tribute?)

Yet giving up control online, in the right way, unleashes its own power. And more than any other “national product” to date — and far more than any other presidential candidate — Obama has tapped into that power.

The key is Facebook.  Literally, not metaphorically.  Obama’s campaign hired one of Facebook’s co-founders, Chris Hughes.  Hughes was not the tech architect for Facebook.  His expertise was communicating through and with social networks.  The key is to give people who want to get involved something to do.

The campaign’s Web site is “far more dynamic than any of the others,” says Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who has been studying Web sites and social media in campaigns with her colleague Jeff Gulati. BarackObama.com features constant updates, videos, photos, ringtones, widgets, and events to give supporters a reason to come back to the site. On mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s quasi-social network, Obamaniacs can create their own blogs around platform issues, send policy recommendations directly to the campaign, set up their own mini fund-raising site, organize an event, even use a phone-bank widget to get call lists and scripts to tele-canvass from home.

Indeed.  For purposes of writing this post, I decided to check out mybarackobama.com.  I signed up in about three seconds. Five seconds later I was being set up to make get-out-the-vote calls to Oregon.

Social media forms the landscape, but Fast Company identifies Obama with a style of leadership that fits best into that landscape: (more…)

Here’s the press release:
Getting Up Close and Personal With the Business of Image

SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 /PRNewswire/ — The Association of Image
Consultants International (AICI) holds its Annual Conference, titled “The
Ins and Outs of Image: Turning Your Business Inside Out and Upside Down,”
at the Renaissance Tampa Hotel, Tampa, Florida from Thursday, May 15
through Monday, May 19.

The title of the conference is a string of visual metaphors that you’d need M.C. Escher to illustrate.

Says Carol Robichaud, AICI CIP, the conference vice president: “The
site selection reflects the international beauty, flavor and ambiance of
our image industry.

Aren’t all conference held in as desirable a location as attendees can afford?  You need an image consultant to tell you Tampa is a nicer place to go than Gary, Indiana?

We will be hosting newcomers in our association, seasoned image professionals

How long has it been possible to call oneself an “image professional?”  What does an image consultant do to become “seasoned” at it?

Here’s what AICI’s website says:

As an independent professional, an image consultant guides you in presenting yourself to your best advantage and in expressing your highest potential.
Whether you’re an individual or a corporation, an image consultant can teach you how to polish your professional image in three areas:

• Your physical appearance – Grooming, hair, make-up, color, wardrobe, and personal shopping.

Okay, I get it.  “What Not to Wear,” except instead of being nominated by your worried mother, you nominate yourself, and pay for it yourself.  Except they also offer to change…

• Your behavior – Personality, stress management, etiquette, and protocol.

From personal shopping to altering your personality is a big leap, isn’t it?  But that’s not all…

• Your communication skills – Diction, body language, relationship-building, and conflict resolution.

Speech therapy? Couples counseling?  Anger management?  The same person who picks a new shape of lipstick can also make lions lie down with lambs?  Maybe they should have a show, too: “Who Not to Be.”

After this crescendo of amazing claims, the site incongruously makes yet another offer — to make house calls:

An image consultant utilizes the learning environment that you find most comfortable and convenient, whether it’s personal consultation in your office or home, a coaching session over the phone, a presentation to your executive team, a seminar for your employees, or a workshop at your annual conference.

Hey, if you’re this gifted, don’t worry, I’ll come to your place.

Now, back to the press release:

Over 45 workshops are scheduled on far-reaching image topics, including
running successful international image businesses, proper business and
social etiquette, motivational and image-related sessions for women and men
by the leading experts in the field.

Seems like kind of weak tea for these image consultant superheroes.  Shouldn’t they be discussing Plato?  Or at least Calvin Klein?

“The conference’s main objective is to provide our members a pleasing atmosphere whereby they can gain professional certification through these internationally accredited programs,” states Robichaud.

Now I’m feeling really let down.  If you can fix my wardrobe, my body language, my tendency to speak too fast and my relationships, you shouldn’t need no stinkin’ badges.

For more information on the conference and registration details, visit our Web site at http://www.aici.org.

The featured speaker at the Opening Reception, Friday, May 16, is Doris
Pooser, AICI, a New York-based internationally recognized image leader,

I wonder if some of the other image consultants at the conference might suggest Ms. Pooser, er, change her last name?  The image I get from “Pooser” isn’t great.

who is president, CEP and founder of AIS International, Inc./Always in Style
and author of nine best-selling books for women and men, including her most
recent: A Woman’s Guide to Success, Perfecting Your Professional Image.

The major sponsors include: Gold-Level - LookSmart, Australia’s leading
tailoring chain for alterations, including general alterations, re-sizing,
restyling and invisible mending. As exhibitors, they present “Perfect Fit,”
highlighting the importance of having clothes altered to fit the body
correctly.

In other words: When you buy clothes, take them to a tailor.  Tailors have been around a long time.  This needs “highlighting?”

The two Silver-Level sponsors include: Nina McLemore LLC, the New
York-based creator of designer-quality, elegant clothing for the busy
executive woman, superbly tailored using the finest imported, mostly
natural fibers;

I like that “mostly natural.”  Hint: “Mostly” wouldn’t work on vegans or people who keep Kosher.

and Underology…the science of what’s underneath, which includes “Lipo in a Box, the SMART foundations of beauty — a line of shapewear that takes away all those unpleasant lumps and bumps hiding beneath the surface and Underology’s SMART line of basic and advanced skincare products by Connie Elder International, featured prominently in countless national and international print and broadcast media.

You mean, like, girdles.  That thing Judy Garland was trying to fit into in Meet Me in St. Louis.  This image business is all about using tailors and wearing a girdle.

The Association of Image Consultants International (AICI) is located on
the web at http://www.aici.org.

Please, go there.  Tell me what you can figure out about the amazing yet oddly prosaic image consultants and their secrets.

Think of it as a mini-site, or temporary site, almost like a booth at a trade show. It’s a combination of marketing, investor relations, and customer service. The content here is meant to answer all of the questions from any of the merger’s stakeholders.

The legalese on the site calls it a press release, a phrase that evokes something texty, a single page with a headline, contact information and some canned executive quotes. No more. The new press release, for major events anyway, is a full-blown communications center.

This one is professional, well designed, and neatly organized by stakeholders—employees, customers and communities (read: local governments that control airports).

The amount of information available is impressive. Employees worried about layoffs get a detailed FAQ, a merger time line and more. Customers can choose their home state to see how the proposed merger affects their service. Investors and municipalities get a 17-slide presentation with statistical information and maps of the combined network of routes.

The site strikes me as an all-you-can-eat buffet run by a chef with OCD.  You can watch highlights of the press conference, or the entire press conference.  Or, you can watch just the comments of certain executives who spoke at the press conference.

There are separate fact sheets, rich with links, for employees, customers and “communities,” meaning the current Delta or Northwest hub cities and the other markets they serve.  Minnesotans get a page all their own, where you can learn that Northwest’s roots in Minneapolis/St. Paul go back to 1926, while the Utah page salutes Delta’s equally long relationship with Salt Lake City (via now-disappeared Western Airlines, which Delta swallowed up some years back).  But they don’t stop there.  The proposed merged airline’s got a message for all 50 states, with even more information for specific cities.  It is a web developer tour de force.

Keep digging around and you’ll find message points on high fuel prices — not really relevant to this story, but the mad PR chef wanted to prepare something in case somebody asked.  Almost humorously, there are frequent places to link to Frequently Asked Questions. Who could possibly have a question left after sifting through all this verbage?  If it hasn’t been covered, it’s probably a question they don’t want to answer.

And that’s the problem I have with this mega-release.  It’s a high-tech version of an old PR technique that one could call “drown the reporter.”  Only now, the audience isn’t just the business press, it’s customers, employees and communities.  It creates the impression that you’ve been told everything.  But of course you haven’t. And if you managed to think of a question not covered in all these pages, there is no way to ask it.  There is no link that allows you to e-mail anyone at either airline.

However, they’d love it if you would write your elected officials, using a note helpfully drafted for you by our OCD chef. You can send the following e-mail to up to 10 of your friends and family at a time:

Dear Friend,

Please visit the link below to learn more about the merger between Delta and Northwest Airlines and to find out how you can get involved.

Spam from your own family!  And you can spam yourself, sign up for regular e-mail updates about the merger, presumably with more requests to write Congress and get your friends into the act.  Maybe you’ve got friends overseas you want to share this news with.  The release is available on this site in 12 languages.

Well, you’re probably thinking this is much more information than anyone can ever use.  How much interest is there, really, in this merger?  The vertical slice of the audience that cares deeply will find this site unsatisfying on many levels, and everyone else will find it to be overkill.  This is the kind of site you could spend an hour reading, but you’ll actually only give it 30 seconds.

Berinato has a theory as to why the airlines’ PR departments went to all this trouble:

I would argue that the Delta and Northwest had no choice. After all, boycottnewglobalairline.com is still available for $9.95. If the airlines don’t put out a compelling message, others may. Who? It could be any group or anyone: The pilots’ union. A blogger who calls himself the cranky flier. Ralph Nader!

People who want to know what this merger means to them will go directly to the web to find out. It’s not that Delta and Northwest would lose control of the message without a website. They wouldn’t have a message at all.

Maybe so.  That’s what PR people tell their clients anyway.  But if this is the press release of the future, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the press. The whole idea of this release is to talk directly to readers who come across it, to let them identify themselves by audience segment, and to reassure them that, yes, we’ve even thought of you, Mr. and Mrs. Vermont Stakeholder.

But after you swim around in this sea of blather for awhile, you find yourself wanting to escape, escape to a world where someone will utter a skeptical word.

Politics is the screen through which we tend to process all news.   Colombia negotiated a free-trade deal with the Bush Administration that needs congressional approval.  Clinton and Obama oppose the deal, oppose all trade deals now, so Penn’s appearance at a meeting with Colombian officials was a political gaffe.

But what if we pretend for a moment that Burson-Marsteller (BM), one of the five biggest PR agencies in the world, is the center of the news universe instead of Hillary Clinton?  What was a bad story for the candidate looks like a disaster for a company that, a year ago, was probably counting on the Clinton connection for a big payoff beginning in 2009.

Let’s look at Robert Novak’s column on the matter:

WASHINGTON — Immediately after Mark Penn resigned as Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist a week ago, he was on the phone with at least two prominent Democrats to assure them that nothing had changed. He said that — though lacking a title now — he still was polling and crafting her message, adding that he had just participated in a top-level conference call. De facto retention of Penn signified a desire to defeat Barack Obama at any cost.

Whether you think Penn adds to or subtracts from the Clinton campaign, how does it help BM’s credibility if its chairman is seen participating in such a nakedly dishonest gambit?  BM execs are out there pitching new business every day.  How do they answer client questions about the Colombia matter?  “Will you apologize for representing us, too?”

One day later, word was spread in Democratic circles that Geoff Garin, hired as a pollster by Sen. Clinton last month, had supplanted Penn as chief strategist. An experienced political practitioner renowned for ethical standards more than imagination or daring, Garin in charge reassured the party faithful. It was interpreted as ruling out an eleventh-hour assault on Obama that would have less chance of nominating Clinton than wrecking the party.

Nice.  Pollsters apparently come in two flavors, ethical and unethical. The chairman of BM is the kind who launches “eleventh-hour assaults” and “wrecks the party.”  Thanks, boss.  

Is Penn deceiving friends about his real status just to save face? Or is Garin merely a figurehead to take the heat off Clinton while she still relies on the contentious Penn?

Neither proposition is wholly true. Garin values his reputation too much to take a sham job lacking in authority. Penn’s firm (Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates) continues to poll for Clinton, adding to the enormous debt the candidate owes it.

No question, Penn’s firm has banked a lot of money from the Clinton campaign, but at this point, the firm, which is owned by BM’s parent company WPP Group, is looking at a massive write-off.   WPP is a public company.  Are shareholders concerned?  (More on this below.)

 Penn remains seated at the table but is not chairing the meetings.

As it enters its probable final days, Clinton’s campaign appears as dysfunctional as it was last year when her nomination seemed inevitable. Penn’s strategic decisions are blamed by Clinton’s friends and foes for her fall, but that was not the reason given for his resignation.

It’s not a good thing if the most famous PR executive in the country is famous for (at least as of now) blowing a sure thing.  Hillary Clinton was the “inevitable” nominee at least until January 2008, as you recall.   

It was the discovery by outraged union leaders that Penn was helping the Colombian government seek congressional approval of the free trade agreement, which is opposed by labor and Clinton. That enabled Penn’s exit without admitting his strategic errors.

Does anyone care about BM’s client?  Colombia was represented by BM for a year, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.  Now, whatever messages the government paid BM to promulgate are drowned out by the controversy between their PR company and labor unions.  Were the Colombians warned this could happen?   It can’t have been Colombia’s intention to become the poster child for labor’s rage at the global economy; nor to pay for the privilege.  Keep in mind, it was only after Penn’s embarassment that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi felt sufficiently emboldened to cancel a promised vote on the deal.  

Whatever was the real reason for sacking Penn, Democrats who are interested in preventing the struggle for the nomination from destroying the party sighed in relief. Garin looks to a post-Hillary political life and does not want to be seen conducting a berserk attack with little chances for success. In contrast, Penn might be willing to fly a kamikaze mission in what is likely to be his last political campaign. Thus, it is critical that Penn still plays a major role in the campaign.

“Berserk.”  “Kamikaze.”  ‘Little chance for success.”  Words to warm stockholders’ hearts. And, hey, catnip for new business.

Penn’s business conglomerate remains entwined in Clinton’s campaign. Three weeks ago, the campaign hired as chief operating officer Howard Paster, who heads the London-based global advertising giant WPP. Penn is CEO of the public relations and lobbying company Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, which is owned by WPP.

I guess WPP has decided “in for a penny, in for a pound.”  It’s conventional wisdom that Clinton’s chances of securing the Democratic nomination are slim, though perhaps slightly improved in the wake of Barack Obama’s inartful attack on rural voters. 

Penn and Paster won the admiration and devotion of the Clintons by running Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign.

That’s one possible explanation.  Another might be that Paster has parachuted into Clintonland to rescue WPP’s assets from further damage.  Penn’s high-profile role with Clinton has drawn much unwanted attention to BM’s business which, like most big PR firms, includes a handful of horrifying clients.  It’ll be interesting to see how Paster fights his way out of the morass BM’s CEO has created.

Beyond loyalty, Penn is welded to the 2008 Clinton campaign by financial ties. A source who has had close connections with Penn got word to me that he believes the Clinton campaign is $10 million in debt to Penn, Schoen & Berland, which is owned by Burson-Marsteller. The campaign’s March report to the Federal Election Commission recorded indebtedness to the company of nearly $2.5 million (with its expenses for the month listed at $3.1 million).

My sources suggest that Clinton’s full indebtedness may be revealed only gradually. This money link helps explain why Penn is still around after organized labor demanded his scalp last summer and he is blamed inside the campaign for failing to perceive the public’s demand for “change.”

Just how much money Clinton owes Penn can cause major difficulties in the future. If not repaid promptly, would it constitute an illegal financial contribution? Because the British WPP owns Burson-Marsteller, would that debt constitute an illegal foreign contribution?

Not much to add to this.  Novak did some great reporting, even though he buried his best stuff.  That’s the nut of the business story right there. In a less politics-obsessed world, WPP and BM’s exposure to potential violations of law would be a bigger part of the story.  Because, let’s assume Novak’s source is correct and Clinton does owe Penn’s firm $10 million.  There’s still at least another six weeks of campaigning ahead, six weeks of do or die, all-out, no holding back.  How big will her debts be then? 

If Sen. Clinton doesn’t pull out a miraculous win, she will have a very hard time raising the immense amounts of money required to repay BM and Penn’s firm.  She can’t go back to previous donors if they’ve “maxed out.”  But WPP’s family of firms can’t just forgive the debts without opening up a legal chasm that could grievously damage the business.

Over the last week, I talked to 10 superdelegates (including two U.S. senators) who are committed to Clinton. Each claimed he would stick with her, but none could see how she could be nominated. In such a frame of mind, they would prefer a Geoff Garin-style soft landing to conclude the campaign. With Mark Penn still around, they could get a far more dramatic endgame.

Novak probably has few sources in the PR/advertising world, but a good business reporter might want to follow up with 10 WPP board members to get their side of this story.  I can’t imagine they are feeling calm right now.