14 days - no computer....and I'm chilled

I'm back working today....sort of....after two weeks of Cyprus sun.

We stayed on a five star resort - definitely the subject for a separate posting when I'm more awake - and the sun shone, and shone, and shone.

For the first time in eight years I left my laptop at home and didn't even splash out the 10 Euro a day to use the in-room Internet facility. So I came back to 759 emails today...of which about 150 were actually worth reading, and, following an overnight flight, have spent this afternoon slowly coming back up to speed.

I'm tired now, but relaxed too and actually looking forward to getting stuck into work properly tomorrow.

Holiday time has to be downtime: time to unwind and leave work far, far away. It has really worked for me this time round. The world didn't crash and burn; the work's still out there and life moved effortlessly on without me having to check out emails on the hour every hour.

All we (should) do is talk-talk

There's a poll on the CiB website at the moment asking: 'what's the most effective form of business communication?'

At the time of writing, more than 70% of respondents are saying face to face, with just 3.5% favouring the intranet and just 1.2% selecting email.

Yet why are most businesses so obsessed with generating intranet content and, worse still, pumping out information masquerading as communication by email?

Since I first started in corporate comms two decades ago, the wisdom has been that people prefer to receive key information from their managers and to have the opportunity to discuss it with their peers.

But in this supposedly time-poor age, we're not supposed to have the time capacity to down tools and talk about what really matters. Instead, the emphasis is back to top-down - shifting information from the centre quickly and putting the onus on employees to seek it out, understand it and act on it. But the assumption that something is read and understood by the right people just because it has been sent is particularly crass.

How many emails do people receive every day? Far too many to act on. And if employees diligently took the time to read everything sent their way, or worse still, surfed the company intranet for new news all the time, wouldn't the time lost be longer than necessary for a quick team meeting or manager chat where the message could be tailored to the specific needs of that particular audience?

Perhaps we've just become lazy and timid as communicators, preferring to operate in our comfort zones where it's easy to pump out content without having to face the consequences of applying that content to the needs of our different audiences. We're not making our managers work hard enough or challenging our leaders to be visible embodiments of the business.

There's a danger that we're talking a great game, and delivering something completely different.

It was 20 years ago today....

20 years ago, Jac and I looked like this - but on June 13 1987 we actually put on slightly nicer clothes to walk down the aisle at St. Mary's Church in Harefield, Middlesex as husband and wife. Funny enough, the weather was pretty much like today - a sunny morning with heavy rain forecast for the evening. We got through the pictures and all that malarkey in bright sunshine - though we got soaked on the way to the hotel in the evening.

A few days later we were strolling down 5th Avenue in New York and I remember feeling totally elated.

Three kids, nine jobs (me 6, Jac 3), 19 cars and four houses later, we're still rock solid.

It's hard to believe that back then mobile phones were in their infancy, email was a joke and the Internet had yet to be unleashed on the world. I had a 'laptop' that nearly broke my shoulder when I carried it, used a hard-copy library and microfiche to research my articles while working at Which?, and used to post 'Yellow Drafts' - hard copies of draft articles for review by the great and the good - often posting out 20 or 30 copies of an article which would come back a few weeks later with hand-scrawled comments all over them.

Life changes, but today I'm feeling weirdly constant.