Jon Strande sent me a very nice email about my blog on the language of branding. I don't know about you but it always brightens my day to get compliments about my blog, and I get a childlike delight at finding my words read in other parts of the world.

Anyway, Jon keeps a pretty nice blog himself, and I appreciate his link here and here to this pdf article: Notes on the role of leadership and language in regenerating organisations from Sun. It begins...

An organization is a living system.
To survive in a highly competitive market,
it strives to increase its efficiency.
Language is the defining environment
in which these systems live.
It is how those in the system reach agreement.
It is also a medium for organizational growth
and change....
It is possible for an organization to learn and grow,
but only if it creates conditions
that help generate new language.
Using new language,
an organization may create new paths to productivity,
and regenerate itself.

This feels along the lines of what I was blogging about. I've not fully disgested this interesting document yet, and I like that Sun are fomenting conversations in this way. There are many thought provoking insights here... and I do have some concern about this bit of it.

Leadership is the reduction of uncertainty
in an organization.
It comes from clear messages,
which lead to focused actions
that cannot easily be misinterpreted.
It comes from developing channels
for continuous feedback.

Whilst that sounds very appealing in some ways, I don't think leadership is always about reducing uncertainty; sometimes it is about more about embracing it. Scary thought that is; indeed by arguing for change in conversations, Sun are introducing uncertainty about the current conversations. And when I read this

Some within Sun
are tasked with improving performance
of the present-day business.
They use the current language
to increase efficiencies.
Others are tasked with generating opportunities
for Sun ’s future business.
They recognize new domains of invention
and translate them into new language
that may lead to profitable new endeavors.

I worry a little more. I don't believe that we can clinically separate the daily doing of business from the reinvention of language. The Academie Francaise tries this model with its bans on Franglais, and frankly it looks a bit foolish.

These caveats may well be pedantic but I like to focus on the fact that each of us, in any conversation, are shaping the culture we work in by the way we choose to converse. Brands are not created by Brand Managers but by everyone in the system. They are created partly by the organisations politics which many brand writers exclude from their descriptions of how brands are built. In doing so, they present ideals that are not true to what's really happening and to that extent are no longer talking about the real brand out there.

I'm warming to this theme and plan to build on it.