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I recently saw a “based on a true story” ad for Tim Hortons that aired during a Blue Jays game. That led me to the Tim Hortons website, where the company is now running a competition (with a grand prize of $ 5000 in Tim Cards) for stories about “special Tim Hortons coffee moments.” The slogan of this initiative is “every cup tells a story,” and it appears that the best stories will be translated into ads.

I’m not sure how many ads have yet been based on these submissions, so I’ll confine my comments to the one that I did see. This story involves a relationship between a young adult daughter and her parents, particularly her father. The young woman has moved to a small apartment – she sleeps in the living room – in the downtown of a big city and, to indicate that this is a lifestyle change, gotten a nose stud.

Her parents have come to visit her. Her father is trying to persuade her to come home – presumably somewhere in small-town Canada – where it is less expensive and quieter. She tells dad that “this [the big city] is home.” Daughter and parents see a Tims and sit down for a coffee and a heart-to-heart talk. While her father still looks distressed at her life choices, the Tims is presented as the place where they can still connect.

The ad portrays very important life-cycle issues. The young woman is asserting her own identity. While the ad doesn’t tell us what work she is doing, it does tell us that it will be in a big city, not a small town, and will involve an edgier and more avant-garde life style than found in a small town. It sounds like she has joined Richard Florida’s “creative class.”

Her father is acting out of sincere concern for his daughter – an aspect of Erik Erikson’s generativity – but his concern is tinged with self-interest, in that he still wants her close by. The difficult realization he’s reaching is that his idea of how she should live her life must give way to hers, and that he cannot control her.

It’s interesting that the company ran the ad during a baseball game, where the audience demographic includes – perhaps is dominated by – the middle aged males represented by the dad. I assume it could also be used on programs with the young adult audience represented by the daughter (perhaps the CBC’s “Being Erica.”)

But where does the link to Tims fit in? It’s indirect, since the ad is not about the coffee or the menu, but rather about the human interactions that customers have at Tims. If the ad’s target market is – even more specifically – middle aged males in small towns, then it is reinforcing the message that Tims is the coffee shop of choice, but there are also many Tims, even in gritty noisy big city downtowns.

The question that comes to my mind – as a middle-aged guy who has spent his entire life in big cities – is where I would go for if I were looking for neutral ground on which to have a heart-to-heart chat with either a family member or a colleague. Tims would not be my first choice. I’d be looking for a place with a quiet corner that has the feel of a living room, and where we could linger without any pressure to free up the table for another customer. To their credit, the Tims I pass by are very successful and always seem crowded, with long lines of people waiting to order. I’d be much more likely to choose a Starbucks or Second Cup that isn’t too busy, and has quiet corners where people linger.

I’ll be interested in seeing the next commercials to emerge out of Tims initiative in narrative crowd-sourcing. I’m an advocate of story-telling as a means of communicating one’s message. But I’m not convinced that indirect stories about interactions between people having coffee (or food) at Tims are winning customers for Tims, or strengthening its market position relative to that of its competitors.

This post is to announce the publication of my latest book, Governing Fables: Learning from Public Sector Narratives. The book can be ordered from Information Age Publishing at its webpage: http://infoagepub.com/products/Governing-Fables. It can also be ordered from online booksellers such as www.amazon.com.

Governing Fables advocates the importance of narrative for public servants, exemplifies it with a rigorously selected and analyzed set of narratives, and imparts narrative skills politicians and public servants need in their careers. Governing Fables turns to narratology, the inter-disciplinary study of narrative, for a conceptual framework that is applied to a set of narratives engaging life within public organizations, focusing on works produced during the last twenty-five years in the US and UK. The genres discussed include British government narratives inspired by and reacting to Yes Minister, British appeasement narratives, American political narratives, the Cuban Missile Crisis narrative, jury decision-making narratives, and heroic teacher narratives. In each genre lessons are presented regarding both effective management and essential narrative skills.

Governing Fables is intended for public management and political science scholars and practitioners interested in leadership and management, as well as readers drawn to the political subject matter and to the genre of political films, novels, and television series.

Here is some background to the book. Narrative has become a significant cultural phenomenon, as evidenced by its frequent use in discourse (particularly in government and business circles), and affirmed by its rapidly increasing Google count, now  nearing 100 million references.

Narrative is also an area of growing interest within public management. Some scholars have begun to collect and analyze public servants’ narratives. Other authors have written about how public management practitioners can use story-telling as a form of advocacy. Still other authors have looked for the management lessons to be found in authored narratives about politics or public management, particularly movies and novels.

My book focuses primarily on the analysis of authored narratives, but does it in a much more sophisticated way than its precursors. The management lessons literature focuses on content rather than form, and looks for unambiguous readings. In Governing Fables, I apply narratological theory to these texts, which necessarily entails an acceptance of ambiguity and conflicting meanings, both within an individual text and among the several texts that retell a particular story. It also involves an analysis of the relationship between content and narrative strategy. Rather than restricting my focus to individual texts, I am looking for common patterns in related texts. It is these common patterns that create the Governing Fables referred to in the title. The fables refer to specific contexts, such as transformational teachers in troubled public high schools, British politicians, or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have also created an overarching structure for the different contexts, namely a four quadrant model that incorporates diverse outcomes for both protagonists and the organizations that they lead. Readers of this blog will recall that I applied this model in posts earlier this year to notable recent films (Inside Job, The King’s Speech, The Social Network) as well as to campaign messaging in the recent Canadian election.

If you purchase Governing Fables you can look forward to a thoughtful discussion of a variety of contemporary British and American movies, novels, television programs, and memoirs about politics and government – some of which you may have already read or seen and others which you may want to read or see. From this discussion will emerge lessons about how politicians and public managers can behave effectively in a variety of managerial contexts, and lessons about the use of narrative as a management skill.

Writing this book has involved a lot of thought, and I believe I’ve come up with something that is distinctive and valuable. I encourage you to read it.

– this post written jointly with my wife Beth Herst –

At a time when Toronto Blue Jays fans are honoring legendary former second baseman Roberto Alomar’s induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, I’d like to celebrate two of Toronto’s so-called utility players, John McDonald and Mike McCoy. Unlike Alomar, they are not stars. They will never receive that call from Cooperstown. Yet in their way they too represent the best of the game.

McDonald, 36, is now a veteran, having been with the Jays since 2005. His fielding is superb, and he is well-known for his diving catches and near-flawless execution. His hitting, however, has never been quite strong enough to hold down a permanent position in the starting line-up.

McCoy, 30, has been with the Jays since 2009, primarily with its Triple A farm team in Las Vegas. Since the beginning of the season, he has been shuttling back and forth as a replacement player, playing nearly every position in the field, including pitcher. (McCoy pitched a perfect last inning for the Jays in a recent 16-4 shellacking by the Red Sox. Given his lack of velocity, and the one-sided nature of the game, one suspects a measure of collusion on the part of the rampaging Sox.)

A personal disclosure: my family has long been huge fans of Johnny Mac, as he’s known. That was our eight-year old son on the Jumbotron on Canada Day, holding a hand-lettered sign reading “John McDonald for Prime Minister – Again”. And we’ve become equally enthusiastic supporters of the cheerfully professional McCoy.

What is it about these two men that draws our admiration? It isn’t just the exemplary work ethic that clearly motivates them both. Not just their loyalty to the team and the “hustle” that is evident in every play. Not even the mental and physical discipline that allows them to summon their best effort, sometimes literally at a moment’s notice.

More than anything, it is their passion for baseball and their abiding desire simply to play the game they love, without star status, or salaries to match. And that’s how they play it, with love, and without ego, or tantrums, or extra-curricular scandals. It is a passion that is manifest in the way both men talk about the game and the privilege of playing in “the Show”.

The legendary manager of the New York Yankees, Casey Stengel, knew that no ball club can consist only of stars. He surrounded luminaries like Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra with utility players who could be counted on to bring their best to the ball park every game and allow the stars to shine.

The reality of the Blue Jays’ position as a small-market team in the toughest division in the Major League, struggling to play .500 ball, means their corporate owners aren’t willing or able to match the salary bill of the Yankees or the Red Sox. And Jays fans have recognized this fact of life, embracing not only our few high-wattage headliners (the prickly ace Doc Halladay, the pensive and intense late-blooming phenomenon Jose Bautista), but the indispensable, hustling utility players too.

Johnny Mac is tremendously popular with Toronto fans, a testament to his modesty, integrity and commitment to community service in the city, as well as his professional skill. And Mike McCoy too has earned widespread affection and respect. Still, McDonald’s contract finishes this year, and McCoy continues to accumulate those frequent flyer points. Could there be a coaching position in McDonald’s future? It seems an ideal role. And surely the stalwart and versatile McCoy has earned a permanent berth?

With late-breaking news of trades flooding every Major League website, this seems a particularly good time to insist on the importance of players like McDonald and McCoy to the Blue Jays and their fans. Both play baseball with professionalism, modesty, commitment, and love. The team is the better for their presence, and so are we.

Not long after my previous post, I received an email from Access Copyright (www.accesscopyright.ca) informing me that the Ontario courts have approved a settlement for Heather Robertson’s second class action on behalf of freelance writers, this one against Torstar, Rogers,  the Financial Post/National Post, all other Canwest publications, and the database Proquest. After paying legal fees, the settlement will provide approximately $5 million to be divided up among the participants in class action.

The deadline for filing claims is October 15. I looked through the list of publications covered by the suit, went back through my c.v., and found three articles in The Toronto Star and one in The Financial Post. I’ve filed my claim and look forward to payment, probably within a year.

Like the previous suit against Thomson Canada this is good news for freelance writers. My concern, though, is what these suits will mean for freelance writers in the future. My expectation is that, before their articles appear in print, publishers will make them sign a contract that, for whatever compensation is agreed upon, cedes to the publisher not only the right to publish the article but all future rights, including posting in electronic databases.

When I did it, freelancing was informal, without any written contracts. I’m sure that now there will be detailed contracts for freelance writers, just as there are detailed contracts for authors of books and academic articles. Maybe compensation will increase slightly because of the inclusion of future rights.

Regardless what happens in the future, Heather Robertson has provided an important service for writers in forcing publishers to recognize that their articles have value, both for first publication in print or online and for subsequent repackaging or republishing.

Some years ago I regularly published freelance op eds in The Globe and Mail. Recently a sitter for our children told me she was excited to see one of my articles appear in her composition text, a book entitled Thinking Through the Essay. On one hand, I was delighted that my work was being used in secondary education. On the other hand, I was deeply insulted that the publisher had not asked my permission in advance or offered any form of compensation. Rather than just getting angry, an opportunity soon presented itself to get even.

Through Access Copyright, I was informed of a class action suit launched by the distinguished Canadian writer Heather Robertson on behalf of other freelance Canadian writers. The suit, Heather Robertson vs. Thomson Canada Ltd et al., alleged that publishers, by automatically including freelancers’ articles in electronic databases, violated the freelancers’ copyright. The case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ultimately upheld Robertson’s claim.

The settlement of the suit provided a pool of $5,400,000 for compensating freelance journalists. Based on my own share of the settlement, compensation worked out to approximately $200 per article. Having published over thirty articles that were eligible for inclusion in the suit, my settlement worked out to a substantial and unanticipated addition to this year’s income.

As I understand it, Robertson is pursuing another class action against the Toronto Star and Rogers Publishing. Good on her!

It seems to me that the big issue here is compensation for producers of what the digital world refers to as “content” versus aggregators and distributors of that content. The terms of trade have moved in favor of the latter. So Arianna Huffington gets even richer while paying contributors to HuffPo exactly nothing. The Robertson class action suit shifts the ground in Canada, providing some compensation for freelancers.

I should say, by the way, that I do not get compensated for this blog. I’ve had offers to place advertising on it, but have resisted. I enjoy the immediacy of posting and see the blog as an opportunity to say something about political issues I may be thinking about, to discuss questions unresolved in class, or to post first drafts of parts of what will later become articles or books. But if I choose to write for a newspaper or online publisher, I expect fair compensation. And I appreciate the efforts of Ms. Robertson to secure it.