Philadelphia Business Journal - February 25, 2002

http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2002/02/25/newscolumn1.html

From the February 22, 2002 print edition More Print Edition Stories

`Titanic' lessons in IT communications

Peter Key   

Calvin Sun has managed to combine one of his avocations with his vocation.

That wouldn't be so odd, except that the avocation is studying the history of the Titanic, and the vocation is presenting seminars on communication, mostly to information technology types.

Sun, who was profiled in this column in the April 25-May 2, 2000, edition, said he had been generally interested in the ship and its infamous 1912 wreck for some time, but began looking into specific details when he learned that his daughters' former pediatrician is related to one of the victims -- William Crothers Dulles, a Philadelphia native who is one of a number of Titanic victims interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Fairmount Park.

Sun, a former IBM engineer and KPMG consultant, has worked three stories about Titanic victims into his presentations.

To illustrate the importance of listening to others, Sun tells his audience about Jack Phillips, one of two wireless operators on the ship. The night the Titanic went down, Sun said, Phillips was communicating with a lighthouse on Newfoundland when a wireless operator on a ship nearby tried to send him a message. Phillips told the wireless operator to leave him alone because he was talking to the lighthouse. Later, it was learned that the wireless operator was trying to warn the Titanic about icebergs in the area.

To point out the importance of telling others what we're doing, Sun relates the story of Alice Cleaver (no known relation to Ward and June). She was working as a nurse for the Allison family -- Hudson and Bess and their two children, 3-year-old Loraine and 1-year-old Trevor, Sun said. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, Cleaver took Trevor with her into a lifeboat, but didn't (or couldn't) tell his parents. According to several witnesses, Bess subsequently refused to get into a lifeboat with her daughter because she didn't know where her son was.

As an example of insensitivity, Sun cites what happened to the father of John Hume, a Titanic band member buried in Halifax. Two or three weeks after the disaster, Sun said, the father received a letter from the company that managed the band, asking him to pay for his son's band uniform.

Few IT workers are ever going to have a chance to be that totally ignorant of other people's feelings. But they are confronted with situations quite often in which, if they just thought about how what they're saying sounds to the people to whom they are saying it, they would be better off.

"Instead of saying, `We can't finish this task until Tuesday,' if we turn it around and say, `We can finish this task as early as Tuesday,' we keep the same meaning, but people tend to have a better impression of us," Sun said.

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