Westrac, Seven merger needs communicating beyond the financial

In the mining business stripping more dirt, blasting more coal, transporting and exporting ever increasing tonnages requires big investments in equipment, but it also generates an enormous feeling of satisfaction among those working in the industry; coal, iron ore, or any number of the extractive industries.

There is a sense of competition and camaraderie, a need for trust and credibility that locks in everyone from owners to engine drivers, from deputies to bath house workers.

Mining lives and dies by cultural codes built into the language, behaviour and operations of the industry. Westrac, and its supplier, Caterpillar Tractor Company of Peoria, Illinois, work hard to cultivate those codes.

So too the media lives and dies by them.

The same codes and the same risky, gung-ho immediacy are embedded in the media.

Proposing and developing new entertainment and drama programs, a sharper focus on news production and dissemination, and the risk associated with attracting advertisers to free-to-air television require an over-abundance of gung-ho.

And the gung-ho generates an enormous feeling of satisfaction among those working in the media.

This is not a revelation - there are no secret societies built into mining and the media; this is not a call for a senate inquiry into illegitimate work practices, inequity, or non-equal opportunity.

It is though, an observation on the stong, positive culture embedded in Westrac and Seven Network and why a merger will be hugely successful in the long run.

The success however, will pivot around the communication of the culture and whether Mr Stokes has the capacity to fire the imagination rather than continuing to provide mind-numbing pages of financial data to analysts, fund managers and non-Seven journalists.

So far, the proposed merger has been communicated as if it were in fact what the analysts suggest - a whim or exercise in personal power.

To get to the core of the merger, to understand what it is that drives these two industry sectors, to understand why they are so culturally similar, and to communicate this strength to diffuse stakeholder interests, is the key to the merger’s success.

Otherwise, it’s just another bit of whimsy from a corporate power broker.