Are you a CEO preparing to give a town hall state-of-the-union talk to your employees? Whether you're a new CEO or one who's been sitting in the chair for some time, keep reading.

An awful lot of planning, time and resources go into these town halls. They're frequently big productions beamed via satellite to offices around the world. Employees take time away from their jobs to attend. Yet, incredibly, there is so much wasted opportunity.
Take a look at your speech.

• Have you spent time thinking about what's in it for them? Do you know why you're really giving it — aside from your Communications Director or head of HR telling you to that you're supposed to update the troops and it's another box you have to check off?
• Have you asked yourself: What do you want your people to feel, think and do when you are done? (If you've left that part to the speechwriter, don't.)
• Have you addressed the elephant in the room? Bad press, layoffs, elimination of benefits, product recall, weak earnings, downgraded rating, takeovers, even widespread perceptions of you that might be less than flattering?

Employees are sick of pep talks that say nothing and do nothing but leave them guessing both about the state of the company and their Chief Executive. When it comes to their leaders, employees want and need a feeling of intimacy — the ability to see into them and to connect with them. They want to know who their leaders are — their background and experience and why they took this job. They want to understand their leaders' style, their values, hot buttons, vulnerabilities, what keeps them up at night, what they plan on doing and what they expect from people. Yes, they want to be motivated and inspired but they can't be either if you're just a talking head.

In an era where building rapport and clear and inspiring communication is so critical, it always surprises me how many CEOs still get it wrong, like one from a bio tech company last week. In a half hour speech to his new employees, without ever referencing the company's massive layoffs two weeks prior, the CEO asked, with a straight face, "Does anyone have any questions?"

Hint to Bio Tech CEO: The question your employees really had on their minds was: Am I next on the chopping block? Are you going to continue to cut healthcare benefits too? Is the plan you just outlined in 15 minutes really going to turn this situation around? I wonder if your proclaimed open door policy is really just that or do I have to run it up the typical chain of command? Are you another CEO who doesn't really ever read his e-mail or anything over five sentences? And what can I do specifically to help the company thrive?

Mr. Bio Tech and others rarely think about their audiences' emotional temperature. What are people's thoughts and feelings as they enter the room and sit down?

Of course, it's important to motivate your audience and tell them how delighted you are to be leading them and the company in such exciting times and how much you look forward to working together, but if you don't bring your head and heart to the stage, then all they see is someone spewing platitudes and generalities, and not the leader they want to follow.

For one new CEO this meant explaining his trajectory on Wall Street not because he was the smartest guy in the room but because he realized early on that while he was smart, he couldn't ever compete with the intellectual wizards coming out of Harvard or Princeton. A first generation Hispanic American from a poor Mexican family, whose parents still struggle with English, he knew the only way he could succeed, especially beyond his Ivy League counterparts, was by working harder and being more attentive to his clients' needs than anybody else. For the last twenty years that's what he did, and that's what he expected from every one of his 20,000 employees who he was addressing for the first time.

For another, it meant making clear to the troops that she didn't want just feedback, but solutions. She reminded them as well how much she appreciated hearing good news noting, "Why doesn't anybody come and tell me about the good things that are happening? I want to hear the good as well as bad. If it's because you fear that your colleagues will think you're sucking up, please don't let that stop you. I really want to hear what you have to say — the good, the bad and the ugly!" She even admitted she preferred short e-mails with thoughts distilled into a few key bullet points — a small detail that later proved immensely valuable to her team who were used to bombarding her predecessor with lengthy e-mails that more often than not were simply ignored, causing major frustration and work delays for everyone.

Communicating in a way that connects with your audience is critical not only for town hall gatherings but in every situation. Don't be the CEO who ignores or underestimates the importance of doing so genuinely with both head and heart. Make sure that reaching out to a broad group of employees from different levels and departments doesn't translate to dull and impersonal "one size fits all" communication. And, don't be tempted to wing it because of the demands on your time. A successful town hall state-of-the-union speech takes significant preparation and thought on your part, so remember what many leaders learn the hard way: you're only as good as your last speech.

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A guidance for those working in the field.

This report originally appeared on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

In the emerging vision for the smart city of tomorrow, we often hear about next generation smart grids, smarter buildings that manage themselves to conserve resources, and smart transportation systems that will lessen congestion.

In fact, Pike Research’s Eric Woods recent report for GigaOM Pro, “Key Technologies for the Future of the Smart City” (subscription required) estimated that the global market for smart city investments will reach $16 billion by 2020 with heavy growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

But we hear much less about smart water systems for the smart city, and the need to develop more efficient approaches to water as a resource. Part of this is basic developed world bias. A brief look at the U.N.’s freshwater availability map shows that nations with water stress (less than 1700 cubic meters per person per year) and water scarcity (less than a 1000) are mainly found in the Middle East, parts of Africa, China and Southeast Asia. Most of the developed world has been lucky enough to grow up in areas of relative water abundance.

Urbanization is accelerating, however, with a billion and half people expected to move to the city in the next 20 years, and McKinsey has predicted that by 2030 water consumption will increase by 40 percent. There have been signs of problems in international megacities like Mexico City where 5 million residents awoke to dry taps in 2009 and Mumbai where 5,000 tankers deliver 50 million liters of water each day, the precious resource going to the highest bidders. Even domestically, many continue to point out that with less than 15 inches of annual rainfall and its dependence on water from the Colorado River, where demand is expected to overwhelm supply in the next half century, Los Angeles’s water supply is risky.

One of the first implementations of smart water systems is smart water meters. A report last year pegged the European smart water meter market at 13 billion pounds by 2020, which is interesting given the fact that there are far fewer top down government mandates for smart water meter deployment than there have been for smart meters for the electricity grid. By 2030 Britain hopes to have all homes installed with smart water meters, which utilities use to identify leaks, create peak pricing mechanisms to incentivize conservation, and catch people who are violating water use restrictions. Designs are already circulating that sync water meters with iPads to give users up to the minute info on their water use, which could drive home to consumers the cost of watering that lawn.

Woods’s report for GigaOM Pro examined next generation greenfield communities like Masdar City in the United Arab Emerates (UAE). Masdar City use 54 percent less water than the average UAE city and Woods notes that the city is deploying diverse strategies from micro-irrigation to treated wastewater for landscaping to highly efficient water fittings. The goal is to get to 180 liters per day per person from the current norm of 550 liters per person per day in the UAE.

But in the developing world, where 1 billion of the 3 billion global urban dwellers live in slums with limited access to clean water and additional water management challenges brought on by climate change induced flooding and droughts, the solutions may be less technological. The solutions in the urban developing world revolve around limiting demand, reducing pollution to the water ecosystem, and preventing leakage from aging infrastructure. Though there is evidence that municipalities are starting to take the initiative, as the city of Mumbai has been working with global meter giant Itron to deploy advance water metering infrastructure. One of the issues is how expensive water has become for the urban poor. A slum dweller in Nairobi, Kenya pays 5 to 7 times more for a liter of water than the average North American.

For the first time in history more Chinese now live in cities than in rural areas with per capita income for Chinese city dwellers three times that of rural citizens. The economic drivers of urbanization will remain strong which means cities will have to get more intelligent in their management of water resources. And that goes for all cities, from Mumbai to LA.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• The importance of water management to the smart city
• Key technologies for the smart city
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Yingluck's government chooses to completely drain water to prevent flooding.

In Thailand's case, tax law hasn't been revised for over a decade. Flaws (in them) are used by wealthy people to avoid taxes.

Los Angeles – Most 2012 IT projects initiated by the business will not directly support the top priorities of CEOs and boards of directors, according to Gartner Inc. VP and Research Fellow Ken McGee.

“No one believes 100 percent of the projects that IT works on that they get from the business are the kind that are measurable, that are auditable, that deliver financial benefit to the organization, and that is the crux of our message today,” said McGee. “... We believe most IT projects will not directly support the CEO or board of directors.”

To remain relevant in an era of flat budgets and growing business demands, McGee’s second-day keynote at Gartners’s Business Intelligence Summit in Los Angeles called for a “CIO manifesto” in order for chief information officers to match the quality of business-initiated projects to the work of IT.

Part of the requirement is to agree to align the priorities of the CEO to those of the CIO, McGee said. “Any survey we do with CEOs, they will tell you that the number one priority is growth … more specifically organic revenue growth.”

Where CEOs polled by Gartner prioritized the need to retain and enhance customers, attract and retrain skilled talent, attract new customers and create responsive organizations, CIOs prioritized IT management, strategic planning, business value of IT and IT organization design.

“Take a look at whatever [CEO or board of director directives] stand as the charter for this year’s priorities and then look at your 10 most heavily funded IT projects,” McGee said. “It will take you 20 minutes. See if you have a match. If you don’t, are you okay with this?”

The analyst then called up some gloomy statistics. 2012 will yield a flimsy one half of 1 percent budget growth for CIOs worldwide, though IT outsourcing budgets are growing much faster; worldwide CIO budgets have not grown more than 3 percent year over year for the last 11 years; and low budget growth is likely to continue for many years.

If you are not growing, McGee said, your perceived value is declining. “We [CIOs] have not created a level of trust with CEOs," said the analyst, "because they do not believe we are on the same page.”

Thus the CIO manifesto must state that, “a primary goal of IT shall be to create measurable and auditable financial benefits for the enterprise, period.”

McGee says CIOs need to have a direct conversation with the CEO and communicate that they understand growth is the CEO’s priority, and make projects transparent for their value. “We want to enter the war, therefore, will you give us the authority to decline any business-initiated request that does not yield a measurable financial gain? And then when the project is done, can the CFO parachute in and see if the promises made are the same as the promises met?"

Consistent with the manifesto is the goal of becoming a money-making CIO, said McGee, not the first observer to suggest that performance based compensation extend to IT like it does to sales, even though IT usually operates as a support or service function. Nonetheless, he called it "the most radical change in mission in the 50-year history of IT as a formal industry," adding, "we are seeing clients who are doing this."

Some of the measurement McGee calls for depends on an ability to quantify the monetary value of information use, a theme senior Gartner analysts like others have espoused. But in the conversation, there’s not much to lose, McGee concluded. “You can be the traditional IT organization responding to a call for help … that is not where this industry is headed.”

McGee works with CEOs, CFOs and CIOs and is starting to research chief marketing officers and is the primary author of the Gartner IT Scenario.

Jim Ericson is editorial director of  Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jimericson.