Writing Boots

Sometimes I worry that I sound like an old gaffer, complaining about the dearth of real writers in corporate communications these days. This field used to be full of them—and if you couldn’t write well, you couldn’t make it in this business. These days, you can find whole communication departments without one first-class writer. Blah, blah, blah. Who cares?

And then I see a note like this, from the comms chief at a big energy company, on LinkedIn …

Team, on my last day at [XYZ], I want to thank each of you for a great nearly three-year run.

You not only helped me grow as a leader, and I’m especially grateful for the times you helped me course-correct—a true sign of a great team.

I’m proud of the outcomes-focused, data-driven, and audience-centric environment we built together …

… and I miss the days when corporate communications was full of ex-journalists (plus the odd disbarred lawyer, frustrated novelist and failed academic) … who at least, when you told them they were full of shit, did not call it a “course correction.”

And then I start sounding like an old gaffer again. Why am I romanticizing the notion of journalists-cum-communication pros representing some golden age of corporate communication? “Corporate rhetoric,” a speechwriter wrote to me recently, “operates at the level of children speaking to children. I’m way too old to work for those people any more.” Ultimately—wasn’t it always thus?

And along comes my old buddy Steve Crescenzo, with whom I reported on the corporate communication scene in the 1990s when we worked for Ragan Communications covering employee communications as trade journalists. (Or, as the great essayist Calvin Trillin put it back then, when he was invited to speak at our conference and was trying to understand our work, “writing newsletters for people who write newsletters.”)

The other day Steve put on a webinar that takes us back to those relatively heady days. He wanted to remind today’s communicators that there was much to learn from their ancestors from the last generation.

I remember how employee communication was back then. It was mostly employee publications, and a lot of it was crap. Stories full of executives’ platitudes about “challenges and opportunities,” “the only constant is change” and “world class quality.” Pandering employee recognition stories, one of whose headlines I still remember: “Lloyd Lubbers Is Our Kind of Regular Guy.” In the 1990s, editors of employee publications weren’t publishing “babies and bowling scores,” like their predecessors in had—or “cheesecake” pictures of pretty woman employees, like their predecessors had—but there was enough crap that Steve wrote a column called the C.R.A.P. Awards: Corporate Rhetoric Awards Program.

But if the worst stuff back then was worse than the worst stuff Steve and other employee communication watchers see today, the best stuff was better than anything anybody’s doing today. I also remember a cover of a utility’s employee magazine with the headline, “Bad Morale: Whose Fault Is It?” I remember communicators’ opinion columns, and letters-to-the-editor sections, where employees would take management to task—and management paid for the privilege!

And now thanks to Steve, I remember this—one of the best employee newspapers of the time, edited by Bill Boyd, who had left his job as a Seattle radio reporter to make an actual living in employee communications for the Weyerhaeuser timber company. Look how Boyd and his colleagues tackled a subject we’re not even allowed to talk about today—diversity and inclusion—in nineteen fucking ninety seven.

Employee communication is probably more “outcomes-focused” and “data-driven” than it used to be. And maybe “audience-centric” too, whatever that means.

Modern employee communication is also probably more strategically focused—is practitioners more single-mindedly concerned about supporting corporate goals than about doing the culture-building, democratizing things inside an organization that journalism is supposed to do in society.

But I’m goddamned sure it’s not as interesting to cover as it was when it was peopled by folks who knew how to report and to (try to) write and the truth about shit—and still wanted to.

Bill Boyd’s LinkedIn bio says, “Retired but still a journalist at heart. Formerly a radio and TV reporter, press secretary, corporate communications guy, marketer, writer, editor and voice talent … and lover of great writing.”

This business misses him, and everybody like him. Whether it knows it, or not.