On communication, professional and otherwise.
They had an eclipse in Europe this week. Legendary Chicago weatherman and Chicago treasure Tom Skilling—he’s got a very funny cameo in The Bear—had a powerful emotional reaction to a similar event a few years ago, in the Midwest.
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I always think I’m too hard on Axios, and the mindless shit they publish.
Whether it was a piece I wrote a few years ago headlined, “Reading the Axios Communicators Newsletter = Eating Toilet Paper,” or another piece I wrote about Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, and how he brags (in an Axios piece on his morning routine) about, as I characterized it, “Farting Around Well Before Dawn!”
Either Axios needs to mature, or I do.
Alas, I read an Axios interview on “AI in the C-suite,” with Robin Vince, CEO of BNY bank. The Axios reporter asked Vince, “On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being no AI usage and 10 being totally AI-pilled, where would you rank yourself?”
Vince answered: “I’m probably a nine out of 10. I won’t give myself a full score though, because one of the lessons for me in AI is that it’s moving so quickly that actually being able to use it to its fullest extent feels like one of those quests you’re never going to quite reach.” He continued, “This feels to me like one of those lessons that is not unique to AI. We all have to be lifelong learners,” and added that it’s all about “being OK with being a bit uncomfortable.”
Bank CEOs have a funny definition of “uncomfortable,” I find. But OK, Robin Vince. Tell us what it’s like on the hairy edge of lifelong learning about AI: He tells Axios that in a big bank, “there’s no person who can see the picture as completely, so now to have AI be able to see a picture you otherwise couldn’t have seen and make recommendations in terms of what you’d actually do? That’s a very significant thing.” He praised AI’s “ability to see through all of these threads and hold them concurrently.”
So as a bank CEO, he’s not omniscient, Vince humbly acknowledges. But as a bank CEO who uses AI, he pretty much is. Got it.
The reporter, who I’m not naming here because she works for Jim VandeHei, a degenerate AI huffer who forces his journalists to hype this stuff relentlessly, asks Vince for an example of how he uses BNY’s in-house AI platform, called Eliza. First, he says that Eliza is connected to the bank’s “360-degree feedback process,” and that Eliza can coach employees who aren’t responding emails quickly enough, into … responding to emails quicker, I guess.
What about Vince himself? This is the one and only example he offers of how he uses AI to see everything everywhere all at once:
“This is where I humble myself because I’m sure that my usage of it is like 5% of what it could be if I was operating perfectly. … [Eliza] understands my calendar. It understands my emails. It understands my documents, and so it coaches me at the beginning of the day, with how I should approach my day proactively. So this morning I open up the Eliza Daily Planner, and it’s starting to give me advice about you should use this bit in your calendar to prep for this other meeting, or there’s this email that’s been lost in your email box, which Eliza thinks is important that you haven’t done anything with.”
Wait, in a few Axios paragraphs, Vince has gone from 9 out of 10 in “AI-pilled” to using AI for only 5% of what it might be used for. Wait again: My Apple Mail is doing all those things he’s bragging about, automatically and often against my will. I won’t say CEO AI Genius Robin Vince is an emperor wearing no clothes, but he’s definitely wearing assless chaps. And Axios is telling us how good they look on him.
And here’s more bad news from Axios: “This is our first installment in a series on how executives use AI tools.”
“I’m just a dumb writer,” was something I heard my writer dad say a lot. And I think he meant it. He ran his own advertising agency for a time, and he confessed to me that didn’t run it well. Not because he was dumb. But because he wanted to write, not run a company.
I’ve been running Pro Rhetoric, LLC for 10 years, and I think I’ve had better luck—and more enjoyment. Mostly, because of the talented and committed people I’ve gathered around me and managed to keep: Benjamine and Mike, Jen and Sharon.
We’re meeting later this month to look out at the next 10 years, if we dare—or five, if we don’t—and see how we want to proceed.
And I thought I’d take a moment to look back on what I’ve learned over this decade, and what I’ve become in addition to a dumb writer.
I was offered a chance to buy Vital Speeches magazine a few years before I ultimately did—and at a much lower price than I eventually paid.
One reason I hesitated was that I always hated the business mantra, “Grow or die!” It sounded true to me, and like a trap, and I thought I might prefer death. I learned that it is true—but it’s also true that you don’t have to grow fast. You need to grow so everyone feels a sense of progress. That’s emotionally and economically essential. But you can grow like a tree—naturally and gradually. As my company generally has.
Other things I’ve learned:
Vendors who you pay to carry out your bad ideas won’t be the ones to tell you they’re bad ideas. (Related: When you own a business you have to learn from all your bad ideas because they cost so goddamn much.)
In negotiations: It’s almost always possible to come up a deal of some kind as long as you favor mutual solutions to moral issues. (And as a business person, you should.)
If you can afford them, hire folks who have been around the block a time or two, and who can appreciate what is good about working at your company—and weigh it with some perspective against what is bad. (The first publisher I worked for hired mostly fresh-from-college folks. We were cheap, but we were nightmares to employ because we had no idea how good or bad we had it so we all assumed the grass was greener and could not separate our own professional frustrations with our employer’s limitations.)
When I first went into business I often entertained this literal thought: I don’t want to lie to anyone ever in the course of my work, but I am glad that lying is an option in case I have to. Now, I can’t quite remember why I thought lying might be necessary to run a successful business. Not mine, anyway.
While you don’t have to lie in business, you do have to hustle, and sometimes that involves saying pretty optimistic things to potential customers or partners with a pretty straight face. A leader is a dealer in hope; an entrepreneur is a salesman of it. (In a marketplace as small as executive communications and speechwriting, the hope you sell does have to pay off most of the time.)
When I was trying to scare up the financing to buy this business 10 years ago, I was complaining to an older buddy about the cost. “Not having a boss is worth a lotta money,” he said. And he was right about that.
(Except, occasionally—only occasionally!—you find yourself wanting someone in authority to tell you you did a good job and you should take the afternoon off.)
While you must take the work your company does seriously, you should not pretend to your people that your company is a thread holding the universe together. Nothing worse than a narcissist boss. However, if you do it right, the business inevitably becomes a pretty important part of your colleagues’ lives—and your customers’, too—and that’s a bigger responsibility than you anticipated in those early years. You can handle it. But it’s big. But you can handle it, and if you do so even reasonably well, then you can tell your colleagues something like this, in a memo ahead of your 10th annual meeting:
Without naming names and in no particular order, this company has provided a prolonged escape from soulless companies and asshole bosses that have taken unfair advantage of both our strengths and weaknesses. It has enabled or supported or celebrated or witnessed the writing and publishing of two books, the following of one epic college soccer journey, a marriage, the adoption of three children, the survival of serious illnesses of selves and spouses (and the grieving of the deaths of parents and pets) and a global pandemic and some amazing vacation adventures. And over 10 years, it has provided about 500 email-free weekends (because [as we often say around here] speechwriting isn’t an emergency).
Not to mention some profoundly rewarding friendships among the five of us, constantly enriched by our evolving relationships with literally hundreds of our customers ….
I’ve said it before: at the end of my life, I hope I remember to be as proud of what we’ve all done together here, as anything else I’ve ever been involved with, including my own family.