Writing Boots

Last week at the Executive Communication Summit that my company convened, I interviewed the famed Yale Management School Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who took us back to the beginning of the robber barons and the Gilded Age and demonstrated, among other things, that whatever your complaints about corporate leaders not “stepping up” to lead as public activists against bad governments, you are pissing into the strong prevailing winds of history.

Sonnenfeld reminded me that CEOs don’t generate political pressure, they only respond to it when they must. He said some CEOs he knows are wondering where the pressure is, these days. For instance, Sonnenfeld offered, where is the clergy that shamed, or tried to shame, corporate leaders in the 1960s to stop supporting the war in Vietnam?

All of which puts me in a strange place—me, and all my customers, who are the people who help CEOs and leaders of other naturally conservative institutions figure out what to say about public issues, and how to say it. Most of the communicators I know despise the Trump administration, but work for leaders who don’t believe it is wise to publicly oppose the president or his policies. Should I and my flock think of ourselves as a potential part of a solution? Or just a paid part of the problem?

Writing Boots readers have seen this little meditation a few times in this space over the years.

It’s by my first publisher Larry Ragan. In a little Catholic newsletter sometime in the 1960s, Larry wrote:

There are the insiders and the outsiders. Two kinds of people. Two ways of looking at life. Two ways of making things happen.

The outsiders raise hell. they demonstrate; they organize marches. They issue reports that excoriate the establishment, challenge the status quo, appeal to all who thirst for justice.

The insiders? Often dull. The insiders speak a different language: they know the tax tables, the zoning variations, the assessment equalizers, the square-foot cost to educate the kids. You’ll find them on the school board, city government, on the village board. Ordinarily not word people, they have mastered the art of the platitude.

Outsiders are often wild. At first, they don’t seem to make sense. The first black kids who sat at a lunch counter and refused to move were outsiders. The first marchers to Selma were outsiders. Surely it was an outsider who first proposed the shocking idea that the generic “he” is a sexist word. Dorothy Kay, who in the 1950s stopped Manhattan traffic to protest atom bomb tests, was an outsider.

Please God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one. But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too. The insiders resist the first answer that comes to them: they have heard it before. They are offended when they see the world’s complexities reduced to slogans shouted into a microphone or preached at a town hall meeting. They are saddened when they hear someone argue that God is on his or her side, and they wonder why God doesn’t speak so clearly to them.

Sometimes you’ve got to feel sorry for the insiders. When they win, few know of their victory. When they go wrong, their mistakes are branded as evil. Often they share the goals of the outsider but continue to say, “things aren’t that simple.”

The world is filled with people who like to feel they are right. Insiders are not always certain they are right. They are unhappy when they must resist the simplicities of popular sloganeering. So when we tip our hats to outsiders, as so often we must, let’s not do so with such vigor that we fail to give two cheers to the insider.

The last time that little prose poem ran here was late December 2020. Half a decade on, we approach July 4, with Trump back in office and pushing through an agenda that overwhelms as much as it offends most Americans, in a spirit that emphasizes meanness and resentment and pessimism. (As I write this, the news channel chyron tells me Trump will today pay a happy public visit to a Florida prison called “Alligator Alcatraz.”)

This July 4, I think more Americans feel like outsiders in our nation, and fewer of us feel like insiders, than at any other time I’ve been alive.

I mean, listen to these words from the Rector and the Rector-Elect at the University of Virginia, which just collapsed around its supposedly beloved President Jim Ryan, forcing him to resign, politically naked and alone, under de-funding threats from the Trump administration:

“First, we share the sentiments of so many members of the University community who have expressed their sorrow about President Ryan’s resignation and their appreciation for his remarkable service to the institution. Based on his outstanding record as president, it should come as no surprise that one of Jim’s last acts in office put the needs of the University ahead of his own.”

Followed by a burst of bureaucratese about the coming “search process,” presumably to find another person who can build his or her own “outstanding record” and deliver “remarkable service to the institution,” somehow without offending the bastards in the federal government who were so scandalized by Jim Ryan and his sinister personal philosophy, which called on Mr. Jefferson’s University to be “both great and good.”

Quoth the Rector and the Rector-Elect who are now in charge of replacing Ryan, “We must continue to invest in supporting our exceptional students, faculty, and staff who form the heart of this vibrant community; we must ensure that our community is one where open dialogue, innovative research, and academic freedom not only persist but flourish; and, as a public research university, we must maintain our partnership with the Commonwealth and the federal government.”

I listened to and heard the sanguine sentiments expressed last week by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and also Great Place to Work CEO Michael Bush, who also appeared, and said it’s a great time to be a leader. As I’ve listened to several other communicators in my orbit, who have tried to convince me that this is an awesome time to be in communications, because it calls on our finest skills, presents a degree of difficulty that exceptional professionals should appreciate. This isn’t an impossible challenge, goes the thinking. It’s an opportunity to innovate. It’s our time to shine!

I am, as I must be in my position as a professional and as a citizen, open to that idea. And I promise you, every communicator who I see using his or her skills to help the influential insiders they serve to find their voice (even if it’s a mafia don’s whisper), I will celebrate, elevate and accentuate; lionize, aggrandize and immortalize.

But for now, as I told a communication pal this week who asked me for my “expert analysis” of the UVA memo: This isn’t writing, it’s mincing. And it’s all that many communicators, higher ed and corporate, feel equipped to do. If this political climate long prevails, our field will soon be peopled only by adult children of alcoholics, who grew up learning how to split the middle and pretend everything was under control.

My own communicator father—who attended the University of Virginia before being unceremoniously plucked from there shortly after Pearl Harbor and assigned to less scholarly duties in Europe—used to talk a lot, later in life, about the choice people have, between cursing the darkness, and lighting a candle. That assumed you had a candle to light, and a match to light it with.

While we grope around for those things, we’re left to use what voices we have to curse this darkness, good and loud. And shouldn’t we at least have the courage do that?