Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

I Love My Customers. I Don’t Always Want to Hear Their Feedback.

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My customers are speechwriters, and other professional communicators. This means they’re wonderfully articulate in their “feedback.” Years ago the afternoon snack we offered at our Speechwriting School workshop was described as so scant as to be “nearly churlish” by one scribe, who I am sure has used those rapier typing fingers to go on to great things. (To this day we rate all our buffets on a scale from “churlish to 10.”)

After the very worst session I have ever been responsible for—I recruited a speaker so smug that when he said “good morning” he seemed to be taking credit for it (as old Jerry Tarver would say)—I overheard one of my customers mutter to another in all seriousness, “It’s actually possible the man bonded this community in hatred.”

But generally, the problem with “feedback” is that too much good feedback gives recipients big bellies, while at the same time they remember the one bitter bite. Like a great seminar leader I used to hire in the 1990s, who was nagged by a comment that he’d received in the 1960s, about being a little man with big ears, and a Napoleon complex. Feedback had turned him permanently into an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Which isn’t a good trait for a leader, however common it is.

So I don’t much like feedback, beyond rousing applause or gales of laughter or telling silence or the smiles and frowns I can see for myself. I’ve been doing this a long time. I know when my customers are absorbed and when they’re disengaged, when they’re happy and when they’re not. And generally, I know why. Sometimes I can’t predict when a speaker will let them down, but I can sense it’s happening, in the room. And: It happens occasionally, and it always will. Sometimes that’s my fault, sometimes it’s not. And sometimes I know what will piss my customers off, and I give it to them anyway because pissed off is what my customers occasionally need to be.

I know it’s rude, in the age of The Customer Is Always Right, to put on a three-day professional event or sell a person a pair of shoes without asking how they enjoyed the experience, and acting eager for the information. But think feedback is mostly useful to out-of-touch corporate executives of Supercuts or Jiffy Lube, who don’t know their business intimately and don’t really have any idea what’s going on in their stores.

Of course, I’m not omniscient, and I can’t see my product through everyone’s eyes at once. Maybe instead of asking how each person found each session, I should ask a single essay question: What was one thing you thought or felt at the conference that would surprise the organizer and emcee (so smug that when he said “good morning” he seemed to be taking credit for it)?

I’d be interested in their answers to that question. Otherwise I’m the rude one, asking customers for opinions I don’t exactly want to hear.

So rude, one might say, to be nearly churlish.

One to Dine Out On: My Conversation With Ferris Bueller

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I sometimes have a hard time describing why I continue to be fascinated by the speechwriting community that I’ve been convening all these years.

Delivering a litany of quirky and iconoclastic speechwriters doesn’t get it across. Nor, quite, does pointing out the inherent strangeness of a bunch of powerless, obscure, not-rich English majors writing things for a bunch of powerful, prominent, mostly rich people to say to mostly powerless, obscure, not-rich people.

From now on, I’m just going to tell this single story, from PSA World Conference last month:

A George H.W. Bush White House speechwriter had to back out of a panel a couple weeks before the event. She recommended that I replace her with a Bush speechwriter I’d never heard of, named Ed McNally. She said he was the funniest of all the Bush 41 speechwriters, and thought he’d be great.

I reached out to him and he generously moved some things around in his schedule and wound up making the show.

Along the way, he sent me an article from the Chicago Tribune that made a strong case that he was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Director John Hughes’ inspiration for Ferris.

McNally and Hughes grew up on the same block in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook. Their whole families were close neighbors. From the Trib piece: “In the film, Ferris skips nine days of school. McNally skipped 27 days. On one of those days off, he ‘borrowed’ his father’s prized possession—a purple Cadillac—and put 113 miles on it, then, as the fictional Ferris does with a red Ferrari, McNally lifted the car onto jacks and ran it backwards, hoping to reverse the odometer.” Etcetera.

The panel’s moderator Robert Schlesinger had some fun with that in introducing McNally, and McNally was fun and lively and cheerful and good-humored. One of those guys who has a permanently impish, Jerry Seinfeld-ish look on his face that says he expects something funny to happen, or to come out of his own mouth, any minute. But somehow also earnest and wanting to be helpful. I saw him do a little life-coaching that he didn’t have to do, for a very young writer not yet out of grad school. 

The session let out straight into a cocktail party before a pretty sunset over the Washington Mall. McNally, who is now a trial lawyer and wore the only cufflinks at the conference, seemed to meet two dozen people in 90 minutes.

Eventually he and I settled into a conversation. I was really curious about Hughes, whose movies changed my life. I told McNally that I was 15 when I saw The Breakfast Club over spring break. I spent the rest of the week gathering determination that when I went back to high school the next Monday, I was going to be free. I was going to be me. 

But I couldn’t think of exactly what I might do, to express that freedom and me-dom. In a closet, my dad had an old green felt hat with a feather in it that he probably hadn’t worn since the 1950s. I decided to wear that dumb old hat to school on Monday and I not to care what anybody said about it. And by God, I did. (Placing it in my locker, of course, in accordance with a no-hat rule at the school.) No one said anything about it.

Still: That John Hughes film stirred something inside me, just at the moment that thing needed stirring.

I also remember showing that movie to my parents, and them hating it. I couldn’t understand why, and they didn’t try very hard to explain. 

I can understand now. The parents in Breakfast Club and all Hughes films were so awful. Negligent, uncaring, out of touch, unavailable, materialistic, humorless and dumb. Their only good quality was that they mostly stayed offscreen.

I told McNally that those parents don’t resemble the parents my generation became. That our relationships with our kids are, if anything, too enmeshed.

I expressed curiosity about Hughes’ relationship with his own parents. The old family friend basically demurred. And then the trial lawyer redirected, asking me if maybe my generation was influenced by all those movies, unwittingly implanted with a quiet determination to be the opposite of those useless monster parents Hughes portrayed.

At that instant I realized two things: 1. I’d never considered that before. I always chalk all my parenting influences up to my own parents, not popular culture, but maybe Ed had a point. 2. I was standing on a patio in Washington D.C. drinking beer, eating passed hors d’oeuvres and discussing parenting styles with Ferris effing Bueller.

Anyway, I like Ed McNally very much, and we both enthusiastically agreed to get together next time he’s back in Chicago with a couple of hours on his hands.

And anyway, I like these speechwriters.