Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Weird scenes inside the archives: In vital speeches of yesterday, a bracing communication warning for today

08.10.2022 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

“More and more youngsters who come in looking for jobs are asking, ‘What can you do for me?’ rather than, ‘What can I do for you?’ They want to discuss the extras they’re going to get rather than the extras they’re going to give.”

How often do you hear sentiments like that today? How often do you express them?

Yet, this was grumbled by Charles H. Brower, president of the New York advertising giant BBDO, in a speech to the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce in Chicago, October 4, 1962.

I trip over a speech like this just about every time I fulfill an archival request for the 88-year-old magazine I publish, Vital Speeches of the Day. This is why I’d like to devote one year of my early professional dotage to spelunking through every issue of Vital Speeches going back to its founding in 1934—each densely printed page echoing with strange expressions from our ancient leaders—and astonishingly familiar sounds, too.

By turns, this six-decade-old Brower speech offers vivid examples of both, well crafted as it is by the man who in his heyday was known as “Madison Avenue’s favorite phrasemaker.”

Near the outset, Brower complains that “girls,” which was the standard 1960s term for women employees, “are more interested in filing their nails than in filing what needs to be filed. The other day I overheard two girls in an elevator (not a BBDO elevator, needless to say), and one said to the other, ‘Heavens no, don’t learn shorthand. If you can’t take dictation, you won’t have to stay after 5.'”

The speech is titled “The Return of the Square,” and it gets early to the bone:

Back in Mark Twain’s day, [“square”] was one of the finest words in our language, among the top ten on any lexicographer’s hit parade. You gave a man a square deal if you were honest. You gave a man a square meal when he was hungry. You stood foursquare for the right, as you saw it, and square against everything else. When you got out of debt, you were square with the world. And that was when you could look your fellow man square in the eye.

Then a lot of strange characters got hold of this honest, wholesome word, bent it all out of shape and gave it back to our children. Convicts gave it its first twist. To them a Square was an inmate who would not conform to the convict code. From prisons it was flashed across the country on the marijuana circuit of the bopsters and hipsters. Now everyone knows what a Square is. He is the man who never learned to get away with it. A Joe who volunteers when he doesn’t have to. A guy who gets his kicks from trying to do something better than anyone else can. A boob who gets so lost in his work that he has to be reminded to go home. A guy who doesn’t have to stop at a bar on his way to the train at night because he’s all fired up and full of juice already. A character who doesn’t have to spend his evenings puttering in a basement workshop and his weekends scraping the bottom of a boat because he’s putting all that elbow grease and steam into doing a satisfying job on the job he’s getting paid to do. A fellow who laughs with his belly instead of his upper lip. A slob who gets all choked up when the band plays “America the Beautiful.” A square, strictly from Squaresville.

His tribe isn’t thriving too well in the current climate. He doesn’t fit too neatly into the current group of angle players, corner cutters, sharpshooters and goof-offs. He doesn’t believe in opening all the packages before Christmas. He doesn’t want to fly now and pay later. He’s burdened down with old-fashioned ideas of honestly, loyalty, courage and thrift. And he may already be on his way to extinction.

Brower goes on to lament—remember, this is sixty years ago (before the JFK assassination, the Vietnam War, the Watts race riots or Watergate)—that Americans aren’t patriotic anymore, America doesn’t have any original ideas anymore, Americans aren’t strong of character anymore and Americans can’t read or make art or write anymore. “Non-books are being thrown together and sold by non-writers who never bothered to learn how to write,” Brower thunders. “And murky poemss are being ground out by scraggly poets who sing them to their friends because they are unreadable. … Life magazine describes our beatnik geniuses as ‘fruit flies … some of the hairiest, scrawniest and most discontented specimens of all time, who not only refuse to sample the seeping juices of American plenty and American advance but scrape their feelers in the discordant scorn of any and all who do.'”

He says America doesn’t know what humor is anymore, the only real remaining humorists to his mind being Bob Hope and Art Buchwald. “Others are cynical, sly and bitter.” Thank God, he says, for American astronauts. “These lads apparently lived too far from the big city and grew up to be squares. For who but a square would volunteer his life for the country’s good.”

Like any good speechmaker, Brower knows it’s not sufficient to curse the darkness. One light a candle, in the form a “call to action,” however disingenuous.

May I suggest that we all join the S.O.S.? The S.O.S.—the society of squares. It doesn’t even exist but it could. Not a left-wing organization. Not a right-wing organization. Just an organization with wings!

We might have to go underground for awhile to avoid being trampled to death by the coast-to-coast rat-packs of cynical saboteurs and the canned wit commandos whose devotion is to destruction.

But we would come out.

We might even have a secret handshake consisting mainly of grabbing the other guy’s hand as though you meant it and looking him in the eye.

We would be for participation and against sitting life out … for simplicity and against sophistication … for laughter and against sniggering … for America and against her enemies … for the boys and girls who excel and against the international bedroom athletes …

No wonder advertising is a young man’s game.

This was one of the sort of old-school ad bosses that my own adman dad, a half-generation younger than Brower, chafed beneath, he and his younger colleagues secretly calling them “old fools in high stools.” These old guys were still writing (and approving) ad headlines like, “The car of tomorrow, today!” And these old guys allowed themselves to slip into the deadly idea that the very upcoming generation that they were paid to communicate with were creeps, and losers.

In my book, An Effort to Understand, I quote a memo my dad wrote three or four years after Broward’s speech, about the very generation Brower disparages:

All of us, as human beings, wear a protective cover or a kind of year-round Halloween mask to keep our nerve endings hidden, to keep our soft underside of hopes and needs and hang-ups, our fears, our pride and prejudices, our irrationalities and our cry buttons from hanging right out there in the sunlight for someone to push in or puncture. And it’s this paper-thin shell that confuses a lot of people in advertising. It’s this shell, when it comes in big sunglasses and long hair, that frightens a lot of us over thirty, and worse, fools us into thinking that it’s not just a shell at all, but a whole new and different kind of person in there. And if we hear the shell express some new idea or value—or speak or sing in some strange new language, we strain to hear what was said and try to play back our communication in the same way with the same words. We try, in other words, to communicate with the shell instead of the she or he inside. …

I can assure you from personal experience that today’s young people, however sober, serious, callous, arrogant, flip, or freaked out they might appear on the surface, still cry quietly in the bathroom when a pimple appears at prom time, or when they feel unloved or unsure (which they really do most of the time) or threatened or confused by some of the problems that confront them. I believe that honor and justice and truth and logic mean as much to them as to you and me—maybe more. I believe that beneath the shell they are simply “young people” (and it’s important to pause between those words “young” and “people” to fully grasp what these two words mean), who, in the main, respond logically to logic, lovingly to love, and honestly to truth.

Alas, nobody was more square than my dad, and believe me, by the time I needed this kind of calm, philosophical understanding and empathy, twenty years after he wrote this memo—I was part of his second set of kids—he didn’t have much of it to offer. And I understand. Already at 53, it often occurs to me that there’s a reason we only live 80 years or so in this world. Whether in style or substance, the human parade does ask us to stand and cheer at a lot of increasingly far-out floats. (And it’s just hard to get one’s adult mind into a young sensibility. Sez a traveling soccer dad who spent all of last summer listening to Olivia Rodrigo and trying with limited success not to grind his teeth.)

But the day you start allowing yourself to think of the next generation as qualitatively inferior to yours is the day after you should have hung it up as a professional communicator.

But by then, of course, you’re pretty well ensconced. And so Charles H. Brower, of course, stayed on as president at BBDO until 1972.

Communicator friend, don’t let it happen to you. (And please, don’t let it happen to me.)

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Pioneering woman CEO fired without an explanation, takes it with a big smile!

08.09.2022 by David Murray // 6 Comments

You don’t get to be a CEO by accident, especially if you’re a woman. When you lose that job, it’s not credible to pretend that you didn’t really want it that bad, anyway. Or so it seems to me. To wit:

This last March, Fortune writer Emma Hinchliffe profiled Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg, who’d been promoted to the big job late last September. Nyborg, wrote Hinchliffe, “seems to have sprung fully formed from the brain of the company’s brand marketing team. The 36-year-old is the ultimate testament to Tinder’s ability to create healthy, long-term relationships: She met her husband on the app six years ago, and still describes herself as a ‘happy customer.’ She’s also a female CEO—the first in Tinder’s history—who made it her first order of business to dig into the experiences women and LGBTQ people were having on the app.”

Which got me to thinking, at the time: the executive communication professionals I serve are weary from teaching all technologists, engineers, finance folks and MBA drones how to be communicators. Squeezing their “origin stories” out of them, like water out of stones. Convincing them of basic shit like the need to repeat messages more than once. Getting them to accept communication coaching, and spend time rehearsing speeches.

What if the company did hire a CEO based on her or his actual origin story, based on his or her innate understanding of how communication works, based on his or her complete willingness to give everything over to communication—because communication, of course, is really most of a modern CEO’s job, is it not?!

So I took the graph at top and put in in a file, about which I’ve been meaning to write a column for a couple of months.

Then last week Nyborg was fired, after only 10 months on the job. Why? 

“Our goal is to inspire our brands to optimize everything we do and build the best teams internally to deliver the finest services externally,” said Bernard Kim, CEO of the parent company Match Group, according to CNN. Kim, who will serve as interim CEO of Tinder, said Tinder has fallen short in key performance measures.

Now that guy sounds like the sort of CEO communicator we’re used to, issuing opaque corporate blather, in the wake of a high-level firing!

Meanwhile, Nyborg, whose résumé includes a two-and-a-half-year stint at Edelman Public Relations about a decade ago, wrote this on LinkedIn (and it was quoted in news stories):

This is my last day at Tinder. I have loved every moment of the last 2 years, working with an I.N.C.R.E.D.I.B.L.E team on the magic of human connection. I have seen Tinder blossom from The Swipe®, to an iconic brand and $1.7+ Billion business. I’m proud of elevating Women’s Experience, International, and Safety & Inclusion as company / growth priorities. I am enormously proud of Tinder’s culture: recently winning awards for Innovation, Leadership, Diversity and Career Growth. It’s been so special to work on a product that literally changes lives, and there are many other problems I’m excited to work on. But first…. My first true break in 16 years, starting with a few weeks in nature with my very own Tinder match <3 #swiperight

What kind of shit is this? Nyborg got hired as the personification of the company, she happily allowed herself to be portrayed as a pioneering woman CEO and then she got coldly shitcanned by a dude who didn’t even bother to explain how he or her successor would seek to improve on what she’d done.

I understand, she probably signed a severance agreement forbidding her from bellyaching about the treatment she received. But did that document further demand that she go out cheering the company that ousted her?

“If you are being run out of town,” said Sally Stanford, “get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.”

I get the logic. But this looks like a pretty sorry parade to me.

Do you agree?

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Monday Morning Mailbag

08.08.2022 by David Murray // 6 Comments

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