Writing Boots

In a Boots post earlier today, I asked, “Do I Have to Change My Communication Style Now That I’m Older?”

My friend and PSA collaborator Justine Adelizzi had a different theory about why I’ve been lately discouraged by some of my friends from posting certain things … and why I’ve found myself running things by more people, in the first place.

David, as one of the consiglieri, let me take a crack at the question you pose in your title.

I think you may have become a bit of a victim of your own success. You’ve built the Professional Speechwriters Association into something that has grown so much in recent years, and it now encompasses a broader, more diverse population of speechwriters and executive communicators than you probably could have imagined when you took it over.

But what that means is that even when you’re speaking as David Murray, author and critic, people hear David Murray, founder and executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association and the Executive Communication Council. You’re now, ironically, the exact kind of leader that speechwriters and executive communicators advise.

So I’m not surprised you’re running more things by people, or that you’re sometimes getting pushback. That’s the nature of leadership. You’re representing a large and diverse group of people.

Instead of asking if you need to change your communication style, here’s the question I’d toss back if you were a leader I was advising: is your communication style advancing the interests of the current and future Professional Speechwriters Association and its members?

Justine, per usual when you write, you provide much to consider. I’ll respond to your points in order:

First, I’m not sure the PSA does encompass a broader, more diverse population of speechwriters and executive communicators than it did when I founded it. The industry demographics of the first PSA World Conference were about the same as they are now. We’re larger now, and we do now also convene the Executive Communication Council and the Higher Education Leadership Communication Council. But everyone in those groups would was represented at that first gathering in New York in 2014.

I think we’ve become more established over the years: more of a symbolic institution, in some people’s minds, than a free-thinking writer’s society that spent much of that first conference in McSorley’s Saloon. And so perhaps increasingly, it strikes some folks as odd, when the head of the Professional Speechwriters Association—even on his personal site Writing Boots, to which he carefully confines his most provocative opinions—comes out with a piece with a headline like I did a few years ago: “Reading Axios Communicators = Eating Toilet Paper.”

The head of the International Association of Business Communicators would never write a thing like that, nor would the head of the Public Relations Society of America. Where does the head of the PSA get off?

I started my career at Ragan Communications, working for its founder Larry Ragan. Larry believed you could be a convener by day and a critic by night. In fact, when he slew a sacred cow or humbled an old fool in a high stool, he frequently quoted the P.T. Barnum maxim, “If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight.” Ragan Communications doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore, but they sure did back then. When IABC paid a zillion dollars to commission a phony “Excellence Study,” Larry came after that bullshit in a four-part series, one part headlined, “Does Selling Scads of Brassieres Constitute ‘Excellent Public Relations’?” Meanwhile, Larry put on warm, smart conferences and was an admired figure in the business for many decades.

So I came up in a tradition that said you can champion a profession and simultaneously participate boldly in the conversation surrounding it.

Still, when a bunch of veteran scribes came to me around 2010 to ask if I would start an association for speechwriters, I resisted so anxiously it came across as angrily. I’d covered a lot of association executives over the years as a trade journalist, and watched their jacket sleeves get longer and longer every year I’d see them. I liked my sleeve-length perfectly well at the time.

That would not—that will not—happen to me. I’ll wriggle out of the role before I see myself, as you suggest, as “the exact kind of leader” that most speechwriters advise. Or before I run my every utterance through the test that you suggest: Is my “communication style advancing the interests of the current and future Professional Speechwriters Association and its members.”

I want to be better than the kind of leaders speechwriters generally advise (and frequently complain about, usually on account of those leaders won’t say shit if they have a mouth full of it). I want to be more candid, more intellectually honest, more interesting, (and more loving and even funnier) than any of those CEOs, university presidents, military leaders, nonprofit chairs or government ministers. And I dare to think that the speechwriters will support me in that, as they have—as you have—for all these years.

I’m a writer first, an association executive last. You might not be surprised to know that I haven’t received a lot of calls from recruiters wanting me to take my talents to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, or the Society of Human Resource Management.

I realize my role as an industry figure makes my rhetorical situation more complicated, and that is why I do occasionally run some of my writing past you and other valued members of our wee society. But there’s a reason I write hard things sometimes, in colorful language: Because that’s the nature of leadership, too. And sometimes it’s required, precisely to advance the interests of speechwriters, and communicators everywhere. Or, sometimes, just to tell the truth.

One last thought, before I toss this back to you: I have frequently advocated for institutional leadership communication to be done in such a way, with such a frame, that the leader can sometimes speak separately—as a human being, who doesn’t represent every employee, every customer, every board member of the institution. My father did advertising for General Motors in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, he wasn’t allowed to write, “At GM, we believe …” It had to be, “General Motors believes …”

As a communicator, my dad chafed under that kind of institutional domination of the human voice and spent his whole career fighting against it.

I guess that fight goes on, in me.

Aren’t you ultimately with me in that?