Writing Boots

I was tested last week, by a colleague. I passed. Or failed, depending on how you think about it.

I wrote the promo copy for a conference website.

It was up to my colleague to create an eblast, to get people to go to the website and register for the conference.

She didn’t want the eblast to simply repeat the website copy. She also didn’t want to make me rewrite the website copy.

So she fed my website copy into Microsoft Copilot, to generate a letter with my copy as a starting point, but altered.

For example, it turned this intro copy from the website …

… into this opening for the eblast:

Which didn’t look too bad at first. Until I started tweaking. I mean, I wouldn’t put “manage through” in quotes like that. Also, I don’t believe there’s some pre-existing “set of tactics” that will “move us forward”? Also, I don’t say, “move us forward,” because I don’t believe “we,” are really supposed to move in any one direction, like a bunch of corporate robots. And I like the sound of “stronger, not just busier.” But I don’t really think stronger versus busier is the operative dichotomy here.

In short, I wouldn’t have written that shit!

After about six exciting minutes of editing it back toward what I had originally written, I wrote to my colleague that I simply couldn’t stand the agony of editing AI-altered copy to read more like the copy I’d already agonized to write!

I thanked my colleague for trying. I acknowledged that I might be being totally prissy about this—it’s just marketing copy, right?—and that someday I might let it go. But I feel that writing absolutely as carefully as I can from the mind of this three-decade observer on this subject to what I perceive is the mind of the reader who I’ve also known for three decades is one of the important bits of value I add to this whole process. And I just can’t let a machine start taking chances with it.

And I rewrote the whole thing, the way I wanted it to sound. And my colleague understood.

I did think back on a moment when I could have really used AI. I worked for a marketing agency once, and they occasionally assigned press releases to me. It got back to me that the PR director there complained bitterly about my releases, because they were “too much David Murray!” Well, I could have fed those David Murray releases into that AI wood-chipper, and satisfied this person entirely. But God made me for greater things than writing press releases devoid of the spirit that God gave me in the first fucking place.

NEXT!

No one is less useful to listen to than an ex-CEO. Every morning’s a Monday, and he’s always the quarterback.

But let’s make a brief exception for Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and ex-CEO of Slack. On a podcast last year that Fortune reported on this week for some reason, Butterfield inadvertently revealed a valuable insight for communicators—not just about how ex-CEOs think, but how some acting CEOs sometimes think. (And their communicators sometimes feed into it.)

Butterfield believes that communicators do what he calls “hyper-realistic worklike activity,” as opposed to “known valuable work,” which is done by engineers and accountants and others directly involved in manufacturing, supply chains, sales and other demonstrably, immediately vital logistical operations of the organization.

Sez Butterfield: “Here’s my grand theory: Hyper-realistic worklike activity goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do. Hyper-realistic worklike activity is superficially identical to work … But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle.”

Butterfield says this fake work crops up at some point after the founding of the organization. “The problem with almost every organization [is] at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it’s going to be valuable,” Butterfield explains. “Everyone’s going to work in the morning like, ‘I have 10 things to do and every single one of them is like something I know how to do, and it’s definitely going to be valuable.’”

But as the company grows, Butterfield laments,

People are calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting, to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides. We are sitting in a conference room, and there’s something being projected up there, and we’re all talking about it, and that’s exactly what work is.

I’ll do it, our board members will do it, every exec will do it. The further you are from having all of the contacts, and all the information, and the decision-making authority, the easier it is to get trapped in that stuff, and people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper-realistic worklike activities, and have no idea that that’s what they’re doing.

Butterfield concluded with an admonishment to leaders, “It’s actually your responsibility to make sure that there’s sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying ‘no’ to things upfront, rather than words like, ‘Hey you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn’t matter.'”

I think I know what Butterfield is talking about here, though he might have spent a little time doing some hyperrealistic work-like activity with a communication pro, who might have helped him be more clear, and who might have asked him a question, like: Do you think when an organization gets large, it inevitably becomes increasingly difficult, and in fact impossible, to assign absolutely certain usefulness to every last activity? And pointing out that digging a hole is a fundamentally different job than running a publicly traded international underground construction company. And that the leader of that company who insists that every minute of his or her day be spent on something that directly affects the top or bottom line would be an insane menace.

Maybe, as a result of such hyperrealistic work-like activity with a hyperrealistic communication professional, Butterfield would come to realize that all he’s demonstrating with his “grand theory” is a magnificent grasp of the obvious—like most ex-CEOs gassing on to everybody else in their Florida condo association, who struggle to drink enough gin and tonics to make it bearable.

But since he’s an ex-CEO, he doesn’t have a communicator in his ear, or anybody else with an attachment to real life.

We can only hope that working CEOs remember that large organizations, like the societies they exist in, require culture-building activities that are too abstract to be quantified, but real, nevertheless. We can also hope that the communicators who work for them have the courage and sense to remind them of same.

Rebecca Solnit, interviewed by The New York Times over the weekend, said what I’ve been muttering for 15 or 20 years of hearing otherwise sensible communication teachers portray storytelling—or “story,” as they preciously call it—as somehow more moral than other forms of communication:

It’s always important to recognize that stories can be destructive, imprisoning. They can obscure the truth as well as reveal the truth. There’s this period a while back when people were flouncing around with this, Aren’t stories wonderful? And there are stories to justify white supremacy, misogyny, environmental destruction. The right has its stories, which the fact that this regime has to lie constantly says a lot about who they are. But yeah, stories can be destructive. A lot of stories can oversimplify. I do often see the stories people on the left tell, and the left, I think, is a lot of different things, not a monolith, as very driven by their own version of sectarianism criticism, grievance, often stories of oversimplification. Everyone in that category was like this, and everyone in this category is like that. … So, yeah, I think the idea that stories are these magical devices that will do all our work for us is itself a bad story.