On communication, professional and otherwise.
We had a friend, Eddie, who used to quip that a now-defunct steakhouse in Chicago called Biasetti’s was “a great place to fight with your wife.”
We always thought this was a comedy gag, like “Galva, Illinois?! Of course I know Galva, I get all my suits in Galva!”
But after Eddie died, we took his widow out for dinner. Somehow Biasetti’s came up—(perhaps it was impishly invoked)—and instantly, the widow exclaimed, “Oh my God! The fights Eddie and I used to have in there!”
I don’t speak for the members of the Executive Communication Council, to their great relief.
But as this organization’s founder and executive director, I’m getting a little restless.
The action was heavy in exec comms in the years immediately after our founding in early 2020. CEOs and other corporate c-suite leaders talked their way through COVID, emoted their way through George Floyd and intoned gravely their way through January 6, 2021. But somewhere between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the death of Roe v. Wade, most corporate CEOs found themselves all communicated out.
Okay, fine. These things go in cycles, and I’ve seen a couple of the cycles before. CEOs all wanted to be on magazine covers in the 1990s, but hid under their desks after Enron, Arthur Anderson and the dot-com bust. A similar hibernation happened around the Great Recession, about a decade later.
Business is so cyclical because business is one elephant that always forgets. Sooner or later, CEOs and other corporate leaders will hear the siren call of celebrity on the one hand … and rediscover the utility of the bully pulpit on the other … and executive communication will regain its dynamism.
But I don’t feel like waiting. The other day I found myself feverishly scouring the ECC’s official Charter, written and informally ratified at our founding—and as happens with such documents, forgotten. Particularly understandable in the extreme sturm und drang of the last half decade.
Below several statements on “what success will look like” if the ECC is successful in leading this burgeoning communication discipline to fulfill its potential in organizations and the society they serve, I found this devilish little line!
“Leadership communication will expand internally, beyond the C-suite—including leaders from all levels of the organization—as part of a compelling human communication choir.”
Oh, yes! So what if CEOs would rather spend the next few years whispering their business agendas through lobbyists, saving their candor for employee town halls and otherwise chuckling their way through chummy fireside chats. The largest purpose of leadership communicators was never to lionize the CEO; it was always to help their institutions become, as the ECC Charter also says in its concluding words, “more humane, socially sensible and effective.”
Until the 1960s, it was, “General Motors believes.” Since the 1960s, it’s been, “At General Motors, we believe.” Who can make that shift more profound, by giving human voice to more people in the organization? Who better than people trained to help people communicate?
If the CEOs won’t talk, how about everybody else in the organization?
I do have a memory, and I can tell you that a decade ago, UPS exec comms chief Dean Foust led a years-long program called TED@UPS, where people up and down and all around that company gave TED Talks. A UPS pilot talked about her personal journey, from a man to a woman. The CEO’s speechwriter theorized that corporations were uniquely qualified to end racism. A UPS driver told a how his 20-year career had recently been enriched by his relationship with an autistic driver helper. By telling these stories, these people told us a lot about what UPS was—or at least thought it was, around that time.
Similarly, a General Electric website called “GE Reports” loosed a first-class magazine journalist around that company to unearth many hundreds of great stories from every nook and cranny—including profiles of many innovating employees at all levels—over the course of a decade.
I also remember a Cleveland hospital that in the wake of George Floyd made moving video testimonies on race from doctors and nurses and staff and administrators, to help the institution talk to itself, and to the community it served.
I won’t be so unreasonable as to tell executive communication professionals that they ought to talk their bosses into turning executive communication teams into “leadership communication” guerrillas and redefine the leadership communications remit to include every brilliant engineer, charismatic salesperson and culture-making mailroom character in the organization.
But I feel I should remind them of the largest and most enduring purpose, which is to humanize the organizations for which we work so that stakeholders relate to them not as buildings and balance sheets, but as people. (And so that maybe, they relate to stakeholders the same way.)
And if the CEOs aren’t doing that much these days, we should all be asking ourselves: Who will?
I grew up in Ohio, watching TV shows like Little House on the Prairie and Eight Is Enough.
And so, even after all these years living on the mean streets of Chicago, I’m still inclined to attribute unhappy facts of life to misunderstandings and unintended consequences—rather than stark-raving naked power grabs and purely greedy money plays.
I think this is a good quality of mine, that often gets me hurt, or embarrassed.
To wit: As I’ve contemplated the put-your-hand-on-a-hot-stove-and-think-it’s-a-flower-crazy world of youth sports for the purposes of writing and discussing my new book Soccer Dad, I’ve been inclined to explain the situation as a kind of blameless accident: Lotta ex-athletes want to stay close to the scene of their sports dreams, and must sustain themselves by coaching. That need dovetails with enough parents so ambitious for their athlete kids that they’ll pay more money than they should for full-time coaches, and all the games and leagues and travel required to justify the arrangement.
In short, lots of well-meaning grown-ups inadvertently making a mess of things. A Winchester Mystery House kind of story.
It’s good for my soul to think this way. What’s more, it allows me to hope that, if all these nice folks just came to their senses, we could somehow find our way back to knothole baseball, and live happily ever after.
But then, last Friday evening, still checking LinkedIn in the sick reflexive twitching of a dead animal, I ran across this post:
Daniel “Nothing Is Ever” Renouf goes on to write,
My dad was an electrician for the City of Toronto.
My mom ran a small daycare out of our house.
They weren’t wealthy buy any means.
But they made it work.
Early morning practices.
Travel tournaments every weekend.
Equipment that needed replacing every year.
Gas money.
Hotel rooms.
Entry fees.
None of it was cheap.
But they never hesitated.
They treated it like necessary spending.
Because to them, it was.
And it paid off.
That investment landed me in the NHL.
It’s why I’m still playing pro hockey today.
I owe everything to what they sacrificed for me.
So when I look at youth sports as an investment…
I’m not looking at a spreadsheet.
I’m looking at millions of families doing exactly what mine did.
Betting on their kid.
Treating it like it’s non-negotiable.
Showing up year over year.
That’s not casual spending.
That’s conviction.
And conviction is defensible.
If you’re looking at alternative investments…
Youth sports is hiding in plain sight.
If you’re interested in youth sports as an asset class, shoot me a DM.
Happy to share what I’ve been learning!
The downside of my soft Midwestern heart is that it’s easily bruised. And when it gets bruised, I get mad.
Finding only enthusiastic comments and reposts in response to Renouf—”when discretionary spend behaves like essential spend, that’s where durable businesses get built”—and not having yet ascertained that Renouf has been a fairly marginal NHL player and is currently playing on a one-year contract with a team in Germany, I wrote:
Your parents bet on you. They won. So it follows that “millions” of parents should be organizing their whole lives around preposterously elaborate sports schedules and betting their family vacations on their kids, only the tiniest percentage of whom will pay back that investment?
Clearly, you’re trying to appeal here to investors who need foolproof asset classes. Crypto, online gambling … family dreams. (You must be seeking capital. Did you not make enough on the bet your parents won?)
But do you think what youth sports and families need is more cold-eyed investors drooling over parents’ ever-increasing spending on youth sports as something to get rich on?
Some people say the quiet part out loud. You’ve said the shameful part, real proud.
The only commenter who agreed with me was Linda Flanagan, who wrote the currently definitive critique of youth sports foolishness called Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters.
Wrote Flanagan (who has endorsed Soccer Dad, BTW):
Incidentally, 79% of parents think youth sports cost too much, and 25% draw from their savings to pay for their children’s games, according the NY Life Wealth Watch Survey from last year. 80% want less travel, 72% want fewer games, 73% say youth sports have lost sight of their greater purpose, this from the Aspen Institute’s 2025 Project Play survey. Of course parents can and should make sacrifices for their children. But let’s not pretend this is all working out great. Oh, almost forgot: our system has created an epidemic of overuse injuries among players.
And five days after this Friday night fusillade from two youth sports parenting writers? Not a word of response, from Renouf, or any of his sanguine supporters, whose silence only repeats the message that Renouf’s post communicated in the first place: We don’t give a shit about kids, or parents. We want their money.
And the scales fall, once more, from my ever-innocent Ohio eyes.