Mediocre managers make rules.
Mediocre communicators make (and remake) style guides.
Mediocre communication managers make strategic planning documents.
And yet, we all know that the best people in our business are good because they have good instincts, subtle minds and the courage of their convictions.
My friend, Pat McGuire, reads every book like it might be his last. Right now he's reading FDR, by Jean Edward Smith. In a letter to me—when he takes the subject seriously, Pat writes in longhand—he writes about FDR's famous first 100 days in 1933, during which the president repealed Prohibition, created the TVA and established the Home Owners Loan Corporation to slow foreclosures.
Was this part of a plan FDR had developed to deal with the great Depression? Not according to this book.
Pat writes: "[FDR] was improvising from crisis to crisis and savoring every minute. The legislation passed and the initiatives undertaken shaped the New Deal and decisively altered the nation's course. Yet each measure represented Roosevelt's nimble response to circumstance rather than any grand design. 'To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan,' wrote [New Deal critic] Raymond Moley afterward, is 'to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior designer.'"
Rules, guides and plans are useful. But, especially in the sort of economic crisis our nation and our organizations are in at the moment, they are not all.
In our office, we often only half-jokingly describe our approach as “instinctive communications” – we all know where we’re going, what we’re trying to achieve, and the message we need to get there. But we don’t necessarily have every step of that written out in a plan. Maybe I should start calling it “New Deal communications” instead.
Good plans are useful, but I find some communicators seem to spend so much time on planning that they don’t have a lot of time left to do the work. And why is it that strategic plans often end up involving really weak messages delivered by every conceivable communications tactic and tool? When did the message become so unimportant?
Right on, Rueben. All the planning in the world didn’t create, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”
If planning is what you’re good at, naturally, you’ll emphasize planning as the key to good communication. You’ll also emphasize planning and breadth-of-broadcase if weak messages are the only ones you can get through the approval system.
But these don’t have to do with communication laws, only institutional and individual gutlessness.
(The consequences of which we’re seeing quite heavily on Wall Street today.)
This reminds me of a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Craig
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