Archives for May 2014

About 60 speechwriters gathered at New York University last Thursday and Friday for the first-ever World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association.

A better man than I would have a summary by now. But as I told the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable on a podcast during the conference, “I’m nearly brain dead. I just don’t even feel quite sane at the moment.” I’m only just pulling myself together a week later. What I could comment on then and now is “the good mood of this event,” strictly for people who think of themselves as career speechwriters. “We’re really with our people here.”

As for details—alas, it is impossible to run an event and cover it both. U.K. Speechwriters Guild and European Speechwriter Network founder Brian Jenner is writing a piece for an upcoming issue of The Toastmaster magazine, and I intend to write and publish a recap of our symposium, “What can the Professional Speechwriters Association do for you? And what can you do, for the Professional Speechwriters Association?”

And I’ve done this little photo essay with pictures taken by Washington Speechwriters Roundtable chief Randy Lee. But ultimately, to know what happened at the conference, you gotta go to the conference. If we missed you this year, we’ll hope to see you next year.

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Washington Speechwriters Roundtable boss Randy Lee (left) connected me with the late Lt. Col. Mark Weber, who I helped to write Tell My Sons, which became a New York Times bestselling memoir thanks in no small part to the promotional help of Weber's old boss David Petraeus. The General's generosity to Weber and those who loved him extended to appearing at this conference. His presence on the program helped a first-time event immensely, and his appearance was thoughtful, charming, lighthearted and fun.

Impressive speakers might draw speechwriters to the conference. But once they're together, they're together. Check out the intensity of these conversations at the dinner party Thursday night.

Still, a conference organizer has a lot to worry about, even in the midst of a wonderful event. The photo below was taken in McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (the unofficial conference headquarters), only minutes after the conference ended.

Former Reagan White House and Colin Powell speechwriter Hal Gordon, who has been a fixture at speechwriting conferences since I attended my first in my early twenties (I worked the "cloak room" at a Ragan Speechwriters Conference in 1992), held this button aloft during a conference caucus on "How can the Professional Speechwriters Association help you? How can you help the Professional Speechwriters Association?"
As we discussed what activities might, could and should be undertaken by the PSA, Gordon accused us of missing the obvious, and said the button itself—which I confessed to laughter and applaise that my art teacher wife made on her button-making machine—and would improve his lot at networking receptions, where he often feels marginalized and alone. No longer!

I hope, as we all do, that the button, and the logo, and the PSA and its annual World Conference—give all speechwriters more confidence, visibility and legitimacy, wherever they find themselves.

I concluded yesterday's post, "We are not doomed to repeat history. The next generation is. Personally and professionally, we must teach our children. Well."

Last night, Cristie and I were kissing Scout goodnight, and as kids often do just before bed, she came out with something she didn't want to sleep on: She said she's afraid to stick up for gay people when her fourth-grade classmates say mean things about them. She knows where she stands on the issue, because her gay aunts are the mothers of her cousin Parker and she knows it's not "gross." But the other kids say it is, and she's afraid that if she argues with them she'll lose friends, or worse.

I told Scout that her friends don't really think gay people are gross. (By and large, their parents are an urban liberal demographic that loves gays and Starbucks and Robert Segal and Melissa Block equally.)

I told her that there are good things about kids and bad things about kids and one of the bad things about kids is that kids can really be jerks to each other. So kids are afraid of each other, and will do anything to place themselves in the majority. And since gays are in the minority, nervous kids will say something mean about them out of a desperate determination to be safely and snugly in the norm. And other nervous kids will agree with the nervous kids. And suddenly the nervous kids will start feeling confident in their numbers, other kids will start feeling nervous.

Then Cristie said some wise stuff about the options Scout has—she can walk away quietly or she can say something out loud—and we both said it's her job to do one or another. And then I brought up the Holocaust, which she has been studying as you know. I said that Jews weren't the only people killed in the Holocaust. I said they made gays wear pink triangles, and they killed many thousands of them. I said that the basic instinct of nervous and worried people to make themselves look normal by declaring other people weird was what made the Holocaust possible.

"That's how important this is," I told her.

People love to say that our children don't have any problem at all with gays, transgendered people or other races or religions. They love to say that because it means the progress we think we're making on these issues is permanent.

It's not.

Goodnight, sweetie. I love you.

Scout, in fourth grade, has been learning about the Holocaust. Like all of us, I guess, she's absorbing this incredible fact in stages. Shock, fascination, outrage—"I hate Hitler!"—and more fascination about the first historical event that fully captured her imagination.

It's struck me sideways, oddly, that each one of us has to learn about the Holocaust completely from scratch. The mind wants to think that some history—and maybe some math and science, too—would be seared into our DNA, that we would understand it from birth, like instincts.

No. Today's kids are just as dumb as we were, and need just as careful an education as we did—lest they be as half-educated as we are. In life, and in communication too. Consider this old unwisdom, which I ran across the other day:

Many workplaces have frequent meetings where everyone on a team gets together (either physically or virtually) to give oral status reports of their respective projects.

These "update meetings" (aka "staff meetings") are supposedly useful because they encourage "better communication." I beg to differ.

As I see it, communication should only take place if it's necessary to coordinate the activities of team members. If that need does not exist, "better communication" is only creating distractions.

For example, programmers working on a commercial application don't need to know the status of the marketing campaign. Similarly, marketing folk do not need to know the specifics of technical milestones.

As a general rule, business communication should be on a "need to know" basis, not because it's secret but because if you don't need to know something you're wasting time and energy if you're thinking about it.

That sounds like it was written in about 1911, before everyone gradually figured out that employees who understand the big picture are more engaged, make better decisions and generate new ideas that benefit the whole company in unexpected ways. Nope! Just the other day, in Inc. magazine!

Peter Drucker is dead. We are Peter Drucker. And Elie Wiesel. It's not that we should never forget. We are not doomed to repeat history. The next generation is.

Personally and professionally, we must teach our children. Well.