Archives for September 2020

In my first year out of college I was writing for two newsletters: The Ragan Report, which went out to corporate internal communication directors (which was mostly a glorified title for “editor of the employee newspaper”). And Speechwriter’s Newsletter, which went out to speechwriters, before they even got their glorified titles, as “directors of executive communication.”

I got in arguments at the Brehon Pub back then with the editor of Speechwriter’s Newsletter. Why? Because I was a young pipsqueak moralist who believed speechwriting to be an amoral pursuit—at least as opposed to internal communication, which had to do, theoretically, with democratizing organizations by making information more available to employees. Speechwriters were articulators for hire. Employee communicators had a social mission. I gradually focused my attention on them and wound up founding, on behalf Ragan Communications, a successful Journal of Employee Communication Management.

That was all in the 1990s.

Since then?

The Journal is long defunct, the victim of the death of the soul of internal communications. Seemingly in the blink of an intranet, the typical profile of an employee communication pro transformed from an ex-journalist still wanting to use her editorial skills for social good, to a philosophy- free communications major who wanted to make director someday. The Journal died because there was no one left to write substantive essays on internal comms, and no one interested in reading them. By then, I wasn’t much interested in editing them, either.

Professional speechwriters, meanwhile, have much more fidelity to their personal views than they did when I first met them. I think the TV show West Wing had something to do with that—established the cultural idea that a speechwriter was an idealist first and a scribe second. Back in the 90s, many speechwriters took pride in their lack of “authorial pride,” an attitude I found as a young writer and find as an older one too, either disingenuous or disgusting or both.

Over the years I have also come to believe, if cautiously, in the idea of rhetoric as a test of truth. That is, if an idea sounds like it holds water for a paragraph and then for a whole speech and then for a decade of speeches—then it holds water. So I consider serious speechwriters to be serious citizens, and I’m proud to serve them and fascinated to swim among them.

I realize I’m painting with the broadest brush here too. There are true creeps among speechwriters, just as there are brilliant, thoughtful, philosophical internal communicators—like Sharon McIntosh, with whom I gathered a summit of exec comms folks and internal comms a couple of years ago, in Chicago. Our aim was to help these two disciplines partner more effectively with one another.

We discovered that my eggshell mind was not the only place where exec comms and internal comms people fought with one another. The exec comms pros were especially hostile to the internal comms people, frustrated by their fixation on communication media over message—I actually heard myself bellowing at one point in the middle of the meeting, “No more apps!”—and disappointed in their comparatively goody-two-shoes corporate demeanor. One grizzled speechwriter who I’d talked into coming texted me a photograph of an empty bar. “This is what 9:00 p.m. looks like, at a fucking employee communication conference!”

But since COVID and George Floyd, exec comms is internal comms. Whereas exec comms pros used to spend all their time writing Davos speeches and Wall Street Journal op-eds, only 13 percent told the Executive Communication Council recently that they’re mostly focused on external stuff. They’re doing more internal work than ever.

But of course, they have no foundation beneath them or philosophy behind them.

And neither do many of their internal communication colleagues (see “philosophy-free,” above).

Both groups, in fact, are scratching their heads and wondering what in the world to have their executives say next to a worried and weary workforce on whom they must rely for many difficult months, maybe years to come.

Just in time for Labor Day, here’s an answer, from one fella who’s been thinking about this—hard—for about three decades. (Me.)

I hope you enjoy it.

“When something goes right, it’s likely to lose me. It’s apt to confuse me. It’s such an unusual sight. I can’t get used to something so right.” —Paul Simon

You know how everything is terrible?

Not just these days but always?

And you’re actually so used to that, you’re sort of fine with it?

As Jerry Seinfeld said, in his classic acceptance speech at the Clio Advertising Awards: “We know the product is going to stink. We know that. Because we live in the world and we know that everything stinks.”

Well what if you got yourself involved with something—especially these days—that was six times better than you thought it could be, dared to even hope it would be?

That’s been my relationship, for the last nine months or so, with the people at Disruption Books.

Disruption is the publisher of my forthcoming collection of essays, called An Effort to Understand.

That’s a pretty nice cover, right?

Every single correspondence and conversation I’ve had with Kris Pauls, Alli Shapiro and the team at Disruption has been as clean, smart, honest and classy as that. Also cool and funny. Even the current phase we’re in, the normally gruesome process of line-editing, copyediting and fact-checking—even this is thoughtful, gentle, sensible and sane.

I’ve been around book writers all my life; indeed, it’s much of their wisdom that I’m drawing on from this book—and to a one, they’ve complained bitterly about their publishers, for being dumb, lazy, ham-handed and not at all like the Maxwell Perkins experience they had hoped for all their lives. Tell a writer you’ve found a publisher for your book, and prepare to hear, “Don’t get your hopes up, Kid.”

Meanwhile, I feel like I’m dealing with Scribner’s, in 1928; and Kris and company make me feel like they’re dealing with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

And we are both working very hard to make sure this book, when it appears in March, 2021, does what it promises: To draw on the wisdom of my life in communication, to help as many Americans as possible in “hearing one another (and ourselves) in a nation cracked in half”—an idea that seemed relevant a year ago but is beginning to seem like an emergency now.

There’s lots and lots of work left to be done after the editing—marketing and distribution work by Disruption and promotional work by me. But based on how this project has gone so far—and based on the response we’re getting from people who hear about this book (not to mention the hundreds of communicators who enthusiastically preordered it a year ago in numbers that got publishers’ attention in the first place)—I won’t lie to you:

Goddamnit, I’m starting to get my hopes up for this one.

Communicators, this is our book: So maybe you’ll allow yourself to hope, too, that our collected wisdom may lend a hand in helping this country achieve what Robert Kennedy called for half-century ago, on another dark night: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”

If you haven’t pre-ordered a copy already, you may do so now, at Amazon.