Archives for September 2023

My mother wouldn’t buy us Kraft cheese singles, because, she told us, “It has all the nutritional value of a roll of toilet paper.”

Similarly, I warned Writing Boots readers earlier this year about the Axios Communicators newsletter, and why it is “worse than nothing.” Now I feel I went too easy.

An issue last week focused on my corner of the communication business, executive communication.

The main story leaned like a drunk to a lampost on a brainless study of trends in executive speaking by a company that produces “event management software.” What would they know about executive communication? Things like this: “Half of planners also say that attendee engagement is one of the three most important gauges for success.”

The next story quoted inexplicably unnamed “executive communication experts Axios spoke with,” demonstrating their magnificent grasp of the obvious: “Establish expectations for every speaking engagement, conference or event before making a commitment.” On second thought, no wonder they don’t want attribution.

And finally, the piece quoted Leigh Gallager, a senior manager at the management consultancy Teneo, as saying: “Yes, [events] present an opportunity for executives to share a corporate narrative or any critical messaging, but there’s also a benefit in showing that a CEO is accessible, relatable and capable of answering questions in a live setting. Audiences want to witness authentic moments, so it can be an effective way for leaders to raise their profile by being seen, heard and getting their message across in what is often perceived as a more off-the-cuff way.”

Gallager is implying that rather than hear a long, boring speech, audiences would prefer “authentic moments,” like “off-the-cuff” conversation.

And since Axios would never, could never, contradict one of its sources or even push them to defend their pink-slime bromides, it’s down to me to ask Gallager, rhetorically: Is it that audiences don’t prefer leaders who can share fresh points of view powerfully through sustained oratory? Or is it that they’ve been trained by experience to expect that CEOs’ speeches will be tedious parades of platitudes. In which case, yeah, they’d rather see the executive shamble verbally without a net, than with one.

I like a fireside chat as much as the next conference organizer and conference speaker. They’re easy.

But the only ideas I remember after 30 years of organizing and attending conferences, came from great speeches. And I remember plenty.

“Do you remember that brilliant panel discussion, back in 2003?” said no one ever—adding, “Do you remember that meaningful article, from Axios?”

My high school English teacher Mary Z. Greer died on Sunday. I wrote this a couple of years ago, and now I’m doubly glad I did. Thank you, Mrs. Greer. —DM

***

My writer friend Paul Engleman says that one of the very best things about publishing a book is that it gives you a moment to thank all the people who helped or inspired you along the way.

The trouble is, you’re often only partially aware of who helped and inspired you along the way, and how. And some of the people who helped you in the most understated ways, helped you the most.

My English teacher in my freshman year of high school was not the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society. Mrs. Greer had prematurely gray hair and she was warm but also kind of reserved, as I remember. 

There was a deep-down confidence, though, that gave me the impression when we read To Kill a Mockingbird and she told us what the author wanted us to think about Boo Radley, she had it on good authority. Like maybe she knew Harper Lee personally. (Doesn’t she look like she might?)

There were things on Mrs. Greer’s classroom walls that weren’t on the walls of other teachers in this WASPy little Ohio town called Hudson. The abolitionist John Brown had lived there, and it had been a stop on the Underground Railroad; but there was only one Black person in my high school class. And my Democrat mother complained that all the liberals in town could fit into the phone booth in Saywell’s Drug Store.

And yet Mrs. Greer had a Pete Seeger concert poster on the wall. I knew Bob Seger. But who was Pete Seeger?

Mrs. Greer had another poster on the wall. This was not a popular sentiment in Hudson, Ohio during the Reagan administration, and I wonder if she took some guff about it from young Alex P. Keatons, or during parent-teacher conferences.

I remember two things most personally about Mrs. Greer’s class: 

Diagramming sentences with the supreme confidence of a mathematician, and realizing that was as close as I would ever get to technical mastery of anything.

And, once, Mrs. Greer telling me in her straightforward way, that maybe I should think about a career in writing.

Which I hadn’t been doing, to that point, despite the fact that my parents were writers. (Because they were writers?)

Mrs. Greer didn’t rave about my writing, didn’t tell me I was the second coming of Ian Frazier (another Hudson product). Just said I ought to think about it, as a possibility.

It meant something, coming from a third party. “When an adult names you, before the wax is completely dry,” writes Rebecca McCarthy, about being called a poet as a teenager by the writer Norman Maclean, “the name becomes part of who you are.”

And so, by the time I applied to Kent State University and declared a major, English, it was. Not because my parents wanted me to do it, but because at least one of my English teachers had suggested it.

To promote An Effort to Understand, I’m going on radio in Cleveland and in Kent this month, and doing a virtual book talk at Hudson Library & Historical Society in May. I thought on Monday night to reach out to Mrs. Greer on Facebook.

I told her I’d become a writer, after all. And that I remembered the “bake sale” poster. And that I have a Pete Seeger poster on my office wall. And that my 17-year-old daughter is named Scout.

Mary Z. Greer was delighted. She read one of my blog posts, and confirmed that I am a good writer. She ordered my book. She’s going to read it and listen to my radio interviews and we’re going to talk on the phone before the Hudson Library book talk. I hope she’ll come on and ask me a difficult question, like she used to do in class.

It’s often said of teachers that they’ll never know the influence they had on their students.

Often, the students never know the influence their teachers had, either. But when we catch a glimpse, we should let our teachers know, in full.

Boy, does it feel good.

Postscript: I don’t remember these classroom rules, but Mary sent this along yesterday, and it squares with the Mrs. Greer I remember.

P.P.S. And as part of her comment here, Mary Greer demonstrates what a fine writer she is herself. “Your memories remind me of how our kids are half asleep and half on fire—how we need to help them wake up gently and at the same time, protect them from scorching!”

One of the problems with getting older is the dismay one feels when shit you and your generation taught people not to do, people are doing again.

Along with many others of my generation in the communication business, I’ve been teaching people for more than 30 years not to junk up the language with unnecessary jargon. (And my professional forbears were teaching people the same shit for at least 30 years before that.) Of course most of my forebears are dead, and most the people I taught are retired now.

And so it was that last week I found on my desk two piles of fresh but discouragingly familiar-smelling dung—one from academia and the other from the corporate world—that hint rudely that my life’s work has been in vain.

An Amherst College economics professor is mad about the school’s “athletic admissions that preference rich white people.” Verb another perfectly good noun? As Bartleby the Scrivener would say, “I preference not to.” The professor went on to casually refer to the athletic admissions policy as “this particular component of the privilegocracy.”

I don’t even understand the argument she’s making, but if this language murderess is right, I want to be wrong.

More egregious is a corporate memo sent last week by the president of a division immediately after a big layoff wiped out a big chunk of the company. This is to the remaining colleagues (and lightly edited to obscure the company):

This team is resilient in delivering a network performance that is the best in the country, maybe even in the world. As we enter the next era of the [industry], these changes will help ensure that the Technology organization will evolve our Network and Applications to create growth opportunities that fuel the business and keep us ahead of the competition. In addition to delivering Best Network – Best Experience – Best Value, our network now needs to become a programmable platform, and our IT infrastructure and services need to evolve to accelerate our journey to become deeply data-informed, AI-enabled, digital-first to deliver best-in-class customer experience. 

In April, we introduced the technology domains to drive a culture of cross-team collaboration, build efficiencies, and empower leaders to drive execution. Through this change, we started to streamline processes to eliminate and consolidate work efforts, improve the span of control, and optimize our workforce post-integration completion of this global merger in the industry.Those changes and the steps we took this week have organized us for the next growth phase.

Every member of the go-forward team is critical to our future success and will help us to deliver by staying focused on build precision, and operational excellence, as well as continuous improvements of our processes and evolving our Network and systems for future growth. As we move into the Era of Innovation, our team will stick together like never before and simplify the way we work as one team. I see great things in our future and with a streamlined, agile organization working together, we can deliver.

Best regards,

The person who sent it to me wrote, “I think what bothers me so much is how obviously proud of it the writer is.”

I think what bothers me so much is that it’s best read in the voice of a robot—and is more egregious than stuff I’ve been discouraging since “privilege” wasn’t the problem, the “under-privileged” were; since “woke” was “politically correct,” “trans-phobia” was “homophobia,” misogyny was “women are crazy,” “diversity” was a new term and “downsizing” was a novel euphemism—a whole generation ago.

How much has really changed? And how much has stayed the same?

And why would I burden you with such discouraging words on a Monday morning? I believe it was Bleeding Gums Murphy who said, “The blues isn’t about making yourself feeling better, it’s about making other people feel worse.”