Archives for December 2024

Before you watch this commercial, please consider four consecutive facts:

1. My late father was an advertising creative director in Detroit, who made car commercials, often pushing his staid bosses at General Motors to make more emotional appeals.

2. The old man was also an old car nut, who built a second garage in our yard to contain obscure jalopies made by a company called Kaiser-Fraser.

3. As soon as I was old enough to afford to dabble in such foolishment myself, I bought an eccentric old car of my own—a 1964 International Harvester Scout. And wrote about it, in Car Collector Magazine … where my dad wrote regular essays on cars, and nostalgia.

4. So meaningful was all this to me that I when I had a daughter, I named her Scout. Here’s that story.

And now Volkswagen has acquired the old Scout brand, created a new version and used this ad to unveil it. The ad involves a daughter and a Scout and a dad. Its purpose is ostensibly to sell cars, but I have to believe it was really written to kill one David R. Murray—most likely by my dead adman father, who probably misses me and wants to see me again.

E-MAIL SUBSCRIBERS, VISIT WRITING-BOOTS.COM TO VIEW VIDEO.

You know what, Dad, I miss you too. But this one was just a little too on the nose. And the one you wrote last year didn’t kill me—it made me stronger.

Better luck next year, old man!

I’ve run this little meditation a few times in this space over the years. 

I keep coming back to it—and when I do, I’m compelled to bring you back to it, too.

Last time I ran it was December 2020, after what I described as “a hard and disorienting year” and ahead of “what will inevitably be one more.” This was a year like that—and next year will be too. But the prayer lands differently at the moment. It asks more.

It was written by my first publisher Larry Ragan, one of the most influential stylists I ever read. In a little Catholic newsletter sometime in the 1960s, Larry wrote:

There are the insiders and the outsiders. Two kinds of people. Two ways of looking at life. Two ways of making things happen.

The outsiders raise hell. they demonstrate; they organize marches. They issue reports that excoriate the establishment, challenge the status quo, appeal to all who thirst for justice.

The insiders? Often dull. The insiders speak a different language: they know the tax tables, the zoning variations, the assessment equalizers, the square-foot cost to educate the kids. You’ll find them on the school board, city government, on the village board. Ordinarily not word people, they have mastered the art of the platitude.

Outsiders are often wild. At first, they don’t seem to make sense. The first black kids who sat at a lunch counter and refused to move were outsiders. The first marchers to Selma were outsiders. Surely it was an outsider who first proposed the shocking idea that the generic “he” is a sexist word. Dorothy Kay, who in the 1950s stopped Manhattan traffic to protest atom bomb tests, was an outsider.

Please God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one. But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too. The insiders resist the first answer that comes to them: they have heard it before. They are offended when they see the world’s complexities reduced to slogans shouted into a microphone or preached at a town hall meeting. They are saddened when they hear someone argue that God is on his or her side, and they wonder why God doesn’t speak so clearly to them.

Sometimes you’ve got to feel sorry for the insiders. When they win, few know of their victory. When they go wrong, their mistakes are branded as evil. Often they share the goals of the outsider but continue to say, “things aren’t that simple.”

The world is filled with people who like to feel they are right. Insiders are not always certain they are right. They are unhappy when they must resist the simplicities of popular sloganeering. So when we tip our hats to outsiders, as so often we must, let’s not do so with such vigor that we fail to give two cheers to the insider.

Just now in American life, we can’t even agree on who the insiders and the outsiders are. At any given moment, in any given context, we don’t even know which we are, ourselves. For the most personal instance: Am I an insider or an outsider because I make my living convening and advising people who advise CEOs and university presidents and politicians? Are my customers insiders because they advise CEOs and university presidents, or outsiders because they aren’t CEOs and university presidents themselves? Are CEOs and university presidents insiders, or outsiders because they’re being buffeted by forces beyond their control and even their understanding?

In such a social spin cycle, it’s not enough to appreciate the insider and the outsider. We must each be effective insiders in areas where we have influence—and responsible outsiders where we only have a voice. This, at a moment where it feels so justified to do the weary, fearful, exasperated opposite.

So let’s say a prayer for ourselves—that we have the stamina and the wit to manipulate forces we can manipulate. And the rest of the time, the courage to use our voices well.

It’s a lot to ask. But it’s the only way forward.

I once found myself dancing in a bar in Bayfield, Wisconsin with a local woman whose hands were so rough that I couldn’t help asking her what she did for a living. She shouted over the live band, “I’m in healthcare!” Later in the evening another local told me that the woman was an embalmer, at a funeral home. That’s not healthcare!

Speaking of which, UnitedHeathcare and all health insurance companies getting a torrent of online acid in their eyes, in the wake of the assassination of UHC CEO Brian Thompson last week—the alleged killer’s motive apparently being inspired by antipathy to corporate “parasites,” the shell casings reading “Delay. “Deny.” “Depose.”

The CEO of the parent company, UnitedHealth Group, responded by defending company’s social contribution, the Daily Mail reports. The insurer is on a “journey to help everyone who needs it within the health environment,” Andrew Witty told employees in an internal video, adding that the firm’s “mission… is truly to make sure that we help the system improve by helping the experiences of individuals get better and better.” Witty said that far from denying care to people who need it, UnitedHeathcare plays “a critical role” in making sure that care is “safe, appropriate and is delivered when people need it. We guard against the pressures that exist for unsafe care or for unnecessary care to be delivered in a way which makes the whole system too complex and ultimately unsustainable … And what we know to be true is that the health system needs a company like UnitedHealth Group.”

A different take on the matter comes from the writer Francine Prose, who wrote in The Guardian that she condemns the Thompson killing, which she calls “a criminal response to a criminal situation,” but believes:

The only consolation—the only good that could come of it—would be if his death led to some serious soul-searching, to a concerted attempt to understand why an apparently affable CEO inspired such violence and hatred.

Deny. Delay. Everyone knows what those words signify in reference to medical insurance. Doctors and patients agree that our healthcare system is seriously broken. It hardly needs to be said that medicine, in the United States, reflects and further deepens our profound economic divide. Not long ago, my husband’s longtime doctor left his practice to join a medical concierge service that charges $60,000 per person per year. Soon after, I found myself in the waiting room of an upstate New York urgent care center, watching patients ask the receptionist if they could pay the $35 co-pay in $5 monthly installments.

Before doing any soul-searching, several insurance companies pulled down the bio pages of their execs. And security firms’ phones started ringing off the hook. A veteran exec comms pro told me the day of the shooting, “I imagine corporate security is going to clamp down even more after this, across companies. This is a wake-up call, but will unfortunately make execs even more isolated from reality.”

That would send a chill down the spine of a lesser founder and executive director of the Executive Communication Council. Our charter was written and ratified by our founders a half decade ago at an optimistic moment when some of us hoped “shareholder capitalism” was going to democratize the corporate economy partly by forcing corporate leaders to be more socially responsive. Our related vision was that if executive communication flourished in the way we saw fit, this would be the ultimate result: “The leaders of corporations, nonprofits, universities and other institutions will be more expressive and candid, and the institutions they run will be more humane, socially sensible and effective.”

Compelling executive communication is hard to pull off, if leaders are in hiding from the society their companies are operating in—literally, or figuratively. After a recent meeting of exec comms pros, one participant expressed his disappointment that communicators aren’t talking enough how they and their powerful bosses can help prevent or at least soothe a “cultural and political cataclysm” that might come with the Trump administration.

I would love it if executive communication played such a role in our troubled society over the next few years, and some of us are doing some soul-searching of our own, about how to make that happen. Companies and their CEOs do share one powerful motive with most of the rest of us: an interest in social stability. To the extent that corporate leaders can be prevailed upon to commit deeds and issue words that meet stakeholders’ needs, executive communication professionals have important work to do, even if it is invisible and seems incremental in the headwind of so much anti-corporate feeling.

But meanwhile, at this moment we must all cast a hard eye on our own mission, asking ourselves, our leaders and our institutions: “more humane, socially sensible and effective” than what?

Than this, for one thing:

Here is Brian Thompson, two years ago, talking a woodenly from stilts, about his company’s efforts in creating something called “point-of-care assist … where the providers can streamline the preauthorization process to reduce delays, bureaucracy and claim denials.”

Exec comms pros: What do you think your profession can do, from its peculiar corporate perch, to make your leaders better (and thus, your organizations better, too). It’s a big question, and I’ll take not-for-attribution responses at David.Murray@Prorhetoric.com.