Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

When the only tool you have is PowerPoint, every problem looks visual

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The "huckster consultant" is such an archetype that eventually, one casually wonders if real huckster consultants actually exist.

And then one receives an e-mail promo like this one, from a PR guy representing an actual consultant, named Juliet Huck:

Could the reason that people are so against a government-run healthcare be that the Obama administration isn't using visuals to make an emotional connection for the American public? Even those that are currently on Medicare, which is a government run program, can't seem to make the connection that they are already in a government run healthcare system.

Juliet Huck, CEO of THEHUCKGROUP, believes that people aren't SEEING the benefit. She is an expert on using visuals as a way to create persuasive communications (what she terms the “EQUATION OF PERSUASION”) and can speak to what President Obama and politicians should be doing to influence the American public to get behind such programs.

Attached is a visual her group created to show how President Obama’s lack of persuasive communications is hurting his popularity ratings. 

Are you ready for the visual that explains the entire first nine months of the Obama presidency?

Are you pumped?ExportObama approval graphic (courtesy THEHUCKGROUP)[2]
Hmmm.

Perotchart By Huck's reasoning, Ross Perot would be in about his fifth term right now.

Alas: Huck can't possibly believe what she's saying. Which makes her a huckster.

Like I said.

I challenge her to dispute me.

There was no joy in Mudville

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I unearthed this video from 1980, when I was in sixth grade and, like the boy featured here, emotionally defenseless to the improbable rise and sudden fall of a truly lovable local football team.

Despite its tremendous campyy-ness, the video brought a tear to my eye, a direct descendant of those that I bitterly shed on in my parents' bedroom that terrible Sunday afternoon.

And I wondered: Is it possible to be permanently wounded, to have one's psyche forever altered, by a perfectly-timed disappointment, even if it's from outside the home? (At play, at school, at work?)

Pardon me, but would you mind if I engaged in a spot of trash talk?

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Gathering speeches last week for Vital Speeches of the Day's sister publication Vital Speeches International, I ran across—oh my God, am I really about to say this?—an attempt—hee hee—by Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper—hoo hoo—to talk trash to the U.S. and other countries, about how they handled the economic down turn up in the Great White North.

In Sept. 17 speech to the Canadian-American Business Council and Canadian Association of New York, Harper crowed, Canadian style:

Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me just conclude by observing that historically we Canadians have been known as a polite, quiet and self-effacing people, but in my view, as you may have noticed, this is no time for Canadians to hide our light under a bushel. A few months ago, The Economist magazine carried a headline calling Canada, quote, "A country that got things right." We have all suffered from the global economic recession, but Canada's management of its economy and its financial system is a success story of which we can be justifiably proud, and on which we can build. In other words, Canada got it right.

Is that all you got, Harper? You apologize in advance, you gently prepare us for a bodacious rhetorical smack-down, you qualify the whole thing by saying it's only "in my view," and then you quote The Economist as saying, "Canada got it right?"

Gangsta!