The U.S. has a fertility crisis, which doesn’t bother me personally, while I’m looking for a parking space at the grocery store, but which is apparently bad for the economy.

Apparently we’ve got to motivate some of these durned childless cat ladies to become sanguine soccer moms. But that’s not a matter of pronatal government incentives, wrote Christine Emba this month, in The Atlantic.

For women to decide to have children, they have a need that government can’t fulfill. “That need,” Emba writes, “is for meaning.”

In trying to solve the fertility puzzle, thinkers have cited people’s concerns over finances, climate change, political instability, or even potential war. But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child. It may be that for many people, absent a clear sense of meaning, the perceived challenges of having children outweigh any subsidy the government might offer.

Okay, I totally get that. And my daughter is not charmed to hear the story of how my wife and I, both 33 at the time, decided to have her. “I’m bored,” I said to my wife as we lay in bed one night, reading. “Me too,” she said. College sweethearts, we’d found our way in Chicago, we’d made a lot of friends while working our way into good positions in happy careers—hers as a public school teacher, mine as a writer. And we didn’t know what to do next, to keep things interesting. And so we tried this.

And it was meaningful, as it turned out. Perhaps falsely, having a child offers a sense of optimism. If your parents were bad, you and your partner can do a lot better; and if they were good, you can stand on their shoulders, and still do a lot better! You can send your child to Montessori, you can spare the rod, you can take them fishing, you can read them books, you can kiss them every morning and every night! They could be perfect!

And even when it turns out your child isn’t perfect (only magnificent), the hope remains—the belief!—that they can stand on your shoulders one day, and see farther and live more and make a great contribution and be happy! Until they have children of their own one day!

I can clearly and coldly see how people who haven’t had children find this process farcical, and the eternal hope of new birth sad, like being a Cub fan. And I can see even more clearly these days how they might feel that way, about mindlessly repeating this cycle in a society that can’t even agree that we don’t want Donald Fucking Trump to be our leader and global representative.

In 2008, my four-year-old daughter in her (Montessori) pre-school Christmas choir, concluded “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” with, “and you’ll go down in history … like Obama!” By 2016, she was in junior high, listening to NPR in my car, when she heard a subsequent presidential candidate say about women, that “you can grab ’em by the pussy.” And covered her mouth in shock.

There’s a real difference, between deciding to have a child in that hopeful 2008 nation, versus that 2016 moral carnage. My father grew up in the 1920s and 1930s and came of age in the 1940s. He wrote about what that was like (despite the Great Depression and the war he fought in, in Europe):

My generation couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to see what might be coming down the street or flying over the house that we’d never seen before. We couldn’t wait until the newspaper arrived or the voice of Lowell Thomas came on the radio to tell us what wonders had happened that day or were on the way. We wanted to fly with Buck Rogers to the 25th century, but we would settle for large silver airliners that would one day take us where the trains did, for superhighways on which we could travel in glass-domed cars, and bridges and tunnels and buildings, the likes of which one had never seen.

Yeah, that was a pretty good place to want to raise more kids in. And we have parking lots full of Baby Boomers to prove it. It might be the place Donald Trump is referring to when he talks about making America great again. But it’s not the place he’s taking us to, I think we can all acknowledge that.

The Atlantic‘s Emba quotes one of my favorite speeches: a stump speech by Robert F. Kennedy, in his 1968 presidential campaign. Kennedy criticized President Lyndon Johnson’s habitual boasting about the gross national product. Kennedy said the gross national product also included a lot of shitty things America was producing, like smog and napalm. And then he added, “The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play … It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

I love that Emba quoted that speech, but I disagree with the conclusion she draws from it: that government and its leaders can’t motivate people to have children. They can encourage people to have children: By leading a nation with love and optimism and humor and imagination and sanity and competence—the qualities of a good parent, come to think of it—and thus making the citizens of a nation feel better about bringing new recruits into the club.

Another article this week, in The New York Times, panned Kamala Harris’s campaign approach by claiming grumpily that “joy is not a strategy.” No, but if you’re trying to make a nation believe in its own goodness and make its citizens believe that life is meaningful enough to want to make more meaningful life—goddamn it, it’s a start.

Whenever I write something here that seems more professional than personal, some readers complain that they like the personal stuff more. So I thought I’d try to mollify these beggars/choosers by making this professional piece a little more personal. It’s all personal to me, to some extent, as I try to never do anything for money that I can’t justify as at least having the potential to make things better. For instance with this business below, I’m hoping to help largely powerless people who work in the proximity of power to do that hideously clichéd thing called “talking truth to power.”

Or as Emily Dickinson advised much more realistically:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Yep, that’s what we’re helping folks to do, with their powerful bosses.

And we sure hope it works. —DM

***

The term “executive presence” didn’t exist three decades ago when I first became acquainted with the joys and sorrows of corporate executive communication professionals. But I would have made fun of it if it had.

Back then, exec comms pros could be identified by sight in a corporate PR department: They were the oldest, and frequently the most rumpled ones. They were not “people people.” They were intellectuals. Their stock in trade was not “emotional intelligence” (a term that no one used back then either) but “intellect” (a term that people actually did use back then).

“Executive presence” wasn’t really a problem for them, because they had built-in gravitas: The gravitas of a Master’s or a Ph.D. The gravitas of a big shelf of books like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, from which they extracted quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville, for their CEOs to say. They had the gravitas of their gray hair. And usually, the gravitas of being a man, in male-dominated (and even macho) c-suites.

And if they had messy hair or crooked glasses or a mustard stain on their shirt, it only made them more lovable and more credible, as the eccentric, absent-minded professor. The resident intellectual. Every company had to have one.

So much has changed since those days. Almost everything, in fact.

CEOs don’t quote de Tocqueville anymore. In fact, they don’t give many formal speeches anymore. Executive communication has become much more extemporaneous in style and much more diverse in media, as corporate leaders express themselves via video, employee town halls and smaller meetings, LinkedIn posts and X.

And you don’t hire eggheads named Hiram to help leaders to nimbly navigate spontaneously spouting issues of the moment across social media channels. You hire people—women, at least as many as men—to guide leaders (many more of whom are now women themselves). 

You hire much younger people, on average. Why? They’re conversant with modern communication media and popular culture. And, they’re affordable to staff exec comms operations that have ballooned from “CEO speechwriter” to whole teams.

Which is great, as it allows more corporate leaders to express themselves more readily to more stakeholders more effectively and frequently than they did, giving one conference stemwinder at a time.

But which creates a gravitas problem. That we’re now calling an “executive presence” problem. And that is very real. “Oh my gosh!” an exec comms director exclaimed when I told her that our Executive Communication Council is offering a virtual seminar next month called Executive Presence for Exec Comms Pros. “My people need that so badly. I keep wanting to tell them when they go into the CEO’s office, ‘Be bigger’!”

Well, it’s hard to be big when you’re twenty-five years younger than the CEO, six levels down, and making in a year what the CEO makes in a week. Hard, but as our seminar leader Jeff Davenport believes, not impossible. 

Whereas an executive presence course thirty years ago might consist of, “Hortense, tuck in your shirt”—Davenport, who taught executive presence with Silicon Valley CEO star-maker Duarte, is going to show modern exec comms people how to manage their professional image, from attire to presentation skills. How to pitch ideas to the principal, and listen deeply to their response. And how to react to objections and overcome execs’ reluctance, to command the credibility they need to become trusted advisors to the leaders they serve.

Lots of exec comms pros and some whole exec comms teams are registered for this course. I’m personally eager to experience it—not just to learn for myself what Davenport has to teach, but for the conversations we’ll have with ambitious exec comms people, trying to get bigger.