Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Software Developer Pushes AI Solutions to Executive Communications Problems; Admires the ‘Passion’ of My Response

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This June 2024 post is a prelude to a fresh one I’m writing tomorrow. Since I wrote this, I’ve seen exec comms pros find handy uses for AI, on the front and back ends of speeches and other exec comms compositions: research, editing, editorial tire-kicking, briefing-doc making, murder-board generating, and so on. My organization is even helping them find more of such uses, through a custom webinar, AI for Leadership Communication, designed to get whole teams working on this productively, together. And yet, for the big things in exec comms—well, I still stand by what you read below. And tomorrow, I’ll evaluate one self-described ghostwriter’s bold claim to the contrary. —DM

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Talked with a tech person this week on Zoom. If she wants to identify herself in whatever conversation results from this post, that’d be great; if not, also fine. 

Anyway, she was trying to get me excited about ways that AI could make executive communication a more powerful strategic force for organizations.

How did I respond? Well, on more than one occasion, she said she appreciated my “passion.”

When it was my turn to say polite things, I acknowledged that there might be limitations to my vision about what tech can achieve.

I’m not exactly technology oriented, I acknowledged. I actually told her to look at my office surroundings, on her Zoom screen. A typewriter. Old books. Tons of old work boots, for some reason. Mike Royko, Studs Terkel and Hunter S. Thompson to the left of me, Pete Seeger to the right, here I am.

As a human guy and not a tech guy, I told her she was trying to get tech to solve human problems. I compared the notion to getting AI to do marriage counseling. I told her what I told an AI/exec comms proponent last week: that the exec comms problems I worry about—helping institutional leaders connect genuinely and convincingly with other human beings about ideas that matter mutually—don’t lend themselves to tech solutions. They demand human solutions: emotional ingenuity, intellectual insight, subtle social sense.

I further told her that, lest she think I’m resistant to AI because it’s a new idea: Actually, I’m always desperately grasping for new ideas to introduce to veteran speechwriters and exec comms people. I’m always terrified that there are no new ideas under the sun, and one day people will conclude that Murray and his crew have pretty much told us everything they know, and everything we need to know. 

I said that the moment I see even one immediately practical and significant application of AI to exec comms, I’ll be that application’s most enthusiastic proponent. I’ll build a conference session around it. Or a whole conference. And I’ll be rich! I helped organize a conference on the Internet in the mid-90s for a publishing company. We expected a couple hundred people. More than a thousand communicators showed up, all terrified of being left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway. (Why? Because our conference brochures read, “Don’t be left on the shoulder of the Information Superhighway!”) 

I’m not into scaring my customers, I’m into serving them—helping them solve the problems they actually have. And there isn’t an app for that.

Maybe my new friend will develop it.

She and I politely agreed that we see the same future: A world where the human element of exec comms will only further stand apart from other corporate communications—which have always, after all, read like they written by ChatGPT.

And we said we’d stay in touch.

P.S. Studs Terkel, who habitually referred to blogs as “bloogs,” also said he figured that if a hardware store carried hammers and nails, a software store must be stocked with pillows and blankets.

An Author Born Every Minute: Easy Come, Easy Go, and ‘Monica, Say It Ain’t So’

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I was checking into the Ohio University Inn for my daughter’s college graduation earlier this month when I saw this lovely email.

It had been a couple of weeks since the frenzy of the book’s launch, and with things quieting down, this was just the kind of invitation I’d been hoping to start getting.

When I returned to Chicago, I didn’t hide my delight at this invitation, telling Monica, “This is especially excellent seeing that I have a lot of family in and around Boulder, who will be interested. (Four sisters and their kin.)” I asked her for more details, so I could consider whether to appear via Zoom, or turn the event into a little family visit.

Promptly, I got 19 happy paragraphs back from Monica, each of them reading like this:

For an in-person gathering, we usually host in a relaxed, social venue here in Boulder often a cozy café, wine bar, or community space that allows for an intimate but lively discussion. Attendance typically ranges from 25 to 50 engaged members, depending on the book and timing. The atmosphere is warm, conversational, and highly reader-driven not a formal presentation, but a genuine exchange of ideas. If you were able to join us in person, we would shape the evening around a discussion first, followed by a natural, informal Q&A with you woven into the conversation.

Yummy in an author’s tummy! I replied, “Wow, Monica, you folks don’t mess around! Everything below sounds absolutely lovely and I look forward to committing to this with you one way or another.” I chose one of the dates she offered based on my availability and also its correlation with our Father’s Day promotions. And I proposed a call, later in the week.

Monica replied affirmatively, calling my Father’s Day angle “brilliant” and saying, “Friday sounds perfect for a call I’d love that. Feel free to suggest a time that works best within your open windows, and I’ll make myself available.”

To which I replied, “I’m really knocked out by the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of your approach here and excited to connect.”

Now folks, I’m already once bitten. While promoting my last book, I got pulled into a long and mind-bending dialogue with some huckster claiming to be the documentary maker Michael Moore, who I was hoping would push it to his followers.

With Soccer Dad, I’ve already been approached by a few opportunists whose advances my publisher helped me head off. Scamming authors is like panhandling the homeless: as morally low as financially dubious. But apparently it’s a thing.

Also recently, I was invited to participate in a kind of SEO scheme through some soccer parent website. Guy kept telling me to just post a ton of stuff there, no matter the quality: “it’s as if someone else is telling google that your book is valuable. nothing else really matters. you want as many links as possible. it doesn’t even matter (per say) if people read it …” I wound up telling this plastic-eyepatch alley-man, “I didn’t write a book so I could become a bot.”

So as much as I was looking forward to visiting Boulder virtually or in person, as much as I allowed myself to accept the kismet of a Boulder book group embracing my book—hey, it wouldn’t be the first lucky thing that happened in my life—the fuzzy feelings turned to suspicion right away and Monica became “Monica” as soon as “she” wrote back: “Friday at 10:00 works well for me. And if you don’t mind, I’d actually prefer to continue our conversation here by email rather than by phone. It helps me keep everything clearly organized and intentional as we shape the experience together. I’m very happy to move quickly back and forth so it still feels fluid and easy.”

One of my Boulder sisters and I quickly discovered: Monica Rose was an elusive presence online. And, others had asked about Boulder Bookaholics being a scam. I wrote, “Monica, pardon me but this is getting a little strange to me, and starting to seem a little commercial. You don’t wish to talk on the phone? Also, I can’t find you online anywhere.” I pasted in a post about the possible scam. “Monica,” I e-cried, “say it ain’t so!”

And that, as the say, was the end of that.

What’s the lesson here? If you try to do anything in this life, people will try to take advantage of your undisguised desire—even if it’s something as dopey as writing a book.

Especially if it’s something as dopey as writing a book.

Communicator Overestimates Own Communication Ability. Again.

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I and some pals from the Professional Speechwriters Association were quoted in an Atlantic piece on commencement speeches titled, “The Best Graduation Speech Is One Nobody Remembers.” I’m not pleased with the piece, starting with its clickbait headline.

Mine is the oldest story in the world: In an approximately hourlong interview with the author, Ian Bogost, I expressed three decades of hard-won philosophy on speeches, commencement and otherwise. He got all that out of me because he seemed genuinely curious, and receptive to a complex view of the psychologically and socially subtle art of oral rhetoric. Which probably didn’t fit into his word count or his need for a provocative, singular thrust. So he cherrypicked quotes that fit, and juxtaposed them with his words, that I would never say. And we get passages like this …

A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.

Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions …

The interview was over a month ago, so I don’t remember everything I said. I can’t list contrary points I made that Bogost failed to insert. But I’m pretty sure I did tell him what I often say: that when I was young, I thought speeches were generally boring old things for boring old people. And that it was years into my adulthood when I slowly came to understand how and why speeches work singularly on an audience, emotionally—even spiritually. And that even a speaker who is not providing new intellectual insight—as commencement speakers rarely are—can galvanize a community in a meaningful and lasting way if they say the words the audience wants, needs, craves to hear. 

So, pretty much the opposite of what Bogost ended up writing.

I’d say I’m sadder and wiser as a result. But if I know myself—and my unjustified but unshakeable faith in my ability to get across nuanced views so powerfully that writers will be compelled to include them in magazine and newspaper articles—probably just sadder.