Writing Boots

The Chicago Tribune reports today that many companies are avoiding or delaying layoffs by issuing temporary, across-the-board pay cuts. For instance, the local office-products supplier Acco Brands is cutting all 2,000 employees' pay 47% over six weeks beginning Feb. 23. The company will "provide short-term financial
assistance to employees put in the 'most extreme circumstances' by
allowing them to borrow from future earnings."

A Watson Wyatt executive was quoted as saying pay cuts and salary and pension freezes are last resorts for many companies. "I remember talking to companies, and we'd go down the list of options
and we'd say temporary pay cuts, and they'd say, 'Can we do that?'"

They can, but they usually don't want to.

"Usually, companies say they prefer layoffs to pay cuts," said Yale
economics professor Truman Bewley. "It gets the misery out the door."

Especially at a moment of such universal economic trouble, I generally like the idea of everyone sacrificing together, as opposed to splitting society into two groups: profound victims and scared survivors.

Do you?

And more to the point here: Have you ever had to communicate a temporary pay cut? What do you say and how do you say it?

I once pitched a magazine editor a story about Chicago's attempt to "end homelessness"; the editor turned me down wearily, "David, the homeless have been with us a long time." Translation: Nobody believes this is a problem we can solve, and so nobody will read about it.

The same can be said about other subjects we all agree are problems but don't really believe we'll ever fix: poverty in general, public education funding and healthcare.

The communication-industry equivalent of these issues is "information overload," an issue we started hearing and talking about with the widespread embrace of the Internet, a dozen years ago. All the studies showing how most people feel "bombarded" by information. The (largely phony-baloney) efforts to count the number of messages an average person receives in a day. And the fear on behalf of communicators that their crucial messages will never stand out from all those other, trivial murmurings that distract their audiences all day long.

Most of us gave this problem up as insoluble years ago and either stuck to our knitting and hoped somehow our messages would get through, or embraced every new-media medium that came along and hoped to transmit our tired messages through a new medium.

Not Bill Boyd, my longtime correspondent, and a real communicator's communicator. Over the years I've known him, when Bill isn't doing communication for his employers, he's thinking about communication. And in recent years, he's become fixated on one stubborn problem.

You guessed it.

Bill has been working with a consortium of mostly academics called the Information Overload Research Group. They have a website and a blog and a conference coming up in April—and, since they all have day jobs, they have a need for similarly hopeless geeks who still worry about information overload and believe a solution can be found.

Ask not what IORG can do for you, ask what you can do for IORG.

As corporate speeches go, Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler's talk on Monday at the Economic Club of Chicago was a barn burner.

He used the urgency of the economic crisis to issue a call for national healthcare reform and make an admission that drug companies have little credibility on the subject:

"A belief that our prices are too high, that we run misleading advertising, and that we care more about playing golf with doctors than about helping them understand our medicines—all of this has earned our industry a reputation near the bottom of all American institutions."

Kindler went on to lay out how Pfizer plans to regain credibility—and how a reformed pharmaceutical industry can contribute to healthcare reform.

Have a look, communicators. Then go out and do likewise!

Download Speech–Pfizer