Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

The communication life

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An exchange between me and Boots regular Ron Shewchuk on his blog, For Your Approval.

Ron gives some career advice for young communicators, and this item is included:

"Understand
that the first five years of your career will be extremely frustrating,
with low pay, tons of boring work and very little influence."

To which I reply, "And after five years you'll get used to these conditions, and your frustration will abate."

Did this really happen? Yes, it did

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An informed Writing Boots correspondent points out that Wells Fargo took $25 billion in government bailout money and recently posted a $2.5 billion quarterly loss.

Then, when press reports criticized the company for rewarding high-performing workers with a trip to Las Vegas for an employee conference, the company canceled the trip.

But then Wells Fargo took out an expensive ad in Sunday's New York Times—did our tax money help pay for this ad?—to defend its original intention.

"Okay, time out. Something doesn't feel right," the ad begins. It goes on to attack the media for implying that every employee recognition event is "a junket, a boondoggle, a waste, or that it's for highly paid executives. Nonsense!"

In the old days, one would simply say this about Wells Fargo communicators, and many communicators at this precarious moment in history:

They don't know whether to shit or wind their wristwatch.

We are the greatest

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So on this rainygray Chicago morning I'm shambling around the series of tubes looking for a timely anecdote for Friday's Executive Communication Report—the free weekly e-newsletter I write that you should subscribe to immediately for a hundred reasons I won't go into here—and I run across something Abraham Lincoln said, about writing:

In a lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions,” delivered in Jacksonville, Ill. Lincoln claimed that writing was number one:

Writing—the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye—is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination … great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space; and great, not only in its indirect benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.

I check the date of that lecture. It's February 11, 1859—exactly 150 years ago today.