Writing Boots

Vancouver communication consultant and Writing Boots regular Ron Shewchuk interviews Petro Canada communicator Kevin Heinrichs, who edits the oil company's brand new employee magazine, inDepth.

Click on the PDF and see if you don't get a funny feeling in your loins.

"We wanted a tone with the text and layout that would appeal to younger
readers, but not so edgy that it's inaccessible to older readers," Heinrichs tells Shewchuk. "We
treat our magazine as though it is a newsstand magazine that just
happens to cover one company. The same editing discipline and attention
to layout detail apply."

This is pornography for employee communicators.

Sometimes over the last four presidential terms it has seemed that presidents and other politicians get away with their lies. They may. But their country doesn't.

MSNBC's Chuck Todd astutely pointed out that one of the reasons the bailout package just failed is that it was sold by the president and by Congress, neither of whom Americans trust.

Just about every member of Congress in a tight race voted no because they thought they'd be beat up by their constituents, who hate the bill.

Why do they hate the bill? Because they hate the people who are telling them, probably honestly for once, that it's necessary.

"This is a crisis in leadership," Todd pointed out, "and the American public just doesn't trust anybody right now."

When you have a country where nobody trusts anybody, do you have a country at all?

Mediocre managers make rules.

Mediocre communicators make (and remake) style guides.

Mediocre communication managers make strategic planning documents.

And yet, we all know that the best people in our business are good because they have good instincts, subtle minds and the courage of their convictions.

My friend, Pat McGuire, reads every book like it might be his last. Right now he's reading FDR, by Jean Edward Smith. In a letter to me—when he takes the subject seriously, Pat writes in longhand—he writes about FDR's famous first 100 days in 1933, during which the president repealed Prohibition, created the TVA and established the Home Owners Loan Corporation to slow foreclosures.

Was this part of a plan FDR had developed to deal with the great Depression? Not according to this book.

Pat writes: "[FDR] was improvising from crisis to crisis and savoring every minute. The legislation passed and the initiatives undertaken shaped the New Deal and decisively altered the nation's course. Yet each measure represented Roosevelt's nimble response to circumstance rather than any grand design. 'To look upon these policies as the result of a unified plan,' wrote [New Deal critic] Raymond Moley afterward, is 'to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put there by an interior designer.'"

Rules, guides and plans are useful. But, especially in the sort of economic crisis our nation and our organizations are in at the moment, they are not all.