Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

What if we stopped trying to reinvent IABC, and just started making it a better version of what it has always been?

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Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility. Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. … The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were in the time of Rameses, and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow. … Let us take a look, say, at the so-called drink problem, a small subdivision of the larger problem of saving men from their inherent and incurable hoggishness …. —H.L. Mencken, writing in the 1920s

And so I had to laugh at the beginning of an interview published yesterday by the communication industry's premier podcasters, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. They spoke with Chris Sorek, the new paid president of the International Association of Business Communicators.

Before they asked him about his big schemes for solving ancient problems at IABC—as I also did last month—Holtz and Hobson got Sorek talking about his last job at a nonprofit in England, called Drinkaware. The mission was to get Brits to drink less. "Under Chris' leadership the charity's website now attracts nearly three million unique visitors a year, the logo is featured on over 5 billlion products and Drinkaware campaigns have started to show 'green shoots' of behavior change," said Drinkaware chairman Derek Lewis in a release announcing Sorek's departure.

You know Mencken would love that term, "green shoots."

In the course of the Holtz and Hobson interview, Sorek identified a number of persistent problems that he hopes to attack:

• The "ABC" accreditation designation: The association needs to make sure it "is objective, is professional, is defensible," Sorek says. This, more than 15 years after the accredited communicator Dan Danbom quipped that the only effect his "ABC" has had is people squinting at his name tag at conferences and calling him, "Mr. Abick." Come on, folks: How is accreditation ever going to mean any more than it does now? It is what it is: credible to the gullible, suspect to the cynical, and a total nonentity to everyone in between. But if it gives the cowardly lion courage, who's gonna complain, or investigate the rigor of the secret test? Not me.

• The Gold Quill Awards. "It should be seen as being the best of the best" in communication awards programs, Sorkek says—and not just by communicators, but by top leaders in business and government. My response? Ibid.

• Communiation World—since 1970, the blandest and most useless magazine ever published on any subject. (I admit, I've missed a few issues: At the World Conference last month, I had a super embarrassing meeting the "new" editor at the World Conference in Chicago. "Wow, when did you take over?" I asked. "Six years ago," she said.) Sorek says that what this publication needs is a focus, on the half dozen issues that members really care about. No, what it needs is an editor who does not work in the hushed IABC headquarters in San Francisco, and who is charged with generating compelling columns, surprising stories and lively conversations about communication. (IABC once had a magazine like that—Reporting, it was called, and it was done by a freelancer named Larry Ragan, out of Chicago, until he quit to start Ragan Communications, in 1969. Sorek ought to look at those back issues, and draw some inspiration.)

Sorek strikes me as a good, smart, in-touch guy, who I believe will make IABC more rational and efficient and user-friendly. "Watch this space," he told Holtz and Hobson. "We're going through a review of what we're doing as an organization … of what we're offering in terms of IT and IT support—basically our digital presence and how we deliver that for members." He told them to check back after the first of the year, and I'll bet he'll have done some stuff by then.

Also to his credit, Sorek doesn't appear to believe for one minute, as some members allow themselves to do, that IABC will ever become a ballsy political "advocacy" organization on behalf of Communication Goodness. Neither does he seem to go in for the fantastical notion that IABC could ever issue revokable, CPA-like "licences" to communicators, a idea that Holtz periodically fondles.

But Sorek did allow his lips to form words to the effect that IABC needs to help communicators get taken seriously in the C-suite.

I'll keep an equally vigilant eye on that, and the flow of ale England.

If gays can come out of the closet, why can’t radicals?

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Social media consultant Todd Defren posted this quote from H.L. Mencken one day last week on Facebook:

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

"While I fall far short of 'radical,'" Defren added, "this resonated."

But only one minute earlier, he had posted a happy piece about "brand-sponsored journalism," an example of our national debauchery so pungent that I can almost hear H.L. Mencken railing about from the great beer hall in heaven.

To his credit, when I called him on his hypocrisy, Defren didn't deny it.

"I'm a schizo, what can I say?" he said. "Gotta pay the rent."

Uh huh.

When I was about 23, my first boss, Larry Ragan—who built Ragan Communications by being an honest voice in a public relations world full of hot air, but who didn't rock any really big boats—leaned in and whispered to me, "You know, Dave, I'm a closet radical."

Because I was young, and not had not yet been compromised, I was infuriated. What good, I wanted to ask him, is a radical in a closet?

I've since learned what good is a radical in a closet. It takes a closet radical—an appropriately dressed person who fully appreciates the stupidity and piggishness and fear and insanity that pervade all human institutions—to be even the least bit useful in communicating in the breach between those institutions and the human beings they affect.

Because we are looking so hard, we can find the real virtue in institutions and occasionally communicate it in a credible way.

But here's the deal, Defren: Closet radicals shouldn't go around hinting at their own radicalism for the sake of their own vanity.

(We do, of course.

But we shouldn't.)

Are you a ‘Corporate American’? Take this test.

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"Unluckily, it is difficult for a certain type of mind to grasp the concept of insolubility," wrote H.L. Mencken. "Thousands of poor dolts keep on trying to square the circle; other thousands keep pegging away at perpetual motion. … These are the optimists and chronic hopers of the world … It is the settled habit of such credulous folk to give ear to whatever is comforting; it is their settled faith that whatever is desirable will come to pass."

Of course Mencken is talking about Americans in general in his essay, The Cult of Hope; but you know which Americans I think of when I read (and reread) this snarling piece?

Corporate Americans.

There's Corporate America … and there are also Corporate Americans.

Now, not every American who works in Corporate America is a Corporate American. And there are some Corporate Americans who do not work in Corporate America, because they were laid off. But being betrayed by Corporate America doesn't keep them from thinking like, behaving like, talking like and voting like a Corporate American.

What is a Corporate American?

A Corporate American is someone who believes all criticism must be "constructive." So constructive, in fact, that it shouldn't be called criticism at all, but rather, the more neutral "feedback."

A Corporate American believes there is a business phenomenon called "professionalism," that's somehow exalted from the regular-life phenomenon called "showing up even when you don't feel like it."

A Corporate American can say, "best practices" and "world class" with a straight face.

A Corporate American can say, "I am passionate about branding," with a straight face.

A Corporate American is liable to explain to another adult that his or her behavior is "inappropriate," apparently by some celestial standard we're all supposed to be familiar with.

A Corporate American, when you take his very best idea, crumple it up in a ball, stomp on it, shit on it and then present it to him in a flat shovel, smiles and thanks you for your feedback.

A Corporate American, when she hears the parable of the frog dying in slowly boiling water, recognizes herself as the frog, realizes she is dying, shrugs and thanks God it's Friday.

A Corporate American believes the CEO has the hardest job in the company.

A Corporate American thinks businesses are somehow more rational than, say, a family with a controlling father and a desperate mother and hundreds of drunk aunts and uncles who come and go as they please, and usually something's broken or missing after they leave.

A Corporate American can not and does not imagine, however sentimentally and simple-mindedly, how much more physically beautiful the world would be without giant corporations turning our whole landscape into a big LEGO set.

And above all, a Corporate American believes everything is going to be all right. The social media stategy will work, the product will sell, the company will profit, the investors will flock, the Dow Jones average will climb, the country will turn itself around.

A Corporate American, who spends half his waking hours working in Corporate America and the rest of them on hold because all of Corporate America's represntatives are busy right now, resorts to wishfulness about everything.

"The fact is that some of the things that men and women have desired most ardently for thousands of years are not nearer realization to-day than they were in the time of Ramses," Mencken writes (think sustainable energy policy, immigration, binge-drinking on college campuses and communicators getting a seat a the strategic table), "and that there is not the slightest reason for believing that they will lose their coyness on any near to-morrow.

Plans for hurrying them have been tried since the beginning; plans for forcing them overnight are in copious and antagonistic operation to-day; and yet they continue to hold off and elude us, and the chances are that they will keep on holding off and eluding us until the angels get tired of the show, and the whole earth is set of like a gigantic bomb, or drowned, like a sick cat, between two buckets.

Does that paragraph make you a little angry?

Tell me: Why?