Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Do you ever ‘Murray the cake’?

03.04.2010 by David Murray // 26 Comments

At the wedding reception of Steve and Cindy Crescenzo, I stood beside the wedding cake, deep into the bottomless glass of champers and telling an animated story. Someone rushed up and pointed out that there was white icing on my black suit coat. And pants. Lots of it.

"Goddamnit, you Murray'd the cake!" Steve bellowed and we all screamed with laughter, because the Crescenzos like funny stories more than they like cake.

And also, because I Murray everything.

I Murray salad bars, I Murray dinner tables, I Murray people's laps. (During a business flight I spilled a glass of gin in Steve's lap—twice.)

At a business dinner, I once absentmindedly ordered a $180 Kobe beef steak, and when the guy sitting next to me kiddingly told me it looked awfully good, I stabbed a $30 medallion with my fork and generously slapped it on his plate. He was a vegetarian. He was not amused.

I wish drinking was always the culprit, but it in fact is rarely the culprit. I'm actually less likely to Murray things when I'm drinking, because I'm less awkward and dorky when I'm drinking.

Last week, at the outset of my visit to my big client, McMurry, I carefully quizzed my client/boss about the names of two business heads who had interviewed me two years ago. In case I ran into them, I wanted to get their names right.

Stan, I remembered. Who was the other? Fred, my boss said. Right! Fred!

That was on Tuesday. On Friday afternoon—miraculously, I was an hour away from escaping Phoenix without having Murrayed anything major—I see one of those big guys coming up the stairs.

I don't know if he remembered who I was, but I leaped at him.

"Fred, it's fantastic to see you again!"

"It's great to see you too," he said. "And I'm Stan!"

Yep. I even Murrayed McMurry.

I'm a goofball, but I know I'm not alone, because I have seen a corporate CEO give a confident speech with his fly down.

What's your most embarrassing business moment?

Let's start a collection for businesspeople like us who are long on enthusiasm and short on grace:

Onward & Awkward.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // business gaffes, embarrassing business moments, McMurry, Murrayed, Onward & Awkward

Our big rock candy mountain

03.01.2010 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

I'll hope to regale you in other posts with yarns and insights gathered during a happy week I spent in Phoenix last week. I was there connecting with my speechwriting peeps at a conference, and also my colleagues at McMurry, the company that publishes Vital Speeches of the Day.

After the "speechwriting jam session" I delivered at the conference, a number of people came up and told me the session had given them goosebumps or made them cry. Same here, I told them. Though I'd seen or read these speech excerpts dozens of times before, being able to share them with other communicators was  emotional for me too.

Many of the discussions with the speechwriters and with my McMurry mates centered on the new community that's growing around the old magazine, Vital Speeches.

I thought of that group of speech geeks, and my happy position as a facilitator and sometime sparker of these conversations, as I read another anachronistic magazine on the flight home.

Ring Magazine was one thing half a century ago, when boxing was still a major American sport. Now that boxing is despised in many quarters and ignored in most others, it may come as a surprise that Ring still comes out every month. What surprised me, a fight fan but not a fight man, was how wonderful a read Ring still is.Image

In fact, it prompted me to ask and answer a pretty old question:

What is a great read?

A great read is when you intend to flip through something but find yourself frustrated by frequent stops, because you never see an article that you ought to be interested in. Quite the opposite: You notice the woman in the seat next to you is looking scornfully at the gruesome knockout photo you've been staring at for a minute, like it's pornography.

"I know," you want to hasten to tell her. "It's really awful, isn't it?"

I guess it's natural to feel a little embarrassed when we find ourselves following our real fascinations, rather than studying the things we really ought to care about.

That's the feeling I want my Vital Speeches pals to have when they go to VSOTD.com and its various social media forums. And it's the feeling I want Writing Boots readers to have when they're here.

The world tells communicators they have to think like business people, that the results are all that matters, that strategy trumps tactics, that language is less important than money.

We accept what we have to of all that, in order to get along out there.

But it's not how we feel.

And fresh off this good trip, I'm feeling privileged to make my living and spend my time creating places for us communication tramps to talk about what is important to us—human beings, and how they talk to each other—no matter what anyone else thinks.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // boxing, David Murray, great read, McMurry, Ring Magazine, speechwriters, speechwriting, Vital Speeches of the Day, VSOTD.com

An old trick, but it just might work

11.16.2009 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

My chief at McMurry, Scott Accatino, e-mailed me last week to warn me that he'd put a rather ginormous ad for the Cicero Speechwriting Awards on the Vital Speeches website. "You can still get the most important [editorial] stuff 'above the fold,'" he said apologetically.

Clearly, Scott forgot for a moment that I'm not just a editorial tyrant. I'm an editorial tyrant whose dad was an adman. An adman who used to tell of a technique for selling clients on ads:

1. You show the client you've thought deeply and broadly about his product and his customer.

2. You write and design a great ad.

3. You blow the ad up to "oh-my-God size."

This way, when you unveil the ad, the sumbitch is so big, the client exclaims, "Oh my GOD!"

It's a start.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Cicero Speechwriting Awards, McMurry, Scott Accatino, Vital Speeches of the Day, VSOTD.com

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