Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Real. Conference.

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If you care about employee communication, there is no better conference to go to this year than RonCon 2010, which is being held in two cities, Vancouver and Calgary, the week of March 22. 

(I recommend Vancouver.)

Ron Shewchuk has not only organized some of the best employee communication people to speak at this conference, but he's organized the most candid crew of speakers ever assembled. (And if you think you get the unvarnished truth from consultants and practitioners presenting their ideas and case studies at most communication conferences, you're about 50 percent off.)

There there might be crying, and there might be shouting and there will be laughing: But with Shewchuk, Crescenzos, Salvo, Williams, Gray-Grant, Wah and yours truly, there will be no b.s. at this meeting.

So if you've got real questions screaming for honest answers and real problems that demand real solutions, come to this real conference.

Today's the early-bird deadline. Sign up by the end of the day today and get a big discount.

Why I owe my career to a guy named Shewchuk, and why you need a Shewchuk in your life

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It must have been the Corporate Communicators Conference, and it must have been 1993.

My fellow rookie Ragan editor Steve Crescenzo came racing up to me in the big suite atop the Marriott Hotel, roaring at me about “Holy shit, Murr, there's this guy you gotta meet. He’s smart, he’s funny and he’s real. I swear to God, you're gonna love this guy!”

What Crescenzo was telling me was that he had met a guy who was … like us.

Except he was far older. He was like 30.

(When you’re in your mid-twenties, 30 feels a long way off. Remember?)

The point was, Steve and I had spent the first year of our weird young Ragan careers thinking of ourselves as wild young kids, and thinking of Business Communicators—God help us—as fully formed, strategic, complete grown-up beings wholly unlike us.

And most of the communicators—gray-templed writers and editors, communication directors and media relations pros—were all too happy to let us go on thinking of them that way.

But this guy Ron Shewchuk had no use for that act. He was too serious a communication thinker, too enthusiastic a conference drinker, and too much of a sincere talker to put on the grown-up act.

At the time I met him, he was working for some outfit called Petro Canada, barnstorming across Alberta from one gas station to another (as I recall) helping people understand—understand what? Like the dozens of wins and losses we've celebrated and suffered since, they mattered then, but they don't matter now.

Ron Shewchuk was the first communicator Steve and I ever met who we could really drink with, talk about books with, listen to music with, pronounce the word “communication” and “adventure” in the same breath with, and laugh with.

I think Ron went a long way to allowing us to think of this communication business as a part of our life’s intellectual and emotional journey, rather than as a semi-lucrative, cynical side job.

And that, as the poem goes, has made all the difference.

Fast forward almost two decades, and now Ron really is old.

We all are.

And this spring he’s putting on a communication conference called RonCon2010 (a name that perfectly fits Ron’s peculiar personality of whimsical egomania, or egomaniacal whimsy, I never could peg it; see photo and judge for yourself).Shewchuk

And he’s invited a number of the other “real” communicators who Steve and I have gotten to know over all these years (and a few we haven't)—to talk straight and funny to the next crowd of up and coming communicators.

Could anything be more appropriate—or more worth looking forward to?

Ron’s worried that promoting the conference too far outside its two locations of Vancouver and Calgary is “spamming."

I tell Ron this is no time to act Canadian, and that people should travel from all over North America—hell, they should travel from South America, and South Africa to see RonCon2010, the conference to which a whole new crop of communicators could one day owe their happy careers.

A blog that’s afraid of politics is afraid of communication itself

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There's a good yak starting over at Robert Holland's blog about trust: the extent to which communication relies on it versus the extent to which communication can actually build it.

Robert got the conversation going by talking about a couple of personal relationships, and how his efforts to communicate with children and lovers rise and fall on whether or not they trust one another.

I weigh in by saying that organizational communication is essentially political, that:

everything we do takes
place in a socio-political context having to do with rich people’s
attitudes about middle-class people and vice versa, middle-class
people’s attitudes about poor people and vice versa, managements
attitudes about labor and vice versa.

And it’s EXACTLY why modern communicators, who believe they can be
effective if only they’re organized and align their messages and their
media and their measurement tools, are fools.

Unfortunately, they’re fools who tell management exactly what it
wants to hear, and they get hired over the guy who says, “Look boss, we
need two years of trust-building just to get the guys down at the
Trenton factory to listen to the first word out of your mouth.”

It also occurs to me to add here, a point I've been thinking about for awhile, about politics and the advisability of writing about them in a "communication blog," like mine, Steve Crescenzo's, Shel Holtz's or Robert Holland's.

I think two truths apply:

1. Readers don't come to a communication blog (or an IT blog or a horse whispering blog) to hear one more asshole's opinion on the merits of the public option. A communication blog will be resented for ranting and raving about the same policies or politicians that Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly are railing about. It's not hard for our readers to get to, "If I wanted to listen to this crap, I'd turn on my TV."

• But almost as off-putting is a communication blog that never reveals the writer's political view. We are not just "communicators"—amoral information trumpets to be played, sweetly or sourly, by whoever owns us. We are players in the organizations we work for, participants in the lives of the people we communicate to, factors in the consciences of the people we advise. If we believe that management is greedy, that is one thing. That employees are whiners, that's another. That spineless middle managers are the problem, that's a third.

Our attitudes about labor unions, technologists, American customers (are they always right, or is a fool born every minute?), investors … these are all political points of view that must necessarily inform any communications we do—and advise our clients to do.

Is the solution persuading employees that current working conditions are "competitive" (and, thus justified), or is it getting managers to make a key concession? Does the organization need to improve the quality of its products, or do consumers need to be "educated" to have more realistic expectations. Communicators don't have a final say in such decisions, but they certainly have a horse in the race.

And so a communicator who takes pains to hide his or her general attitudes and specific opinions about these kinds of issues—as circumstances arise and as the spirit inspires—is doing so in order to give hiring managers the false (or worse, correct) impression that they'll play whatever tune that's requested.

Talk about your trust issues.