Writing Boots

Foreword

When riding a motorcycle at night, what you mustn't do is "outrun your headlight." Meaning, ride so fast that you can't stop for obstacles that appear at the end of the beam.

When living, unfortunately, you inevitably outrun your headlight. That is, you live long beyond the last year of age you pictured when you were young, and still making pictures of your life.

At 30, I was still able to judge my life and to some extent even live it based on what I'd imagined it might be, what I'd wanted it to be.

But at 40—with a child but no parents, with a 15-year marriage and a 30-year mortgage, with a head full of dueling truisms and a heart where love and worry jostle senselessly for chamber space—I have outrun my headlight.

So along with my old college roommate who also turned 40 this year, I'm channeling all my uncertainty into a single line—a motorcycle track, from Chicago to Cleveland to Buffalo to Montreal to Quebec City to Fredericton, New Brunswick to Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I'm sure other people have traveled from here to Nova Scotia before, but finding a single road map has proven impossible. To see the whole journey on a single map, I have had to awkwardly tape together six sheets from two North American atlases. They make an ungainly diagonal, bottom to top, left to right. The scale of each differs a bit, so that once you get to Nova Scotia, the getting-back maps—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York—don't fit.

I’m hoping it’s a two-way trip. But it’s a one-way map.

In the beginning of Jupiter's Travels, the 30-year-old book about riding a motorcycle around the world, Ted Simon writes that after weeks of planning the trip as an enthralling obsession, on the eve of his departure "I looked at the absurdly overloaded Triumph ... and had my first cruel glimpse of the reality of what I was embarking on. My vision had been dazzled by the purple drama of warfare and banditry. Now I saw, with awful clarity, that a large part of my life henceforth would be devoted to the daily grind of packing and unpacking this poor, dumb beast.

"'It's impossible,' I whispered."

I'm beginning to know how he feels.

Back here in late July ....

***

PROGRESS UPDATES

6/27 Chicago to Cleveland

6/28 Cleveland to Lakeville, N.Y.

6/29 Lakeville (over top of Finger Lakes and up through Adirondacks) to Prattsburgh, NY.

6/30 Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

7/1 Kamouraska, Quebec

7/2 Sheeiac, New Brunswick

7/3 Hawksbury, Nova Scotia

7/4 Ingonish, Nova Scotia

7/5 St. Peters, Nova Scotia

7/6 Louisbourg, Nova Scotia

7/7 Liscombe, Nova Scotia

7/8 Digby, Nova Scotia

7/9 Portland, Maine

7/10 Woodstock, New Hampshire

I'm Linda Wertheimer

I'm such a chronic over-estimator of my own talent that it's disorienting when I pleasantly surprise myself. But with a story about the Chicago Force women's football team that aired this morning on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty Eight show at 9:00 central time, I actually managed to do it.

Click here to have a listen (and see portrait of quarterback Samantha Grisafe by my brilliant photographer pal Bruce Bever).

All my thumbs and I are grateful to WBEZ producers Aurora Aguilar and Joe DeCeault for being so encouraging and for cleaning up after my technical messes. Most editors make rookies feel like rookies—and try as hard as they can to make veterans feel like rookies too. Not these guys.

And speaking of veterans and rookies, the Force's are all traveling to Seattle for round one of the Independent Women's Football League playoffs to face the mighty Majestics.

Force Family Win.

They don't write 'em like this anymore

The schoolteacher wife is off for the summer, which means a major household reorg. Out of the domestic dust storm came my late mother's portfolio from her advertising copywriter days back in the mid-1960s.

How about this public-service ad headline, over a soft-focus photograph of a sleeping child:

If you feel sure civil rights
is moving fast enough,
try to imagine your children waking up
Negro tomorrow morning.

The devil you know

Yesterday, saw a young man hectoring a pretty young woman as she climbed the stairs to the el platform, looking over her shoulder uncomfortably.

When he saw her reluctance to meet his eye, he said, "Aw, c'mon, I'm just bein' friendly. I was the guy you heard before, yellin' that you have a million-dollar walk. Now you remember me?"

Although the damsel escaped to the el platform this time, it struck me that this young man understood an important dynamic of advertising: There's lots of creeps trying to win you over. So in the end, you often go with the creep you've heard from the most.

Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, do you really believe this?

I have a complicated relationship with Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, the world's most dogged student of CEO reputations. The love comes from the fact that she's the world's most dogged student of the confluence of CEOs' reputations and corporate reputations.

Dr. Gaines-Ross conducts and collects research that agrees with my belief that the human beings who run organizations are largely responsible for corporate reputations, good and bad—and should be.

So I consider her an ideological ally, and I've made her Reputation Xchange one of my recommended blogs.

But our relationship hasn't gone any deeper than that, because I have trust issues with someone who can bring her fingers to type consecutive half-truths like those Gaines-Ross spouted on her blog last week.

In wrapping up the results of her own recent study—which yielded less-than-newsworthy findings like, many current senior executives would like to be CEOs someday despite the widespread contempt in which corporate bosses are currently held—Gaines-Ross concluded:

The good news is that our next generation of CEOs appears eager to sit in the corner suite and for the right reasons (making a difference, growing business and meeting the toughest challenges of the day). CEOs have their work cut out for them but I think we will see reputation recovery in due time.  In fact, when we asked when we’d see CEO reputations redeemed, it looks like 2013 is the year. Mark it on your calendars. I did on mine.

So status, power or wealth no longer motivate would-be CEOs. Instead, these days people want to be CEOs for the very same reasons one might want to join the Peace Corps or start an organic farming co-op or teach school in the hollers of West Virginia.

And furthermore, we're to trust these Cub Scouts when they predict, without any evidence or even reasoning, that CEOs will be held in higher esteem by American society in 2013.

Look, I understand: A researcher can't release survey results with the headline, "Future executives as full of b.s. and unfounded optimism as current old fools on high stools."

But neither does one have to say exactly the opposite of what one knows to be true.

Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross, keep doing your research, keep studying CEOs and corporate repuations—but also: Keep it real.

Obama, wipe that smile off your face

One of the happiest men I know found his calling in politics late in life and hit the water like a fish who'd grown up on the dock.

He recently gave a speech about how his office works and how smoothly it's been working lately, despite the recession.

"In the office, we don't understand what happened," he said. "We are really surprised and really relieved."

Quips and all, the talk was cheerfully covered by a local reporter. My man came off looking like the happy warrior that he is. And the online commenters reacted by calling him arrogant and perceiving that he was laughing at them.

These are not good times to be a happy warrior. If I had to quantify the hatred in some quarters for President Obama, I'd chalk some percentage of it up to plain jealousy over that big bright smile and all those reasons he has to flash it despite the mountain of trouble that looms.

You think you are such hot shit.

I suggested to my pol pal that he march stone-faced in this summer's parades and get a campaign song. Maybe Obama ought to make it a temporary national anthem.

Corporate Communications All-Name Team

As a rookie reporter at Ragan, I burst into sophomoric gales of laughter when I ran across on our subscriber rolls the name, Richard Puffer. Dick Puffer! Dick Puffer! Hah! Hah! Hah! I called him up to get a quote for a story and to see if I could keep a straight face when he answered the phone, "Richard Puffer."

He answered the phone, "Dick Puffer."

Since then, I have made a casual study of the best names in the communication business. Vinca LaFleur is a speechwriter I know, Nova Newcomer is an up-and-coming communication consultant and Tack Cornelius is a speechwriter friend.

I wonder if you have any favorite communication names to add, or—hell, it's Friday—non-communicators' names, for that matter.

Two surefire ways to become a communication conference keynoter

You can either come up with a big idea that’s truly going to help communication practitioners be more effective, or you can use the formula that most communication keynoters use.

What’s the formula? First, take the best dozen anecdotes from your spotty career and dress them up to sound heroic. Then, repeat them in Toastmaster’s talks and chapter events until you actually believe, for instance, that you once walked into the CEO’s office and asked him whether he did or didn’t want you to tell him when he was full of b.s.

Now, plug those well-honed yarns into the Communication Keynote for Dummies Formula®, which involves saying two things realquickbacktoback: an insult, and a lie.

1. The insult: That members of the audience are worthless drudges doing meaningless work. For instance, you might tell them that the “formal communication” that they’re responsible to produce represents less than 10% of the information employees take in. This will have a powerful effect on an audience of sincere communicators who already doubt their effectiveness; now to their doubt you have added shame, and you have them right where you want them.

2. The lie: The drudges can become heroes, if only they will use their copious discretionary time and their unlimited power to transform the entire organization to conform to their superior instincts as communicators. For instance, one might tell an audience of communication managers that, in addition to juggling all their campaigns, events, vehicles and departmental issues, they ought to venture forth and change HR policies and procedures to eliminate the thousands of credibility-killing daily "say-do" gaps. And when they’re through with that, they ought to go knock some supervisors’ heads together until those unwashed bastards get on message too.

I know what you’re thinking: The audience won’t appreciate being insulted and will object to being lied to. Au contraire, some of them will love it! (Many grown-ups are looking for father- and mother-figures, and the more smug you are, the more comforted they will be by your authority.)

Others may respond less enthusiastically to your attack, but they won’t have the courage either to claim they don’t see themselves as Bartleby the Scrivener, or to admit it’s not their purview to close the organization’s “walk-talk disconnects.”

This leaves only a handful of punch-bowl turds to ever-so-politely suggest during the Q&A that you are a phony. Since you already know this—after all, as a consultant you’ll take any nickel anyone pays you, and you get most of those nickels in exchange for doing the tactical 10% that you deride—you accept it with a shrug and a smile and the hint of a wink and you say, “We have a difference of opinion.”

It’s that simple! Oh, sure, there are advanced techniques. I could describe the Keynote Cadence, teach you how to remind the audience of what losers they are by sprinkling in context-free anecdotes about great companies in utterly different industries, arm you with rhetorical canards like, “now, I know I’m going to be very unpopular when I say this” and show you how to introduce a communication “model” that’s at once simple enough to explain in on one PowerPoint slide but complex enough to require months and many thousands of dollars to understand fully and implement in your organization.

But basically, anybody can follow the CKDF®, which works today every bit as well as it ever did.

The question is, do these talks do anybody any good? They sure do! They get you in front of some hundreds of eager, ambitious communicators every year, talking to them like the voice of God. That leads to clients and clients pay you money and money pays the bills and when the bills get paid everyone’s happy.

Except for your audiences, who trudge away with less than the nothing they brought to your talk.

The latest asinine idea for organizing blogolism

Huffington Post Chicago blogger Mike Doyle goes to desperate journalism conferences and sneers at all the flaccid ideas put forth. Which would be fine, if he didn't feel the constructive need to offer any half-baked ideas of his own. But he does.

here's what I think this town needs: a blogosphere roundtable: We local bloggers ought to get together for a strategy charrette one weekend afternoon in a modestly-sized group in a shabby conference hall surrounded by pizza, beer and a phalanx of flip charts and have a frank discussion amongst ourselves about where we want our sites to go, how we're trying to get there—and most importantly, how we can work cooperatively to make sustainability happen. Then we should take we we've learned from each other, package it into a manifesto and vet it at a community-wide conference. Now that would be a conference I'd want to attend.

Let's count the silly assumptions, Mike:

• We disparate, self-interested pricks and prickettes won't "get together," for "strategy sharrettes."

• Even if we did: We don't like flip charts, especially when they're organized in a phalanx.

• The last thing we're going to do is have frank discussions with each other about where we want our sites to go. Why? Because whenever we're with other bloggers, we devote all our energies to trying to convince them our site is the bee's knees, and that they should be so lucky to get where we've got.

• A communitywide conference devoted to vetting a bloggers' manifesto on sustainability? That's where you want to go? Come on, Mike, it's summertime. Get a sense of humor. A return to common sense is sure to follow.

What's my idea to solving the crisis in journalism? I'm waiting for a vulgar Ted Turner type to swoop in, this decade or next, and show us all how to make money again. Maybe that's dumb, but it's three times as likely as your bloggers' pizza party—and in the meantime, summers off!

Twitter destroys innocent man's Sunday

I've known Sean Williams for about a decade. He is a straight-laced corporate communicator from Cleveland. He has worked for Goodyear and National City Bank, and is now starting his own consultancy.

He's a fine writer, he understands communication theory, he believes in measuring outcomes, and somehow he also has a sense of humor.

In short, he's true blue and blue chip.

And this morning, he is a victim—a decidedly innocent victim of a vicious and utterly unfair attack, by none other than PR villain Amanda Chapel.

You'll read Williams' account if you give a rat's ass about Twitter and the dangers of the anonymity the Internet affords would-be character assassins, or wonder how you'd behave if you felt, as Williams told me this morning, "the sense of helplessness" that comes from "sticking your toe into the waters of social media and getting a bite out of your leg."