Writing Boots

Locking the windows and setting the lights on timers

We're taking a break from rearranging deck chairs to join the band, playing on. A week in Mexico, to celebrate Cristie's 40th.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Back at you Dec. 4.

Just-in-time holiday party tips

Usually it's lawsuit-wary HR nerds who generate the flaccid annual "tips" for socializing with co-workers at the holiday party. But this year, I'm ashamed to admit, it's a communicator, trying to sell books, about "body language."

Whoever generates the perennial holiday party tips, they should amount to a version of the classic John Denver carol, "Please, Daddy Don't Get Drunk This Christmas (I Don't Want to See My Mama Cry)."

Alas, they always go on from there, becoming God's Christmas present to Steve Crescenzo. (Have you seen his scary new blog photo? Eeek.)

Communication consultant Carol Kinsey Goman has written a number of good books. But her latest isn't one of them. It attempts to make novel a fact we have all intrinsically understood since we were nine months old: that body language speaks louder than words. And as part of her strategy for hawking The Nonverbal Advantage: Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work, Goman sent media outlets a series of "Tips for the Office Party."

Let's take the "tips" one by one, and analyze their usefulness to grown-up white-collar workers they purport to "help":

The desire to relax and have fun—especially in these challenging economic times—can be a highly anticipated, positive antidote to workplace stress. But when you combine the need to let your hair down with too many glasses of wine or cocktails, it's a mix that can cause trouble.

That's not a tip, it's a simple truth. Now here is a tip: Two hours or six drinks into the holiday party, whichever comes first, gather your wits and attempt to find another employee who is drunker than you. If you can find one, no worries! She'll be the sheepish one on Monday. If you can't—either because there is no one drunker than you, or because you can't walk or see—bid everyone an early good night and call a cab.

But no: instead, Goman gets into "body language" tips:

* Develop an inclusive, welcoming attitude. Pretend that you are the party's host or hostess, and that your job is to make others feel welcome and at ease. Approaching people with this attitude will immediately resonate in a positive way.

This isn't just useless, it's weird. Suddenly Drooling Louie from accounting is walking around like he owns the place, slapping backs and shaking hands and showing everyone where the restrooms are? You know everyone will just assume he's shitfaced.

* Stand tall. Your mother was right when she told you to stand up straight.  As you pull your shoulders back and hold your head high, you assume a posture of confidence and self-esteem.

Yes, my mother was right. And I was seven. If I didn't listen to her at the dinner table, what are the odds I'm going to suddenly take her advice just in the nick of time to be a smashing hit at the company holiday party?

* Optimize the power of touch by shaking hands—but don't go overboard.

For instance, you shouldn't shake their breasts.

* Let your body show that you are at ease. If you want people to see you as comfortable and approachable, assume an open position with your legs about shoulder width apart and your arms loosely at your side. Don't cross your arms and legs or use objects as barriers. It looks as if you are closed off or resistant.

Because you are closed off and resistant, and for good reason: You're surrounded by smiling sharks who would like to have your job. One of the several absurdities about "body language" tips like these is that they pretend body language has no purpose other than to undermine you. Ultimately, when our brain stem tells us to cover our nuts, we can't and we shouldn't try instead to stand with our legs apart and our arms loosely at our side.

* Mirror the other person's gestures and expressions.

Carol: Everybody who doesn't have Asperger Syndrome does this automatically. Now, a book of Body Language Tips for People with Asperger Syndrome Who Nevertheless Have to Go to Holiday Parties ... that might be worth something.

* Smile. A smile is an invitation, a sign of welcome. Smiling directly influences how other people respond to you. The human brain prefers happy faces, recognizing them more quickly than those with negative expressions. In fact, research shows that if you smile at someone, it activates the "reward center" in that person's brain. It is also a natural response for the other person to smile back at you.

Yes, Carol. And this is why we're drinking in the first place.

* Lean in slightly. Leaning forward shows you're engaged and interested, but also be respectful of other people's space. Although this varies by culture, in North American business situations, even in a party setting, that means staying at least 18 inches away.

Here's a tip: If you're calculating the number of inches between your forward-leaning face and your conversation-partner's schnoz, you're probably appearing painfully self-conscious, and condemning yourself to a career in the back room. Thanks, Carol!

* Use open arm movements and show the palms of your hands. Those gestures are subconsciously evaluated as positive, candid and persuasive. But keep your gestures below shoulder level. Flailing your arms in the air will not look convincing, only erratic.

Did you get that, Mussolini?

Look: The reason rational people focus on language in communication is that what we say is conscious, and how we say it so rarely is. If your natural body language makes you the leading horse's ass at your company's holiday party—or at the company itself—you ought to look for another place to work, where the people appreciate your shiny red nose.

If writers ran the circus

Got an e-mail tonight from my first editor, Hugh Iglarsh. Subject line, "God, what a verb." We haven't spoken in months. Here's the whole text of the e-mail:

I just like this sentence:

"Lockhorn had finished his drink very fast, and he got up and walked to the bar. Price's eyebrows went up as he heard the heavy slug of bourbon chortle into the glass."
—James Thurber, "The Interview"

Actually, all of Thurber's sentences are damnably good—"Price, who had jumped to his feet, stood bowing and grinning at his hostess. She barely touched him with her smile."

So how are things? Lunch sometime?

And as I'm thinking that one of the benefits to being a writer is you have writers for friends ... I stumble on this, from last night's pool report, on Obama:

The Obamas left the Pritzker home at 8:53 p.m. Michelle Obama proceeded directly to the SUV while the president-elect walked over and shook hands with a dozen mostly teen or younger fans who had gathered outside to cheer him on.

Obama carried a hard-cover book on Abraham Lincoln. Both Obamas wore winter coats. ...

The Lincoln book was Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, by Fred Kaplan.

A writer friend in the White House. Who ever could have imagined?

Are rich people this crazy?

A fundraiser at Scout's school caused me to get my Huff on.

FYI

I am here to say it is an exquisite pleasure to be (with the exception of your playing partner and seven deer) the only mammal on a golf course in Chicago in middle November.

Eighteen holes takes three hours to play. When it's 36 degrees, you keep your ass moving.

Two linguistic canards-in-the-making

• "Team of rivals." Good lord, has a lamer colloquial novelty than this ever spread like such wildfire? Doris Kearns Goodwin is the nicest talking head you'll never meet, but I have to say I hated this term when her book of the same title came out two years ago. How can you use the word "team" to describe a group of 19th century guys in muttonchops who lived 40 years before the sports took over United States culture and sports analogies took over our rhetoric. All this is is a new term for a very, very, very, very, very conventional idea: Don't surround yourself with mindless sycophants. Well, of course.

• This "no drama Obama" business we keep hearing about. Yet another new-sounding term for a nonsensical idea. The only way I know of ensuring no drama in an organization is to forbid conflict, and the only way to do that is through a dictatorship. Which doesn't exactly lend itself to a "team of rivals," now does it?

I am sure that in the Obama administration, there will be rivals. To the extent there are rivals, the operation won't always behave like a "team." And when that happens, there will be drama.

You know it, girl.

Writing Boots quote of the week

I'm scooping this Friday's issue of McMurry's eNewsletter, The Executive Communication Report*, but what the hell:

Did you know that New York mayor Ed Koch once grew so weary of a reporter's repeated questions that he said, "I can explain it to you, but I can't comprehend it for you."

* You can sign up for this free weekly eNewsletter—it's really quite good; I write it myself!—by clicking here.

** If there's anything we try to do here at Writing Boots, it's to provide added value for our customers.

Before I "run with it"

So today I interviewed one of my favorite communicators on the planet for an article on analyst calls for McMurry's The Influential Executive.

She remarked sardonically that she works in a "feedback rich" environment, with IR guys who approve everything down to a gnat's ass.

For the same story I also interviewed an IR guy, who with his head shot, e-mailed a request: "Let me know if you’d like me to 'fact check' anything in the story (quotes, etc.) before you run with it."

Love the "fact check" in quotes. (Whereas, if it were me, I'd put "run with it" in quotes.)

Writers, readers and healthy relationships

Lately I’ve been thinking about readers, and a writer’s proper relationship with them.

Actually, I’m not thinking about it. I’m entertaining several opposing ideas and trying unsuccessfully to mash them together. And I hope you can help.

Here are the ideas:

• Larry Ragan once wrote at loving length about the exquisite pleasure he felt upon having a stranger walk up and say he enjoyed an obscure magazine Larry edited. I think Larry saw this as the empirical evidence writers need every once in a while that we are having a larger effect on the world than we know.

• My dad and I had a conversation recently where we agreed it’s more rewarding to write for a small audience that understands you—in his case, readers of his hometown Middletown Journal, in my case corporate communicators—than a large one that doesn’t. This was born out by the conversation I sparked on Huffington Post last week, about Tiger Woods and Barack Obama. It’s nice to inspire comments from 30 strangers, I guess. But really, what do I care that someone named luvangelHussein330 says, “I think this article would have made better since to me if you compared him to African American politicians before him”? Often, the bigger the circulation of the publication you get published in, the lower the quality—and often, the quantity, too—of the reader response.

• And yet it does seem silly that so many good writers are devoting so much energy to blogs that give them the sphere of influence similar to that of the unpaid mayor of a one-horse town. And then there’s the miserly business that I know writers shouldn’t be in, of counting unique visitors and compulsively checking for comments. It all makes me admire Larry’s method, however pathetically serendipitous it was: Write, then go on about your business in the vague hope someone’s reading your stuff.

As I said, I can’t get these ideas to come together. Can you?

The shoulders I stand on

I'm pleased to share with Boots readers my column in the current issue of Advertising Age, about my dad's communication philosophy.