Bill Sweetland does not grade on a curve

It's not that Bill Sweetland is totally out of his mind. It's that he's totally in his mind, and not constantly aware of what's in your mind, my mind, the public's mind, the corporate mind.

Which means that he often appears to go off "the deep end" or "over the top" in his colorfully stated opinions on subjects such as public education, road construction or the Chicago Bears' offensive line strategy. Whether they come in the context of his writing at Ragan, his work for the Huffington Post or in a personal conversation, the intensity of Bill's tirades and harangues can be confusing to people who are more tied down intellectually, psychologically or circumstantially than he. (That's most of us.)

In fact, as Bill's close friend of two decades, I often find his rants humorous. (Buy me three beers and I'll do you a perfect impression of Bill critiquing the work of John Cougar Mellencamp.)

But I have also found them useful enough that I have to count Bill as an intellectual influence on a par with my own parents.

I've come across a recent Sweetland salvo on a subject near to the hearts of some Writing Boots readers. I think it may be useful to us all. Useful enough, in fact, that I'm giving over a whole week's posts to it, and to the discussion I hope it will incite.

Last year, a corporate editor entered his slick, sophisticated employee magazine into the Ragan Recognition Awards. Entrants into that awards program receive a critique—usually a few sentences of encouragement and constructive criticism.

Fortunately or unfortunately for this editor, the judge who wrote his critique was Bill Sweetland. Bill's nearly 4,000-word critique was Dresden, all over again.

And yet—you'll be the judge of this—it could have been written, fairly or unfairly, about almost any corporate publication in the world. Yours included.

In four parts, today through Thursday, I'll run the most germane excerpts from this critique (the name of the company, publication and editor have been dedacted or disguised).

Editors of employee publications, I hope you'll read this as a critique of your own work, and respond to it.

And then, on Friday, I'll run this editor's response to Bill's critique.

Bill began by answering the first criterion of the Ragan Recognition Awards:

1. Does the publication make a solid connection between the strategic goals of the organization and its intended audience?

You say in your self-evaluation that the publication “makes key leadership initiatives and messages more accessible.” Let me test the accuracy of your statement by looking at the Fall 2009 issue. Mr. R., every story feature story in this issue but one is about the after-work activities and adventures of the very interesting people who work at the company. Only one feature in this issue could conceivably be labeled a “key leadership initiatives and messages” story, and that is the article titled, “Laying the groundwork,” about the Customer Services Group.

You may reply, “Even if I grant your premise about this being the only story on ‘key leadership initiatives’ in the issue, look at the location of the CSG article. It leads off the magazine.”

And that observation is correct, Mr. R. But still, the next five stories are about (in order):

1. An employee worker who climbed Mt. Everest
2. A worker who has made a career, half in and half out of of the company, it seems, selling the concept of a personal brand
3. An employee who has done excellent things for the lower schools in the country of Sierra Leone
4. An employee who is fighting a rare disease that strikes surfers
5. A Cincinnati couple who are successfully balancing 60-hr. work weeks at the company while raising four small children

And that is why this first feature on the CSG seems to me more like a dutiful, hurried nod in the direction of strategy and the work that employees actually do at the company, so that your magazine can get down to what really is interesting: what employees do after work and on weekends.

And that attitude, I submit, leads to a meager, perfunctory job of covering the company, explaining the work that its people do, and satisfying the curiosity that your 40,000 employees must feel about the company they work for. And what about telling stories of managers and employees who solved intractable, distracting work problems at the company through the application of uncommon intelligence, common sense, and perseverance? Not one article on this theme.

Your publication urgently needs more than fascinating stories about the extra-curricular activities of employees. What is your company really like? What problems do your workers encounter, and how do they overcome or solve them? What new business are you pursuing? What is your competition doing? Where are you the leader in your industry, and where not? What are your company weaknesses (or at least, some areas in which you want to improve) and how are you working to overcome them?

What are the company's “strategic goals"? Do you have any? Are they written down? Frequently updated? Measurable? What progress has the company made toward fulfilling those goals in the last year? The last two years? The last five? Do you have charts published in your magazine showing how far you’ve come in the fulfilling of those goals? If not, why not?

What makes these questions all the more pertinent is the fact that, according to an article in Spring 2009 issue the magazine, “Looking to the Future,” the company boasts a Strategy, Research & Innovation Group, numbering nearly 350 members—and your competitors have no such group. Why then isn’t the company's strategy the biggest and most important editorial subject in the publication?

And may I say that this article I just mentioned contains no new ideas about the firm's strategy, no clarion call to battle, no detailed description of the real business issues the strategic team is working on. It is all deliberately superficial, strategy lite, and extremely unsatisfying.

Tomorrow, Sweetland diagnoses the larger problem: The editor's slavish and misplaced dedication to "managing word counts."

Comments

[TimH]

Well, that first excerpt, though stern, looked pretty reasonable to me. When do we get to the exciting stuff?

Footnote: In a previous job I helped produce material about progress against goals. It was exactly the stuff Bill is calling for above. Most readers thought it was boring, and it WAS boring.

There's a dual challenge here: first to get management to let you write about the strategic stuff, and second to make it interesting.

[David Murray]

Well, now we should begin a conversation about why on earth articles about the strategy of an organization be naturally "boring" to readers whose livelihoods depend on the success of that strategy.

Strategy stuff is boring because of the abstract language we couch it in and, because we don't write about it in enough detail.

Tune in to tomorrow's discussion of what REAL strategy talk should look like.

[Robert J Holland, ABC]

Bill Sweetland's previous rants have been so vitriolic and mean-spirited that I have a hard time getting past that to read anything he has to say, valuable as it might be. Maybe he himself still has a lot to learn about effective communication.

[David Murray]

Robert, try.

[Kristen]

Robert is of course entitled to his opinion, but for myself, I can't find a single thing to disagree with in the above critique of the publication in question, and I see nothing in this evaluation that could be described as either vitriolic, or mean-spirited. What I see here is a well-conducted review of a publication being submitted for consideration for an award in a company which advocates "strategic business communications" and so the review Bill's offered is, in my opinion fair.

While I can see how some might see Bill's critiques as mean, having spent my entire 15-year career working in a variety [almost 10 at this point] of corporate organizations, which spanned different industries, business structures, and employee demographics,I am here to tell you almost ALL the critiques I've read from Bill, and the issues he identifies in the communications he reviews are completely valid. There are a LOT of stupid, ineffectual communications being served up in a LOT of companies throughout the U.S. and Canada too!

What's more, Bill has probably, in the job he has, been forced to read more bad communications than anyone else on the planet, so if he's a bit perturbed by yet another C.R.A.P. award deserving piece of junk, I say he's entitled.

Here's the thing - if you choose to work for a company who either won't let you do effective communications, or you don't want to do the work that would make them better, that is absolutely your choice. But if you make that choice and then you CHOOSE [because almost everything Ragan looks at was submitted BY THE ORGANIZATION itself] to send your comms to Ragan, then, hey, you deserve what you get.

I don't believe that a company should expect or deserve a pat on the head for doing crappy communications.

I've also seen Bill give a glowing review to really good stuff, so if you let Bill look at your communications, just make sure they do what they're supposed to do, and there's no issue.

Looking back on my education and my career, the feedback that was most valuable to me was from the teachers and mentors who gave it to me straight on with no holds barred about what was good and what wasn't. The feedback may have stung a little, but it sure lit a fire under my ass to make it not just better, but great. So I say: Keep it coming Bill! Our industry needs honesty like yours if we're to get to the strategic place we need to be.

[David Murray]

Kristen, well said. I once wrote a critique of a hospital publication: From the headlines to the paper stock it was printed on, the worst publication in the history bad publications.

I spent three days and much blood trying to make my critique softer and more palatable.

When I finally e-mailed it to the client, the communication director dressed me down, remarking that she didn't want something so critical "in the e-mail system."

I have a mind to create a communication critique service that says right up front: "THESE CRITIQUES ARE DESIGNED TO MAKE YOU MUCH BETTER. If that's not what you want to become, go elsewhere."

Do you think I'd have any customers?

[Kristen]

Not enough to live on, no. The corporate environment, granted with some notable exceptions, seems to built on a foundation of obfuscation, massaged messages and artificially gentrified language that fools nobody . . . except perhaps those who insist on it, whatever rung of the hierarchy they may be perched upon.

This "emperor's new clothes" approach is why those notable exceptions - SouthWest et al - are SO beloved and so frequently held up to the world as paragons of virtue.

[Robert J Holland, ABC]

I'm not opposed to either giving or receiving honest critique. My point is that in the past, Bill has gone overboard in his delivery, which I suspect is at least partly an effort to "grab ratings," as we might say if he were in the TV or radio business.

Meh. Still not a fan.