Writing Boots

The Quotable Murr

"I suppose it would be churlish to observe that when God opens a window, a door mysteriously closes right around the same time."

Friday Happy Hour Photo: It's complicated

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666. S. State Street, Chicago—1970s.

If you ran the circus: Advice on running a business, from a dumb writer

"I'm just a dumb writer," my adman dad used to say, with genuine humility that was rare for him.

I've always been just a dumb writer, too. Then about three and a half years ago, I swallowed very hard and bought a publishing and training company, and became a business guy.

I was so tense around that time that my then 11-year-old daughter asked me what was the matter, and then answered her own question. "I think I know," she said. "You're afraid you're going to screw everything up."

I'm not rich yet, but I've had three really rewarding years, I'm almost out of debt, and though I may have screwed some things up, I sure haven't screwed everything up. (Also, I've been wonderfully lucky in several of ways that I'm aware of, and probably just as many ways that I'm not.)

Anyway, a little more than a week before the big annual conference we host—when I feel my very happiest and most secure about everything, because my customers are right in front of me, clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves—I thought I'd "give back," as we capitalists say, by sharing a few things I've learned, in case there are other dumb writers out there thinking about starting a business, and wondering what they don't know:

Get ready to fuck some stuff up. As a writer with writer parents and writer friends, I knew the editorial business, and I knew myself in relation to it—knew how to react to good and bad editors, good and bad pay, good and bad reactions to my work. As a business owner, I know some aspects of the business, and am an ice cream-cone-on-his-forehead-and-licking imbecile in others. It's like going from star quarterback to player/coach/general manager. You're going to do your best, you're going to surround yourself with good teammates who tell you when you're being an idiot, and you're still going to blow some stuff. For instance, if you're trying to grow your business ...

Go where people know you. You think people buy stuff from you because you're handsome and charming. But the homely truth is, you're neither that handsome nor that charming. People buy stuff from you because they know you and have come to like you because you know their business and you always show up and you always come through and you're useful. If you want to grow your business, you're better off deepening your relationship with your friends—or getting them to tell their friends about you—than waltzing shiny-shoed into some world where they've been doing fine without you since Lincoln was alderman. 

Related: People probably won't steal your latest big idea. Why? Because your idea probably blows. And even if it's good—if it can be taken from you and executed by another person, then it probably isn't sufficiently of you to carry the day in a world that, again, has been getting along perfectly well without it since time began. And besides: Stealing an idea also requires executing the idea, which takes absolute assloads of work. Most people have jobs, and no time to execute a new idea, stolen or otherwise. And the unemployed are not typically intellectual property thieves either. So stop whipping out NDAs in the J&M Tavern or at the breakfast buffet at the Hampton Inn, Steve Jobs.

(Also related: People who you're paying to execute your big idea will tell you it's a good idea, whether it is or not. They definitely think it's a good idea, because as far as they're concerned, it is a good idea, because it's getting them paid! Pay someone to help you start a professional basketfoot team in Muncie, Indiana, and they'll become so excited about the idea. And you won't blame them, because you know goddamn well you've earned money on that basis yourself.)

Simmer down in general. When you start a business, every day feels like an Italian opera—which you and your colleagues have to find a way to embrace, the way you would any other adventure (like a writer does!). But don't get hooked on adrenaline. Eventually, routines and procedures and business patterns develop. And if you still need every day to be a crisis and every negotiation to be a drama and every competitor to be a baby-eating dingo, then you should go work in the Trump White House, not try to run a company of employees who want stability and sanity, vendors who want to make a profit too and competitors who can become strategic collaborators if you take the emotion out of it and focus on the customer, who may need you both.

Running a company brings happinesses your dumb writer brain never anticipated. When I was a freelance writer, I used to love not being accountable to anyone for when and how I did my work, because I was free! Now, I find I actually enjoy being hourly and geographically accountable to our COO and other close partners and colleagues, and feel a sense of daily connection and team accomplishment that I didn't know I was missing. Also, I have less anxiety than I used to; I spend far fewer nights staring at the ceiling now than I did when my clients could end my livelihood with one Monday morning voice mail. I feel like I'm building something—something that keeps building itself, because it wants to grow. Also, I can occasionally write off a steak dinner. And now that I play far less golf, I enjoy it far more. 

Terrible things might befall you if you start a business, but it won't be the things you're worried about. Here's what I was worried about three and a half years ago, as I recorded it in this space:

Writing Boots will always be about writing. (Unless it takes a surprising turn and focuses strictly on boots.) But since I'm now a business owner, and my days are as much filled with business stuff as with writing, I bet I'll reflect here occasionally about that trip.

My daughter said gently the other day that she's tired of hearing me tell "everyone we talk to" that I bought this magazine called Vital Speeches of the Day. That night, it was a bunch of chummy soccer parents who I hadn't seen since fall. I told her I'm telling them not to brag about it, though that's surely part of the reason. But mainly, I'm telling them in order to notify them that something real in my life has changed—something significant enough to change me. If we'd had a baby over the winter, I'd tell them that. If we'd moved to the suburbs, I'd tell them that. If I'd had one continuous panic attack since about November—well, that kind of is what I'm telling them.

And as a writer, I feel almost like I'm announcing a sex change. A writer, no matter what his or her politics, is by nature a watcher, an analyst, a dramatist. A business owner must watch, too—but the next move isn't articulation. It's action. That's how businesspeople express themselves: Not through words, though action. (We know this, yet we wonder why their speechwriters have such a hard time getting them to sit down and discuss what they want to say in the speech.)

"Everything's going to change," my entrepreneur pal Tom Gillespie warned me and promised me as he congratulated me for having done what he encouraged me to do—he and a number of other entrepreneurs in my life, who clearly wanted Mister Smarty the Grasshopper to know what it's really like to be in the middle of the cash flow without a paddle.

Well everything can't change, I told Tom. Even though I'm now the publisher of Vital Speeches, people will still show up looking for what they got from me when I was just its editor—back before I spent so much of so many of my days at the UPS Store, at the bank, on the phone listening and cajoling, on email pitching and interpreting, lying awake in my bed trying to figure out what Authorize.net does.

So I must make time for writing, and to make time for writing I must make time for thinking like a writer.

One more thing to do! No, not one more thing to do. I have no time for one more thing to do.

I must learn to integrate my well developed writing mind with my business mind, such as it is. One way I do this is to cultivate a habit of stepping out of myself and see the business stuff as a drama to be remembered and recounted. I tell my colleagues about this documentary I'm always filming and producing in my head, about the early days of this business.

The documentary sees me in Chicago's Central Post Office haplessly refereeing an argument on my cell phone's speaker phone between the cornfed, sweet-mouthed printer's representative Cathy in Northern Wisconsin and the hilariously truculent Sharon, who has been working in the USPS Periodicals Department for 34 goddamn years and has never been wrong about the postage rules yet! (She was wrong this time, as I found out on a subsequent visit, from her colleague Wanda. But I never told the printer, because I liked Sharon's attitude.)

The documentary records me calling people "motherfuckers" a lot, catches me thanking people profusely in advance for favors they have not yet promised to do for me, sees me squinting at spreadsheets, and zooms in like a National Geographic telephoto lens showing my eyes glazing over like a polar sea.

And you hear the disbelieving pause on the phone as our COO absorbs my offhand mention that, in response to a request for proof of residency by an important prospective vendor, I faxed over an unpaid speeding ticket.

I could go on. I will go on, I hope. Because to the extent that I can describe my life as a publisher as thoroughly and joyfully as I've described my life as a writer, I'll still be a writer.

I'm still a writer. And after three and a half years of being a publisher, the two things don't seem so separate. In fact, they seem like me.

Postscript: This is what my weekly list looks like now (you'll note the only task not completed is tennis).

I actually saw a complete American asshole

This is expansion of a reference in yesterday's post, about American civility. —DM

***

We've all heard someone described as a "complete asshole," right? That's always seemed to me like hyperbole, in a couple ways.

First, how could someone be completely an asshole? Even Hitler was nice to his dogs.

And how could anyone measure up to perfect asshole-ism. A complete asshole would be mean to his dogs, too.

And then I saw him: The complete American asshole. 

He walked into the dry cleaner with a cowboy hat on his head—and on his feet, those fucking running shoes with the toes.

He was: A complete, comprehensive, top to bottom, head to toe American asshole.

I stood in admiration, and God help me, I almost saluted.

Savagery is one problem; civility is another.

Yes, it's terrible to be terrible. But civility isn't really a virtue, either.

Civility is a cold civil war.

Civility is a hiss.

Civility is a cowardly mutter, "I'm better than you."

Civility is the new "tolerance."

Civility is, I think you're an idiot but I'm not going to tell you.

Civility is, I think you're an idiot but I'm not going to tell you, but I will shake my head behind your back.

And I will tell the next person I see who knows you.

And I will probably tell you when you finally go too far, and (I've decided) enough is enough.

Civility is, "Fuck you, you ass—it's you and people like you who are ruining this country! Excuse me, I meant to say, 'Pass the salt.'"

Civility is staying together for the kids (who are dying from the tension in the house).

Civility is I hate you, and I'll never understand you.

Communication, on the other hand, is: I might be wrong. I might be blind in one eye or deaf in one ear. There's something I might not be seeing. I just saw something in you that I admire. We are all brothers and sisters—even the guy I saw on the street the other day wearing a cowboy hat and those stupid fucking running shoes with the toes.

My dad, in his late seventies and twice divorced, had a girlfriend of whom he was fond but with whom he fought a lot. Many nights I heard him say quietly as he slipped into his bedroom and she into hers, "Let's try 'er again tomorrow, Betty."

Communication is, let's try 'er again tomorrow.

An auto reply received in response to a Professional Speechwriters Association promotion

For speechwriting, please contact Joseph K—, Lauren T— or or Hugh P—.

I have moved on.

Friday Happy Hour Video: She's clogging!

Writing Boots' resident Appalachia expert Fletcher Dean—a speechwriter and editor of Grandpap Told Me Tales—points out that "a traditionalist will argue that what you're really seeing is more flat-footing than clogging. IMO, clogging is more of a lineup and has more raised foot movement. This is more akin to true dancing."

Every day's a school day, when you read Writing Boots.

Another effort to understand

Onetime Reagan White House (and Gen. Colin Powell) speechwriter Hal Gordon shared this post last week, at the beginning of the Ukraine shit show:

In his post today, conservative commentator Rod Dreher perfectly captured what it's like to be conservative under Donald Trump. I quote: “Last weekend I wrote about a situation in my neighborhood, in which a beleaguered 60-year-old woman lives with her mentally ill, violent, abusive son, a 6’5″ man in his twenties. It’s a nightmare for her, but she persists in it, because she’s too afraid of the alternatives .... That poor woman is a symbol of conservatives under Trump.”

As a liberal, I could imagine being in that situation, if the Democratic president was corrupt and yet a Republican alternative seemed to me more dangerous still.

During the 2016 election, I contemplated how long so many Republicans had despised the Clintons, and tried to imagine how horrible the Democratic candidate would have to be to drive me to vote for a Republican who I'd loathed for two decades—Newt Gingrich, say. When I couldn't conjure a Democrat that bad, I started to worry that Trump might win.

I'm not saying we should renounce our tribes. But at the very least, we should recognize their power in our own lives.

A profession, and a people, on eggshells

I posted a version of this a couple years ago. Last week, when the owner of a professional online forum lamented a dearth of intellectual debate these days, it occurred to me to run an update. —DM

***

It's said that in an unhappy marriage, loud arguments frequently erupt or cold silences commence because in an unhappy marriage, everything is about everything. "Pass the salt" means, "You think I'm a terrible cook." "I'd rather not go until Christmas Eve" means, "You hate my family." "Let's wait til next month to buy the duvet cover" means, "You don't trust me with money!"

These days, all of society feels like that unhappy marriage. We are reading serious articles advising us on safe topics of conversation at family dinners. And professionally, we focus our human imaginations on the art of being amusing, yet sufficiently banal that no one could object.

The most reliable way I can witness this change is from my own little world, of corporate communication. For the first 10 or 15 years that I hung around in this business—roughly the early 1990s to the mid 2000s—professional arguments were robust, common, and often fun. These civilized wars took place first in the opinion columns and letters-to-the-editor sections of our communication trade newsletters and at industry conferences, then on rudimentary Internet forums with names like PRSIG, and eventually in the comments sections of blogs written by professional communicators.

Some of the hot-button issues at the time may sound esoteric to people outside the profession, but they seemed high-stakes inside it. Who does an employee want to hear from first: his or her direct supervisor, or the CEO? Should employee publications continue to publish personal stories about employees and their hobbies, or should strategic communicators put away childish things? Is the news release dead? Is print dead? Is upward communication dead? Is face-to-face communication dead? Is it possible to quantify the bottom-line impact of communication? Is a particular communication ethics principle worth quitting your job over?

These and dozens of other topics regularly generated sometimes noisy debates, and occasionally deafening donnybrooks characterized by accusations like, "You just set employee communication back 30 years." There were bruised feelings. There were participants so stubborn and tunnel-visioned that they might now be called "trolls." And there was seldom resolution.

But there was something that amounted to an ongoing and slowly evolving philosophical dialogue on the nature and purpose of organizational communication.

Now, unless in my own tunnel-vision, I fail to know its location, there is little such debate.

Why?

I think people had more job security when those debates were taking place, and so were less fearful of burning a bridge and thus more willing to risk rubbing a colleague the wrong way or expressing an unpopular opinion. They had a professional reputation to maintain, but not a precious "personal brand" to protect.

A related reality: Because they had a stronger, longer, deeper connection to their employers, I think people cared more—about their institutions, and about the profession they worked in—and were more inclined to the spend time and spill blood on these kinds of disputes, because they mattered more.

But maybe more importantly, arguing about communication, back then, wasn't arguing about everything. For instance, I could (and frequently did) have a public argument with technology guru Shel Holtz about our widely differing degrees of belief in the information superhighway as a solution to age-old communication ills.

(This is what Shel and I looked like at the time—he Bud Cort from Harold & Maude, me Lee Harvey Oswald.)

Anyway—in those days, Shel and I could go at it hook and tong without either of us even thinking of broadening the argument to something like, "Well of course you would think that, because [your politics, your virtue-signaling, your function as an unthinking tool of the great oligarchy]." No. An argument about communication was an argument about communication, and it had to be won, lost or tied on its own merits. And it didn't risk the whole relationship.

The boundaries! The manners! The seriousness!

Doesn't it sound like I'm describing the peculiar cultural mores of the Edwardians? But it was only 15 years ago that these debates began to dwindle in the number and diversity of debaters. They were engaged by fewer working practitioners and left mostly to pundits like me and consultants whose public engagement is a natural part of our practice.

When did the professional debate begin to blink out entirely? Maybe it was about the time that the 2008 recession scared the professional bejeezus out of everyone and left us huddled together on LinkedIn right in the middle of a U.S. presidential election that polarized the country in new ways.

In any case, I can't remember the last time I had—on this blog, or on any other—a really lively exchange of ideas about communication.

Did we stop caring?

Or did we stop daring to bring anything up, for fear that we might bring everything up?

Seriously, my friends: Let's talk about it.

Corporate speechwriter: If you're ever going to get the CEO's ear, you're going to get it in the next few weeks

What I'm about to say is probably naive in some ways and impractical in others and may come across as a bit overwrought in general—but I'm not going hold back from telling everyone who helps corporate leaders communicate: 

If you are not feverishly working on a memo or a crafting an executive presentation or researching an internal position paper on the subject of how your leader describes your company's position in society, then you are one of the less effective Seven Dwarves: Sleepy, Bashful or Dopey.

Now, don't be Grumpy: I'm only telling you, you are not ever going to receive an invitation more ornately engraved than this.

I mean!

Last month—during the quiet, philosophizing-friendly month of August, the Business Roundtable redefined the purpose of the corporation, and your CEO and/or most of her or his peers signed the damned thing. A corporation, instead of serving only shareholders, now must promote "an economy that serves all Americans."

What does that mean, exactly? Well, it'll be the CEOs who defines what it means. And who writes the words that the CEOs say?

But speechwriters take vacations in August, too. And who wants to write about thought leadership by the lake? And then Labor Day came and then school started and everybody hit the ground running in September and nobody was thinking philosophically anymore, because earnings were coming up. (Earnings are always coming up!)

But then in the very last week of September, a bunch of CEOs got sacked or resigned, and The New York Times Sunday business section has a fine cover feature titled, "The Week the CEOs Got Smacked," which blames the bloodbath, essentially, on badly calibrated communication. Specifically, the sacked CEOs were positioned too far the direction the Business Roundtable suggests, and too far removed from the bottom line. CEOs are getting canned from companies that have lofty mission statements but uninspiring balance sheets.

"Today, as the stock market wobbles and steeply valued start-ups face discerning public investors for the first time, not every company with an inspirational story is standing up to scrutiny," the Times reported, quoting New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, “People’s radar for yoga babble is on high alert right now."

For instance, DropBox's promise to "unleash the world's creative energy" and Uber's promise to "ignite opportunity by setting the world in motion." 

As I wrote two years ago, companies are increasingly looked to to weigh in on cultural issues, because CEOs are now seen as the only adults in the room, more moored than our current political leaders to public consensus and global standards. "Trump can pull out of Paris," one communicator put it, "but UPS can't."

And yet corporations can't afford to weigh in on everything. From The Times:

Indra Nooyi, the former chief executive of PepsiCo, said she was willing to engage in third-rail debates only if they were relevant to the company’s broader mission. “Not all companies need to speak up about everything,” she said. “If the lofty rhetoric is not linked inextricably to the core business, you should question it.”

Somebody in every company needs to think hard and tough and write loud and clear about firm's real, sustainable, honest-to-goodness economic, political and social impact in this world, and build an articulate and aggressive executive leadership communication effort around that immediately.

And if that somebody isn't you, Mr. Speechwriter or Ms. Executive Communication Director, it's either going to be someone in marketing, or no one at all. Or worst of all, someone at the fucking ad agency. 

Writing a memo that redefines the corporate mission: Yes, I realize it's not as simple as that.

But it is as simple as this: I've been watching corporate communications for more than a quarter of a century, and over those years I've listened to thousands of speechwriters and other executive communicators complain justifiably about how they can't get the ear of the CEO, who can always think of so many more important things to do than talk to you about how to articulate the corporate mission.

Hard to imagine a CEO who wouldn't read some smart thoughts from you (and maybe a few other communication and marketing colleagues).

Those smart thoughts:

If you have them, share them.