"We Heard You!" shouts the gigantic poster on the wall of the stinking anal canal of Chicago, the Blue Line subway that connects us to O'Hare.

The preening poster (or is it scolding, as in "shut up already"?) is issued by the Chicago Transit Authority, the second creepiest quasi-corporate public agency in the state, right behind Illinois Tollway Authority.

The issue the CTA claims to have heard us on is "slow zones," which is the CTA's name for miles-long sections of track so desperately creaky that, in order to reliably remain on the tracks, the train must creep along at five to 15 miles per hour.

Apparently the CTA has listened closely to its riders' subtle and many-varied opinions and ascertained that we don't like to stand on the train, packed like sweating manatees in a rolling manatee can, for lots of extra time. Through their qualitative and quantitative research, the CTA has gathered that we want to get where we're going faster, not slower.

What amazingly sensitive and perceptive chaps!

Now they're embarking on an incredibly innovative program that they call a "Slow Zone Elimination Project." Which will, when and if successful, restore train speed from 5-15 m.p.h. on long sections between O'Hare and downtown, to the 60 m.p.h. the subway normally travels.

Or used to travel, before the tragic but mysterious and inevitable and natural onset of "Slow Zones."

Now that the CTA is listening to us so closely, we're looking forward to more incredible work by the CTA, such as "Operation Nose Plug," to help us deal more graciously with the rancid urine odor that's been assualting commuters at the Washington/Dearborn stop for nearly two months.

I just watched a press conference where federal officials and Minnnesota politicians discussed the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.

A discouraging amount of the discussion was jingoistic claptrap about how bridges "in America" shouldn't fall down and how bystanders' response to the incident showcased the "goodness of Minnesotans."

It was damn near a political pep rally, incongruous to say the least as most Americans look on and wonder metaphorically and concretely, however realistically or hysterically:

Is the ground rotting out from under us?

So a couple months ago, Ragan launched MyRagan.com, the corporate communicators' version of MySpace. On Monday, they're going live with the corporate communicator's version of YouTube.

(I'm all like, Take a summer vacation, you freaks!)

Anyway, the new thing is called MyRaganTV, and though the Ragan folks expect it will become a vast, searchable (read: benchmarkable) collection of useful videos from MyRagan members, it's already chockfull of interesting and entertaining stuff like "The Four Types of Writers".

Perfect for a Friday afternoon.

I spent some time over the weekend with my pal and colleague Steve Crescenzo, whose opinions I sometimes disagree with but almost always respect.

He objected to my column in the July 30 Ragan Report, in which I quoted RR columnist Bill Sweetland to the effect that the top management of corporations are mostly "little boys," unlearned in anything but business and often naive about society and history.

In that column I went on to ask:

"Are most senior leaders 'little boys'? Are they scoundrels? Are they imbeciles? Contrary to much of what we appear to suggest here, and much of what our readers tell us, we don’t think so. We know we don’t think so, because in the rare occasions that we actually run into a senior corporate executive while reporting a story or attending a wedding, we react with pleasure and curiosity, not defensiveness and scorn.

"We don’t think executives are, by and large, bad people—just that they’re often limited somewhat by their corner-office view, contractually bound to the corporate interest (which often does not encourage open communication) and in their high-pressure daily money chase, occasionally forgetful of the meanings of life that extend beyond the meaning of the brand.

"We are all limited by our world-view—do you think RR editors imagine our seat in the world says 'omniscient' on the back?—but all our wisdom comes from our world-view.

"Senior corporate leaders are only harmful when they are too powerful. Same is true of everybody else. It’s just that senior corporate leaders are too powerful more often."

This wasn't enough for Steve, who sometimes works with senior management as a consultant and usually finds them to be: very smart, well-intentioned—and doing their best fors shareholders, customers and employees in massively complex jobs, in fast-moving markets.

It doesn't matter what "RR" thinks about executives in general, or what David Murray thinks; but what communicators think about the executives they work for does have consequence.

Communicators will be effective counselors to management only to the extent that they clearly understand each executive's areas of vision and blindness. They can't afford to indulge simple-minded prejudices, even for reasons of psychological self-preservation ("you don't respect me? well I don't respect you").

Readers, what successes have you had—and what failures have you suffered—in seeing your executives as individuals, taking advantage of their real strengths and helping them overcome their real weaknesses?

Chrysler just hired Bob Nardelli, the CEO who ran Home Depot into the ground while making gazillions for himself. He was well-known as a tyrant, and I knew an employee communication person there who said "tyrant" was too kind. Remember "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap? Next to Nardelli, he was Mister Rogers.

Even a kind reviewer on CNN Money today said, "where Nardelli was weakest was in dealing with the regular folks at Home Depot ..."

Oh: And Nardelli knows nothing about the car business.

What was Chrysler thinking? Judging by its business results, Chrysler hasn't done any thinking since Lee Iaccoca left about two decades ago.

I'll watch this, like the car accident it is, with my hands over my face. You heard it here first: By the time Nardelli is done, Chrysler will be totaled.

It's no fun eating crow. But the bird I'm eating at the moment doesn't taste so terrible, because I like the people on whose behalf I'm eating it.

IABC hasn't released the official attendee-evaluations for its International Conference, held in New Orleans in June, but it appears those results will contradict my take on them in my conference coverage in the July 9 Ragan Report. I praised IABC's choice of keynotes ...

"... But in those breakout sessions—the ones that make up the meat of a conference—boy, were there some bombs. We’ll check back with IABC to find out what the evaluations say, but … during one hour-and-fifteen minute time slot on Monday, RR ran around the hotel, ducking into five sessions in a desperate attempt to collect useful items for this special issue and story ideas for the future. ... If the session we started in was a morgue, the one we ended in was the cemetery itself."

I went on—and, looking back, in a somewhat gleeful way.

But the numbers are coming in and they look good, according to IABC conference maven Chris Grossgart, who writes in response to my query: "I can tell you this will be our best rated conference. Ever. Our average for all sessions is a 6.1 on a 7 point scale. As a point of comparison, Vancouver's average [2006] was a 5.9. Goal always is 80% plus favorable. 2007 average is 85%."

To make matters worse, IABC—also at my request—sent me the results of a session on which I was a panelist. It ranked 46th out of 70 overall sessions. Of course I'm busy making private excuses about the absence of the panel organizer and moderator—Suzanne Salvo had a client conflict—and about the topic of the panel (photography ethics isn't the most immediately practical topic in the world). But: Damn.

As for my obviously too-harsh coverage of the rest of the sessions, it may be that I didn't go to enough sessions at this conference to judge the program fairly. Maybe all I saw were the bombs. It may also be that I am not interested in the same topics most IABC members are interested in. But then, I wasn't evaluating the sessions for their relevance to me—rather, for their relevance to the communicators in attendance.

And so Chris and Julie Freeman, it appears I did you wrong. I'm sorry about that, and I'll be more careful next time. Look for a similar note in RR after the official results come in.

Just got this e-mail from Melcrum Publishing Ltd. I'm starting to think I'm some sort of weird Puritan nut job for thinking a blog should draw readers based on its content, rather than by sending my readers to Melcrum to pump up my rating on their star system.

Maybe I should think of it this way: It's a legitimate sign of devotion if my readers sign up for Melcrum just to puff up my blog rating there.

But I don't. I think it's a clever way for Melcrum to get more members.

And then I wonder: What are my own motives for making this post?

Oh, I just don't know what to think anymore!

***

Hello David,

I contacted you a few weeks ago to let you know that your blog is now listed
in the new reviews section on the Communicators’ Network.

These reviews are starting to get significant traffic so the more comments
and star ratings your blog has, the higher it is ranked and the more traffic
your blog will get from the CommsNetwork.

CommsNetwork members are based in over 50 countries worldwide, so this will
undoubtedly secure new readers who are not familiar with your blog.

You can improve your ranking and resulting traffic to your blog from the
site by encouraging your contacts or blog readers to post some more reviews.

If they are already CommsNetwork members they can rate your blog 1-5 stars
anonymously in about 5 seconds after logging in. Or write a longer comment
or review, whichever they prefer.

If they are not already members, they can sign up for free in under 60
seconds, write a review and have full access to all the free stuff on the
site.

The URL for your blog on the site is:

http://www.communicatorsnetwork.com/?page_id=156&cat_id=2&cat_type=2&post_id
=104

Do let me know if you have any questions or if I can assist you further.

Regards,

Kristina Oddestad
...............................................
Melcrum Publishing Ltd.
The Glassmills
322b King Street
London W6 0AX
UNITED KINGDOM

Tomorrow is the funeral for my friend Ed Reardon, who died last Sunday of a heart attack, at 63. Below is what the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times obituaries didn't say. (For some reason I'm having trouble linking to these. I blame Eddie, who could never figure out how to get an e-mail message.)

***

One of the great thrills in the life of former Chicago paramedic Ed Reardon was meeting his hero Studs Terkel and later becoming one of his favorite interview subjects, appearing in a couple of the books.

Much later I was also lucky enough to meet Studs Terkel, and in the first conversation I had with him I mentioned I was friends with Ed Reardon. “How do you know Ed Reardon?” Terkel demanded.

Eddie was sick with congestive heart failure when I met him, about seven years ago. By then he’d had a heart attack, quit working, lost his wind and sold his sailboat.

I never knew what I was missing, but I always knew what I was getting.

If Eddie loved you, he called you “darlin’.” One time, late at night in Laschett’s bar, I was talking about my mother and he was talking about his son and he was moved to reach over and grab my ear lobe and hold it and tell me through his gap-toothed grin and with a mist in his big eyes, “You’re a good boy.” I was 33, and I believed him.

Eddie could make you feel like a boy, because he grew up in Chicago in the 1950s in an old neighborhood. He casually called taverns “saloons” and $10 bills “sawbucks” (and $20s “double sawbucks”). Eddie was three generations in one.

Which gave him more than old words—it gave him old wisdom. Once, with my first baby on the way, I was fretting about what kind of parent I would be. Eddie cut me off short. He told me there’s no such thing as “parenting,” as some series of techniques, some bag of tricks. “Your kid gets you for 18 years. If that’s good, good. If it’s bad, bad. That’s it.” (A reassuring message to me, since I already knew I was a good boy.)

Eddie’s genuineness sometimes made it a little difficult to be with him, at least in the beginning of the evening. When he asked me what was going on in my life, I actually had to know. Patter didn’t work. If I was going to engage Eddie, I had to know just exactly what I was happy about, what was bothering me, what I was looking forward to. If I didn’t always know those things when I started talking to Eddie, I always knew them by closing time.

Magic happened with Eddie. One afternoon he and I were alone in a saloon that had an old-fashioned pay phone. He was explaining to me how, as a kid, he used to poke the wire with a paperclip and make calls for free. Then the phone rang. I walked over and picked it up. It was for Eddie—it was a friend who had talked to Eddie’s wife Geri who had heard from Eddie’s doctor that some recent tests revealed his bad heart wasn’t beating right, and he needed to go to the hospital right away to get a pacemaker installed. I panicked. Eddie insisted we had time for one more Heineken and a Marlboro Light, before they “put a Duncan yoyo in my chest.”

That was the old paramedic talking. He knew the body and the brain as appliances, made of wires and pipes and water and meat. "Do I believe in a life after? I have no idea,” he told Terkel in Will the Circle Be Unbroken. “I really believe that what I am is not this body. I know how quick this body turns to garbage.”

He might have treated his body like garbage, but he kept close track of every bad thing he ever put into his soul. He didn’t have many regrets, but few he had were permanent and he talked about them often—usually in the context of begging his friends not to make the same mistakes.

The only frustration I ever had with Eddie—he didn’t dwell on what his friends might be, and we didn’t waste a lot of time thinking about how to improve him—was his one real area of insecurity. Despite his wide reading, I think he worried that college-educated minds were somehow better organized than the pile of books in his head. This notion frustrated Eddie’s writer friends; we all wanted him to write, partly in order to fill his quiet days but mostly because we wanted to read his writing. We wanted him to turn his oral genius and his deep feeling—he told me stories about his life that make me cry when I retell them—into something we could hand to other people.

Maybe it was this same insecurity that caused Ed to pretend to know a little bit more about some matters than he actually did. He thought of himself, for instance, as something of an expert on Native American history. Once he and a friend were driving on a Wisconsin reservation and they were arguing about which tribe owned it. They stopped at a gas station and asked the teenaged attendant what tribe he belonged to; the answer contradicted Ed’s opinion, and, back in the car, Eddie grumped, “Aw, what does he know? He’s just a kid.”

I’ve got lots of friends and family who live in places with better climates and prettier terrain than Chicago. When they’ve occasionally asked me why I insist on living on this cold, crowded slab, I haven’t stammered about the architecture or the cultural institutions or the rich history. I know that the best answer I could give them is an evening with Ed Reardon in a smoky saloon.

What am I going to tell them now?

It is true, in my experience, that for all communicators purport to know about communication, corporate communication departments are at least as dysfunctional as every other area of the organization.

Reading this repulsive Slate article about President Bush's bickering ex-speechwriters, it occurs to me that communication departments aren't dens of backstabbing because of some ironic "cobbler's children" syndrome.

It's because they're full of writers.

Writers collaborate about as well as any other solitary predator: Writers—and moreso the better they are—are leopards, not river otters.

And communication departments are mostly made up of writers, forced by the overpowering "teamwork" ethic of most organizations to try to get along and to pretend to like it. When in reality—whether they know it or not behind their corporate Stepford masks—they cringe at every boss's edit, seethe at every colleague's feedback, silently howl in grief for every genius story idea rejected in the group story meeting.

Readers, if I'm wrong about this, then you tell me: Why aren't communication departments the employee communication utopias we should be modeling for the entire organization?

For a week I've been trying to figure out what to think about Bob Murray, the owner of the Utah mine where the workers are trapped. All I've come up with is two essential (and contradictory) truths:

• Murray is a crisis-PR disaster, speaking before he thinks, speculating in bellows and sobs on things he can't know, truculently defending his company (and disparaging the miner's union) when his only public concern should be for the miners.

• Murray is a crisis-PR saint, wearing his (however flawed) humanity on his sleeve, ignoring stuffy PR and legal advice about "appropriate" language, going into the mine himself and facing the press with a face covered in tear-streaked coal.

Which of the above is more true? I don't know. So far, despite his occasional moments of near-insanity, I suspect he's better liked by the general public than he would be if he'd gone by the crisis communication book and said all the right things with controlled corporate somber.

If I were Bob Murray's PR person, I'd be hiding in the mouth of the mine. If I were his lawyer, I'd be looking for another job.

But as a silly-ass humanist who believes the world would be a better place if everyone just said what was on their mind, no matter how monstrous or stupid, so we knew where everybody stood, I've got to say: Give me Bob Murray any day.

You?

Some of my older writer friends worry that one day everyone in the universe is going to have a blog and no one's going to pay anybody to write articles anymore.

I tell them not to worry, because I think regular bloggers, just like daily columnists, are a rare breed of people who have stuff to say all the time—or who know how to package the stuff they're thinking into readable chunks—and that most would-be bloggers will eventually fall away. As my mother would say, "It'll all work out in the great cosmic wash."

Lately another reason has occurred to me for why not everybody will be a blogger: Not everybody is built tough enough to weather the hurly-burly of public disagreement.

Over the last few years, I've seen a number of bloggers react to a battle they've purposely or inadvertantly started by becoming hysterical basket cases, pouting jerks, self-pitying sad-sacks.

I've been involved in some "kerfuffles" of my own—most notably a huge blog war that began when I gratuitously referred in a print column to a blogger as a "nobody"—and I'll admit to you: It's stressful. You feel a little out of control and wonder if the whole blog world might turn on you. (And sometimes it does, at which time you have to decide: Do I care?)

But then, I've also been a print columnist for almost 15 years. In print and online, I've started fights and had fights picked with me, I've slammed and been slammed. Usually I relish the conflict, and see the whole thing in the big picture of P.T. Barnum's—and Larry Ragan's—philosophy: "If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight." The more intelligent and productive the argument the better, of course.

I say all this not to distinguish myself as more equipped for battle than other writers, many of whom are fathoms more gutsy than I; I say it to distinguish writers who have blogs from Regular People Who Have Blogs.

The bloggers who are provocative enough to occasionally start a fight and battle-ready enough to deal with the fight when it comes (sometimes through apology) will be the ones still blogging in five years.

Yes, I hope that's me. But I've got a hunch about a few people who it won't be.

Last week a MyRagan.com blogger named Hypermark jotted a brief post about a friend whose "laziness forced him to come up with solutions that enabled him to be successful without perennially running around like a chicken without a head. That wasn't his vision of himself."

How did the Lazy One do it? Hypermark doesn't say, but he got me to thinking about how I do it.

I have lots of work, with deadlines every day, every week, every month. But I'm freelance, so I have no meetings and I don't do a ton of traveling. Which means:

Somehow, so far, most days, knock wood, I am not wall-to-wall busy, even though I sometimes tell people I am so that I can concentrate on my work. I can make myself super busy by planning a golf game or a family outing for the afternoon and cramming all my work into the morning. But my standard 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. workday usually has time for an after-lunch nap and a workout and a long phone conversation and a little daydreaming.

But what really fills the cracks between the deadlines is agony over what I should be doing. In seven years as a freelancer I've never settled on a basic agreement with myself over whether:

• Taking a nap is a sign that I am fundamentally bored with life.

• It is decadent and irresponsible for a man in the prime of his career to play golf on a Wednesday afternoon.

• I should think of my career, or remember that life is short.

• I should be here in case the phone rings.

• I should be learning more about Web 2.0—and beyond!

• I should to try to make more money for my family every chance I get.

• I should write a book.

We exist in a corporate culture where busy-ness is valued, in an American culture where the long work weeks equal virtue, in our own inner life of vacillating passions and ambitions.

Because of who are and where we are—and when (an age that offers us more choices than any previous)—these are the difficult questions most of us have to answer every single day. We must decide every day: What should I do with my life?

In fact, the only ones among us who don't have to answer that question are those folks running around like chickens without heads.

And in this narrow sense—I've been there before and expect someday I'll be there again—they are the lazy ones.

No?

A couple of posts ago, I asked, Whither Bob Murray? and vacillated on whether the owner of the collapsed Utah mine was a crisis PR nightmare or a crisis PR dream.

It appears we have our answer. In an e-mail sent five days after he simply disappeared from public view—after several more miners were killed in the meantime—he explained his absence: "efforts in the digging and recovering have left me such that I cannot be a good spokesman to the public media on behalf of our efforts to rescue the original six miners.''

Dear Bob: You were "such" to own the mine and "such" to preen in front of the camera during a heroic rescue attempt (and "such" to bash the union and defend your company as being so incredibly safe). So you ought to be "such" to be able see the thing through to what seems to have turned out to be a bitter end.

Most students entering college this fall were born in 1989. Beloit College has published its perennially shocking "Mindset List", which describes the cultural frame of reference for this generation.

I've heard of horse whisperers, and having family in Boulder, Colo., I've heard of a lot stranger things than that.

But until a friend of mine returned from a horse show this weekend, I'd never heard of a "Medicine Horse."

But Natalie is one special mare, according to the brochure offered by her owner, a Mary Marshall, of central Indiana. (Marshall practices "animal communication," which she says "is to animals what sign language is to the hearing impaired. It is a nonverbal form of expression .... It is not a special gift given to a few but rather an ability to have an open mind and a willingness to learn to hear with the heart and see with the mind's eye.")

Born in 1986, "Natalie is a gifted healer and intuitive horse who provides guidance on health, nutrition, and spiritual and personal matters for humans. She is a mentor to individuals in the healing arts and willingly helps anyone sincerely seeking her counsel. Natalie is available for private readings by phone or at the farm."

Something tells me "sincerely seeking her counsel" is the rub: "If you would just open your heart and listen, you'd realize that when Natalie flaps her lips, that means you should go for the fixed interest rate on your second mortgage ...."

Because corporate communicators are working in autocracies within a democracies, Western communicators must keep up a pretense.

Thus, when we roll out a new policy, we give employees a phone number to call in case they have any questions, or—and this is the word we always use—"concerns."

CEOs and other grown-ups, of course, do not have "concerns." They have opinions, ideas, beliefs, complaints, criticisms, thoughts, issues and problems. Employees are the ones who have "concerns."

Concerns about their benefits package, concerns about their future with the company, concerns about ethics, concerns about the anonymity of the employee assistance program.

Employees are some seriously concerned people!

But "concerns" is all employees are allowed to have. You never see an invitation in the employee publication like this: "If you have questions about the diversity program, or if you think it's intellectually bankrupt, contact Maxine Minderbinder, at ...." Or, "If you disagree that the new benefits package competitive with others in the sweatshop industry, contact Joe in human resources ...." Or, "If you're prefer not to, contact Bartelby in the scrivening department ....."

No, it's always "if you have any questions or concerns." (And we never acknowledge the chance that an employee might have one big concern; we always use the plural concerns, which implies they are small, specific and easily dismissed.)

Obviously, as large institutions, we can't ask employees for their opinions. (Where would we keep them? We don't have the storage space!) But I'm concerned that after many decades of receiving requests for their "concerns" employees are onto us with this one.

Has anyone found a suitable and slightly less condescending half-sincere way to request upward communication than the vaguely insulting invitation to employees to register their "concerns"?

There was a smart exchange last night between Jon Stewart and Barack Obama, on the subject of communication and narratives and habits of thought and how you break them.

I maintain that Obama is the Communication Candidate because he is far more thoughtful on our favorite subject than pol in recent memory.

This doesn't mean we all ought to vote for him, but it does mean we can all learn by watching his campaign.

Hewlett-Packard is a company for whom my admiration lingers despite a decade and a half of strategic stumbling, communication bumbling and utter executive foolishiness.

I can't stop hoping the company's roots will save it. Bill Hewlett. Dave Packard. The HP Way—one of the first and most enduring declarations of corporate culture.

The recruiting section of HP's Web site still sings beautifully: "HP’s focus on people underlies everything we do. Being known as a great place to work makes it easier to attract top talent. For us, being a great place to work is good business. HP people live for the big idea. The next great discovery. The new way of being. ..."

The new way of being! Sweet Jesus, sign me up!

But every time I dare to hope that this company is ready to regain its onetime status as a proud and special culture ... well, something like this happens:

Last week someone in HP sent me an e-mail that went out Friday to about 170,000 U.S. employees.

***

2007 U.S. WFR Severance Changes
All Employee Communication
To: U.S. Employees
From: Marcela Perez de Alonso
Subject: U.S. Severance Program Changes

As part of HP’s ongoing review of Total Rewards programs, we are announcing several changes to the Workforce Reduction Plan for U.S. employees. These changes are designed to more closely align our program with current market practice, while continuing to provide employees with significant transition support to a new career or other opportunities outside of HP. Although the changes are not intended to coincide with any specific WFR/layoff activity, we want to be sure all U.S. employees are aware of the changes.

Changes to U.S. Severance Program

The U.S. severance program has not changed in many years, and currently exceeds what is provided by most of our industry peers and other large employers. As a result, we are making the following changes for employees notified of WFR on or after September 1, 2007.

Cash severance payments will be reduced from two weeks’ pay per year of service to one week’s pay per year of service. Payments will continue to be subject to a minimum of three months’ pay, but the maximum payout will be nine months’ pay (reduced from 12 months).

The minimum period before an employee can rejoin HP as a contingent worker will be extended to 12 months (from six months), and future opportunities to be rehired at HP into regular employment will subject to approval by a member of the HP Executive Council.

Most other features of the U.S. WFR program are not changing, including the opportunity to seek redeployment to other HP positions, the 9-week job search/salary continuation period that applies prior to termination of employment, and career transition counseling services. Vesting and exercise periods for outstanding stock awards also are not changing at this time, but will be subject to future changes.

For additional information

As mentioned above, the new Workforce Reduction Plan for U.S. employees will be more closely aligned with market practice while continuing to provide affected employees with significant transition support.

If you have any questions or need additional information regarding these changes, please see the U.S. WFR Severance Changes ... or go to Contact HR ... to submit your question.

***

So, HP: When you're recruiting peope, it's to a "great place to work." When you're shitcanning them—in a constant flow of downsizing diarrhea—it's to "market practice" standards.

The HPer who sent me the e-mail asked me whether I thought this announcement was particularly cold, whether this need for "aligment" with current market practice was a good enough reason. I replied:

"I think this e-mail is crap—I’d hope for a more detailed explanation of the financial hardship to the company and the need to reduce these severance benefits—but that said, it’s not much worse than I’d expect."

Readers, what do you think?

My three-year-old daughter Scout is starting to catch on.

When the the family or old friends are together and people are taking turns telling funny stories—(honestly, sometimes I think the only reason to live at all is to compile stories for these sessions)—Scout will say, "Okay, I have a story."

Of course everybody solicitously says, "Okay, Scout, tell your story."

And then, after beginning well—"once upon a time" is her standard opening—Scout butchers the story and everybody has to politely pretend she didn't. "That's a great story, Scout." And of course she knows full well we're pretending.

She'll figure out how to tell stories, of course—or she'll be out on her ass—but I've been thinking about what advice I might give her, if she asked for it, for telling better stories.

Here's what I think I'd tell her: Speak louder and, before you start the story, know exactly how you're going to end it.

And I thought: That's just about everything I know about storytelling. And most of the time, it's enough.

Ragan Communications is a very strange company, and lest you think I might get in trouble for saying so, Mark Ragan is constantly after me to write a New Yorker story about the company and all the characters that have worked for it, and all the nutty things they've—we've—done. (I wish Mark would get after the New Yorker, too!)

The best and the worst thing about Ragan Communications is that there are no boundaries between our "work" selves and our "regular" selves. To read about how that plays out in weird and occasionally insane ways, you'll have to pick up The New Yorker.

But in the office Wednesday afternoon I was reminded of the vast beauty of working for a company like this:

Conference director Rebecca Anderson is sort of halfway back from maternity leave, coming in for a few hours a few days a week. She brought her baby girl with her on Wednesday.

As Rebecca was on and off the phone, in and out of meetings and conference calls, other women in the office—yes, it was all women—passed the baby back and forth. The marketing director, the CEO's administrative assistant, a writer ... each took a turn holding the baby, rocking the baby, pushing the baby from desk to desk for goo-gooing and tickling. The baby-passing went on quietly for several hours.

It wasn't their willingness to take care of the baby during the workday that moved me. It was the effortlessness of it, the liquidity with which it happened, the taken-for-granted trust, the sheer relaxed naturalness.

And Rebecca's own serenity reminded me of how good I feel when my own daughter comes to a large family get-together and I don't see her for two hours and I simply know she's being happily taken care of and loved by people who I trust to take care of and love her.

I suppose someone might object to such a situation as a productivity killer, fret about the dangerous precedent being set. But nobody at Ragan Communications would. For better or for worse, Ragan does not believe productivity is the highest human value. And as for dangerous precedents, they try to set a new one every day.