I recently got back in touch with a childhood friend of mine with whom I stopped corresponding with for about 15 years for reasons I've spent 15 years trying and failing to explain to myself.

Actually, he got in touch with me. If it were left to me, I may or may not have ever gotten back in touch. Another mystery.

I spent a night and a day with him and his family in Ohio. I was terribly nervous about going there—why? oh, I suppose meeting with a childhood friend after so long promised/threatened some kind of referrendum on the integrity of my soul, or some small matter like that—and after I left, needed a few hours to calm down.

I don't know how he felt about the reunion, which was a lifelike jumble of happiness and sadness and regret and what-can-we-do-about-any-of-it-now.

But we shared one moment on equal terms.

We went to the golf course—the crummy old public course where I played, with him, my first round of golf 26 years ago as a seventh-grader. Since then, millions have been invested in the course and everything is different—most of the holes were in new places.

But as we walked through the threshold of the rearranged clubhouse there was a smell—it was the smell of that clubhouse, an odor we hadn't smelled since we were kids, an odor whose source I cannot tell you. The second that smell hit my brain I looked at my old friend, and he looked at me with eyes just as wide ... and if we weren't well-trained men, we would have burst into tears on spot and we might have cried until the police were called.

Dear Shades of Gray readers:

My blog isn't working. I can post my ideas but I can't receive comments. Never have I been more acutely aware of the fact that the comments are the reason I blog.

I have never heard of this happening to anyone but me, so I'm soaking in self-pity—and all by myself!—until the comments functionality is restored.

I will post the split second that whatever needs to happen happens and whatever is wrong is fixed.

David

IABC has come out with its first “Profile” survey in five years. It’s a study of the communication profession, and it seems pretty comprehensive. I know it’s good that IABC does it. It gives concrete shape to our amorphous profession, and maybe it gives really underpaid communicators ammo to get raises.

But I’m looking at the executive summary from the association’s Communication World Magazine, and I’m coming down with a serious case of Tell-Me-Something-I-Don’t-Know-Motherfucker.

Among other things I’m “learning”:

• Very few communicators make more than $120 grand; the vast majority make between $50 and $100 grand.

• Communicators with more experience make more money. Same goes for communicators with more education.

• Most communicators work more than 40 hours per week.

• About a quarter of communicators are “very satisfied” with their salary level.

The only thing, in fact, that leaps out at me is that about half of these respondents said they have “unlimited” direct interaction with management. And that one has me scratching my head skeptically and asking more questions, like: What’s the quality of that interaction?

You know how we all moan and grown about how management doesn’t believe anything they can’t count? I’m afraid I’m equally pig-headed in my refusal to be moved by anything you can count.

Or maybe I'm just frustrated that for all the "revolutions" and "sea changes" pundits like me have hopefully predicted over the years, the day-to-day realities of the communication business haven't changed too damn much.

That said, if anyone finds anything here here that they think is worth a second thought or even a discussion, I’d love to hear it.

I spent a year as a full-time employee communication consultant. I hated the job for a hundred reasons, but probably the most immediate reason I got out was, in corporate meetings, I always felt like I couldn't breathe.

My best talent—hell, it's my only talent—is that I'm good at loudly and clearly expressing the reality of the situation. In corporate life, the most important talent is to use language that clouds and mutes the reality of the situation. As we'd say in the corporate sphere, "I wasn't a good fit, and I had to go in a different direction moving forward."

My pal Steve Crescenzo had a great blog item about the term "devil's advocate" a little while back and his readers contributed a flood of horrible corporate hedge words.

Three I didn't see were "unprofessional" (what exactly is that?), "inappropriate" (if I knew what that was, I'd still be in consulting) and my personal favorite:

"I'm not comfortable with ...."

Instead of saying, "I don't like your plan and I'll be damned if I'll carry it out," it's "I don't think I'm comfortable with that. ...."

To which I always want to respond: Who ever said your comfort was the end-all-be-all, Baby?

Shades readers, I want to create a lexicon of "Words Only Cautious Corporate Cowards Say." Steve got us off to a great start. What are your faves?

Yesterday on the IABC blog IABC chairman Todd Hattori released the organization's brand-spaking new strategic plan for 2008-2011!

Why has IABC created a new strategic plan?

What is different about this plan?

What old strategic priorities aren't priorities anymore, what new priorities do we have?

What do the new priorities mean to me, a member?

No answer on any of those—nothing!—just a bunch of dreadful bullet points: "Leveraging technology to maximize networking opportunities and access to resources." And "Fostering top-quality, motivated staff and volunteers."

And then of course the lame call for feedback at the end: "Kudos to Julie [Freeman] and the senior staff for developing the strategic plan! Let me know what you think."

About what, Todd? Fostering motivated staff? I'm for it!

I'm used to reading empty, exec-centric, audience-ignorant corporate windbaggery in employee publications. Am I unreasonable to expect a little more from IABC?

Perhaps it is presumptuous to assume my Friday blog entry inspired IABC chairman Todd Hattori to reply to his own post about IABC's new strategic plan.

But if he's not responding to my post, then why does he begin with a rhetorical question that paraphrases my demand that he tell us "What is different about this plan?"

"What makes this strategic plan different?" Hattori asks. And then in five tidy paragraphs, he attempts to answer. His paragraphs are below, in Roman. My attempted translations are in italics.

**

The process. Previous plans were created by the Executive Board and tasked to the staff to implement. This strategic plan was developed by senior staff based on member feedback, the branding research, and trends in the communication profession. Two key results: increased focus on what is important to our members and how IABC will meet those needs, and increased clarity and buyin for our staff.

Oh. So the paid staff now makes the plan, rather than the executive board—the direct representatives of the membership. I'm not going to argue with this new governance method—in fact, if pressed, I'd argue for it based on my experience covering IABC boards and my knowledge of the current staff. But I'd say this fundamental shift from board-control to staff-control might have been worth an explicit mention in the original post, wouldn't you?

The structure. Previous plans were based on the Balanced Scorecard method, which was right for the time, and helped IABC manage the challenges — financial, staff and volunteer trust, etc. — that we were facing. When you look at the previous plan, it included 20 goals in four sections that created silos within our operations. This strategic plan sets four goals on which all activities are measured, and five priorities on which all actions are based.

Translation: We've simplified the old plan.

The focus. Again, the previous strategic plan was right for the times. A lot of detail on a lot of operational tasks. These new goals and priorities focus on what our members have told us is important. They provide focus so that the executive board doesn’t micromanage the staff, and the staff have the tools to make decisions and act rather than responding to the “grand ideas of the day” that don’t measure up to the criteria set by our priorities.

Not only did we simplify the strategic plan, we board member-proofed it. No longer can these well-intentioned boobs make the staff chase their tails with dumb ideas.

The reality. Our recent branding efforts involved seeking input from our members, and from non-members. We assessed our strengths and weaknesses by looking at the communication profession and other professional associations for communicators. We learned that we do some things very well, and others not so well. The reality is, IABC is an organization of 15,000 members from all areas throughout the world, specializing in a broad range of communication work, and wanting and needing a broad range of resources. The reality is, we will never be all things for all people. The reality is, we should strive to be something for all of our members. This strategy helps us focus on our strengths and what we will strive to offer this year.

I'm pretty sure this means IABC is shitcanning some services or products or events that some members (and board members) hold dear.

That’s what is different in this plan. Once it is posted and available to you, you may have questions. In fact, I hope you do, and I hope we — me, my fellow board members, and the senior staff — hear from you. I believe this is a very practical strategic plan that will help us maintain focus on our strengths and pursue new strengths that will define the IABC of the future. Your comments and questions are important to our processes, structure, focus, and reality.

Actually, I think you've just spent four paragraphs saying our comments and questions have less bearing than ever on your processes, structure, focus and reality. But whatev.

***

Let me be clear, because somebody has to be: I've got no issue with what Hattori seems to announcing here; to the contrary, a more focused and less concensus-mired organization is what I and many other observers have been calling for IABC to become for years. I've also known, from interviewing IABC board members and president Julie Freeman over the years, that these changes have been in the works for some time. Some IABCers might object, but I don't, particularly.

Neither do I relish criticizing Hattori; he's been a good and effective volunteer soldier at IABC, several years ago helping the organization streamline its governance structure by cutting the number of board members in half.

But in rolling out IABC's new strategy in such an opaque way—in smothering the true novelty of this plan—he seems to betray an obnoxious anti-communication instinct that all communicators can smell from a hundred miles away.

It smells like many of our communication clients—not our communication colleagues.

There's a new documentary out called Helvetica. I got jacked up about it by the enthusiastic reviews and by this clip, found on YouTube.

Lots of people will tell you that the communication business is a lot more interesting now than it was 15 years ago (when I started working for Ragan). Communicators are said to have more political organizational sway, their work is more aligned with the organization's goals, their media are more technologically advanced, their work has more to do with behavior change.

Yes, all true to some extent, and if this business had not changed over the years I'd probably have gotten bored, begun looking out the window during class, and flunked out.

But as we've climbed to 20,000 feet, what intellectual worlds we have lost! Barely any conference speakers these days talk in any compelling detail about what makes great writing. Or gripping photography. Or tasteful graphic design. All that has been dismissed as merely “tactical.”

But that stuff is—whether we like it or not—the very art of our profession! And communicators who look down upon it or ignore it or leave it entirely up to specialists undercut their own power drastically.

I’m going to see “Helvetica” the very first chance I get. I’m going to remember how cool graphic design is, and mourn Jan White and other design instructors who used to pack conference rooms with fascinated communicators.

That was fun.

So this week my niece—the one I've referred to here, who I once talked out of majoring in PR and studying English instead and she went on to become a bigwig Hollywood studio marketing kingpin—wrote me an e-mail the other night.

She called in a chit—she's read the screenplays of several of my friends—and she asked me to point her to "funny and useful 'fluff'" for her company's new employee newsletter. The "coordinator" of the newsletter—I bet he majored in PR—hasn't been good at finding the fluff.

"Why are you trying to find this crap?" I replied. "Do you seriously think employees of your motion picture company are waiting around to read amusing stuff in the employee newsletter? They read it for news about the organization. Not Leno’s bad headlines or Letterman’s Top 10 list!"

I went on for about 500 more words before telling her, "If you can demonstrate a need for giving employees this kind of crap, I’ll give you the info you need .... But not until!"

She came back:

"Point taken. Fuck it. I will tell the C.O.O. that I consulted an expert on the subject. We are working overtime right now to raise company morale, so this came from a good place. But you’re right, this is not the way. The newsletter itself is enough."

Now let us pray ...

It's Monday, and after a nice breakfast with my old Ragan pal Sarah McAdams, I blew the rest of the morning running completely useless errands, a trip punctuated by scraping the ass-bumper of the new Subaru on a fire hydrant. It turns out red doesn't go very well with silver.

I get home and read an e-mail sent to me with one of those obnoxious I'm-going-to-bore-everybody-with-my-favorite-quote signatures.

Here was the quote: "Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means."

Who said it? Albert Einstein.

Look, Einstein: I don't go around spewing elegant mathematical formulas. Why don't you leave the clever communication quotes to writers like me—dig it, wiseguy?

To hell with Mondays. To hell with Einstein on leadership.

In my capacity as editor of Speechwriter's Newsletter, I read a speech by a Fortune 100 CEO and wrote the speechwriter to tell him the speech would be my November Speech of the Month because it "sets the standard for drama, authenticity and intelligence."

The speechwriter nearly went into an ecstatic seizure.

"Wow! I'm speechless. I don't often get great feedback like this. Thanks for making my year!"

Organizational communicators toil in organizations that do not celebrate great communication, for communication is not their product.

So let us always tell our lonely communication colleagues when they do great work. Let us make them speechless. Let us make their years.

Reading a magazine produced to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Memorial Day Massacre of Republic Steel unionists in South Chicago, I came across this piece of white-hot rhetoric, titled "The Scab."

It's by Jack London.

***

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.

A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten princples.

When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out. ...

***

Sweet JESUS what I'd give for a cause worthy of verbal vitriol like that.

Or is there one that I'm missing?

Communiblogger Trevor Cook posted this first, and then Lee Hopkins did too.

I wouldn't have bothered to post it if the damned thing somehow didn't fill my eyes with tears.

This right here is one of the things keeping the world from just unraveling completely.

Whenever I go into Ragan® offices I spend an hour or so "going through pubs," which sounds like a lot more fun than it is. "Pubs," in Ragan's® lexicon, are "employee publications"—and most aren't exactly a scintillating read, even for a certified Ragan® Employee Publication Connoisseur®.

So when I run across a good employee publication, I celebrate—until, in some cases, Iam® Crest®fallen to Discover® that somehow the company's legal staff has won, or its communicators have failed to fight, a crucial battle for readability and credibility.

And so there are these ridiculous Trademark® symbols all over the prose, making it look disagreeable to the eye, and like a brochure.

I wonder if anyone has any advice for the editors of these publications, some of whom may believe that a company that fails to protect its own products with a useless symbol is giving others permission to violate a trademark.

Which—it must be true—is certified Nonsense®.

I've been stewing about this all weekend, ever since my daughter came home from school Friday and told me the highlight of her day was "Show and Share."

Show and ... Share?

That's what they called it at her last school! Not "Show and Tell"—as it was in my day, when we usually brought in plastic toy machine guns—but "Show and Share."

I had thought that was just a one-school thing. But now I realize "Show and Tell" has been universally condemned as—what, too didactic?—and this great scholastic celebration of materialism is now called "Show and Share," across the nation and thoughout the universe.

We no longer tell, we share. Soon, now doubt, we will no longer "show," either. (When you think about it, showing is so ... showy.) We will "Make Available for Viewing." Show and Tell will then be called "Make Available for Viewing and Share."

How is it that in one generation our nitwitted society can organize itself to make an absolutely unnecessary and slightly obnoxious edit to a perfectly good and simple phrase—Show and Tell—and meanwhile allow "impact" become a verb and "win-win" become a noun?

Went to the Ragan "Communications Roundup" at Southwest Airlines headquarters a couple of weeks ago.

My account of the overwhelming experience appears on Ragan's overwhelming new Web site, just launched today. Check it out here.

Late last week I got a note from a publicist named Jacquinn Williams. She began,

"Dear David, In the last few weeks, you should have received an advance copy of Stop Pissing Me Off! by author and founder of Work Places that Work, Lynn Eisaguirre. Lynn is a keynote speaker and skilled facilitator of strategic conflict management in the workplace. ..."

Impishly, I replied, "I beg your pardon." I have not heard from Jacquinn, which pisses me off.

Then over the weekend the stupid cable news shows started buzzing like morons about this new study that found that "workplace profanity boosts morale." The moron management professor, a fellow named Yehuda Baruch, who of course proved no such thing, also admitted his so-called "finding" opened a can of worms: “Managers need to understand how their staff feel about swearing. The challenge is to master the ‘art’ of knowing when to turn a blind eye to communication that does not meet their own standards.”

If you've read a bigger dumbfuck quote than that one this month, I'd like to see it.

I've got lots of ideas about swearing, most of which I got from my mother, who used to confide, "Your father wouldn't say shit if he had a mouth full of it."

I swear a great deal. And I swear a great deal when I visit Ragan offices. (I am not alone, but I would say that I'm a leader in this area.)

But I do not swear in order to boost morale, and if I sensed for a moment that my swearing was boosting morale, I would stop.

Have you ever worked somewhere where it was cool to swear?

My favorite columnist in Chicago is Neil Steinberg. Today in the Sun-Times he writes:

"Sad that we prefer to celebrate the technological aspects of communication—how small our phones are, how easily they track us, the glory of our bandwidth. When art communicates in a way that science cannot approach. A blind poet 2,700 years ago uttered a few syllables—'Arms and the man, I sing ...'—and they rang around the world, leaping time and distance, their echo continuing to thrill to this day, no batteries required."

Glory be to poets.

Ragan didn't wind up covering the PRSA conference in Philly, so to figure out what happened at the Karen Hughes luncheon keynote that I predicted might bomb, I've had to troll the Internets.

I haven't found much either way, and I haven't heard any reports of booing.

But what I have found—a blog quoting people's Twitter tweets during Hughes' speech—is even more chilling.

Imagine being a public speaker and wondering how you're going over and knowing audience members are Twittering the world with their impressions—while you're still talking!

Some of these folks appear to be booing Hughes, not audibly in the room, but silently, to the whole world.

Check it out here.

I'm writing this blog entry just to take a break from a really horrible chore:

I'm in the second day of what I hope will be a two-day job of converting a book chapter I wrote on executive communication into a speech I'm giving next month in Copenhagen.

The process invovles larding up my tight prose with really explicit transitions, gross repetitions and just plain air and space so it'll be comprehensible and conversational—especially so, to an audience of Danes.

Come to think of it, though I'm rarely bored when writing prose, I'm almost always slightly bored when writing a speech. I think one of the things I like best about writing is the puzzle of being as spare as possible. And if that's what you like, speechwriting isn't your favorite gig.

Anybody share that feeling? Happy to chat, as this chore has turned me into an ADD addled freak. I'll be checking my Comments every two minutes.

Okay, here in Cook County, Ill. we used to have a board president named John Stroger, who like many of our local pols, was widely regarded as a creep, and reelected year after year.

He had a massive stroke during the last election and though he was more or less comatose, he beat the reform candidate.

When it became clear that the old warhorse was never going to recover from the stroke, his son Todd took over, with a résumé as blank as his mind.

Now young Todd is trying, partly through the magic of rhetorical persuasion, to get an $888 million dollar tax-increase passed.

Judging from this speech—at the site, click on "download this show"—his speechwriter "Donna" is either as green a speechwriter as young Todd is a politician, or she's against the tax hike too.

(Hat tip to Ragan's Roula Amire for making my morning with this, and I hope yours too.)

Reading an interview earlier this month in Advertising Age with Procter & Gamble's top marketing guy Jim Stengel, I came upon a passage in which he advises other marketers to ask their CEO for a little space upon being hired:

"If you can, make a deal with your CEO: 'If you're going to hire me, leave me alone for 90 days and I will come back to you. And if you don't like the agenda I have and what I think we can do for this company, then I'll renege the contract.' Then begin to focus on metrics. Do it for your own personal credibility. You need to show what can be done, what you want to be held accountable for, and how marketing can help the organization achieve it."

It occurred to me that communicators' work would be very different—and wholly more effective and rewarding—if only new communication managers could get some time to study the company before leaping into the communication stream.

I've actually seen this happen a handful of times, and though a 90-day study period is unrealistic in most cases, I'll bet if we all agreed on the importance of an intitial study period (we'll take 30 days!), more of communicators could make more strategically intelligent communication programs, and more rational jobs for themselves.

What would you do with 30 days?

1990s: I wrote a couple of newsletters for Ragan.

2000: I did all that and a few articles for other publishers. (And thought I was super-busy.)

2002: I did all that and planned conferences.

2004: Then I did all that and did a little public speaking.

2005: Then I did all that and worked on a couple of books.

Early 2007: Then I did all that and wrote this blog.

Now: I do all that and write one-off stories (and now record a weekly TV talk show!) for the new Ragan.com.

I love all the work, but please do not ask me how I fill all these slots with ideas, because I don't know. Seriously. I don't know.

I know this mirrors the increasingly spectacular juggling act communicators have been performing over the same time period.

The question is, how much further can we stretch our skills and our time?

Corporate leaders, politicians, friends and spouses know the main reason important things don't get said—and begin to build into things that can't be said—is that there's no perfect time to say them.

In fact, it seems there are only imperfect times to say them: I'm tired, you're drunk, I'm stressed, you're running late.

A superior civilization would have a designated "Communication Day" every month or every week—better yet, a "Communication Hour" every day—where everybody would stop, where everybody would get it across.

So everybody could get on with it.

Communicators looking to launch campaigns for world peace—and they're out there—could do much worse than to push Communication Day.

... if in 1997—while your e-mail address was still 20010223@compuserve.com and you were still hazy on the difference between e-mail and the World Wide Web—you had read this sentence, knowing it came from only 10 years into the future:

"Hat tip to C.C. Chapman, who already blogged this and tipped his hat to Jeremy Pepper, who tweeted it."

(It's from Shel Holtz's blog, yesterday.)

From Reuters: "... opinion polls around the world continue to show high levels of anti-Americanism, which the Pew Research Center in Washington says is strongest in the Muslim world. 'Attitudes have grown much more negative in many parts of the world,' said Richard Wike, senior researcher with the Pew Global Attitudes Project. Public support for the United States has even declined among allies Germany and Britain."

But Hughes, whose reasons for leaving are not clear, declared Mission Accomplished:

"I feel that I have done what Secretary Rice and President Bush asked of me by transforming public diplomacy and making it a national security priority."

Spin on, Karen, spin on.