Clorox Co. announced its fiscal first quarter results this week, putting a cheerful release out on BusinessWire:

"The Clorox Company today announced that top-line growth and cost savings contributed to strong operating results for the company’s fiscal first quarter, which ended Sept. 30, 2007.

"'I’m delighted with our first-quarter results,' said Chairman and CEO Don Knauss. 'We delivered strong sales and volume growth in our North America and International operating segments. In addition, recent price increases and aggressive cost savings are helping us mitigate the difficult commodity cost environment. And the plans we’ve put in place to address competitive activity are paying off.'"

Hip-hip hooray!

But then here's the lead of the Reuters story that came out the same day:

"Clorox Co. posted a lower quarterly profit on Wednesday as higher costs offset sales growth in its higher-margin businesses."

Usually companies avoid such contradictory press release/press reports, anticipating how the media will interpret their results and callibrating their release accordingly. Not Clorox, not this quarter ....

Calling all financial communicators: How does this happen?

Kurt Vonnegut called them "the Guessers"—the variously qualified men and women who run our governments and our institutions who make guesses on which our lives largely depend.

The Guessers make guesses about global warming, guesses about nuclear threats ... and in the case of a dam in Mosul, Iraq, apparently ... guesses about whether a creaky dam will or won't break, and how many of a potential half-million people will drown if it does.

The Guessers in this case—American and Iraqi officials—have been debating for some time what to do about this dam, according to the Washington Post:

"The debate has taken place largely out of public view because both Iraqi and U.S. Embassy officials have refused to discuss the details of safety studies--commissioned by the U.S. government for at least $6 million--so as not to frighten Iraqi citizens."

Because if you frighten the citizens, the Guessers can't guess in piece, or in private. And if they guess in public and guess wrong, the Guessers get their guessing privileges taken away.

But not before some thousands of people die.

You never think it's going to happen to you. In your mind, when you try figure out who is following those asinine news stories about missing pretty white girls, you conjure up some flabby-minded, sweat-pants-and-flipflops wearing person whose favorite color is pink-with-sparkles and whose favorite dish is tater-tot casserole.

And then one of these stories comes along and it pulls you right in.

You try to differentiate this story from all the others you have so archly dismissed, but you have to admit the woman is young, she is pretty, she is white, she is missing and her name is Stacy Peterson, which rhymes—lord help me!—with Lacy Peterson.

You justify signing up for a Google News Alert by saying to yourself: Well, she's from Bolingbrook, a town whose mayor I just profiled. Maybe this mystery is a hook on which to hang a book about Bolingbrook. (Now you realize you're using your ambition to conceal something worse!)

You say this story is richer than all the others because of the impossible combination of details: On the one hand, this was the dingy cop's fourth marriage—his last one ended in the accidental drowning of his wife in a bathtub. But if you assume this was a murder, there's Stacy's mother's habit of periodically disappearing from her family—and her permanent disapperance a few years ago. I mean, how could you not follow this one ....

Of course, everyone said that about beautiful Lacy and the unborn baby .....

Sweet Lord, friends: Tell me you're into this story too, and my interest is not the sign of a softening brain.

Or alternatively, fly here to Chicago to throw cold water on my face. I'll reimburse you for your airfare and thank you for the service ....

Gazing at the football games yesterday, lying on the couch between a rough weekend and a busy week, my mind erred on the side of darkness, more happily entertained visitors dressed in black.

To wit:

As I make the transition all of us writers are making—fewer of my words appear in print, more of my them appear online only—I do feel I'm moving from oil painting on canvas to chalk-drawing on the sidewalk, from writing to something more like talk radio.

I can't help but feel that my words, however unlikely they ever were to be read 100 years from now, are even less likely to reach into the future now.

The compensation for this impermanence is immediate reaction: At the new Ragan.com web site, the stories now have comment capacity. So each story I write is like a blog entry—a statement, but also potentially, the beginning of a good conversation.

Which is cool.

Except the moment Ragan turned this feature on and I got the first long electronic response to a story of mine my first thought was, "Oh no. Maybe I've gotten my last Letter to the Editor."

The Letter to the Editor was better, more flattering, more exciting than an online comment. Because it took the writer time to create and required some measure of consideration to send. Why? Because it might appear in print! But a quick, hotheaded electronic comment? Not that big a deal. ...

Letters to the editor are also a sign of the publisher's open-mindedness. With a letters page, the publisher is not only saying it is willing to give you a forum to shout, it's saying, "We're so glad to get your point of view that we're going to lovingly edit it and spend our money on ink and paper in order to place it with a proportionately chosen group of other views (the dumb ones of which we have eliminated)."

A lively string of readers' comments on an online article? That's good, and if the article is timely, it's probably more socially useful that a Letter to the Editor a week or a month from now.

But for a symbol of civilized discourse, online comments are no Letters to the Editor section, and they never will be.

Readers, do you share these feelings or am I being what Shel Holtz has always said I am, "The world's youngest curmudgeon"?

Looks like the TV writers are on strike.

"It is unfortunate that they choose to take this irresponsible action," said the producers' group.

I haven't broken this strike down to decide which side I'm on—but isn't it fun to fantasize a similarly solemn CEO saying the same about his speechwriter, a sweaty HR director about the intranet writer?

Toward the end of a long Ragan.com debate about Steve Crescenzo's recent C.R.A.P. Award Column, the subject turned to whether Ragan.com should allow people to comment anonymously.

I came down in the middle. I thought Ragan should discourage anonymous commenting because persistent, nasty anonymous commenters can hijack and ruin online discussions.

But I also said that "I am one of the only believers I know in the need for anonymity in many cases. I think Americans, especially those who work for big corporations, live in a severely restricted environment and I want their voices to be heard."

Commenter Mary Boone thanked me for my comment but said she was disturbed by my remark about Americans who are scared to speak. She says "anyone who is in a big corporation and feeling too fearful to sign their name to a blog post" should quit their job.

"And I truly don't mean to sound glib here. Life is too short to stay in a job where you can't speak your mind amongst your professional colleagues. ... Quite frankly, I can't think of a single instance other than whistleblowing or life-threatening political dissent where people should not have the courage to identify themselves when they make public comments. I don't believe a voice is truly 'heard' until it has a name associated with it."

I love Mary's spirit and I want desperately to agree with her here, but I have believed for a long time that if corporate communicators felt truly free to speak their minds—and I don't just mean free from the judgments current employer but free from the judgments of future employers, too—that we'd hear a lot more colorful stories, shall we say, about corporate life.

Am I overestimating the amount of fear and repression out there? Or is Mary naive to think there are plenty of open-minded companies who will employ all manner of opinionated, outspoken, even politically obnoxious people?

Since yesterday's debate about how upset Americans should or shouldn't be about the fact that they're terrified to say anything online for fear of being disqualified for some corporate job in 20 years by a J. Edgar Hoover type in some HR department of the future ...

... I've been looking at my four-year-old and wondering at what point in her childhood development will it be appropriate to inform her that she will live her whole adult life watching everything she says, like some kind of corporate politician.

... I've been wondering why those who envision a society where people can fearlessly speak their minds must necessarily be naive imbeciles who have lost all perspective.

... and I've been thinking about what important topics a fearless American—or a fearless American journalist—might explore if he wasn't always looking over his shoulder. Here's one:

Why can't kids ride their bikes freely around town anymore? Are there really more horny men interested in molesting children than there were in 1960, or are there just more cable news shows scaring us into locking our kids in the house and turning them into timid, pasty, useless, scaredy losers who live inside their computers, just like us?

Human life has never been safer, human lives have never been more secure.

What are we all so afraid of?

... they do a lot of yucky stuff so we don't have to. Like go to wakes of people they don't know, and pancake breakfasts, Rotary luncheons and spaghetti dinners.

A local pol friend of mine e-mailed me one evening this week after he and his wife had endured a four-hour-long Chamber of Commerce dinner.

Can you even imagine?

To pass the time, my pal kept track of to whom speakers attributed their quotations. Here's how it broke down:

Someone (3x)

Mother Theresa (2x)

Webster's

"Webster's Thesaurus"

Vince Lombardi

Ike

Helen Keller

"An old proverb"

"I had a hunger, a thirst, a craving, a need, for Sophocles, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, John Donne," my man wrote. "But I was with the wrong crowd, wasn't I?"

Better you than me, old pal. Better you than me.

In a comment on my Nov. 7 post, Joan from Alaska writes a note to all Shades of Gray readers:

"I wish that we were all neighbors, and could get together and cook a big supper, with the little kids watching the big ones, laughter and music, aromas of garlic and tomatoes and a fresh-made Caesar salad, bumping into each other in the kitchen, uncorking a good red wine, and lingering late into the evening because the conversation is too good to leave. My life has grown far too hectic, I think; the thought of such a lovely evening and how long it's been since I've had one is my own little lesson in priorities, and I believe that mine have been misplaced.

"It's snowing here on this quiet Sunday, the first real snowfall we've had all winter. I live far out in the country, where moose wander through my yard and stare disinterested at me while they munch my trees. I wish you were all here watching this snowy woods fill with me."

Oh, we are, Joan. Thank you.

P.S. Off to Dallas to speak Tuesday at the IABC/Dallas Quill Awards luncheon. I'm told that former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach is speaking simultaneously, across town. Boy is Roger Dodger going to be surprised when no one shows up. "Who the hell is David Murray?!"

Word to the wise, from this London Telegraph report: When you get paid a half-million bucks to give a speech somewhere, the local reporters expect you to say something worth repeating in the newspaper.

After former British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke in China, the press ripped him for sounding ... like any Chinese bureaucrat:

"Frankly, we are very familiar with all this—it's just like listening to any county or city official's reports,” Deng Qingbo wrote in the China Youth Daily.

"If so, why pay such a high price to hear the same thing? Is it worth the money? Do these thoughts multiply in value because they come from the mouth of a retired prime minister?”

Of course Blair was probably advised not to say anything that would ruffle political feathers.

But what might the old chap have said that would have justified a half-million dollar speaking fee—especially in a country where millions of people still live in caves?

As we talked over ribs and a ribeye steak and a beer with a diving board at the appropriately tawdry Bone Daddy restaurant in North Dallas, I started to get the feeling that Charles Pizzo is getting ready to climb up the spout again.

Pizzo, a former IABC chairman and the longtime owner of a New Orleans PR agency, washed up in Dallas after Katrina with his elderly mother and his dog.

To be dislocated from New Orleans is to be dislocated from an irreplacable form of reality, and for those who know how fundamentally connected Pizzo was with that town ... well, it's hard to imagine how he and his mom have survived.

But Charles may be finished being our profession's leading symbol of the ongoing social cost of the disaster. Or he might be ready to become a more hopeful symbol.

After spending several years taking care of his ailing mother almost full time--they lived with a Red Cross family for the first few months--the former IABC chairman is starting a column for The Ragan Report, he's eager to resume his PR practice, which focuses on labor communications, and he's starting to ask the kinds of vexing questions again that can only be asked in a sing-songy New Orleans accent.

"Tell me this, David," he began. I won't attempt to directly quote the rest, which amounted to: Why do companies always permanently downsize huge chunks of the workforce; why do they almost never attempt to satisfy analysts with temporary across-the-board pay cuts that might actually bond the workforce together in common struggle against hard times?

Good question, Pizzo. Welcome back, Charles.

I flew Southwest Airlines to Dallas, and my seatmate startled me by offering to buy me a beer with a special ticket he had. I shyly demurred, instinctively worried that accepting the beer obligated me to talk.

Of course he didn't want to talk to me at all. He just had an extra beer ticket and a generous attitude. But after finding out how he got the ticket—he's a Southwest employee, headed down to the Love Field headquarters for some leadership training (or "Kool-Aid drinkin'," as he put it with a chuckle)—I wanted to talk to him.

I asked him about Herb Kelleher, the legendary hard-drinking, heavy smoking Southwest Chairman. He and his three young colleagues, who were sitting in nearby seats, had each met Kelleher a number of times. They said he does indeed drink hard liquor and despite that fact never forgets any employee's name once he has heard it.

"It's pretty amazing," my seatmate said. No--with 30-some thousand Southwest employees, it's impossible, despite the fact that it's also, apparently, true.

On the way home from Dallas yesterday, reading the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which amounts to a great collection of essays on "The American Idea," it occurred to me that Southwest Airlines would make a very short list of American institutions I still admire without reservation or suspicion.

What's on your list?

P.S. This issue of the Atlantic is fantastic; it's the 150th anniversary issue and I read it cover-to-cover. I've grabbed a tiny handful of my favorite remarks about The American Idea, which I'll sprinkle around on this blog between posts. (Perhaps this will temporarily sate my appetite for blowing hard on politics.) Here's the first:

I've had the priviledge of spending time with some of the poorest people in this country and some of the richest, and it's left me feeling that we have far too many of both. The best lives, the happiest and most satisfied ones, seem to be lived somewhere in between. —Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation

I'm pretty sure I was the only reader of Roger Cohen's op-ed in the Monday New York Times who thought of Roger D'Aprix's book, Communicating Change.

Cohen argues that American cable networks should start offering us—and we should start watching—Al Jazeera English.

"... America can say to heck with an ungrateful world. It can mutter about third, even fourth, world wars. Therein lies a downward spiral. Or it can try to grasp the new, multinetworked world as it is. To this world Al Jazeera English offers a useful primer. ..."

D'Aprix argued more than 10 years ago in Communicating Change that communicators' first responsibility was to "turn all eyes outward," familiarizing employees with the realities of the marketplace—the competition, the customers, the economic forces at work on the organization.

Why? Two reasons, D'Aprix argued: To give employees a fighting chance of responding intelligently and helping the company weather the storm. And at the very least, to eliminate the surprise when the merger comes or the sell-off begins or the axe falls.

I think a lot of us have a sense that there's something fundamental that we're missing in our understanding of the Middle East, and we've had that sense for so long that it's starting to turn into: Maybe we'll never really know what's happening over there.

The same feeling in the workplace is translated to the old cartoon that shows two guys pushing levers around a spindle, around and around. The spindle disappears into the ceiling, and one of the guys says to the other dismally, "I think they got a merry-go-round up there."

Has anybody had decent success at turning all eyes outward? I'd love to hear how you did it.

When I was a kid I didn't care about the vacation, I only cared about the plane ride.

It's come full circle. I'm flying to Copenhagen tonight to give a couple of presentations next week to a couple of speechwriting and rhetoric conferences put on by the fine Danish firm Rhetor.

I've been here once before—the city is beautiful, the hosts are brilliant and warm and the audiences are enthusiastic during the Q&A, which over there they excitingly call "questions/debate."

But what am I focused on? The plane ride over, a direct flight of eight or 10 hours during which I am going to snuggle into my seat, put my thumb in my mouth, read five magazines and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, which I've been meaning to read for 10 years. I might watch an in-flight movie, but I might not for fear it would make the flight go to fast.

My flight to Australia this year was like being in my mommy's womb again, a 36-hour train trip through China a couple of years ago was a form of heaven ... and all I can think about is how wonderful it must have been to take a ship across the ocean to Europe when the only way to get or send a message for two weeks was by cable.

Lately I've expressed this love for the occasional long international flight and for the rare privacy of air travel—mind you, I don't travel an eighth as much as a Steve Crescenzo or a Shel Holtz—and others have agreed: Airport time and flying time is the only time we get to be left alone in this insanely overconnected world of ours.

Those of us who feel this powerful need to be left alone—and to be forced to leave others alone!—must find cheaper and more frequent ways to do this than air travel.

Has anybody succeeded?

"If it can't be communicated, it doesn't exist."

My host in here in Copenhagen, Kell Jarner Rasmussen, attributed that quote last night at dinner to the conservative prime minister of Denmark, who is now in his third term and thus has earned some credibility. (Rasmussen noted that the original source of the wisdom might have been the P.M.'s "spin doctor," as hired communication consultants are called here without perjorative connotation.)

Lying in bed last night, my head still buzzing with Tuborg Christmas brew but wide awake because jet lag has turned me into a bat, I tried to sleep by thinking of "things that can't be communicated," and pondering whether I do indeed believe they exist:

* A generally palatable, logistically doable program of "immigration reform" in the U.S.--or conversely, a rationale for leaving immigration alone.

* Answers to my four-year-old daughter's follow-up questions. Where are you going, Daddy? Denmark. Where is Denmark? Far away. Why is Denmark far away?

* The discouraging feeling an average American gets in fashion-forward Copenhagen that he is a time-traveler from Omaha, Nebraska, 1991.

My host Kell Jarner Rasmussen and his colleagues Jesper, Jens and Christian took me out last night for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 of these powerful Danish beers (yes, Kristen, you warned me).

An ecstatic evening, which apparently included some loose political talk.

Because when Kell introduced me to the Copenhagen business rhetoric crowd this afternoon he listed some of my accomplishments and positive attributes, among which he included casually, "He hates Bush."

I was briefly embarrassed, and as I watched the Danes smile smugly, I felt briefly like a traitor to my country. But, hell: I do hate Bush, and if hating Bush is the bare-bones qualification for an American who wants to address a foreign audience these days, I guess I won't shrink from the truth.

It's not Christmastime until we see the first of those Lexus car commercials where the husband surprises the wife with a new $40,000 car with a big red bow on top.

I grind my teeth at these commercials, not just because they are preposterous, but because they confuse me. So much money spent broadcasting ads that suggest an idea—buying a luxury car for a spouse for a Christmas surprise—that only a tiny percentage of the population could conceivably act on. This can't be efficient advertising. And yet Lexus does it every year.

Does anyone more sophisticated than me think there's a method to this madness?

Last week on Ragan.com, I wrote that the blog of Edelman Public Relations CEO Richard Edelman was boring, which I said he shouldn't take personally because all CEOs are boring, because CEOs' lives are typically dominated by "abstract and disconnected and largely ceremonial experience[s]."

In reviewing Edelman's blog as an indicator of the state of CEO blogging, I'd failed to notice that Edelman himself had actually weighed in recently, about "Next Generation CEOs."

In a November 15 post that he said was based on several CEOs he's met recently—Lev Leviev of the Leviev Group, Sunil Mittal, who runs Bharti Enterprises, Mohamed Bin Ali Alabbar, chairman of Emaar—Edelman declared that the modern CEO is "comfortable across cultures," "instinctive and entrepreneurial," "very philanthropic," "patriotic." Modern CEOs are "believers in leadership from the front line, not back at headquarters" and "believers in public relations."

I'm thinking: Wow, who are these intellectually curious, culturally loyal, boundlessly generous supermen? Maybe I should write about some of these folks in Speechwriter's Newsletter!

Then comes Edelman's last line, not intended to be a punchline, but serving as one anyway: "Disclosure: Leviev, Bharti, GE and Emaar are Edelman clients."

Readers, have you ever seen a CEO's blog that's interesting enough to get read and credible enough to be believed?

A communicator's work is never done. But by the same token, aren't we damned lucky that it's not all up to us? So, so much of the communication in an organization—and I'm talking, culture-shaping, rule-enforcing, problem-solving communication—is done by people who haven't ever heard of IABC.

I was reminded of this simple and obvious fact yesterday, when I received an all-Ragan e-mail from Sharon Pryor, a longtime executive assistant/office manager/nobody really knows her title because she just does shit that needs to be done (and with attitude).

The subject line was "Kitchen." Which if you know Sharon, is ominous. Here's the whole text:

***

Do you remember that roast beef sandwich you left in the refrigerator? It stinks-please remove by 5:00pm today.

A reminder for all of us to be a little neater when it comes to closing your leftovers securely, the spills are getting bad~

The fridge is not a dumping place, if you are not going to use again-please throw it away.

Thank you,

Sharon

***

It wasn't even my sandwich—hell, I don't even work at the Ragan offices—and I felt properly chastened by this William Carlos Williams-worthy bit of grassroots internal communication.

Would that the stuff we professionals wrote had such power!

A high-powered 50-something veteran speechwriter friend was grumbling nine months ago and bellyaching three months ago. Now he's starting to howl. Despite a star-studded résumé, he can't get a job. This is part of an e-mail he sent me today, giving me permission to share but requesting anonymity.

***

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the reasons why I have nothing but rejections to show for over a year of full-time job-seeking are as follows:

1) I’m too narrowly specialized.
2) I’m over-qualified.
3) I’m too old.

I’ve got more degrees and a better credentials than most of the people I’m interviewing with.

I’m convinced that speechwriters are going the way of harness makers and viola da gamba players.

***

To anyone with experience in or around speechwriting: Does this fellow's assessment ring true to you? Better yet, can you offer him any advice?