Writer out front: One CEO's reasonable strategy

It's not popular in the blogosphere to point out anything that would limit the amount of potential income for self-appointed blogging experts who want to earn consulting dollars helping everybody blog.

The last time I suggested in print擁n The Ragan Report葉hat I didn't think most CEOs would be able to sustain interesting blogs, with or without the help of their speechwriters, I had consultants yelling at me for weeks, telling me how shortsighted I was and sending me lots of examples of exceptions that傭log, blog, blog, blog, blog用roved my rule.

As I usually do when I am cornered, I held fast to my point of view and I still do.

But last week I came across a story in BusinessWeek that alerted me to an alternative way that a company could do a good blog謡ithout forcing its CEO to turn into a daily columnist, and without really threatening the blogging experts.

Stornyfield Farm, a yogurt maker based in New Hampshire, has a CEO who doesn't blog but who believes in blogging and hired a "chief blogger," Christine Halvorson, to write several blogs for the company擁n her own voice.

The CEO, Gary Hirshberg, told BusinessWeek how he got the idea for hiring a company blogger: "Before the New Hampshire primary, my wife, Meg, and I got really involved with Howard Dean. His assistant, Kate, had been his blogger. There was a party one time for 150 people, and Howard came. Everyone was excited to see him, but when Kate walked in you could hear the buzz. As a guy interested in building brands and in particular building through unconventional means, I was really intrigued by the kind of immediate intimate connection created by blogging."

Stonyfield went looking for a writer "who could speak as you and I are speaking right now." He found Halvorson on Monster.com. "I knew what blogs were and had read some out of political interest, but had not blogged myself," she told BusinessWeek.

She was hired and writes five blogs in her own voice溶ot Hirshberg's預nd under the label "Blogger Chris."

Good for Halvorson, good for Hirshberg, good for Stonyfield.

Now: Will lots of companies push writers out front in this way?

Probably not. Even putting CEOs' egos aside, most firms would be understandably gun shy about giving some writer that much power to make relationships with customers.

But this arrangement is still more realistic for most firms than CEO-as-blogger, it seems to me預nd more sustainable in the long-term than speechwriter-as-ghost-blogger.

First lady succeeds in reading a dozen tame jokes,
making inside-the-beltway geeks titter

"First lady knocks 'em dead with monologue" was the story here in Chicago, where our Tribune actually included a streaming video of Laura Bush's "performance" at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner.

Thinking the Trib had simply gone a bit overboard, I didn't even bother with a blog entry on the subject, even though correspondent Pete Weissman had sent me what passes for an insider's article from The International Herald Tribune about Landon Parvin, the speechwriter and ghost-joker who has specialized in this sort of humor for Republicans since he started writing speeches for President Reagan more than twenty years ago. (The better-known Al Franken and lesser-known Mark Katz are Parvin's Democrat counterparts.)

Parvin knows this stuff is crap and that his job is easy. He said in the Herald Tribune article that presidents always get laughs. "I noticed it first with Reagan," Parvin said. "Reagan would come into the East Room, and he would have a little throwaway line, and it would get a laugh, and it wouldn't have gotten a laugh with most people. What it did was break the tension. It's the unexpected, I guess. People don't expect presidents to be funny."

Apparently they expect first ladies to be even less funny. That must be why, when Laura Bush delivered her safe Parvin humor about how the president goes to bed early at night and how she is a "desperate house wife," the place erupted and the media couldn't shut up about it for a day and a half.

Parvin said it himself about this old ritual of journalists pretending to laugh at lamely delivered presidential comedy: "In the scheme of things, it's not important."

Then why on earth are we spending tax dollars on it? (We are spending tax dollars on it, are we not? I'm guessing, at least $10,000 of them.)

More alarmingly, why is Wolf Blitzer filling up his precious time on CNN with highlights of Laura "Leno" Bush (as the president witlessly called her the next day) at the expense of truly funny stories.

Did I ever tell you the one about the runaway bride?

On her way out of her current job and looking for a new assignment is an experienced New York City speechwriter.

I've known her for several years.

She's a talented and serious speechwriter who overflows with ideas and energy; if your CEO is looking for a dynamic message and market prominence, she's an ideal candidate.

Send me an e-mail and I'll put you in touch.

From 'General Motors believes' to 'I'm seeing some good signs'

General Motors isn't my father's communication client.

My dad, Thomas Murray, did advertising for GM in the 1950s and 1960s, and I grew up hearing his stories about the stodgy executives—"old fools in high stools," he often called them—whose idea of a good ad headline was "The Car of Tomorrow Today."

So I chuckled when I heard some hipster at GM had convinced vice chairman Bob Lutz to start a blog.

And I laughed even harder when I read the tone of a Lutz post from late April, after GM issued some ugly earnings reports.

Lutz wrote in his blog on April 19: "Every so often, we all have to do a bit of a sense check, just to make sure that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow. And, amidst all of the gloom and doom surrounding GM lately, I'd like to give yet another alternative viewpoint. No, it's not all bad; indeed, I'm seeing some good signs. …"

And he went breezily on to list some signs of life at the troubled company.

A couple days after reading that and trying to imagine what the "old fools in the high stools," would say about Lutz's blog. Then I opened the May issue of Car Collector Magazine. Regular columnist Thomas Murray was writing about the difficulty of doing human advertising for GM:

… the GM corporate account was not run by people with advertising or marketing credentials as it is today. It was mostly overseen by reassigned sales or PR people who wrote speeches for the top executives, trying to anticipate exploratory [advertising] projects from overheard conversations, and memorized the rules and shibboleths of the impersonal GM stylebook, likely established in the days when only a serious tone in corporate communication seemed to reflect quality of product. Thus, if an agency writer would mistakenly try to breathe life into a GM ad by saying something that suggested there were human beings behind the GM logo, even something as personal as 'At GM we believe …' the wise old veteran would quickly change it to read, 'General Motors believes …' while issuing a strong reprimand and a reminder of the rules.

GM may be in financial trouble these days. But I think my dad will agree: Its communication is better than it ever was.

Yesterday I spent the entire day on the couch in my home office reading CEOs' columns in employee publications.

By lunchtime, my head was filled with challenges. And opportunities. And excellence. And teamwork.

By the end of the day, I was having all sorts of world-class quality thought leadership.

At one point, my 18-month-old daughter came in crying because she couldn't find her doll and I gave her a rather calm talk about the importance of accountability; the doll has purple hair so I also talked briefly about diversity. My dog farted, and before I could become angry I said to myself, "Well, change is the only constant." And I laid him off.

But on this strange day of reading CEOs' columns, there was something more than the platitudes and the bromides and the boring, boring, boring bureaucratese.

On this day, there was some seriously good CEO communication. That's because I was looking at the very best CEOs columns written in the last year庸or the Ragan Recognition Awards.

I'm not allowed to reveal any companies or any details about the entries, but here's what I saw yesterday in the best of these columns. I saw some things you rarely see, and a couple things I'd never seen before:

� I saw a CEO take on directly a media report on his company expressing doubts about its economic viability. Not only did he take the charges on, he acknowledged their veracity to a great extent and explained what the organization was going to do about it.

� I saw a CEO use his column to praise a star employee in great detail for a brilliant and inspiring and complex thing she did that helped the company save a great deal of money.

� I saw a CEO explain a very difficult spin-off to employees in a way that was neither patronizing nor cheerleaderish擁n a way that expressed both appropriate sadness at losing the business unit and credible confidence that the divestiture was the right strategic move.

� And I saw a senior vice president, in a column about diversity, say that he knows from experience that minority cultures have to deal with "disrespectful behavior and comments" every day within his organization. He went on to give a few specific examples that he'd heard of. And then he went on to say how much he despised such behavior and how he wouldn't tolerate it. And he called on all employees to have courage and root such behavior out wherever they saw it.

Next time you or your senior executive wants to communicate and some goof in human resources or legal says you can't say that, remind them預nd use this column to do so if you must遥es, you can.

Just yesterday:

• I read where the CEO of the grocery chain A&P plans to "deleverage" the company's Canadian operation. That's right: sell it.

• I read in an employee publication of a new buzzword that appears to be making the rounds in at least one workplace: "fierce conversation." It's a good thing, according to the publication: "to communicate directly and candidly."

• And I heard a Chicago alderman quote another Chicago alderman on why one scandal after another is erupting in the City That Works despite the best efforts of our well-paid Inspector General's Office. The alderman said the alderman said of the inspector himself, "I don't know whether his job is to clean up or cover up. But in either case, he's not doing his job."

I sometimes wonder what people who don't think about words all the time do think about.

Have you seen this thing?

When Speechwriter's Newsletter correspondent Rueben Bronee sent along what he said are "some unique insights into the speechwriting process at the highest levels," we thought he was serious.

And maybe he was.

Check it out here.

Did you read last week where Microsoft got in all kinds of trouble every single interest group from gay activists to the religious right?

Actually, it was only those two groups. The rest of us in between just shook our heads in wonder at Microsoft's klutziness, as it first took a shaky neutral stance on some gay rights legislation in Washington and then switched over to a shaky stance in favor of the bill傭ut too late to help it pass.

The whole incident left gays, who had hoped the company would come out on their side because it's known for its gay-friendly work culture and benefits, smarting.

And it left people like right-wing preacher Ken Hutcherson, who has been credited with pressuring Microsoft into taking its original neutral stance, gloating. "If they were poker players, they'd be out of the game right now," said Hutcherson.

Me, I'm not in a gloating mood on this one. I'm in a watchful mood. I'm waiting for the Red state-Blue-state culture war in the U.S.葉he one that keeps demanding to know which side we're on as individuals, and worse, presuming to know葉o start using wedge issues in order to pin companies down to Red company and Blue company.

It's started already, of course.

Costco and Target are Blue companies. Wal-Mart is a Red company.

Volvo, Saab, VW, Saturn: Blue.

Ford, Chevy: Red.

We're not likely to have any Blue oil companies and we probably won't have any Red bookstore chains.

But as for companies and industries that haven't already defined themselves politically熔r unwittingly allowed themselves to be defined預re they thinking and talking about how to avoid looking like a deer caught in one blue headlight and one red headlight, as Microsoft did here?

If they're not, they'd better be.

In the June issue of Speechwriter's Newsletter, I rerun a column from 22 years ago that could have been written today. SN founder Larry Ragan wrote about bogus surveys conducted by companies anxious to get publicity by commissioning surveys. Larry wrote:

A friend used to refer to himself as his company's manager of the bureau of social research.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Oh, on Thursdays I write news releases based on responses to questionnaires I sent out three weeks earlier."
I used to see his stuff quoted regularly in those snippets on The Wall Street Journal's front page.

"Executive Survey: What Makes a Great CEO," bellowed an e-mail press release that hit my inbox Monday. The subhead said, "Surprise, It's Not Ethics according to Survey Conducted by TheLadders.com."

Now, what do you suppose TheLadders.com folks葉hey are headhunters for six-figure execs洋ean by, "Surprise, It's Not Ethics"?

I think they mean to give us the impression that they are edgy and irreverent.

But they don't back it up with any expressed point of view. They certainly don't express the view that ethics should be the single defining characteristic of a great CEO.

In fact, they don't express any view at all; their most startling statistic is one showing that "leadership" is the most popular central CEO trait, with ill-defined traits like "ethics," "strategy," "accountability," "management," "creativity" and "industry expertise" all trailing far behind.

Well, sure. Leadership. Hard to argue with it. But what does it mean? Does it mean more than mere charisma? And can't leadership also mean ethics, strategy, accountability, management, creativity and industry expertise?

Of course, like 98 percent of these company- or industry-sponsored surveys, the thing falls apart under a two-minute-long gaze.

The question is, how should we feel about such serial duping attempts? Larry said it well enough during the first Reagan administration:

Does anybody care? Probably not. We grind the stuff out, nudging the truth here, stretching it there, exaggerating the speck of reality to a mountain of falsehood. To some, that's the way of business: the huckster's phony smile, the pitchman's smirk, the advertiser's technique of "conveying the lie instead of telling it," to quote Fielding.
We should occasionally remind ourselves that communication is a moral undertaking. It is only human beings who can lie. We should try to do so as seldom as possible.

Wal-Mart attacks sentimental critics head-on

Wal-Mart is caught in the middle of the red-state, blue-state cultural war in the U.S.

And so far, it's been reeling, as pressure against the company mounts from a thousand points on the left, while support for Wal-Mart and its business practices doesn't seem particularly on the increase from the right.

On Tuesday I saw a sign預 tiny sign, but the kind of sign speechwriters can recognize as a potentially important sign葉hat Wal-Mart might be feeling its rhythm a little bit.

The sign was actually a line擁n a speech given Tuesday by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott at the Executives' Club of Chicago. The speech was similar to the one he's been giving around the country for the last couple of months, though this one focused a little more on how Wal-Mart could help the economy here in Chicago if we let them open more stores than the one to which we've already acquiesced.

But the line that I saw as a sign came during the part of the speech where Scott defended Wal-Mart. Instead of addressing friends on the subject of enemies, as Scott has done in speeches in the past�"our detractors" this and "our critics" that擁n this speech he spoke directly to a particular brand of Wal-Mart critic: The one who hates Wal-Mart for putting mom-and-pop stores out of business because of its low-low prices and its ability to buy in bulk.

Scott spoke directly to that critic on behalf of the Wal-Mart customer:

"Those people," Scott said, "can't afford to live the life that you idealize."

That's a good line. And, if you're in Wal-Mart public relations, a good sign.

A local columnist, usually unsentimental-to-a-fault, surprised us the other day when he expressed the opinion that one shouldn't write in books.

Chicago Sun-Times writer Neil Steinberg says he's not sure he's right揺e acknowledges that people he admires write in books, including another local writer, Studs Terkel傭ut he holds to his point:

"I always assumed that writing in books was a form of vandalism, a crass act committed by callow students underlining passages that might be on the test and speckling the margins with their lame epiphanies of 'How true!'"

This preciousness about books優on't fold over the page corners, Don't write in them and Don't ever, ever, ever throw one away no matter how bad it is擁s the product of a time when books and were scarcer than they are today and when information was infinitely scarcer.

Am I attached to some of my books? Yes. But I've never ruined a book I've loved by writing too much in it or folding over corners. In fact, the more I've loved the book, the more wonderfully worn out it is. And if my margin scribbling reveals a college student thrilled beyond self-consciousness to discover ideas for the first time, it's probably good for me to hear that kid's voice every once in awhile, too.

So I'm going to teach my baby to use a book like her favorite pair of blue jeans.

What about you?

Delegating decency

I'm scooping my own commentary in next week's Ragan Report—blogger, scoop thyself!—but have you seen the May 14 National Journal?

The cover story pegs President Bush's first-term chief speechwriter Michael Gerson as the president's "Soul Man."

The story itself opens by summing up George W. Bush's presidential résumé: Bush has "rallied a nation stunned by terrorists, and alienated longtime allies by launching military forces against two sovereign nations, one of which never attacked the United States. He has committed American resources to fighting AIDS in Africa. He has helped to turn domestic party politics upside down by positioning himself and his party as Wilsonian Democrats whose mission in office is to make the world not only safe for democracy, but receptive to it."

And then, author Carl Cannon gives much of the credit for this work to Bush's first-term chief speechwriter. "[Michael] Gerson's role in these undertakings can hardly be overstated," Cannon writes.

Well, okay: It was Gerson, of course, who wrote the words—or directed other speechwriters in the writing of the words—that articulated Bush's policies.

But other speechwriters have written words for other presidents without getting credit for the making of the presidency.

The difference with Gerson, according to Cannon? Gerson has made the Bush administration palatable. "Around the White House, Gerson is known as the man who makes sure the 'compassionate' stays in 'compassionate' conservatism," according to the Journal, which goes on to quote White House Office of Strategic Initiatives director Peter Wehner as saying, "Mike is really the conscience of this place."

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove adds that Gerson, who has left the speechwriting post for a policy position, looks out for the little guy: "Not to say that he is the only one here with a conscience, but you can count on Mike to ask how a given policy will affect the least among us. The shorthand, political way to say it is that Mike is the one always wondering how we can achieve liberal goals with conservative means."

The article related one anecdote, from a policy meeting about the practicalities and advisability of funneling $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa.

At one point, Bush turned to Gerson:

"Mike, what do you think?"
"Mr. President, if this is possible--and we don't do it
--we will never be forgiven."
There was a brief pause, as the others seemed taken aback.
Bush broke the silence himself, bellowing, "That's Gerson being Gerson!" And then he approved the plan.

And: What are we to think of a crew that delegates conscience and empathy for "the least among us" as if it's an administrative detail?

And: This was the president who was guided by his soul and delegated all the technical stuff to his cabinet. Now he's delegated soul, too?

And what will he offload next? Golf?

(I'll take it!)

Editor of Speechwriter's Newsletter agonizes over best-man toast

At the end of an otherwise innocuous e-mail about a wedding I'm in in Cleveland on Friday, a Canadian speechwriter who I correspond with asked a question that pierced me: "Have you prepared your best man speech?"

I think it was the word "prepared" that really got me. "Written" wouldn't have done it. "Prepared," for some reason … that got the sweat flowing.

So I poured my heart out to him:

"This is proving to be a terribly tough assignment. This is my best friend in the world. But there is absolutely nothing I have not said to him or he to me. To me, toasts work best when the giver says one extra thing that's never been said before in the relationship, and says it in front of God and family and everybody. That thing doesn't exist between us, for we have been drunk too often together."

I added that the audience is a tough one: "A gang of blue-collar Clevelanders --witty, funny, wise blue-collar Clevelanders."

Which meant Walt Whitman was out. ("We two boys together clinging … One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making …" Uh huh.)

My correspondent replied: "I have no advice to give except that remember you and your best friend may have said/heard it all before--but presumably those in the wedding party haven't --or not all of them--and certainly not at the same time. And even if they had--it is the saying of the familiar out loud--the public witness --that gives whatever you have to say its extra meaning."

Is my correspondent right? I'll find out the hard way, and I'll report back next week.

Wish me luck, bloggees.

(Did I just invent that awful term?)

SN editor bombs in Cleveland wedding toast

I knew it was over when the DJ who had handed me the microphone only 30 seconds earlier slid it out of my sweating hand and yelled into it, "Let's have a little respect."

It wasn't my delivery擁t couldn't have been my delivery, because I simply wrote the toast down on three sheets of paper and began to read it in my usually charming-nervous-sincere-and-borderline-emotional way. At several occasions in the past, this delivery method has made people laugh and cry so hard the roof leaked.

And it couldn't have been the content, either, because nobody could hear the content over the din of the boozy crowd that milled about the lobby of the Palace Theater in downtown Cleveland, where the reception was held. (Eileen was right; as I've told her, the only difference between my adopted hometown of Chicago and my former hometown of Cleveland is that, while Chicagoans measure their lives by their heart attacks, Clevelanders measure theirs by their DWIs. "Yeah, I got married right after my second DWI. �")

But the trouble wasn't the crowd, primarily. The trouble was預nd I share it only because it was instructive to me and I think it may be instructive (if only as a reminder) to other speechwriters and speech makers.

1. The venue. Theater lobbies are not designed for one to be heard from one end of the cavernous thing to the other. Quite the opposite. The band sounded like it was playing in the men's room. How could I have expected to be heard, even when I muttered, into the microphone, "This is a disaster."

2. The tyranny of the casual. All weekend, I was trying to get people to tell me who was giving toasts and who wasn't, what order in which we were giving them, at what point in the reception would we be giving them, etc. And everybody just waved me off. Why? Because toasts are supposed to be spontaneous, dummy! I felt like saying葉o the bride, to the groom, to the father of the bride, to the mother of the groom and to anyone else with any planning responsibility�Well, it's too fucking late for spontaneous, because I've already spent three evenings and a six-hour car ride down I-80 writing and rewriting this goddamned thing. So how about you spontaneously tweak your imbecile nonthinking on the proper nature of toasts and help me do a little planning here? But I didn't. And I should have.

3. The bullheadedness of the speaker. By the time I arrived in Cleveland, the wedding itself seemed to me merely A Prelude to My Toast. I was full of anxious thoughts of me謡hat I, as the best man and the only professional writer in the crowd, would be expected to say. Though I knew this was happening at the time, there was nothing I could do about it: My thoughts of wanting to deliver A Great Toast to My Best Friend simply crowded out my ability to soak in what should have been obvious: That this occasion, this venue, this crowd was not meant for a long and thoughtful toast. It was meant for an, "I love you Julie!" bellowed into the microphone, a la Van Morrison or Benito Mussolini.

One last thought, and a greatly reassuring one: It's impossible to really screw up before loving friends who know you well容ven when you really screw up.

As soon I realized no one was listening溶o, when I realized no one would ever傭e listening to my toast (despite the fact that a dozen people told me afterwards that they were running around trying to shush people), I cut it short, loudly reading the last two lines (they won't make sense to share here but those who heard them at this reception understood). Then I smiled up at the groom and the bride. I laughed and raised my glass, with love様ove made humble by fresh humiliation.

And so it all turned out beautifully. As we all knew it would.

But what a heavy sweat in the meantime.