While I wasn't feeling punchy enough to send it my speaker directly, I did send your memo to his deputy chief of staff with the polite suggestion that there might be "some good advice in here for the boss." Response: zero, which really isn't suprising to me. I don't even know if it went any further up the food chain, but I doubt it.

Frankly, I don't know how effective it is for speechwriters ourselves to make these arguments to executives anyway. It would probably be more effective to get the same memo from one of their peers - a recognizable executive who knows what it's like to be them but is also speechwriter friendly.
(Hopefully that doesn't strike too much of a blow to your ego, David)

My ego can take a punch; indeed, it's normally punch drunk.

I really didn't expect lots of speechwriters to send this to the CEO; I'll be thrilled to hear if one or two did and heard something encouraging back.

Mostly, I just wanted to get these ideas off my chest--off all of our chests.

The mere fact that you thought it made a reasonable enough argument that you sent it to the deputy chief of staff is encouraging to me.

These problems are just about intractable and the differences in perspectives between writers and corporate executives and politicians are more than just stylistic. Often, they are fundamental.

Maybe the best way to reach CEOs with that kind of a message is to package it as an op-ed for the New York Times or WSJ, or sell it as a little feature/how-to column to Business Week or Fortune. Then the execs can read it in the context of their own quest for information and self-improvement advice.

That's a real good idea, Ron. I just might do that.

I did read it, and thought the "strategy" section particularly important in my shop. And (somewhat apprehensively) yesterday evening I gave it to the CEO.

When I did, I added some caveats. Most importantly, I stressed that this wasn't meant to fix a "problem," rather to improve a process that's already working well (which for the most part it is). And my CEO is always interested in building skills and improving results, so that approach seemed to work. Having acess to the voice of an outside authority actually gave me a little plausible deniability--by forwarding your "don't do speeches as favors!" I could get the message across without having to say it myself!

And the response was actually very favorable. He also asked that I keep it for a month and send it in again and we'll talk more about it then. So my career seems to have survived, and maybe this will help us improve our process. A good outcome I think!