Last week we at Vital Speeches celebrated the 75th anniversary of the ad agency Leo Burnett by sharing this speech by the founder.
To our rhetoric-centric way of thinking, it was a doozy.
But a correspondent—a veteran corporate logistics exec—wrote to say, “Listening to this guy is painful. Of course the employees of advertising agencies need to focus their attention on improving the quality of their output. Better ads translate into more product sold which in turn translates into higher ad revenue and greater profits for the agency. Leo Burnett did not need to lecture his employees about this truth. They understood it perfectly so his musings came off then as they do now as condescending drivel.”
He went on:
“The real objective of managerial lectures like this one emphasizing doing the job well for the sake of the craft itself, integrity, or your own professionalism is to divert employee attention away from all the money that is going into Leo’s pocket.”
I replied that the man had a point: The speech comes across as condescending. Nevertheless, it has proven to be a touchpoint for the company for many years.
And then I drew on some personal experience to address the more important issue.
As for Leo’s motives, I can’t speak for them, but I do know something about the culture of advertising agencies back then. My dad was creative director at Campbell-Ewald in the 1960s and head of his own agency in the 1970s.
Back then, foolishly or naively perhaps, there was a kind of idealism among ad-agency creatives: They talked earnestly and deeply about their craft (my dad gave speeches called “the man inside the man,” and “the importance of being interesting”).
And as I wrote in a tribute to my late father in Ad Age a couple years ago, his generation of admen believed that if they wrote more honest, human ads, the world would actually become a better place for it.
Of course, the same guys also believed—really believed—that what was good for GM was good for America.
In any case, I’m pretty sure Leo Burnett wasn’t needing to divert employee attention away from the money he’d made.
It’s so hard to imagine the era when people who worked for ad agencies and clients really believed in what they were doing.
But, to an extent far greater than anything we see today, they did.
Calling all Vital Speeches veterans: Has the leadership communication context, or has it not, changed in the way I described over the last 40 years? Has it become disingenuous to talk about intrinsic love of work? Or, as my correspondent claims, was it always thus?
In a blog comment, communication commentator Ike Pigott offered a tactic for dealing with executives who reject your advice about the importance of storytelling.
“You’re right, ’story’ doesn’t sound important enough for an executive to worry about,” Pigott wrote, “but you can scare the bejeezus out of them by pointing out how their inaction is ‘ceding the narrative.’”
Normally, you write the speeches, and Vital Speeches editors read the speeches.
But sometimes we dream of speeches that never were, and ask, “Why not?”
The speech I’m dreaming of at the moment is a speech that I think ought to be written, and soon. It’s titled, “Who is in charge?” and it’s about the ongoing, gut-wrenching debacle in the Gulf of Mexico.
The president is criticized for trusting BP too much. BP is criticized for its poor safety record, which government regulators are criticized for not holding BP accountable for earlier. Later, Tony Hayward is criticized for saying the wrong things and the president is criticized for not appearing angry enough.
I use the passive voice for a reason: I don’t believe it’s the media who’s making these criticisms. I believe it’s us.
I think we are looking at this mess like eight-year-old boys and girls who just spilled the paint all over the driveway. We are looking at one another—how did this happen? We are looking for someone to blame. We are looking for someone to fix it, before the parents get home. But it’s starting to dawn on us, that only our parents can fix it.
Only in our case, the parents are dysfunctional, self-involved, divorced drunks, neither of whom knows how to get paint off asphalt, and neither of whom can remember who got the paint in the first place.
It’s chaotic down here, we don’t know who’s in charge, is what we hear the CNN reporters saying down at the gulf.
The truth is, and we saw this with the banking crisis too, we don’t know who’s in charge anywhere. And what’s more, we don’t even know who we want to be in charge. But we want someone to be in charge, even if it ends in a good spanking.
It’s as if we’re waiting for God.
God isn’t going to fix this, and the parents—both parents, government and business—have to sober up and have an honest conversation in the morning light, about how they can work together, not perfectly.
But more harmoniously and effectively than this.
Or something like that.
BP can’t issue that speech right now. Maybe President Obama could, but it’s hard to talk big-picture when you’re in the middle of a hot mess.
No, this is a job for a thoughtful CEO who has been contemplating these issues and come to a few surprising conclusions.
Thus far, I’ve left BP and its beleaguered CEO Tony Hayward alone. I’m sure I’ve made them uneasy with my silence.
But the beauty of being quiet is that it gives you time to think. Watching the CEO aspects of this crisis, I find myself asking like lots of my communication-minded brethren, “When will these guys ever learn?”
And then I find myself upbraiding myself for the multilevel simple-mindedness of my own question.
First, “these guys” will never pre-learn the lessons of crisis PR, because each generation of executive has to experience things like this for the first time. We don’t criticize kindergarteners for having to learn how to read, just because we had to learn it from scratch ourselves. Similarly, Tony Hayward didn’t go to all of Fraser Seitel’s seminars on crisis leadership. (Clearly.)
Second, the question is, “learn what,” exactly? It’s easy to find flaws in BP’s crisis response—indeed, at times, it has been hard to find anything else—but it ought to be acknowledged that a disaster this big will beget a communication crisis that isn’t tied up in a bow by Day Two.
Finally, framing this matter as a problem of crisis PR misses the larger point, which is that many CEOs are scarily out of touch, both with how their companies operate day to day, and with how the “small people” live. Such truths come out in a crisis—”I want my life back”—but they are part of the cause of crises in the first place.
In sort, this isn’t a crisis-PR problem, nor even a Tony Hayward problem. It’s a CEO problem, a social problem, an economic problem, an environmental problem, a who’s-in-charge-(no-who’s-really-in-charge)-problem.
And if we blame Tony Hayward for it, we condemn ourselves to continue to live and die by the mistakes and lucky blunders of similarly blind social drunkards.
A communicator-correspondent who will go unnamed bleats on Facebook:
Dear Senior Executive: if you won’t speak to me, or email me, or provide me with ANY INFORMATION about what you like/don’t like, want/don’t want, and what your intentions are for the communication I’ve been directed to create for you out of thin air, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the components of the draft don’t meet your requirements. I’m good, but I’m—sadly—not actually a mind-reader!!!
It’s the old, “write down my ideas as if I had them” routine, and it’s as dispiriting as ever.
Executive communications professionals may hope they get their reward in heaven, for heaven knows, they have suffered here on earth.
Departing CNN anchor Cambell Brown’s statement in bold, our comments in itals.
I knew on the day that I accepted my job at CNN that a ratings victory at 8pm was going to be a formidable challenge. As I have been told over and over, this is the toughest timeslot in cable news. That is obviously due to the incredible talents of my 8pm competitors. I have also always marveled whenever a television anchor says that he or she pays no attention to ratings. I’m pretty sure the last time any anchor could honestly ignore ratings was well before I was born. Of course I pay attention to ratings. And simply put, the ratings for my program are not where I would like them to be. It is largely for this reason that I am stepping down as anchor of CNN’s “Campbell Brown”.
Sorry to use a sports analogy here, but imagine a football quarterback walking off the field halfway through the third quarter and just saying, “I suck. Put somebody else in.” It would be contemptible; it would also be nearly unprecedented. Anybody who has gotten as far as Campbell Brown has, thinks her supreme talent and judgment will, eventually, win viewers over.
To be clear: this is my decision, and one that I have been thinking about for some time. As for why, I could have said, that I am stepping down to spend more time with my children (which I truly want to do). Or that I am leaving to pursue other opportunities (which I also truly want to do). But I have never had much tolerance for others’ spin, so I can’t imagine trying to stomach my own. The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out of the way so that CNN can try something else.
And we’re to believe the CNN executives begged her to stay, but she was the clear-eyed one who knew “something else” would work better than her act. It’s possible, but it’s not the way to bet!
CNN will have to figure out what that is. The 8pm hour in cable news world is currently driven by the indomitable Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann. Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might co-exist in that line up is simply impossible for me. It is not who I am or who I want to be; nor is it who CNN asked me to be at any point. This is the right decision for me and I hope it will be a great opportunity for CNN.
And now the thinly veiled self-pity: It appears I’m just not enough of an asshole to compete these days. Sigh.
Since its launch three decades ago CNN has strived to be an independent, credible and enduring source of news. While the rest of the cable news world moved to opinion, CNN allowed me to stay true to my hard-news roots and supported me with a true commitment to old-school journalism. There is plenty of debate now about whether real journalism even has a place in primetime. I may be taking myself out of that debate on a nightly basis, but I am truly proud of the work we have done on this program and I do still believe that journalism has an essential place in primetime and at all times. I am also especially proud of the people who put this show on the air every night. They are an amazing, dedicated, loyal and caring team. To them, I will be forever grateful.
And I’ll leave it to others to compare me to Edward R. Murrow.
My plan right now is to help CNN through any transition, and then to enjoy, for the very first time, the nightly ritual of “Good Night Moon” and good night kisses with my two little boys. I wish my CNN colleagues all the best. And as long as bedtime doesn’t conflict with primetime, I will be watching and pulling for them.
So actually, in the end, I am leaving to spend more time with my family.
Communication guru Shel Holtz loves him some technology, and so I wasn’t surprised last week when he rebutted the pilers-on to a strong New York Times piece about how much time is wasted putting together ineffective PowerPoint presentations, and gaping at them.
… people need to be taught the right and wrong uses of PowerPoint. Would you get rid of hammers if your employees were using them to pound screws into wood? No, you’d teach them to use a screwdriver and show them when it’s appropriate to use a hammer.
Holtz’s argument strikes me as logically right but practically pointy-headed, because:
We know organizations won’t invest heavily in PowerPoint training … and I’d argue that they shouldn’t, because they’d be throwing good money after bad. What, you’re going to bring in an army of presentation coaches to transform every potential presenter in the organization—many of whom can’t write a coherent e-mail—into a sophisticated and sensitive balancer of verbal and visual communication cues?
No, you’re not. And so in 95% of its applications, PowerPoint will go on being the thought-substitution smoke machine it has been all along.
I won’t push for a ban on PowerPoint, because I live in Chicago, and in Chicago you never back a loser. People really don’t like to think, and most people who make presentations don’t have any one clear point to make. They have a few dozen random thoughts, which they can’t organize in their head, so they sprinkle them onto slides and call them “bullets.” (They’re still random thoughts!)
But I am thinking about organizing a PowerPoint-free conference.
“I can only say that I am deeply sorry that our management—starting with me—was not more prescient and that we did not foresee what lay before us,” says former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. See his whole testimony here, and weigh in on its effectiveness.
