Draw Down the Lightning
I. Let the experiment be made! Let the experiment be made. With those words, Benjamin Franklin put his pen down for the day. I imagine him looking over his personal …
A Rare Memoir from a Corporate Speechwriter
Review of Cross Bronx: A Writing Life by Peter Quinn (Fordham Press; 2022; 256 pages) Peter Quinn’s facility with language has helped him build an enviable reputation as a novelist and historian …
Is This Book the New ‘West Wing’?
On a road trip with my wife last weekend, I listened to former President Obama Chief Speechwriter Cody Keenan’s new memoir, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for …
What I Saw at the Reunion
As a trade journalist, I used to cover communication-industry conferences as compellingly as industry conferences could be covered, I thought. Now that I run an industry conference, and oversee the …
Badassery, at the 2022 PSA World Conference
We may seem a quiet, cerebral group, practitioners of a refined craft dating back to classical Greece, when the likes of Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates dusted the hems of their …
To corporate leaders who wonder why folks don’t want to return to the office …
Jean-Paul Sartre once clarified the meaning of his famous line, which came from an existentialist play he wrote in 1944: “Hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has …
Contributors’ Guidelines for the new Executive Communication Report website
Our new Executive Communication Report website exists primarily as common bullpen for practitioners of executive communication to visit for inspiration, instruction and professional camaraderie. We also want it to become …
Burned Out, and Wanting to Talk About It
When I sat down in a conference room in San Francisco to listen to a presentation on executive communications, I wasn’t expecting to take it … so personally. As researcher …
CEOs Don’t Have a ‘Bully Pulpit’
Some old activists in my neighborhood tell a story from forty years ago, when Pizza Hut was tearing down a historic corner building to put in one of its cheesy …
A speech can do the impossible, instantly
I’ve shown clips of this speech in talks around the world, because it demonstrates the power of speeches to convey the humanity of their givers—sometimes in ways the givers don’t …