Oh My Gosh, This Is Incredible!
Not all leadership communication emanates from stages. “Oh my gosh, this is incredible!” GM CEO Mary Barra exclaims as she climbs into the backseat of an autonomous vehicle for the first …
Exec comms reset
The past two years have been challenging for executive communications professionals. As people turned to government, community, and business leaders for help making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, the reckoning …
Et tu, Harvard Business Review?
“The formal speech is dying,” was one typical anguished speechwriter’s response to the Speechwriters’ Census 2021, released last month by the Professional Speechwriters Association. “The verbatim speech is on its way …
How speechwriters are doing (and what you should do about it)
I went to get some pants let out a few weeks ago, and discovered every tailor in Chicago is overwhelmed with such work. This didn’t surprise me, as I’d just …
Communication Isn’t Helping. Why Not?
I run the Professional Speechwriters Association, and I’m publisher of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine. So I’m going to open this session with a real old-fashioned speech. I think and hope …
From “Oratorical Inflation” … to Rhetorical Recession?
Intrepid Vital Speeches rhetoric editor Neil Hrab unearthed a great speechwriting-industry time capsule, written by New York Times’ reporter Don Oberdorfer and published on Sunday, April 26, 1964—surely to the stifled consternation of …
Back to the Future, in Speechwriting
Editor’s note: At the Professional Speechwriters Association, we naturally focus on new developments and burgeoning trends. It’s our job to stay current on the changing leadership communication landscape—and to help …
Exec Comms, Employee Comms: We Are One. But One What?
Last week my colleague Sharon McIntosh and I co-hosted the Executive Communication Council’s Employee Communication Summit, which participants have told us offered the most sustained helping of good ideas, true …
Rhetoric Turned Inward, to “Turn All Eyes Outward”
A colleague of mine always insisted she had no idea what employee communication was, even after working for an internal communications consultancy for 20 years. She had a lot in …
The sound of my own counsel
A CEO asked his exec comms director, among others: Should I proactively make a statement against recent and looming changes to voting regulations? And the comms chief asked me for …