Did Jacinda Ardern just teach us our biggest leadership lesson yet?
They say don’t meet your heroes. But last year I had the chance to meet Jacinda Ardern. In person she was more gracious, empathic and effective than the reputation that …
“Stakeholder capitalism,” and the corporate speechwriter
New York University history professor Kim Phillips-Fein had a guest essay in The New York Times last week that got under my skin, on behalf of my friends and colleagues in corporate executive …
Bonfire of the Inanities
If you didn’t read “CEOs Were Our Heroes … At Least According to Them” on the front page of the business section of Sunday’s New York Times, I understand. Reading the …
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 …
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 …
Speechwriting elder, respect thyself
It’s an unkept secret among speechwriters that if you want to talk to the head of the Professional Speechwriters Association, all you have to do is email me and ask. …
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 …
A prayer for the communicator: an insider and an outsider both
“Please, God, let us always have outsiders and give me the grace, in my better moments, to know how to be one,” the old communicator wrote. “But I’m torn because I want to be an insider too.”
After This Terrible Year, a New Hope
As any year ends and another begins, most of us quietly, maybe half-consciously, take stock, organize our memories, gird ourselves to begin again. We put a period at the end …
Not just nice—needed
Today a group called Speechwriters of Color announces its formation. Is this truly necessary? I think it is—but I understand why some would ask the question. The Professional Speechwriters Association, …