I’m the Guy Who Wrote “The Art of the Deal”

Good morning fellow scribes, wordsmiths, storytellers, unpaid novelists, laid off journalists, untenured scholars, professional inventors and reinventors. I come to you this morning as a rueful, remorseful and penitent—a product …

The Right Book for Right Now

Review of:  FDR on Democracy: The Greatest Speeches and Writings of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Harvey J. Kaye (available via Amazon in both print and ebook) In these days of …

Book Review: A Feast of Speeches

Review of: Transatlantic Rhetoric – Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes by Tom Wright For more than 10 years, Tom Wright of the University of Sussex has concentrated his scholarly energies on …

“Good Intentions”

About 40 years ago, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop, waiting to have a conversation with one of my students. We’d just finished a semester at the University …

Domestic Abuse: Words Are Not for Throwing

“We don’t hit, we don’t bite, and we don’t throw things.” Those are the first rules any parent teaches any child. And then the parents put the kids to bed, …

The Communication Manifesto, Revisited

You’d yawn, if you started reading here about the trouble with corporate life these days, and corporate communication and I was saying stuff like: “Employee levels of distrust have probably …

Leaders Don’t Guess, They Guide

Three times a week, I write a newsletter called Executive Communication Report (to which you should subscribe, because it is useful, and free). Published under the auspices of the Executive Communication Council, its …

No, Kids, Life Is Not a ‘Journey’

Earlier this month, we pulled together the annual commencement speech issue of Vital Speeches of the Day.  Though I don’t love commencement speeches as much as the best commencement speech writer of …