Don't, don't, do; won't, won't, will

Sing along with me now the words of Bob Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.

And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him

As they rode him in custody down to the station

And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Take the rag away from your face.

Now ain't the time for your tears.

Through two more verses, Dylan sticks with his story that now ain't the time for your tears. Which brings him to the part where "the ladder of law has no top and no bottom." And the judge:

Stared at the person who killed for no reason

Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.

And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,

And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,

William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.

Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,

Bury the rag deep in your face

For now's the time for your tears.

The first time I heard this song, what made me sit up and take notice was its structure: Don't, Don't, Don't ... Do.

Now comes columnist Matthew DeBord, who starts his December 17 piece by saying "I will not talk about Tiger Woods' mistresses..." It is the first of 29 consecutive sentences that start with "I will not talk about..." and end with some Tigerish detail. Mr. DeBord has to write a few longer-than-usual sentences to avoid breaking his "I will not talk about" structure. The longest one contains 63 words. He then adroitly whittles down to a sequence of sentences with word-counts of 13, 11, 10, 10, 9, 6, and 7, bringing us to the threshold of what he WILL talk about.

He starts clean and crisp: "But I will talk about golf." Then he proffers a few opinions about golf that are not quite worth all the suspense, before closing with some hokum about games and real life.

I've always thought I would someday use the don't, don't, do model for a speech. When the time comes, I'll draw inspiration from the narrative compass of Dylan and DeBord's commitment to structure.

Lighting a light for the topic sentence

I'm reading the words of economist Paul Samuelson, published in 1965. They please me on a level that I don't quite understand, so I read them again. After a third reading, it begins to dawn on me: it's not the subject matter, it's the construction. Says Professor Samuelson:

One should not read too much into the established theorem. It does not prove that actual competitive markets work well. It does not say that speculation is a good thing or that randomness of price changes would be a good thing. It does not prove that anyone who makes money in speculation is ipso facto deserving of the gain or even that he has accomplished something good for society or for anyone but himself. All or none of these may be true, but that would require a different investigation.

It's a paragraph that stands in tribute to the topic sentence. This bundle of five sentences is telling us: Don't do this. Here's why. Here's why. Here's why. Over and out. Ah yes, the way they could still construct a paragraph in the mid-20th Century. Why am I getting this image of Captain Walker in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? Why am I hearing Savannah Nix in the final scene?

Time counts and keeps countin', and we knows now finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our trek, and we gotta travel it. And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna lead. Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from. But most of all we 'members the man that finded us, him that came the salvage. And we lights the city, not just for him, but for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home.

A symphonic moment

Four guys, sitting in the sun, talking about the work they do.

First guy says, "I tend to get hired when there's complexity, or ambiguity, and they need someone to make things clear. I get hired for clarity."

Second guy says, "I get hired when things are cold and stiff, and they need some feeling. I get hired for emotion."

Third guy: "I get hired for design."

Fourth guy: "I get hired for narrative."

Not unlike the night my grandson walked into the room where I was working and said, "Strings, brass, percussion, woodwinds," and walked back out.

Got narratives?

"Running Without a Narrative" said the op-ed headline in yesterday's New York Times. Cameron Stracher was telling us that, when it came to the decline of American distance running:

Some have blamed performance-enhancing drugs for the loss of American dominance on the roads; others have criticized United States training methods; still others see a shifting of interest to other sports, like lacrosse and soccer. But the real reason for the decline is a failure of narrative.

On the same page today, Tom Friedman uses the word "narrative" in three consecutive sentences:

I don't think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se.... Rather, he has a "narrative" problem. He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected.

Friedman believes the narrative Obama needs is "nation-building at home." Stracher believes the narrative of marathon runners needs to get back to the racers and the race, instead of the current emphasis on human interest stories like the "blind dog running with his septuagenerarian master."

Everybody's talking about "narrative" today, usually in the sense of someone who needs one. Let me tell you my own story about someone who has one.

Last week I received a call offering to enroll May in a "buddy program" for Alzheimer's patients. For the next seven months, a first-year medical student will be her partner in "a fun and friendly relationship." The orientation session was last Friday.

The director of the program spoke for about two minutes. Rather than quote a bunch of details about how the program works, she told a story. I wasn't taking notes, but it went something like this:

This program is now in it's 12th year. So there are 110 people who have been on the journey that you are starting today. It all began with Dr. X, who was on the faculty of the medical school. When he learned that his memory lapses were actually the early stages of Alzheimer's, it was very shocking to him. But he reacted by saying, "Send me a medical student whom I can mentor, so in addition to the science of what causes this disease, they can experience first-hand the human cost it exacts." And today each of you follows in his footsteps, as a mentor to your junior partner.

This narrative took us out of our personal story full of unknown twists and turns, and put us into a connected series of happenings. There were those who came before us. There would be others who would take our places. There was a progenitor, who had looked at his options and decided to make a gift of his condition to someone who could benefit from it -- to be of-service rather than in-need-of-service. We could model our behavior after his.

Got something unpleasant coming up in your organization? Thinking about how to tell people? Trying to marshall all the facts? Don't forget to craft a narrative. Think of it as a story that people can see themselves in. A story that makes sense of what's happening and provides role models that guide behaviors.

Short words, short sentences, good communication

May, my wife, has early-onset Alzheimer's. For years we toured the medical establishment trying to find out what was wrong. We heard a lot of doctor talk that didn't help at all -- until we came to Dr. Weintraub. She spent a morning with May and then sat down with the two of us for more doctor talk about more specialists and more tests -- but she also offered to see me privately. Here's how it went:

Me: You've already decided what it is, haven't you.

Her: Yes.

Me: And you've decided it's Alzheimer's, haven't you.

Her: Yes.

Me: How long does it take to run its course?

Her: Ten years. It goes slow and then it goes fast. You're still in the slow part.

Everything I needed to know, in 18 one-syllable words, the longest of which contained five letters.

The official diagnosis came four months later. It is early-onset Alzheimer's. We're still in the slow part.

The perfect corporate statement

Well, surely you know the great David Allan Coe rendition of Steve Goodman's You Never Even Called Me By My Name. The one where he sings the first three verses and then speaks the next part:

Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song, and he told me it was the perfect country and western song. I wrote him back a letter and told him it was not the perfect country and western song because he hadn't said anything at all about mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk. Well, he sat down and wrote another verse to this song and he sent it to me and after reading it I realized that my friend had written the perfect country and western song. And I felt obliged to include it on this album. The last verse goes like this here:

Well I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison...

Well, I thought of that today as I was eating a Mrs. Fields cookie and reading a nicely written corporate statement on the bag. It started out like this:

In 1977 cookie pioneer Debbi Fields wasn't trying to create the gourmet cookie boom, she was simply impassioned about making the finest oven fresh cookie possible.

And I can hear the corporate voice saying,

Well, you haven't written the perfect corporate statement because you haven't said anything about passion ("impassioned" doesn't count), or commitment, or quality, or the consumer experience, or world-class.

So the copywriter comes back with this perfect second paragraph:

Thirty years later we are still moved by that passion -- honoring that same commitment to the signature cookie recipes and quality standards that make your experience at Mrs. Fields world-class.

And so the corporate voice felt obliged to include that statement on the paper bag that I was reading as I ate my cookie.

Harmonious writing

Over at presentationzen.com, Garr Reynolds has a post entitled Wa: the key to clear, harmonious design. He begins by saying "if there is one principle that reveals the essence of the Zen aesthetic found in Japanese traditional art and design -- and life in general -- it is harmony. The kanji that has been used in Japan for the past 1300 years or so to represent this concept is 和 (wa)." He offers "just seven things to think about as you strive to bring more wa into your own design solutions." They are:

1. Embrace economy of materials and means
2. Repeat design elements
3. Keep things clean and clutter-free
4. Avoid symmetry
5. Avoid the obvious in favor of the subtle
6. Think not only of yourself, but of the other
7. Remain humble and modest

Those seven things work for the writer, as well. And it's not a bad idea to think of writing as verbal design. I have been working for the past several months to write an essence statement for a new venture. I finally got it down to four sentences:

Every company has the few who decide and the many who determine. That is, the few decide what needs to happen and the many determine how successfully it actually does happen. And between the few and the many, there's a chasm. We cross the chasm, to connect the few with the many.

If words are materials and sentences are means, I think we achieved an economy of materials and means with this statement. We repeated design elements with "the few" and "the many," and also with the alliteration of decide/determine, and cross/chasm/connect (with a nod to Geoffrey A. Moore). It's clean, but not as clutter-free as I would like (I would prefer to do without the second sentence). Symmetry was not an issue here. Our choice of words took us out of the more obvious ways to describe what we do. And let's lump the last two things together -- think not of yourself and remain humble and modest. Our credo in this venture is "subsume and resonate," (with a nod to Ralph Siu) where subsume reminds us "to find our place as part of something more comprehensive than ourselves" and resonate directs us "to evoke a broadly shared feeling, belief or understanding." You can find our modest beginnings of this conversation at subsumeandresonate.com

An obit, of sorts

I was one of about 40 people who received an email that one of us, from way back when, had passed away. He was a boy from the South Plains of Texas who went to college in his home town and then joined the Peace Corps, was sent to Nepal, and stayed to become a Buddhist monk. I didn't know him well, but I felt moved to reach out to the other recipients of the email and tell a little story from 40 years ago:

One night after a party I found myself in that all-night restaurant where everyone used to go and eat a chef's salad to sober up. Bugs, who was living at home and driving the family station wagon, nevertheless found himself at the table with us. He offered a bunch of us a ride back to wherever we'd left our cars. There'd been a light rain, and you know what light rain does to the layer of dust on a Lubbock street. A car comes sliding through an intersection, manages to turn sideways, but doesn't stop its skid until it kisses the driver's side of the Humphries family wagon. The perpetrators speed off into the night and I know Bugs is thinking the same thing I'm thinking, which was "wow, that could have been a lot worse--glad it's over." But the chorus from the back of the station wagon was of a different ilk: "Follow that car! They can't get away with that! Come on Bugs, catch 'em!" And Bugs put the pedal to the metal. We chased them all the way to the street where they lived. They left the car in the driveway and ran into a small wood frame house. "Block the driveway, Bugs," came the cry from the back of the wagon. "We got 'em now." Well, yes we did. We had them. They would have to shoot their way out.

Bugs and I and the other two weakest, meekest, members of the group were left to stand guard while the guys who had insisted on giving chase walked off to find a pay phone to call the authorities. A police cruiser came quickly, and a check of the license plate showed that we had essentially made a citizens' arrest of some folks who were wanted for more than a few crimes. The officers thanked us, and we all went home as if it were all in a night's work. I have no memory of Bugs past that night. For sure, I never knew him by his monastic name of Tsültrim Töndrup. But we took a ride together once. I finished off my remembrance with this:

In my memory, this little story has always been about Bugs. A peace-loving kid, monk-in-the-making, living at home, borrowing the family station wagon on a Friday night, being a nice guy and giving a bunch of drunks a ride back to wherever they had left their cars, caught up in a random hit-and-run accident, nobody hurt, no serious damage to the station wagon -- sudden danger but no harm done -- and then urged into a high-speed chase to a rough part of town and posted to guard duty over a carload of fugitives from the law. And he never said, wait, it's not really my car, I was supposed to be home by now, I'm actually not supposed to be on this side of town. When the boys said go, Bugs went. And when the boys said block the driveway, Bugs blocked the driveway. And when the boys said wait here while we go for help, Bugs waited there. It could have been right there, that night, on the mean streets of Lubbock, that Bugs made a pledge to himself: if I live through this, I'll join the Peace Corps, and if my mom doesn't kill me for smashing up the car, I'll devote myself to a monastic life. RIP Bugs.

Unambiguously unrelenting, unyielding, undeterred and undaunted

The question "What does 'good' look like?" was close to the surface of my brain when I was asked to get on a conference call about writing an introductory statement to an annual report. The proposed theme was "Shaping our own future." I was given a list of key messages that began with a statement about staying "ahead of the curve" despite "unprecedented economic challenges."

On the call, I said I wasn't very interested in asserting that we were shaping our own future, but I could get interested in exploring what "good" looks like in a time of unprecedented economic challenges. My friends gave me an hour to come up with something, because it was 11 o'clock on a Friday morning and the design concept would be presented on Monday afternoon.

This is what I wrote:

In the face of unprecedented economic challenges, what does uncommon achievement look like? We believe it's unrelenting client focus and unyielding pursuit of service quality and operational productivity, powered by undeterred associates, enabling an undaunted growth agenda and leading to financials that are undeniably solid, and unquestionably stable. Unambiguously.

I averred that the repetition of the prefix un- was an appropriate way to state positives in an off-the-charts bad year. When nobody is setting the world on fire, pressing on with undeterred associates and an undaunted growth agenda looks pretty good.

The Un- concept was presented as an alternative to Shaping our own future, and Un- won.

Oh, and why was the question, "What does 'good' look like?" on the surface of my brain? Because I had just finished two very fun days with three colleagues talking about how to translate leadership intentions into organizational behaviors in a time of upheaval. One of the levers we had settled on was to answer the question "What does 'good' look like?" in the new world we're trying to create. More on that later...

A sticky sentence

The second principle of sticky ideas, in the Heath Brothers' fine book, Made to Stick, is Unexpectedness. "We need to violate people's expectations," they say. It is not their intention to make this next assertion, but it is mine: you can violate people's expectations with a single sentence. My five-year-old grandson did it recently in a supermarket parking lot.

He hadn't had any breakfast or lunch, and we were in the middle of grocery shopping about 1 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Adam wanted to start eating the fresh pizza we had picked up in the deli department. I said no. He asked again at the checkout counter. I said no. On the way to the car, he asked if he could eat a slice on the way home. Again I said no. As I started to back out of the parking space, his stomach growled, and he said:

"I just heard myself starving."

Grammy and I laughed so hard I had to stop the car. I've repeated that sentence to lots of people, and they in turn have repeated it. Expectations are violated every time.

Words: how they look, and the sounds they make

I was working with a graphic designer friend on the renaming of a company, and he suggested the name: plumb.

I guess I didn't warmly embrace it. So he says, "Bill, sometimes you pick a word for how it looks more than for what it means." He points out the descending "p" and ascending "b" at the front and back of the word, and in the middle, the round mounds of the "m" right behind the scooping "u." And I saw the beauty of it all.

Tonight I was looking at a piece of print copy I had written and thought, "Yeah, and sometimes you choose a word for the sound it makes." Like this:

There’s a place where this can happen.

A pace at which it all unfolds to your liking.

A case for why it works.

A grace in the daily nature of it.

And a space, in the midst of it all –

among the activities, the friendships, the continuum of care –

a space that feels like home to you.

One sentence

He was steady in his approach, and positive in his outlook.

Our leader wanted to pay tribute to his father in a speech. My colleague was asking questions trying to draw out some life lesson from the father-son relationship. We listened as the son described his early family life. Eventually, my colleague reduced it all to that single sentence: "Well," she said, "it sounds like your father was steady in his approach and positive in his outlook -- which is what we all like about your leadership style." 

So did the father ever say, "Son, be steady in your approach, and positive in your outlook"? 

No. 

Did the son ever say, "My dad was always steady in his approach and positive in his outlook"? 

No. 

It was the listener in this conversation, taking what she liked about the son as our leader and finding a way to match it with the description of the dad. And then she gave it elegant voice in 11 words averaging less than 1.5 syllables each.

We used her sentence early in the speech, and came back to it late. I was comforted by it the first time I heard it, and I'm comforted by it now. Give me leaders who are steady in their approach and positive in their outlooks, and I'll sleep well at night.   

On the physicality of words

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in yesterday's New York Times about "the lost art of reading aloud." About listening to a book being read aloud and reading it aloud yourself, he says:

Both are good ways to learn something important about the rhythms of language. But one of the most basic tests of comprehension is to ask someone to read aloud from a book. It reveals far more than whether the reader understands the words. It reveals how far into the words -- and the pattern of the words -- the reader really sees.

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words. To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips, is very different than reading with your eyes alone. The language becomes a part of the body, which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality, in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company. The words are not mere words. They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading.

Over the course of my married life, I have occasionally been called to account for my shortcomings as a mate. The last time this happened, I suggested that we shouldn't cherry-pick the downsides without considering the wholeness of what I bring to a relationship. So I started listing the upsides. I ran through the predictable Men are from Mars qualities and then surprised myself with a heartfelt "and when I'm reading a book I think you'd like, I read it aloud to you, page after page, late into the night, until you fall asleep--hell, that alone is worth cutting some slack on a few character flaws." As I reached the "that alone" part I had convinced myself that this was powerful stuff. Well it may have been.   

Jarvis, page 117

I realize now that there's a particular kind of paragraph that makes me happy. It's built on a parade of simple declarative sentences with parallel constructions. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Subject-verb-object. Often involving the same subject or the same verb. I found happiness today on page 117 of Jeff Jarvis's book, What would Google Do? Third paragraph down:

Newmark operates by many of the rules in this book. He created a platform and network for his communities. He trusts the wisdom of his crowd. He brings communities elegant organization. He understands that free is a business model. He relies on the gift economy. He dooms middlemen. He runs a disarmingly simple system. But then he adds his own unifying principle of technology, communities, and the internet. Here it is, with classic Craig brevity: "Get out of the way."

The cadence of the paragraph goes like this:

Newmark ta-da ta-da ta-da. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

He da-dum. 

But then! ... he deetle-dee-dee. 

And here it is: babada-boom.  

All my children

My teammate emailed to ask how I felt about the piece I had written for our client. My first thought was: With the changes that were made during the review process, I felt like the copy had become a gondola car for predetermined messages that would not be credible or even interesting. But I didn't say that. Instead, this is what I said in my return email:

A client asked me one time if I felt differently about each speech that I wrote. I told him they were all my children, and I loved them one and all. But for some, I saved to send them to the best schools; and for others, I encouraged them to keep going to baseball practice. For this little piece I just wrote, I hope there's a decent trade school, and maybe somewhere down the line, a job as a draftsman or a teller in a bank. 

My teammate wrote back:

At Version 4, it needs to move out of the house and live somewhere else.

Later we wondered about a project that seemed to have run away from home to join the circus ... and we were pretty much okay with that. 

What Bill Simmons wrote...

Three great paragraphs from Bill Simmons at espn.com: 

I will always appreciate this Bulls team because they did the impossible: They made a fan base that just won a title care even MORE about their own team. Last season barely matters right now. All that matters is winning the most incredible playoff series ever played. I don't even care what happens after Game 7; we can't beat the LeBrons anyway. This is our NBA Finals. Right here. The Celtics fans feel that way, and so do the Bulls fans. I can promise you.

I thought about all of these things during my marathon walk. And this, too: When I was 6, my father took me to the greatest basketball game ever played: Game 5 of the 1976 Finals. I slept through the second half, the first overtime and most of the second overtime before waking up for Havlicek's running banker. I can still see it. Happened right in front of us. The Celtics won that one in three overtimes. Thirty-three years later (ironic number), they played another three-OT classic and lost. I was a little boy for the first one; for the second one, I watched most of it with my little boy. He had no idea what was going on. When he's older, I'm going to tell him that he did.

Sports keeps moving. You get older. You pass the love down to your kids. You think you will care less ... and you don't. The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. Two toe-on-the-line 3-pointers ... I can't stop thinking about them. Add everything up and that's how I ended up 500 blocks from my house fretting about Game 7 and rehashing everything that happened in the other six.

What do I like about this? 

Those compact sentences: This is our NBA Finals. I can still see it. You pass the love down to your kids. 

The repetitive constructions: The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. 

The linkage between three generations of Celtics fans.

The reference to "Havlicek's running banker." (Every now and then, we ought to write for the 10 percent of our audience that needs no explanation. That 10 percent will love it, and the other 90 percent will get it from the context. "Havlicek's running banker" maintains the cadence. And in this run of sentences, cadence is more important than the information that would have been gained from, say, "before waking up with six seconds left and the Celtics down by one when John Havlicek, famous for revolutionizing the sixth-man role, took the ball and drove for a running one-hander in traffic to put the Celtics ahead 111-110 as the horn sounded.")

Take those three paragraphs and run them through your Microsoft Word spell-checker with the "readability" function activated and here's what you get:

Words per sentence: 10.7

Characters per word: 4.1

Passive sentences: 0%

Flesch reading ease: 83.2

Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.1

Fourth grade reading level! The speech I wrote yesterday was 11th grade. 

A speech very much worth giving

Last week, Garr Reynolds, in his Presentation Zen blog, singled out Shai Agassi's presentation as his personal favorite of the TED '09 Conference. This week he came back to defend his choice against a reader who questioned how he could recommend "such an imperfect, 'awful' talk as a sample model to follow." 

The presentation in question is a story of how one man started asking himself how you could run a whole country without oil. That was four years ago, and now he has the country (Israel), he has raised the $200 million he needs to build a nationwide infrastructure for an all-electric car fleet, and he has a car company (Renault-Nissan) committed to building 100,000 battery-powered cars in the first year of the program. His TED presentation is the story of how all this came to pass, and what is at stake. 

Let's see how the Agassi presentation stacks up against our Speech Worth Giving architecture that we introduced in our April 11 post. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best: 

Knowledge (something you know that no one else knows): 10  

How to obsolete the internal combustion engine within the bounds of today's science and today's economics, riding the power of consumer-up and not edict-down? Yeah, that's a 10.   

Vision (a picture of the future that makes sense in the present): 10

Converting an entire country to an automotive fleet with zero carbon footprint? A 10 hardly seems high enough. 

Leadership (tell a story and provide "what's in it for me"): 10

The story is clear and compelling; the storytelling is direct and intense. And is there something for me in a more convenient, more affordable, emission-free car, scalable to 99 percent of the population? Yes there is -- for me, and for my grandchildren. 

Passion (voice and body language): 10

His voice is authoritative and authentic, his body language crisp and confident -- by themselves probably not quite worthy of a 10, but he did walk away from the executive suite at SAP because Shimon Peres asked him what could be more important than saving a country and saving the world.  

Urgency (see it, feel it): 10 

I can see the urgency in his controlled use of facts and figures. And then, in the stunning last minute and 12 seconds, you feel the urgency down to your toes when he says, "We have to do it within this presidential term, because if we don't, we'll lose our economy, right after we've lost our morality." 

So his slides weren't that many and weren't that great -- his knowledge, his vision and his story carry the day. I stand with Garr. 

Looking for the best

Over at duarte.com they're asking for candidates to comprise a "Top 20 Speeches of All Time." You might want to drop by and offer your favorite, and check out what's been submitted so far. There are a lot of nominations from the TED Conference, and a number of diatribes and soliloquies from the movies. 

One contributor has offered not a speech, but a list of "21 skills of great preachers." Scroll down to the first entry on April 16 and follow the link. The first four skills (content, passion, credibility, prepared) would be no surprise on any skills list for great speakers in general. But it gets interesting as the numbers get bigger. For example:  

#9. Self-revealing

#10. Confidence

#19. Movement

#20 Decision (as in, they ask for one)

#21 Landing (as in, they land their message on the first pass)   

A codification of what I have learned

I have summoned everything I know about writing speeches and put it in one diagram. To explain:

1. We start with something the speaker knows that no one else knows. What we are going to get from this speech, we could only get from you. 

2. But knowing something is not good enough reason for you to be speaking. Because of what you know, you are expected to have a vision of what could be, a vision that's news to the rest of us. It needs to be a vision of the future that makes sense in the present. It might appear to us as well-nigh impossible to reach, but it makes sense to us that we would want to get there. With these two steps, you have created a gap that the whole of the speech will try to bridge.

3. To cross the gap, we look first to your leadership. We will follow if you can do two things: (1) tell a story in which we can see ourselves as players, and (2) be clear about "what's in it for me." Earlier this year, I wrote a speech that a CEO would deliver at a product launch for several thousand sales reps. He would be speaking last, following the entire product team, the vice president-marketing and the vice president-sales. Everything that could possibly be said about the product would have already been said. But there would be no end to the stories that could be told. And we found one that only he could tell, which went like this: 

I was there when we were debating whether to develop this product at all. The pluses and the minuses were evenly matched. And then one day a guest sat in my office and said one thing, in a single sentence, that opened my eyes to the huge potential of this product, and from that moment, I pushed for us to develop it. Now, as you take it to market, you are probably thinking only in terms of what it means to your customers, and maybe what it means to our U.S. operations. But let me assure you, the eyes of our global corporation are on you. They're watching in Europe. They're watching in Asia. The chairman of the board is watching. This product that you are taking to market is nothing less than the beginning of the next generation of our corporation throughout the world. 

That was a story that began with something we could only get from the speaker; it ended with his vision of a future that made sense in the present; and every member of the audience could see themselves as players in that story. 

The "what's-in-it-for-me" should be explicit. Tell them straight-up why they should care about what you have to say. In another recent speech, I summarized the wiifm in the close:

We're stepping up into a new sales archetype. Let's run through its qualities one more time: Bringing in more business at a lower cost with greater predictability. Closing more deals. Generating more value with each sale. A higher degree of customer satisfaction and loyalty at every touchpoint. New technologies, new sales models, and new processes. Leveraging people, infrastructure, knowledge, communication and collaboration between sellers and buyers. You can't pull one lever and get that. You can't innovate in a single system, process, value chain, market segment or geography and make it happen. You have to innovate everywhere, at once. It's not that hard if you know what to do. 

4. If you've made it this far, you have a very good speech -- if you were planning to mail a copy to everyone in your audience. But because they're all gathering in one place to hear you speak it, you still have work to do. Your audience will respond to the passion you display for the words you are delivering. Your passion will come across in how you look, how you move and how you sound. Which means you have to rehearse. One of the biggest mistakes we see in business meetings today is that the last rehearsals are treated as extensions of the composition process. People are still peppering the speaker with, "Why are you saying that? This word still hits me wrong. Shouldn't we be mentioning such-and-such?" As if getting all the words exactly right will guarantee success. There comes a point at which I'll trade a 5 percent improvement in content for a 200 percent improvement in delivery. 

5. For 20 years I've been following Professor John P. Kotter's thoughts on business leadership. In 1996 he published his seminal "Eight Steps for Successful Large-Scale Change," in which Step #1 is "Increase Urgency." Six years later, after rigorous study of how leaders were dealing with his eight steps, he reported that "rarely" does successful change follow the path of "analysis-think-change." Rather, "almost always" it follows the path of "see-feel-change." Therefore, if you believe the purpose of a speech is to get people to change what they think, feel, believe and/or do, then you have to convey a sense of urgency when you speak. And if you're keeping up with Kotter, you don't try to create urgency on the strength of your business case; you do things that enable people to "see" and "feel" the urgent conditions. A couple of years ago, I was working on a product launch in which the marketing director started a session by sharing the stage with an easel that held a copy of the marketing plan. The marketing director didn't say anything for a few minutes. He just stared at the marketing plan as if expecting it to talk. Finally he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, there stands the marketing plan. It hasn't made a single sale." He then began a rousing pitch for a committed effort from every sales rep. From time to time, he would stop and wait for the marketing plan on the easel to do something, then shrug and put the onus back on the reps. You could see the futility of depending on the plan to carry the day. You could feel the individual responsibility to launch the product successfully.

The "Knowledge" and "Vision" blocks of this diagram speak to the left brain of the listener. The "story" component of the "leadership" arrow speaks to the right brain. The "passion" and "urgency" arrows prompt the preverbal reptile brains -- where the "fight or flight" response is housed and where short-term memory is converted to long-term.

As I have begun to use this diagram, I have noticed its effectiveness as:

-- A speech development tool

-- A speech-coaching tool

-- A speaker evaluation tool

-- A closed-loop feedback tool 

Ten years ago a chief strategy officer asked me what my speech development process was. I told him I had no process. He snorted and went off to write his own speech. I'm ready for him now.           

Maybe the perfect paragraph

As the president stepped up to 10 Downing Street, he leant over, made eye contact, said something courteous, and shook the hand of the police officer standing guard. There's always a police officer there; he is a tourist logo in his ridiculous helmet. He tells you that this is London, and the late 19th century. No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before, and like everyone else who has his palm touched by Barack Obama, he was visibly transported and briefly forgot himself. He offered the hand to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who was scuttling behind.

What is a paragraph, you ask? I give you this, written by A. A. Gill, a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times of London. 

He starts with a keen observation passed to us in story form. We can see it; we get where this is going. But before we can settle in, right there in the second sentence, the observer intrudes and the story is interrupted. "There's always a police officer there..." A simple statement, and we get that too. Then in the very same sentence, a surprise: the tourist slam and the helmet jab--and we learn that the observer is not merely of the objective kind. 

A follow-on sentence extends the fun, which turns out to be a set-up for: "No one has ever shaken the hand of the policeman before..." With this we have the twin pillars on which the paragraph is built: There is always a police officer there/no one has ever shaken his hand. Always/never. 

Suddenly it's clear that the swipes against the officer's appearance were structural--they provided the proper spacing between the two load-bearing statements. But we're not done yet. We're told something that we can only take on faith: the policeman was transported and briefly forgot himself. Excellent writing has prepared us to believe this assertion that only the policeman himself could have actually experienced. 

We leave the paragraph the same way we entered it--the story rejoined: policeman offers hand to prime minister. And if it's the attitudinal subplot you prefer, you're rewarded again: whereas we came in with the American president "stepping up" to 10 Downing Street, we go out with the British prime minister "scuttling behind" ... at the entrance to his own official residence and headquarters of Her Majesty's Government. 

(whence it came)    

What Roy said

A sports reporter asks Roy Williams if he'd like to see Tyler Hansbrough and Blake Griffin play one-on-one. Williams is the basketball coach of the North Carolina Tarheels, Hansbrough is his star player, and Griffin is the star player for the Oklahoma Sooners. You can go to school on the way Williams answers.

He says he'd rather eat a peanut butter cookie than watch the two big men go one-on-one, but then adds this:

Blake is perhaps more gifted, more explosive. And Tyler is just so focused in what he's tried to do to make himself the best player he can be. During the course of the game, when they were matched up, I would love to watch that, but only in a team situation. Who would read the defense better? Who would throw it back out better? Who would post up better? Who would get to the offensive boards better? I think that part would really be a lot of fun.

What he did:

1. Restated the question on his own terms (not one-on-one, but matched up in a team context)

2. Turned it into a story (the gifted player against the self-made player)

3. Communicated his personal passion (he "would love to watch that")

4. Told us what to look for in a beautifully concise sequence of identically constructed interrogative sentences that display his insider knowledge in ways the average basketball fan can absorb

With those four principles, you can write a difference-making speech. 

One sentence

"Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy." -- Karl E. Weick

Those are certainly eight adjectives you don't usually see in the same sentence with "organization." By the time you got to "grouchy," did you remember that he's talking about an effective organization?

Governing words

From a piece on presidential speechwriter Jon Favreau in today's Chicago Tribune, three points worth noting:

The value of words...

"I've never worked for a politician who values words as much as the president does," Obama senior advisor David Axelrod said. "The speechwriter is an unusually important person in the operation."

The cadence of words...

Favreau and Obama alike "think in terms of the cadence of the words," Axelrod added. "Not just the meaning of the words but the cadence of the words, how they work together, how they sound together."

Storytelling...

Storytelling is at the core of Obama's public speaking, overriding the modern obsession with the sound bite. Favreau has explalined their joint approach to friends simply: "Tell a story. That's the most important part of every speech, more than any given line. Does it tell a story from beginning to end?"

The first-person voice of authorial self-confidence

Fred Kaplan, in Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, takes us to a 28-year-old Lincoln's "first memorable speech" and tells us:

The audience was small, the occasion obscure, the speaker irrelevant to the national debate. But Lincoln gives no sense that he thinks of himself or his ideas as peripheral, let alone irrelevant. The language positions itself in the first-person voice of authorial self-confidence: he speaks from himself, for himself, with the voice of someone whose literary style creates the impression that he has earned the right to speak. What he says is credible because he has thought deeply, carefully, impartially, and with noble intentions; because he believes he has something important to contribute to the national discussion; and because his argument is based on a combination of evidence, reason, and analysis.

First let me say that Mr. Kaplan writes exquisite sentences (if you don't count the kludgy handful of words in the middle of the passage). We welcome them here for their beauty and for their power. His message to the speechwriter is a twin to Mr. Sorensen's contribution in our March 2nd piece: help your speaker speak as if he or she had something important to contribute to the national discussion.    

A wise leveraging...

The first annual Theodore C. Sorensen Speechwriting Award was presented last month to my long-time colleague Laurie Vincent for her work with a MasterCard Worldwide executive. My eyes popped out of my head when I read Mr. Sorensen's critique of her entry, where he said:

The content of the speech is a wise leveraging of the core competencies of the speaker's company; in particular, MasterCard Worldwide is uniquely positioned to identify global payment trends in micro- and macroscopic terms.

I've been saying for some time now that every speaker knows something that no one else knows, and every speaker has data that can help make a point that others are trying to make but can only quote anecdotal evidence. So in writing a keynote address, you should ask yourself (1) What does my speaker know that no one else knows, and (2) what data do we have that will substantiate a point that is struggling to take shape in a larger conversation? The idea is to present your speaker not as a knowledgeable quoter of other people's data, but as the owner of data that knowledgeable people will soon be quoting as a primary source.

In the MasterCard speech, Laurie provides this jumping-off point for her speaker:

MasterCard Worldwide has a special vantage point, at the heart of global commerce. We are able to monitor global payment trends, and individual economies and markets. What we're seeing now is... 

She's got us. We can see in our mind all those credit cards being swiped, generating data that her speaker is now going to make meaningful for us. That makes this a speech worth listening to.   

Words of February

February writing covered five industries, nine writing categories, and six communication media, spanning print, electronic and face-to-face channels. 

February Industries: Business Process Outsourcing, Energy & Communications Infrastructure, Information Technology, Pharmaceuticals, Politics

February Categories: Communication Strategy, Employee Communication, External Communication, Investor Communication, Marketing Communication, Political Campaign, Product Launch, Rebranding Initiative, Sales Meeting

February Media: Annual Report to Shareholders, Keynote Address, Marketing Brochure, Restructuring Announcement, Web Copy, White Paper

Doing all the world's work with grammar and lexicon (the working words of February):

His job is to walk into a situation he may or may not have seen before, at a company he may or may not have worked with before, in an industry he may or may not know anything about. He’s there because the situation demands an outcome that’s different from what the organization will get if it keeps doing the same things in the same ways. He asks questions, listens to the answers, formulates a hypothesis, tests it, and then puts it in motion. The value of his contribution is measured in other people’s ability to become orders of magnitude better at what they do. His client base includes a large percentage of repeat customers because of his success rate.

***

In every company, our experience and research tells us, better cash flow and greater liquidity are available to you now – in how you collect what’s owed to you, in how you pay what you owe to others, and in how you procure what you need to run your business.  The proof points are in our daily involvement with companies that are improving their operating costs, reducing their days sales outstanding, trimming their bad debt expense, lowering their unapplied cash and credits, avoiding penalty payments, securing early-payment discounts, eliminating duplicate and erroneous payments, slashing non-compliant sourcing spend and improving buying power. All of which flows to improvements in working capital.

***

We sold $400 million worth of industrial and energy cable into the terrestrial wind farm market globally in 2008. Now the offshore wind power market is poised to grow rapidly. The solar power market is expected to vastly exceed the market for wind power, helped by the fact that it requires four-to-six times as much cable as wind does. And a nuclear renaissance is expected to begin in 2011.

***

Across every aspect of our business, we look to the future: identifying unmet medical needs, broadening our sources of discovery, establishing new therapeutic platforms, and cultivating a rewarding work environment in which dedicated people come together to do important work.

***

Contractors often play an important role when you’re bringing new technology online or when you have peak demand or talent shortages. But if a contractor has been on the job for six months or more, or they’re still being used for skills that will be needed for ongoing support, they’re probably doing jobs that should be sourced internally. In addition, they tend to get hired by different functions in different parts of the enterprise, which complicates governance and forecasting of their performance. 

***

Our organizational strategy is built on the belief that competitive advantage is gained by having better people delivering superior quality with exceptional service backed by advanced technology and sustained by a best-cost position.

A word in the museum

My five-year-old grandson spends two or three hours a day drawing trains and Transformers. On Saturday I took him to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to broaden his horizons. I thought it might broaden mine too, because I usually leave the MCA thinking, what was that all about? 

We moved through each space at a non-contemplative pace, but that doesn't mean a pre-schooler isn't taking things in. As we entered the last exhibition, I saw two wheelbarrows in the middle of a room. One was filled with popped popcorn, the other with red Christmas tree balls. I was thinking, how am I going to explain this if he wants to know why this is art? 

But without pausing to think, Adam walked straight to the installation, pointed to one wheelbarrow and then the other, said, "That's harvest ... and that's Christmas harvest," turned and walked on. I didn't know he had that word "harvest," but he played it at just the right time for me. 

Words and transformation

On a cool misty long-ago night I went for a late run through the streets of my neighborhood. I had given up on a writing assignment that was due the next morning for a communication course I was taking. But in rhythm with my feet splashing on the pavement, my mind did consider what might be worth writing about. And I thought, if I were to write anything, I would want it to be about the Mississippi in flood. Beyond that, I had nothing...

Back at home, I decided to at least sit down at the computer and see if anything might happen. I slid my fingers onto the keys and wrote:

Dear Children,

Someday I must take you to see the Mississippi in flood...

And something did happen. I had a finished piece in about 45 minutes. I volunteered to read it to the class the next morning. Afterward, the instructor asked if he might have a copy to put in his lecture file.

I saw him again about six months later and he said, "You were great last week." "I was great?" "Yes, at the Air Force Academy." He taught that you are what you say, so if he has your words with him, he talks as if you, yourself, were with him. He went on: "I was teaching a course at the Air Force Academy. I had Lincoln with me. I had Jefferson with me. But because of where the conversation was going, I thought the cadets needed to hear from you. I read them your piece, and you were great. You transformed the conversation." 

This memory came back to me at lunch today as I read in the second chapter of Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer, where Fred Kaplan describes the young Lincoln's reading of two anthologies that became his "formative books." He says:

It seems almost certain that Lincoln repeatedly read both volumes from cover to cover. He had few other books to choose from, and those did not have similar range and quality. These anthologies, created in the spirit of Anglican tolerance and respect for literary history, transformed him.

It's the word "transformed" that stopped me. That word is a little overused in corporate settings, but I still put a lot of stock in it. To think that Lincoln was transformed by what he read -- and because he was transformed, his bicentennial birthday was all over the news yesterday. 

But where do the transforming words come from? In my middling experience, when the transformational teacher trotted out my words at the Air Force Academy, they existed only because of... 

an assignment...

a deadline...

a run in the dark and the mist...

a mental image of something worth writing about...

and a choice that was made between going to bed and laying fingers on a keyboard to see what might happen. 

Probably not all that different from the words that transformed Abraham Lincoln. 

Sound and texture

A friend and I were talking Sunday afternoon and he asked me about something I supposedly wrote years ago about relationships with clients. Oh yes, I said, "bidder, vendor, partner." "Yeah, that was it," he said. 

It was about six years ago. Those three words were the pillars of a presentation I made to an agency about the importance of understanding where you stood at any given time in your relationship with a client. Were you a bidder seeking to win a contract? A vendor who could be plugged into a project as needed? Or a partner in developing critical solutions? 

Someone reminds me of that presentation about once a year. Here's how I think it lives on in the minds of those who were in the audience that day: they remember (1) how they felt when they heard it, and (2) there were three words that sounded alike. 

It's no different for me. When my friend, who had heard about it second-hand six years removed, asked me about it, my mind immediately went searching for the three words and came up with "bidder, vendor, partner." And I remembered feeling as good giving it as I had ever felt in a room full of business colleagues. 

Several years ago I was asked about the possibility of doing a repeat performance at a different agency. I went back and found the original presentation and was surprised by how much substance it contained. It runs much deeper than three words. But without those three words, you have no mental gateway to it. I remember that in the early versions, I had "bidder" and "partner" but the middle word was something that didn't match the ending sound of "er." I was smart enough to hold off going public with it until I came up with the "vendor" tag. 

In the book Words that Work: It's not what you say, it's what people hear, published in 2007, Dr. Frank Luntz offers 10 rules of effective language. Rule Six is "Sound and Texture Matter." He writes:

The sounds and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves. A string of words that have the same first letter, the same sound, or the same syllabic cadence is more memorable than a random collection of sounds. The first five rules in this chapter do just that: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, and novelty stand out because they all end with the same sound. 

That's good to know, but here's what happens in a corporate review process: content stomps all over sound-and-texture. Multiple reviewers take content from other sources and drop it into the draft wherever it suits them. Dr. Luntz's other nine rules get stomped too.

Unless!

Unless we're talking about a speech. With a speech, we have one decision-maker, and he or she knows to expect instant and highly personalized feedback from an audience that's sitting right in front of them. The good speakers will close the content spigot in time to think about how people are going to hear what they're saying. That's why, in my experience, if you really want to change something with words, do it in a speech. 

Going off the logic grid

An email from a long-lost friend reminded me of my time working with people who think at the speed of Moore's Law. My favorite story from that time:

I was on a year's retainer with a company that has played a leading role in the development of the PC. My job was to write about things that hadn't happened yet. That meant there were about five people in the whole company who could give me useful input, and for everybody else, their guess was as good as mine.

I'm on a conference call with about ten people who are pushing me for a publishable document by the following Wednesday. I'm saying that's fine, but I have to have content--somebody has to tell me what to say. The topic is something that hasn't been announced yet. They tell me only Mr. X knows what the story is. They check his calendar and make an appointment for me on the following Friday.

"Great," I say, "So what's my deadline?" 

"Wednesday, like the schedule says."

"So...first draft to you on Wednesday, input for the first draft on Friday?"

"Yes. The schedule is what it is."

This is the kind of moment I live for. I think logic is vastly overrated, and here we had a chance to jump completely off the logic grid. I would write the piece, we would stay on schedule, and then I would get the input for the piece. 

This company has a website you can mine six ways from Sunday. The trade press also works hard to cover their forward direction. And bless the bloggers who are trying to be the first to predict what's going to happen next. I rounded up lots of jargon from the website, some well-sourced analysis from the trade press, and the predictions of a couple of bloggers who were tech-savvy enough to follow known developments to their logical conclusion. 

I wrote the piece, submitted it on Wednesday, got it approved on Thursday, and had my input interview with Mr. X on Friday. 

When you're granted an hour on the phone with one of the key knowers in an organization that's pushing the frontiers of technology, it's amazing how liberating it is to know that the reason he agreed to speak with you in the first place has already been satisfied.  

Nailing a keynote

Just back from California and the first CEO keynote address of the year. Ten years ago it would have been 35 minutes long, but this one was 11 minutes, which felt just right.  In those 11 minutes, the word "you" was heard 25 times -- a good number. The final draft checked out on the Flesch-Kincaid readability calculator at the 9th grade level, a little higher than I would like. The first draft was just about right at the 6th grade level, and the numbers got higher with each of the four revisions. 

The speech was scheduled for Feb. 4. At the end of a read-through in the CEO's office on Jan. 30, he said, "What a great speech. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." We canceled our Feb. 2 read-through. On the plane Feb. 3 somewhere over Oklahoma, he came down the aisle with edits on a stick--nothing structural, just getting the words right for the way he talks. That night, in a read-through in front of three or four people who were hearing it for the first time, we took some changes and lost a bit of our enthusiasm. 

In a private read-through the next morning, we started feeling good about it again, and just when we thought the speech was in its final form, our CEO said, "Do you think we're missing an opportunity somewhere?" We know, by now, that a question like that is code for "I think we can still make this speech better." Back to work we went. I pointed out that three times since we'd landed I'd heard him tell a story about several people he had bumped into on the plane who were coming to the meeting for specific reasons. I thought that story belonged in the speech. He asked me to work it in. It turned out to be the cherry on top of a speech that hit all the right buttons. 

We thought we had one more rehearsal in us without starting to sound too slick, so we broke for lunch and did the final read-through on stage in the arena about two hours before the meeting started. That's where content and performance came together. And then he nailed it when it counted.     

Words of January

January writing covered six industries, nine writing categories, and eight communication media, spanning print, electronic and face-to-face channels.  

January Industries: Business Process Outsourcing, Energy & Communications Infrastructure, Information Technology, Shipping, Pharmaceuticals, Politics

January Categories: Change Communication, Communication Strategy, Employee Communication, Investor Communication, Management Conference, Political Campaign, Product Launch, Rebranding Initiative, Sales Meeting

January Media: Annual Report to Shareowners, Earnings Script, Keynote Address, Panel Discussion, Poster Copy, Public Statement, Restructuring Announcement, Video Script

Doing all the world's work with grammar and lexicon (the working words of January):

"We are not looking to you for a quick fix or a miracle cure. We are asking you to join us in a time of 'less,' not 'more,' and work with us to figure out our thoughtful shared sacrifice."

***

"You're beating every milestone. Protocols are getting written faster. Sign-offs are happening faster. You're moving quicker into the clinic for execution, and recruitment is ahead of schedule."

***

"You hustled to keep your systems running while you enhanced them or developed new applications. You fought off inconsistencies and redundancies creeping into your operations. You spread your limited resources across a swarm of critical requirements. Meanwhile, the requests for more analysis and reporting of critical business information were multiplying." 

***

"And this management team is not exactly untested when it comes to meeting challenges brought to our doorstep by external forces."

***

"Across the company today, there's a cultural movement and a common vocabulary, spreading outward from something that happened in the Colombia affiliate more than ten years ago."

***

"They went to patients' homes to observe how long it takes for them to get ready in the morning. They went with them to shop for clothes. They interviewed their spouses. They mapped out the complete patient journey. And with that awareness they were able to identify times and places to intervene and bring patients back to centers of excellence for treatment."

***

"Our challenges have come in many shapes and sizes -- customer-driven, competitor-driven, technology-driven, and luck-of-the-draw-driven. We do not back down. We know we're going to be challenged; we just don't know what form it will take. Well this time it's a Category Five recession."

Form follows function

You can't write for President Obama as if he were still Candidate Obama. No longer is he giving a variation on a stump speech that he knows by heart. He's reading something that has just been handed to him, written about something that just happened. There is no time to familiarize himself with it. He has to dive in and trust that the sentence he's reading will come out in a good place. It is a time for simple forms--which is not what he got today. Try reading this cold with the cameras rolling:

The businesses that are shedding jobs to stay afloat -- they can't afford inaction or delay. The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job, and all those who live in fear that their job will be next on the cutting blocks -- they need help now. 

If you saw the President delivering those lines, you saw fear and anxiety. The first sentence gave him pause when it started over in the middle. But in the second one, he considered taking matters into his own hands and then decided to ride it to the end and hope there was a predicate somewhere over the horizon. "The workers who are returning home to tell their husbands and wives and children that they no longer have a job"...give me the verb, give me the verb -- no verb, not yet..."and all those who live in fear"...should I bail now, 31 words into this sentence with no end in sight--uh, no, in for a dime, in for a dollar..."that their job will be the next on the cutting blocks -- they"...whew, a predicate at last..."NEED HELP NOW." 

Forty words into the sentence, he finds out where it's going. That might work in a speech he had time to rehearse; it serves him poorly when he's delivering it on the fly. 

One sentence

I've been thinking about loosely coupled systems (for insights into why most panel discussions don't work, but some do). I recommend, from the conclusion of Chapter 17 in Karl Weick's Making Sense of the Organization, the meditation beads in this sentence:

Actors in a loosely coupled system rely on trust and presumptions, persist, are often isolated, find social comparison difficult, have no one to borrow from, seldom imitate, suffer pluralistic ignorance, maintain discretion, improvise, and have less hubris because they know they cannot change the universe because it is not sufficiently connected to make this possible. 

Obama & Favreau

Stanley Fish says "Barack Obama's inaugural address is proving to be more powerful in the reading than it was in the hearing." Professor Fish tells us that commentators on radio and television are now eagerly discussing the implications of an isolated sentence, clause, phrase or word. He says:

Obama doesn't deposit us at a location he has in mind from the beginning; he carries us from meditative bead to meditative bead, and invites us to contemplate. 

The technical term for this kind of writing is parataxis, as opposed to hypotaxis. Again, Professor Fish:

One kind of prose is additive--here's this and now here's that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you're looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you. 

I wrote a speech like that once. I entitled it Ground Truths -- a phrase I got from Laurence Prusak when he was at IBM. He got it from the U.S. Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned, where it was used to describe "the rich truths of real situations experienced close up: on the ground, rather than from the heights of theory or generalization." In this speech, I took a CEO's observations about his industry and offered them up as a list of industry-wide ground truths. The remarks were delivered at an association meeting that no one else from his company attended. Within the company, the speech was never heard; it was only read, as it got passed around through the management ranks. Years later a member of the CEO's executive staff told me "we felt differently about our company when we read that speech." 

That's the power of words written as one meditative bead after another: an unknown number of readers over an unlimited period of time accepts the invitation to contemplate each independent thought, and then they change the way they feel about something. It can be a company -- or a country.

What's that? I didn't say anything about Favreau? Neither have the commentators. But we know he's back there, where he should be, helping an Obama speech be as Obama-esque as it can be.  

Bush & Gerson

Two days after winning a second term, George W. Bush told Michael Gerson that "I want this to be the freedom speech." And boy, was it ever. The word "freedom" appeared 27 times in the final draft. The word "liberty" appeared 15 times. 

Peggy Noonan wrote in her Wall Street Journal column that the speech left her "yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance." 

If you want to read a speech that requires no imagination to understand what it is talking about, or at whom it is aimed, this is the one to read.  

Clinton et al

The work on Bill Clinton's first inaugural began in Little Rock with ideas from his campaign staff as well as the likes of Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A draft was produced by Michael Waldman and David Kusnet. Four days before the inauguration, the Clinton team arrived in Washington, where more people, including Clinton's college roommate, joined the writing process. There was a final rehearsal after an inaugural eve gala. Revisions continued until 4:30 in the morning of inauguration day. 

"Clinton never knew exactly what he wanted to say until he heard himself say the words," George Stephanopoulos wrote in All Too Human. There's a key word in that statement. Know what it is? 

The key, and easiest to overlook, word is "exactly." As a speechwriter, let me say this about speakers  who don't know exactly what they want to say until they hear themselves saying the words: they are the more highly evolved speakers. And those who don't exactly know until they see themselves saying the words are the most evolved of all.