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. 

***Special Wordpaths Alert***

Go to nytimes.com and read From Books, New President Found Voice. Or don't -- just sit quietly and think about these two excerpts: 

Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power "to transform": "with the right words everything could change...

And...

As Fred Kaplan's illuminating new biography ("Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer") makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading... Both men...use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln's case, Mr. Kaplan notes, "The tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him." 

Bush & Noonan

George H. W. Bush had provided a list of words to Peggy Noonan as she was preparing his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Among the words were "kindness," "caring," "decency," and "heart." Noonan turned them into a sentence: "I wanted a kinder nation." Bush penciled in "gentler." 

That's it! That's how this work gets done! (1) The speaker does a brain dump on you. (2) You organize the thoughts into sentences and paragraphs. (3) The speaker makes them his or her own. It's an Oreo cookie, and the writer is the filling. 

Kinder/gentler came back in the inaugural address. Knowing that it's coming, we can appreciate what happens a few sentences before...

No President, no government, can teach us to remember what is best in what we are. But if the man you have chosen to lead this government can help make a difference; if he can celebrate the quieter, deeper successes that are made not of gold and silk, but of better hearts and finer souls; if he can do these things, then he must.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.

Did you see it, the foreshadowing? Before "kinder/gentler," they gave us "quieter/deeper" and  "better/finer." But not just that. There were the less obvious dualities of "no President, no government," "gold and silk," "hearts and souls," "if he can, then he must." And then, they play the variation on the theme set forth in the convention speech, where Bush had said:

I want a kinder, and gentler nation. 

Now, in the inaugural, they give us, the listeners, full credit for knowing the straightforward "I want..." expression of kinder/gentler from the convention, and they treat us to this variation that is actually what it speaks of -- it's a kinder, gentler development of its antecedent: "to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world." 

Reagan & ... uh, Reagan

A few days ago, nytimes.com posted a video feature entitled Inaugurations in Times of Peril. In it was a piece of the closing of Ronald Reagan's first inaugural, in which he told us we had to believe we could overcome the perils ahead, concluding with the line: "And after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans." 

What was the inspiration for that remark? Robert Schlesinger says it was Reagan himself, who  "had a Hollywood thought":

There was a World War II movie about Bataan*, he told Khachigian and image adviser Michael Deaver, in which an actor named Frank McHugh said something like, "We're Americans. What's happening to us?" Khachigian spun this thought into a line in his first draft -- "We have great deeds to do.... But do them we will. We are after all Americans" -- which in turn evolved into the delivered speech's closing...

The rest of the speech was inspired by ... well, Reagan. Again, Schlesinger:

Reagan had handed Khachigian a six-inch-high stack of four-by-six index cards from his speeches over the years. In a sense, though, he had given one speech over his entire career...what came to be known as "The Speech" -- his standard statement of a philosophy that favored country and business and opposed government and communism....Khachigian had sent Reagan a batch of memos with suggestions for the inaugural, but the president-elect had hardly glanced at them. He wanted themes from The Speech and from his 1967 inaugural address as governor of California, a speech he had written by hand...

*By the way, if you can find a movie about Bataan in which Frank McHugh said anything, let me know--Bill Seyle

Carter & Fallows

"Carter thinks in lists, not arguments," James Fallows wrote after having stepped in at age 27 as Jimmy Carter's speechwriter. Sure enough, Carter's inaugural address closed like this:

Within us, the people of the United States, there is evident a serious and purposeful rekindling of confidence. And I join in the hope that when my time as your President has ended, people might say this about our Nation:

-- that we had remembered the words of Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy, and justice;

-- that we had torn down the barriers that separated those of different race and region and religion, and where there had been mistrust, built unity, with a respect for diversity;

-- that we had found productive work for those able to perform it;

-- that we had strengthened the American family, which is the basis of our society;

-- that we had ensured respect for the law, and equal treatment under the law, for the weak and the powerful, for the rich and the poor;

-- and that we had enabled our people to be proud of their own Government once again.

I would hope that the nations of the world might say that we had built a lasting peace, built not on weapons of war but on international policies which reflect our own most precious values.

These are not just my goals, and they will not be my accomplishments, but the affirmation of our Nation's continuing moral strength and our belief in an undiminished, ever-expanding American dream.

Nixon & Price (Kissinger too)

From the Nixon chapter of Robert Schlesinger's White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters:

Richard Nixon and Raymond Price finished working on the inaugural address at around midnight on Saturday, January 18, in Nixon's Pierre Hotel suite in New York City. Nixon split a bottle of Heineken with his speechwriter and put his feet up on the desk. "Only the short ones are remembered," he had told Price. "Lincoln's second was a great one -- Theodore Roosevelt's was damn good, even though it came in the middle of his presidency. Wilson's was very good, and FDR's first. Kennedy's basically stands up because it has some good phrases, and because it caught the mood and it caught himself." 

Quoting from Price's book, With Nixon, Schlesinger tells us that Henry Kissinger had submitted a couple of sentences he had negotiated with Soviet representatives. They read:

To those who, for most of the postwar period, I have opposed and, occasionally, threatened us, I repeat what I have already said: let the coming years be a time of negotiation rather than confrontation. During this administration the lines of communication will always be open. 

Translated into speech cadences, those lines became: 

"After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open."

Kennedy & Sorensen

Ted Sorensen was the first appointee announced in John F. Kennedy's administration. As JFK's closest advisor, he was busy with the transition in addition to working on a first draft of the inaugural address. 

In White House Ghosts: Presidents and their Speechwriters, Robert Schlesinger reports that Kennedy told Sorensen to "solicit suggestions," "keep it short" and "read previous inaugurals." He also assigned the Gettysburg Address, "tasking Sorensen with ferreting out the secret of its genius." Sorensen concluded that "Lincoln never used a two- or three-syllable word where a one-syllable word would do, and never used three words where one word would do."

When writing for JFK...

"Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required, Sorensen noted. Soft words and phrases -- "suggest," "perhaps," and "possible alternatives for consideration" -- were avoided. Short words and clauses were the order, with simplicity and clarity the goal. And while the summoning trumpets of the inaugural address have linked Kennedy in the public mind with flowery prose, he generally shunned rhetorical excess. 

Lincoln & Seward

William H. Seward offered a paragraph to Abraham Lincoln as a suggested conclusion to Lincoln's first inaugural address. Seward attended the inauguration not knowing how much of his paragraph had made it into the final draft. This is how Gore Vidal presented the scene in his historical novel, Lincoln:

Lincoln resumed his speech. As he came to the coda, Seward leaned forward, eager to hear what Lincoln had cut from his own speech and what of Seward's paragraph he had used....

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords..." 

Seward, eyes shut, chanted softly his own original phrase: "The majestic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriotic graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths..." Tears came to Seward's eyes whenever he declaimed this particular passage, first tried out many years ago at Utica. But Lincoln had changed the language. With some irritability, Seward heard the trumpet-voice intone the new "mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." 

A story about a picture is worth...

On Meet the Press this morning, David Gregory asks Bill Cosby "what it was like" for him to go into the voting booth and cast his vote for Barak Obama. And Bill Cosby says:

I took my father's picture. I took my mother's picture. And I took my brother James -- he died when he was seven; I was eight. And I took the three of them into the voting booth in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, and I pulled the curtain and I took their pictures out and I said, "And now we're going to vote..."

The question was "what was it like?" And eventually, Bill Cosby does say, "it was wonderful." But what will you remember? That Bill Cosby thought it was wonderful to vote for Barak Obama? Or that he took family photos into the booth and lined them up to share the experience? 

What Bono said

Bono is the op-ed guest columnist in today's New York Times. He's writing about Frank Sinatra, with whom he recorded a duet of I've Got You Under My Skin in 1993. Below are his concluding 301 words. All of them are interesting, but 183 of them distract us (see Jan. 7 post) or stray from the spine (see Jan. 2 post) of his narrative. The line-throughs are mine.     

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

If you take out the line-throughs, you get this:

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know about the world. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing "My Way." The first was recorded in 1969. In this reading the song is a boast embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he's made.   

In the later recording, Frank is 78. This time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer's hubris is out the door. The song has become an apology.  

I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment. 

We haven't changed a single word that Bono wrote; we've only taken some of them away. 

Could I get some plausibility with that please?

This time last year, I was working with Stephen Denning to design a workshop based on his book The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action through Narrative. The thing I took away from working with Stephen is that it's not about being a great storyteller. It's about telling a particular kind of story. Here's how Stephen explains it in an earlier book: The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations: 

The stories that were successful for me all had certain characteristics. They were stories that were told from the perspective of a single protagonist who was in a predicament that was prototypical of the organization's business. The predicament of the explicit story was familiar to the particular audience, and indeed, it was the very predicament that the change proposal was meant to solve. The story had a degree of strangeness or incongruity for the listeners, so that it captured their attention and stimulated their imaginations. Yet at the same time, the story was plausible, even eerily familiar, almost like a premonition of what the future was going to be like. ... The stories were told as simply and as briefly as possible. Speed and conciseness of style were keys, because as an instigator of change, I was less interested in conveying the details of what exactly happened in the explicit story than I was in sparking new stories in the minds of the listeners.

Hold on there! Did he say "plausible?" Has he been talking to Karl Weick? Professor Weick, who studies how people make sense of things, says there are at least seven characteristics of sensemaking, and #7 is "Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy." In his book Sensemaking in Organizations, he offers one of my all-time favorite paragraphs:

If accuracy is nice but not necessary in sensemaking, then what is necessary? The answer is, something that preserves plausibility and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies past experience and expectations, something that resonates with other people, something that can be constructed retrospectively but also can be used prospectively, something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for embellishment to fit current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is necessary in sensemaking is a good story. 

So the storytelling guy is pointing to plausibility, and the plausibility guy is pointing to storytelling. Good enough for me. Let's tell some stories, heavy on the plausibility. 

Look at those sentences, check out those verbs

Tonight I was working with my interviews of international change agents. Here's an answer to the question, "What advice would you give to someone who wanted to be a change agent like you?"

You have to go outside. You have to see what's happening in the real world. Go in-depth. Don't jump to conclusions. Go in the houses of your customers. Ask open questions. Go on the Internet with them and see what they're doing. What are they looking for and not finding? Take your timer and see how long it is before they find something useful on the Internet. Do the experience with your whole team. You need awareness before change. If people think they know it, they will do exactly what they did before. Then find the right thing to do. Stick to it. Develop it. Test it. Fine tune it, because it will not be right the first time. And if you have your experiences right, you will know you're on the right track. Focus on the team. Don't do a thousand things -- do three things right and at 100 percent, and then measure them. 

What a great burst of sentences. According to the readability statistics that come with my spell-check, the words per sentence is 8.0; the characters per word is 4.2; the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 3.0. I've never seen scores like that. I've had a few 6th and 7th grade levels recently, and that's about as low as I can go. Look at these verbs: go, see, jump, ask, take, find, do, think, stick, test, know. Those are first-line verbs; you knew them when you were five. There's a load of advanced ideas there, delivered in sentences that are crisp and clear and require no interpretation. I'd have been proud to have written them.  

If it's not really contributing...

"You're a minimalist," said the voice across the table.

"Yes, but I wasn't always," I heard my own voice saying.

My mind went straight to 1998, when I was living in a minimalist space, where it was six steps from my bed to my writing spot, and many nights my dinner was two pieces of toast eaten on the fly. At first there was no TV, but eventually I got one and I mostly watched The Ovation Channel. One night there was documentary on Robert Irwin. I understood very little of what he was talking about, but I loved his enthusiasm. Last night, I dug out the old VHS tape I made, looking for these words: 

More and more I began to understand that a painting had its own set of rules, that there was a physics of seeing at play in a painting; for example, that two things could not occupy the same spot at the same time. So a lot of the gestures and colors had volumes, they had weight, and these things as they structured themselves in the painting had to make sense within those physics of seeing. Everything in the painting either works for you or it works against you by the fact that it's simply there. It takes up space, it takes up time, it distracts, so if it's not really contributing, there's no reason for it. So I began very slowly to take things out of the painting that were not really necessary. 

Over the weekend, a friend asked me to edit a piece he had written about why he was running for public office. He has to write effectively in his line of work, so it was by no means a remedial assignment. I didn't change a word; I just took out entire sentences, in bunches. The document he sent me was 650 words. The document I sent back to him was 391 words. 

That reminds me of a story...

If a sign went up across from my house and it said "Top 10 Fabric Collages in the World," I wouldn't walk across the street to check it out. But yesterday I was stopped cold by a fabric collage. It was propped against the wall of a friend's new office space. For it to win a permanent spot, it needed to be something he could tell a story about. A New York connection would be nice... 

While other pieces were being discussed, I circled back to the fabric collage and emailed the artist's name to myself.  Later I looked up her web page, clicked on "biography" and ... SHAZAM!!! 

She grew up in Queens! 

She supported herself as a New York City waitress, cab driver and welder! 

She worked in the garment district--that must be why fabric is her medium! 

Stories can be told, New York stories!

Never underestimate the power of a great story, or even little inconsequential ones.  

What did you do in the recession, Granddad?

I kicked off the new year by writing this:

Good morning and welcome to 2009. I'm sure you saw the same news coverage I saw over the holidays, most of it revolving around the worst holiday season for retailers in more than 30 years. Now the holidays are over, but the problems in the economy are not.

Never mind the retailers who are liquidating or filing Chapter 11. Take a look at Starbuck's ... the Gap ... Ann Taylor ... Talbot's ... Home Depot ... Office Depot ... Sears ... and Kmart. All of them have closed underperforming stores. Walgreens and Wal-mart, which have been opening hundreds of new stores each year, are putting the brakes on their expansion plans. Best Buy is cutting their capital spending in half ... and their CEO says the current economic climate is THE most challenging consumer environment his company has EVER faced. Not one of the most ... but the most. And one analyst says this recession will wipe out 5 to 10 percent of the retail stores now operating -- maybe more than that -- and we'll continue to feel the effect throughout 2009 and maybe into 2010. 

In this environment, what are our choices?

We can tighten up our operations. We can improve our levels of customer service. We can find ways to drive new business opportunities. And that's exactly what we're doing with the steps we're announcing today.

(Here we announce a restructuring and explain how it will work.)

I know I speak for the entire management team when I say we would have preferred a continuation of growing volumes and record earnings. But we know that good times don't last forever, and neither do hard times. And this management team is not exactly untested in meeting challenges brought to our doorsteps by external forces. Those challenges have come in many shapes and sizes: customer-driven, competitor-driven, technology-driven, and luck-of-the-draw-driven. So the only mystery for us is not whether we'll be challenged again, but what form it will take ... well, this time it is a Category Five recession. 

We are as prepared for this threat as any company can be. It finds us with a storehouse of financial strength. We have no debt. We have a good supply of cash on hand. We have positive cash flow. With your help, we will move decisively to extend our leadership position while the market is down ... and then profit from it when the market comes back.

Thank you for everything you do. Now let's go out there and win the recession. 

As soon as I finished that, I turned around and wrote this for another client:

In a world where all the news is about scarce resources and limited options ... that's not what we're about. At the highest levels of our corporation, we have options. We have resources. We have executive leadership and a board of directors that is thinking "more" and "better" and "sooner rather than later." And they're making decisions every day that boil down to investing in you, to give you what you need to succeed across your span of control.

Today I start on the chairman's letter of an annual report for a company that, at its low point of 2008, had lost nine-tenths of its market cap. 

Spine and form

Years ago I videotaped Sidney Pollack on Inside the Actors Studio, because I wanted to remember his stories about spine and form. Spine is what a production is about. For example, Sidney told us, the spine of Out of Africa was possession -- possessing the land, possessing the African continent, possessing a personal relationship. "And once we realized that," he said, "every scene could become a dramatization of possession." 

When the idea for Tootsie came along, Sidney said he resisted making the movie until he could find a spine that would be more than a recurring cross-dressing joke. In his words:

What was a breakthrough for me was, finding something to make it about that wasn't just about dressing up like a woman. What happened was there was a line in it in which a guy said to him, "being a woman has made you weird, Michael." And what occurred to me was if we changed the line and then we never said it, "being a woman has made you a man," it became the spine. So now you can take every scene and say, "in what way does this scene dramatize this idea that a man becomes a better man by being a woman?" And that gave us a shape. It gave us a kind of a form and a shape...

Here he breaks into a story about a dance class, and how it led him to the ABA form, in which a theme is stated, then you move to variations of that theme, and eventually you bring it all back home with a restatement at the end. Again, in his words:

Most of the films I've done are ABA films. They almost always end where they begin. Literally. They come back in a circle. But it's different. It's like T. S. Eliot's line, 

We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know it for the first time. 

Because you learn it by going away from it and then you come back. And it was always a very appealing form, in a certain way. It's such a nice feeling when you sing a song and you go away during the middle section and now you come back again and sing what is familiar, but informed by the bridge. 

When you read a piece of corporate writing that doesn't work, it's often because someone told you everything they knew about a subject without giving it a spine or form. When it does work, you'll most likely find that it's clearly about something, and there's a form, of which ABA is a good one.