Authentic voices #2

Don't ask why, but I was riding in a pickup at the top of New Mexico through about three feet of snow to feed the buffalo at Vermejo Park Ranch, which today belongs to Ted Turner but back then was owned by Pennzoil--which allowed people like my client to use the old land grant for meetings. We were about two hours out when we found the herd. We threw some hay on the ground and then the driver announced that we had to travel on to a different pasture and feed this one buffalo who would be the object of a buffalo hunt in a few days. I asked him what that meant and he said a big game hunter was flying in from Dallas, and he specifically wanted to shoot a buffalo. They were not going to put the whole herd through such an ordeal, so the victim had been chosen and sent to the killing field.

A couple of hours later we came over a rise into a treeless bowl with a frozen pond at the bottom. An old buffalo stood there in the clearing, by the pond, facing into the winter wind. The driver, who was one of the hunting guides, stopped the truck about 100 yards from the animal.

I said, "So on the day of the hunt, he'll be hidden in the woods, right?" "No," said the hunting guide, "He'll be right there. He hasn't moved since we brought him over here." I asked if they would honk the horn, or make wolf sounds, or something, to at least try to make him run. And that's when he told me how it would all go down:

We'll stop the truck right here, just like you and I did. We'll look at the hunter and say, "There's your buffalo." He'll nod and get out and get ready to shoot. If he's a good shot and knows what he's doing, he'll hit him in the heart on the first shot and that'll be the end of it, nice and clean. But...I've yet to see that happen. Most generally, it goes like this. First shot hits the ol' boy in the flank, and he just looks around as if he was bit by a fly or something. Second shot'll get him in the shoulder and stun him a little. Third shot will bring him to his knees. And he'll roll over on the fourth shot and bleed to death. Hunter'll walk up and nudge him with his foot. The boys'll pick him up and in a few weeks the hunter will receive a mounted head for his trophy wall and some bison meat for his freezer.

We drove on down and dropped off some hay, and I watched as we motored away and never saw the buffalo move. I spent the rest of my day making plans with my client, his sales vice president, his chief marketing officer and his chief financial officer, and then the hunting guides came in their vehicles with the big knobby tires and drove us on back to Raton where the company plane was waiting to take us home.

Authentic voices #1

Twenty-five years ago I was doing a corporate video at a chemical plant on the Escambia River in the Florida Panhandle. We were waiting for the magic hour, when the sun would be low enough to light the plant at right angles. To pass the time, the videographer asks our host a throw-away question: "I'm not really worried about it or anything, but, say, just for example, if there were an explosion, what would we do?" To our host, it's clearly not a hypothetical question.

"If it comes from over there," he says, pointing to our left, "there'll be a gas that'll eat your lungs out. It's heavier'n air, and we're in kind of a bowl, you see, so run up that hill over there just as fast as you can go. Now if it comes from this other direction, there'll be a gas that's highly inflammable, and first time it hits a spark it'll be a rolling ball of fire. The river is that way. Make a run for it. If you manage to get there, jump in. Don't think about it. Jump in and keep your head low. Don't worry about the gators--they'll be gone."

The authenticity of his life-and-death counsel made an impression on me that hasn't dimmed over two-and-a-half eventful decades. I can still see the videographer's gaze, aimed at the middle distance in the direction of the river, his appetite for small talk satiated as we waited in silence for the light to be right to make beautiful images on videotape.

Which one of these is not like the others?

The assignment was to take five words and turn them into a statement of a company's culture. The five words were performance, people, leadership, connections and collaboration. Here's what we came up with:

We are a company that believes in performance as a foundation, leadership as a differentiator, people in their uniqueness and their commonalities, connections that unite us and collaboration as a way of life.

Which of these phrases is not like the others?

It's the "people" statement.

In the other four, the key word is linked to its usefulness to the company. Performance is a foundation that the company can build on. Leadership is something the company can use to set itself apart in the marketplace. Connections are important to help unify the company. And collaboration is how the company does things. But people? The company believes in their uniqueness and their commonalities -- how they differ and how they fit together. Are people a foundation to build on, or a differentiator? Maybe. But the statement of culture doesn't say anything about that. It just says we believe in you, in the ways you are different, and in the ways you are alike.

I wrote it that way on purpose and submitted it without any explanation. No one has said, "Hey, I see what you're doing there!" I like to think of it as a little treasure waiting for someone, someday, somewhere along the line, to sit down and seriously contemplate what kind of company they work for, and to stumble across this little discontinuity of syntax and suddenly feel better about everything.

Promulgate!

I want to make it safe for me to use this word, the way the late Howard Zinn used it:

We should have a history that enhances human values, humane values, values of brotherhood, sisterhood, peace, justice and equality. Those are the values that historians should actively promulgate in writing history.

Yeah, like that. I want to be able to say "here's how we're going to promulgate the new culture" without fear of being ridiculed for making up words. But that will only happen if people hear the word in context enough times. So here's a start, from a quick search of what's going on in the world:

"Oli said the Maoists would not help promulgate the constitution by the deadline."

"That will let HP promulgate its Converged Infrastructure strategy..."

"They have all contributed to promulgate and popularize the now-how and how-to in the domain of securing a sustainable development for all mankind."

"However, Gelb has been so successful in getting out his message that even in criticizing him, critics unwittingly promulgate it."

"EPA has refused to promulgate an antidegradation implementation plan."

"I hope the media promulgate this study's message far and wide..."

"Nepal is yet to promulgate a new Constitution for the country..."

"We are concerned that sites like this one that promulgate inaccurate perceptions of campus safety may result in a breakdown of the important process of sharing publicly accurate information."

It's a good word. We need to make a place for it.

Long sentence update

If you've been following the long-sentence thread, here and here, I'm happy to say that I have now written a long sentence that got approved, and it goes like this:

So this matters, what we're doing today, this gathering of people, this new office space, these new jobs, those patients out there who need the particular medicine we're bringing them today and the additional medicines we will bring them in the near future and in years to come, this North and South American region we are building, from Canada now, down through the United States, on across Mexico, and into Brazil--all of this matters.

These words appear in a speech, so they don't show up in the script as one sentence. But everything here is an expansion of the subject "this" and the predicate "matters." They are 80 words that belong together, entering the listener's ear on the simple assertion that "this matters," and then going on to paint a richer picture of what "this" actually is: it's this gathering, this space, these jobs, those patients, this region; and when all is said and done, the listener should have a pretty good sense of how it matters.

On narrative, and narrative consistency

I was sitting across the table from a hip hop artist who was explaining his plan for helping other independent artists cross the licensing and distribution chasm to make sure they get paid for what they do. He'd figured it all out for himself, and now he wanted to help others. We were at the end of this long list of things when he finally got to something I understood:

"It's all about the story," he said. "50 Cent sold 10 million copies of Get Rich or Die Tryin' because he got shot nine times."

There you go. The power of narrative. 50 Cent sold 10 million copies of Get Rich or Die Tryin' because he got shot nine times.

By the way, how'd this guy 50 Cent get that name? Wikipedia says he took it from the trade name of a 1980s Brooklyn bank robber. They quote the new 50 Cent as saying he appropriated the old 50 Cent's name "because it says everything I want to say. I'm the same kind of person 50 Cent was. I provide for myself by any means."

There you go again: narrative consistency.

Another long sentence

From Ian McEwan, in the very first paragraph of Solar:

Patrice was seeing a builder, their builder, the one who had repointed their house, fitted their kitchen, retiled their bathroom, the very same heavyset fellow who in a tea break had once shown Michael a photo of his mock-Tudor house, renovated and tudorized by his own hand, with a boat on a trailer under a Victorian-style lamppost on the concreted front driveway, and space on which to erect a decommissioned red phone box.

73 words. Nice.