The Business Books That Have Most Influenced Me

Over the years, I probably have read most of the self-help books that have taken the business world by storm. Speechwriters were almost required to do this, if for nothing else than finding a topical quote to use in an executive’s speech. In Search of Excellence. Who Moved My Cheese? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The One Minute Manager. Reengineering the Corporation. Crucial Conversations. The Tipping Point. On Management. First, Break All the Rules. Made to Stick.

Many of these books had interesting ideas. However, the impact on me was nil, or close to nil.

But I did read books that changed my day-to-day work, transformed my work life, and made me think about work in a completely different way.

Most of them weren’t actually business books, however, or what we think of as business books. Many were about communication, which is no surprise because that’s the field I’ve worked in for my entire career. Some were academic works. Others weren’t.

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (first published in 1964) is the source of the famous, almost clichéd statement “the medium is the message.” What that means is that the medium is as important as the message; some media are better for some kinds of communications than others. In this contemporary culture of the mania for “message points,” no one remembers what McLuhan said about the media themselves.

Eloquence in the Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1988) came at the mid-point of my speechwriting career. Jamieson’s focus was politics, and how the television sound bite had transformed political speech (and by extension, corporate speech). She did not see this as a good thing. She was right. Look at Washignton, D.C., where discourse has become all but impossible.

Poet David Whyte published two books that approximate “business books” – The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America (1994) and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (2001) that had an enormous impact on how I thought about work, and what I understood work to be. (I also like his poetry.)

Walter Ong was a Jesuit priest who taught at St. Louis University. In 1982, he published Orality and Literacy, which in a sense continued the discussion started by McLuhan but broadened it to what was happening in human communication generally. I didn’t read the book until the mid-1990s, in the throes of just having started a (revolutionary-at-the-time) email newsletter and the company’s first web site. Ong helped me understand why I seemed to intuitively grasp electronic communication – it’s closer to an oral culture than a print culture (words encouraging to a speechwriter).

The late Neil Postman wrote two books that served as serious warnings in the rush to all things electronic: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1987) and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993). He wrote a number of other works as well (all of which I read) but these two provided the watch outs for embracing the internet and (later) social media.

More recently, and one closer to a traditional business book, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith published Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust (2009). It shaped my entire approach at work to using social media. It still does.

Other books had an influence, but none like these eight. I still go back and read highlighted sections. And I remain surprised at how up-to-date they’ve remained.

Over at The High Calling, Jennifer Dukes-Lee is asking for what business books have influenced you the most. Check The High Calling to see what others are saying.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Church and Wholeness

I’ve mentioned before that a large part of my career has been spent as a speechwriter, mostly in corporate communications with occasional (very occasional) stints in politics. One of my favorite books, one that had an enormous influence on the speeches I wrote, especially during the second half of my speechwriting years, was (and is) Eloquence in an Electronic Age by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, published in 1988

Jamieson argued that communications technology, and specifically television, was eliminating traditional political discourse. Television was shrinking our attention spans to 15 seconds or less, with the hallmark of the sound bite, and that this meant that political discourse, and by extension governmental discourse, was becoming increasingly problematic.

While her focus was politics and government, the world of corporate communications was not immune. The television news show 60 Minutes almost singlehandedly changed how corporate executives communicated and gave interviews. Everything became reduced to “three positive message points” and “bridging every question to the positive message point you want to make.”

Keep in mind all of this happened before the advent of the internet, blogs, and social media. The problem of civil and political discourse – being able to discuss problems and issues and come to some kind of resolution or consensus – is becoming something rare and seriously endangered. We appear to have a national government that no longer governs but remains in permanent campaign mode. Sound bites, like slogans, are the stuff of campaigns. They are not the stuff of governance.

A convergence of technology and changes in culture are at the root of our inability to govern ourselves. Life has become a no-holds-barred political campaign.

The church has not been immune.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove say this: “Western culture has been shaped under the ever-tightening grip of technology and individualism, and the trend of modernity has been toward greater isolation from people and places. At the same time, we have been trained well to compartmentalize our lives and narrow our vision. …We reduce life to broad generalities. We approach people not as unique persons created by God but as generic categories: African American, Latino, female, gay, wealthy, homeless, liberal, right wing and so on. We use the labels most often with people who are different than us.”

Culture and technology is tearing us away from each other. The story of God, and the story of the church, is the counter-argument. As the church, we are the reconcilers. And it’s not only about helping people understand the promise of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but about the wholeness of life grounded in faith. As the authors of Slow Church point out, “As the people of God, we locate ourselves in the ecological story of God reconciling an interconnected creation.”

They’re not taking the narrow definition of ecology as the natural environment, but the ecology of life as a whole. And this is hard. We’re taught to compartmentalize our lives. What happens at church may or may not have any application to where we work. Our political opinions and preferences may or may not have anything to do with our faith. How we choose to entertain ourselves may or may not have anything to do with what we believe. What happens in society at large or with world events may or may not have anything to do with what we’re taught in church or what we teach ourselves from the Bible.

God calls for reconciliation. Jesus was sacrificed for reconciliation. The church needs to be about the wholeness of that reconciliation.

I’ve been devoting Mondays on this blog to a discussion of Slow Church, which I believe is one of the most important books I’ve read about the church. This chapter is entitled “Wholeness.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

What Resonates? (It Matters)

Most of my working career has been spent in speechwriting. It’s tempting (the temptation being smugness) to think that the 30 years I spent immersed in speechwriting (roughly 1976 to 1980) were the last hurrah of formal discourse. Television, PowerPoint, and now social media have all had an impact, and not necessarily positive.

Instead of civil discourse, we utilize videos and talking points.

Instead of speeches, we have PowerPoint.

Instead of intelligent conversation, we tweet.

For someone like me, whose day-to-day work occurs online and largely within social media, I understand what we have and what we have lost.

The change was already obvious by the mid-1980s, largely due to television. “Sound bite” had entered the communications lexicon. So had “talking points.” Up to that time, most large companies had speechwriting departments (we didn’t call them teams then). But change was underway. The great corporate restructurings of the 1980s did not spare the speechwriting departments. In 1980, I was one of four full-time speechwriters for the company I worked for. In 1990, I was the sole corporate speechwriter left, and I had supervisory responsibility for other functions.

The conventional wisdom about speeches had become (1) shorter is better, (2) use illustrations like photographs and videos, and (3) be entertaining.

And then I attended an event that turned the conventional wisdom on its head.

In 1992, I attended a speechwriter’s conference in Chicago. One of the speakers was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Claude Pepper and now with the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A few years before, she had published Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechwriting. The book spoke to political and corporate speechwriters alike, and it articulated the unease that many of us speechwriters felt. It wasn’t only speeches and speechwriting that were changing; it was all discourse – corporate, political, academic, and social. And it wasn’t change for the better.

Jamieson spoke with interruption or a break for an hour. A solid hour. The audience was spellbound. No one got up to leave. She finished to thunderous applause. She was asked one question, and spoke for 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes to answer one question, and the audience remained spellbound.

What she said resonated with me and the other 200 people in the room. I still consider it to be one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Two years later, I arranged for her to speak at a company conference. She had the same effect. By 1994, many of us could see what was coming with electronic communications technology, and how it was already transforming how we communicated with each other.

Today, I hear and read very few “speeches” as I understood and wrote them. Speakers string together message points and call it a speech. Virtually no one utilizes the tools of rhetoric. Few marshal evidence. Instead we make assertions as emotionally as we can, and it passes for thought leadership.

In Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day, Todd Henry talks about the importance of resonance,  which he calls a “valuable clue on the path to performing your best, most unique work.” We each have, he says, “resonant frequencies that we respond to naturally, and when we encounter them in others, their words or actions are amplified in us and we begin to resonate with the other person…Typically, these points of resonance are thematic, not specific in nature. It’s more about the deeper theme their words or actions point to and not just what was said.”

Her words resonated. In the years that followed, I wrote some of the best speeches I had ever written. What she said also had an impact on how I approached social media, and I generally use it in atypical ways.

I still remember that speech. I still remember the room, and being there. The impact was lasting.

Over at The High Calling, Laura Boggess is leading us in a discussion of Die Empty. To see what people are saying about this section of the book, please visit the site.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Enchanted by a Speech

It was a little more than 20 years ago. I was attending a speechwriters’ conference in Chicago, and the keynote speaker was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Few of us had heard of her, but she has just published a book entitled Eloquence in an Electronic Age, about how radio and television had reshaped and transformed political speechmaking, and not necessarily for the better.

This period – the early 1990s – was a critical time for corporate speechwriters. Reorganizations, restructurings and downsizings were taking their toll. A number of corporate executives were beginning to take their speeches cues from the political world and beginning to experiment with “key message points” from which they would speak extemporaneously. People were saying that speeches longer than 10 minutes were becoming extinct. Speechwriters were beginning to feel like dinosaurs after the meteorite hit.

Some 250 us were gathered in Chicago. Jamieson, who had been a speechwriter for a congressman for many years, had turned to the study of modern political rhetoric. And she understood how television and radio – with the emphasis on sound bites and “cool” speakers – were profoundly changing politics and elections. (If you’d like to know where today’s political incivility comes from, a lot of the seeds were sprouting in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

Jamieson, in her keynote address, defied expectation and convention. She spoke for an hour without pause. And you know all that stuff about short attention spans? Right out the window. We were mesmerized by her speech. The entire group was silent, completely captivated.

Actually, I was enthralled. Completely.

She called for us to take back rhetoric. She told us how difficult it was going to be. She told us how we would be fighting a powerful current, and attitudes already becoming entrenched. She said we would have to defy the crowd. And we would have to do all of this without knowing whether we would be successful or not.

She spoke for that hour. When she finished, we were on our feet, cheering. She was asked the first question, and spoke for another 30 minutes. We were on our feet again, cheering again.

She changed my speechwriting life. I read everything she wrote. I changed how we did speeches at my company, and instead of falling victim to the electronic age we took full advantage of it. We produced scores of quality, award-winning speeches, the kind that got noticed and quoted and reprinted. We flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom.

Ultimately, we only delayed the inevitable. Eventually, executives retired and new ones appointed, and then came the message-point barbarians. But for six years it was incredible. And this was before the internet  had become ubiquitous.

What Jamieson did in that speech was precisely what Guy Kawasaki describes in Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. Over at The High Calling, we’ve started a new book discussion on Kawasaki’s book. Today’s discussion covers chapters 1 and 2: “Why Enchantment?” and “How to Achieve Likability.”

Kawasaki offers a number of definitions for enchantment, but the one I like best is a process by which situations and relationships are transformed (the book is about how that happens and what you can do to make it happen). He lists five situations when enchantment is necessary – aspiring to lofty, idealistic results; making difficult, infrequent decisions; overcoming entrenched habits; defying a crowd; proceeding despite delayed or nonexistent feedback.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson did exactly those things in her speech – 20 years before Kawasaki wrote his book.

And I was enchanted.


If you’d like to learn more about Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who’s authored or co-authored some 17 books since 1990, here are some resources:

Her faculty page at the University of Pennsylvania web site.

Her entry at Wikipedia.

Some of her books:

Eloquence in an Electronic Age

The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (contributing writer)

Electing the President 2008: The Insider’s View

Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (co-author)

Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising