One of the challenges speechwriters confront is capturing our clients’ voice — at an immediate level, meaning writing in a way that sounds like the client at hand, but also at a meta-level: writing the way real people really talk, and about the things real people really care about.
In that regard, I was struck by this comment from Wal-Mart vice chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright in a New York Times interview this morning:
Q. What would you like business schools to teach more, or less?
A. I’ve done this quiz several times when we have gone to talk at business schools. I always ask people, “So who’s taking accounting?” And everybody raises their hand. And, “Who’s taking strategy?” And everybody raises their hand – and you go on with your typical curriculum about the business school. Mostly they are very good at teaching strategy, operations, management, finance, accounting.
But then I ask, “O.K., how many courses have you taken on how you talk with an employee you’re firing?” Or, “How do you talk with the person who comes to your office late at night to tell you that her daughter is sick and she might not be able to come in the following day?” Or, “What do you say when they come in with issues in their marriage that are impacting their job?”
As managers and leaders of people, those are the kinds of questions that one deals with probably 80 percent of the time. I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.
Whether we’re writing about public policy, or politics, or the private sector, it’s essential to keep the “people side” top of mind.
P.S. One of my favorite sources of inspiration for “keeping it real” is StoryCorps on National Public Radio, where you can hear brief excerpts of real people — often family members or close friends — interviewing one another for posterity. The project’s tagline is “The conversation of a lifetime.” I usually catch the segments while driving to work on Friday mornings, and on more than one occasion have found myself weeping as a result. And I ask myself, every time, how did these people — whose faces I can’t see, whom I’ve never met in my life — touch such powerful emotional chords in fewer than three minutes of dialogue?
