On Thursday May 24th the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable will host Barbara Seymour Giordano in a free conference call.

Barbara is a speechwriter with an edge. In fact, she has three distinct edges that set her apart from the run-of-the-mill wordsmiths who clients hire to craft their speech.

She is a writer who is also comfortable on the podium. Very few writers are. I remember a Ragan Speechwriters Conference where in a room of 60 only three people raised their hands when asked if they are also comfortable presenting.

She is a speech coach. Many of us draw the line at delivery coaching. I always found it impossible in the corporate setting to advise an executive many levels above me on the ways they’d need to change as a speaker to be more effective onstage. This often involves dealing with unconscious mannerisms and deeply ingrained habits that are better addressed by a professional coach. Barbara is such a coach.

She is an accomplished storyteller. Many writers claim to understand the value of the story to move an audience to action. Many fail to deliver. Barbara specializes in helping speakers tell memorable stories that audiences yearn to hear and share. Her specialty is guiding speakers — from the page to the stage — through the often murky and intricate process of bringing a story idea to life. She turns complex subjects into moving stories that spark imagination across cultures.

Over her career Barbara has advised Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, scientists and TED presenters on creating and sharing stories that unite, influence and inspire audiences worldwide. Her fascination with story began when she worked as an assignment editor with CNN and E! Entertainment Television. She then parlayed her news experience into producing and directing corporate videos, global sales meetings and events for Amgen, Cisco Systems, and Nike among others. In front of the lens she’s appeared as an on-camera national TV fashion and beauty spokesperson for Lands’ End, Neiman Marcus, and TJX Corp. She delivers keynote speeches on topics that include The Art of Business of Storytelling, The Startup Pitch: Telling Stories Investors Want to Hear, and Storytelling TED Style. Her 360-degree communication experience allows her to offer a unique approach to crafting the stories that make speeches come alive.

Barbara is a two-time Cicero Speechwriting Award Winner:

2015 for ‘Rap on Trial’ delivered as a TedX speech by Charis Kubrin, Professor of Criminology. Law and Society at UC Irvine;

2017 for ‘Preserving History in 3D ‘ delivered by Andrew Jones, Senior Research Associate, Vision and Graphics Lab at the Institute for Creative Technologies.

To register for the event (no charge) visit the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable site. We start at 11:45am (Pacific) on Thursday May 24.

On April 26, 2018 the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable Held a conference call with Felicity Barber. Felicity is the Executive Speechwriter at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She is a communications expert specializing in thought leadership, storytelling and speechwriting. Prior to joining the Fed she ran her own business, Thoughtful Speech for three years. She moved to San Francisco from London in 2014 where she was a speechwriter at the global insurer, Lloyd’s of London. She has also worked as a Policy Advisor to the Home Office in London and as a Parliamentary Assistant to the Labour Party member for Islington South and Finsbury, Emily Thornberry MP.

The call covered a wide range of topics including:

• The focus of the book Felicity wrote that was presented to the Queen (and Her Majesty read).
• The origin of the term ‘underwriter’ (as in the Insurance industry, not someone who is a junior speechwriter…)
• How Felicity broke into the speechwriting business in London.
• A comparison between the work of a speechwriter in the UK and USA.
• Her observation that the publishers of anthologies of famous speeches rarely include those given by woman.
• The impact of the young women such as Emma Gonzales who survived the shooting at their school and spoke out against American gun culture.
• The advantage enjoyed by the younger generation of speakers who are social media natives.
• Notable speeches by women such as those by Oprah Winfrey, actress Anne Hathaway and the secret speech of MzBhaver Raver.
• The UN Women Instagram account as source of inspirational women speakers.
• An appreciation of the work of Denise Graveline promoting women speakers.
• The challenges faced by women who work in the “Brotopia” culture of Silicon Valley tech companies and the urgent need for that industry to recruit diverse talent.
• The value of women mentoring women, for example by Women who Code and Anitab.org
• The challenges faced by women in politics and lessons speechwriters can learn from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the views of communications director Jennifer Palmieri.
• The value of building a long-term relationship between a speechwr1ter and speaker.
• The rise and fall of women in tech (as a percentage of programmers).
• The pervasive influence of Silicon Valley on our economy, culture and politics as revealed by Norm Cohen in The Know-It-Alls.
• How to address the imbalance in the ratio between male and female speakers? What influence can speechwr1ters have?
• The prominence of women in the National Speakers Association including Past-President Patricia Fripp.

To hear these and other topics discussed click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:08 — 15.1MB)

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“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing”
— Archilochus

I recently had a situation where a potential client in the technology industry preferred to hire a speechwriter with deep domain knowledge rather than go with someone with general writing skills. This is, in some ways, choosing the “hedgehog” who is a focused subject matter expert over the “fox” who draws on a wide variety of experiences.

In my past experience a writer can often rely on the speaker and their staff to provide the expertise (while helping with the research by interviewing relevant SMEs). In my work with over a dozen senior leaders in Silicon Valley I translated their jargon into compelling stories and concepts the audience could grasp. That, and keeping a weather eye out for the countless assumptions that experts inevitably make (from concepts to acronyms).

Indeed, Robert Lehrman author of The Political Speechwriters Companion, advises the use of the Flesch-Kincaid reading level assessment, given that the average American audience has a 7th-Grade reading level and anything more complex risks losing some part of the audience (which might explain why we have the current US President not his main challenger in the White House). Even an audience of PhD’s at the end of a long day might not be able to follow complexity delivered at a rapid clip from the podium with the same ease as they would if the ideas were on the page (where we can re-read difficult passages).

What do speechwriters say?

I polled speechwriters on LinkedIn to ask which they think is preferable: writing experience or domain knowledge? Should a client measure the level of subject expertise or the degree of writing skill? Can they have both? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each set of skills in crafting a speech? In their opinion, which is preferable?

The topic generated considerable debate with a range of opinion and anecdotes from some very experienced writers. Here’s what they had to say:

Deep domain knowledge is good for audience/reception analysis and staying safe yet bad for truly innovative communication due to group think.

— Rune Kier Nielsen, Strategic Communicator, Award Winning Speechwriter and Dedicated Storyteller.

I think it’s a mistake to prioritize domain expertise above storytelling excellence. A great speechwriter can deliver an amazing story about any topic. A domain expertise litmus test says more about the client than it does about the complexity of the material that will be communicated.

— Mary Smaragdis, Senior Director at LiveSafe. Past: Senior Director, Corporate Storytelling, Yahoo!

I have never had a client or prospective client want deep knowledge about content and I have had hundreds of clients. It would be incredibly stupid of them. I have had a few clients who were stupid but not that stupid.

In politics people used to hire people to write speeches, telling them they could “learn on the job.” I don’t want some MD learning by operating on my knees. And the people I have worked for and with have always been more interested in how well I write speeches than by how much I knew about the subject — even complicated subjects.

— Robert Lehrman, Speechwriter. Author The Political Speechwriters Companion.

To me, it all depends on the audience. If it’s a general audience with little knowledge of the domain, it seems to me the potential client would be better served by a speechwriter with only general knowledge. But if it’s an audience full of experts, having only general knowledge could be a real disaster.

— Aaron Hoover, Executive Speechwriter, University of Florida.

Ian, good question. I agree with Aaron Hoover that it depends on the audience. Overall – for the scenario you describe (a long term hire), I’d prefer a really sharp generalist speechwriter who knows how to synthesize complex information, craft a narrative, capture the speaker’s voice and move an audience. You can find out what you don’t know pretty quickly, especially when you’re asking on behalf of the CEO. One exception would be a one-off speech or tight deadline situation, where there is just not enough time to ascend the learning curve.

— Pete Weissman, Speechwriting, Strategy, Thought Leadership.

In my decades of speech writing — and other games grown-ups play– I’ll have to vote with GREAT WRITERS over domain knowledge. Masterful writers daily dive into new material–and deliver. It’s the gig. Yet serious writing chops take years to hone. Most of our dear and/or maddening clients will vote for DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE (to Ian’s question). God bless ’em, but what do they know? What do they really know about the art & chutzpah of putting words in people’s mouths? Terrific writers can walk in cold, ID the hot spots, gather great quotes and prep their exec. to rally the troops.

— Marianne Fleischer, Corp. Communications strategist and senior creative all media. CEO speechwriter, Presentations coach & workshop leader.

In my experience, deep knowledge of the audience is far more important. A writer who is an intelligent layman can often help a technically minded speaker reach — and move — a wider audience.

— Howard Tomb, Communications advisor and speech writer to the chairmen, CEOs and other senior executives of leading public companies.

In the main, a “speechwriter with a deep domain knowledge” is a pretty rare fish. Typically he or she is an expert first and a writer incidentally, and not a speechwriter in particular. I think Pete Weissman has it right: the best choice is a sharp and proven generalist speechwriter who is a quick study, which, to me, is the definition of a first-rank speechwriter.

The problem with an expert-who’s-also-a-writer is that a strong writer overall is rarely familiar with the unique requirements of aural presentation. A well-composed essay is not a speech. The essayist need only be clear, but the primary task of the speechwriter is to keep listeners engaged despite their own distraction. This the most important part of speechwriting, and the ability to do it is not a function of one’s knowledge of the topic at hand.

— Mike Long, Writer, speechwriter, & educator with
extensive experience in business, government, non-profits, and policy.

The obvious solution is teamwork between the subject matter expert (SME) and the speechwriter. I very much agree with Michael Long that even a SME who is a good writer might lack the expertise of the generalist speechwriter who is expert in connecting the dots for audiences, no matter how complex the material.

— Amélie Crosson, Director of Outreach and Strategic Engagement at Office of the Government Representative in the Senate, Ottawa, Canada.

I quite agree with Amelie. The ideal is access to SME’s. By example, I work closely with a solar developer and frequently interview their analysts to make certain that I am correctly understanding and translating material. When I have subject experience – and I do in a half-dozen spaces – I enumerate. When I don’t – I _sell my ignorance_ as Charles Eames** did. That is, I am coming to the project with a passion to grok the material and make it accessible – never dumb – to a particular audience. Experience is key. Sub-specialization is not; but accessing it is important.

** “Sell your expertise and you have a limited repertoire. Sell your ignorance and you have an unlimited repertoire.”
—- Richard Saul Wurman on Charles Eames

— Jerry Weinstein, freelance speechwriter. past: Speechwriter to Chairman & Publisher, The New York Times.

There’s something called the Curse of Knowledge. The more you know, the harder it is to explain. But, with all communications, it’s a balance. If you don’t understand the subject properly, you can make rookie errors – embarrassing yourself and the client.

— Mike Sergeant, Communications adviser to CEOs and business leaders. Past: Financial Correspondent, BBC News.

There are huge advantages of being a speech writer working across domains. For instance I was working with a financial services regulator last week who was speaking about the importance of company culture in financial services firms. I was able to pull on my experience the day before with a yoghurt manufacturer to give him a metaphor about how different cultures will give different end results and how each culture needs the right environment to flourish.

— Benjamin Ball, Investor presentation advisor.

The short answer is “it depends.” Depends on the audience, the expectations of the speaker’s role and so on. If this is a dinner speech in front of 500 people, go with the gifted wordsmith. If the speaking venue is a scientific conference with 500 drug researchers, however, the writer with domain knowledge would be the appropriate choice.

— Peter Ramjug, Executive Communications, Boston. Past: Senior Speechwriter, U.S. Department of Transportation.

It helps to have some domain experience, but I wouldn’t expect a speechwriter to have deep technology expertise. If a marketing backgrounder with some key industry links (or internal company info) is given, then the speechwriter can delve into the available content. I worked with an external agency to produce a script and creative content. The writer listened and read the brief with the available content. He also went one step further and did some other research online. So he was able to use his writing expertise with the domain resources to create a compelling story and message. Far too often the subject matter experts are too close to the product/service to develop the stories; that’s why we rely on expert story tellers!

— Jeanne Hsu, C-Suite presentations.

Seems to me it depends very highly on what sort of speech or speeches your speaker delivers. If heavy insider industry thought leadership, it helps to have a speechwriter who either knows the industry or cares to learn it really thoroughly really quickly. But if the speech or speeches are (as I’d argue they much more often should be) about human aspects of the industry, then you want a great writer and thinker first.

— David Murray, Executive Director at Professional Speechwriters Association.

In my experience, the best combination is a strong writer (an expert communicator and a quick study) and a subject matter expert – if it’s a general audience. If the audience is made up of PhDs, then a writer with deep domain knowledge makes sense – if you can find one.

— Don Heymann, Independent speechwriter.

I think there are no easy answers. To me, the best qualification has to do with a speechwriter who can “get into the head and capture the voice” of their client. If they are an SME all the better, but if they aren’t, as a speechwriter, they understand how to do research. The generalist can mine the needed information with some work. As speechwriters, we understand how and where to find that information to prove the point or bolster an argument. I believe a generalist that has a deep understanding of their client and the audience, can take their vast knowledge, dig deeper and come up with a speech that connects in a powerful way.

— Bob Sands, Freelance speechwriter.

Ditto on the wisdom shared above, particularly Don Heymann’s. It doesn’t necessarily have to be either/or. I suspect that a few generalists do have deep enough knowledge of a specific subject to craft a speech that resonates with narrow niche audiences, such as highly specialized surgeons or engineers. But even then, it’s wise to limit jargon. If forced to choose, I’d pick a generalist who’s willing to learn enough to get through the gig over an expert who can’t write in plain language.

That being said, when I first started out as a freelancer a few years ago, the head of a writers’ agency told me that he needed subject matter experts, not generalists.

— Sheri Lair Saginor, Award-Winning Speechwriter, Speech Delivery Coach.

This same issue comes up with nonfiction book ghostwriters, experience or specialized area. We also need to focus on the needs of our (potential) customers and their audiences.

— Maggi P. Kirkbride, Nonfiction Developmental Editing & Ghostwriting

In the spirit of full disclosure I should say that, following my adventures in America detailed in Part II of this series, I returned to England in the Summer of 1978 after three years in the States without a graduate degree. My studies at Tufts had been frustrating, and had cured me of any desire to become a sociologist. When I landed in England the customs agent said “Welcome home, sir…” but I really felt America was my home. The next two years were spent in Bristol, but my heart was in California.

Fundraising

1978-80: Fundraiser, Help The Aged Youth Campaign, Bristol: On my return to the UK I visited friends in Cornwall and decided the stop off in Bristol on the way back to my parents home in Cheshire. I’d been in the town 15 minutes when I ran into Faith from the shoe store in Oregon quite by chance. I took this as an omen that I should move there, and the very next day was hired by the charity Help The Aged as a fundraiser in their Youth Campaign at a salary of £2,000 and the use of a Mini. I drove around to Primary schools in the South-West organizing sponsored walks and, together with other Youth Campaign organizers, worked on larger fundraising events in London, and, rather embarrassingly, Leicestershire (which took me back to Wreake Valley College where a couple of the 6th Form remembered me as their first year teacher “who couldn’t keep control of the class…”). After two years I left on a summer holiday to the US and stayed on.

Again, in the spirit of full disclosure, as I first wrote in this blog eight years ago, I lived in the States for six years without papers, until President Reagan granted ‘illegal aliens’ amnesty in 1987. During this time I kept my nose clean, paid my taxes, and even, for one surreal week, helped the Immigration Service design a database that tracked immigrants (see Bytel below).

“To live outside the law you must be honest”
— Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie

Temp Work

1980: Whim Agency, Mill Valley, CA: On my return to the States I settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and signed on with the temp agency ‘Whim’. I completed a broad range of casual work assignments including: Window washing; Balloon Delivery; “Ian The Butler” catering private events; House cleaning; Father Christmas appearances at malls and in private homes; bartending and much more. One gig as Santa Claus took me to the Sausalito home of Ron Cowan the property developer who was hosting a private dinner party where Santa’s gift for California Speaker of the House Willie Brown was a pair of bright red woolen gloves.

1981-82: Construction Labor, San Rafael, CA: I was hired (via Whim) to dig the foundations in clay baked as hard as steel by the summer sun on a hillside home above San Rafael. I worked with Rolf and the crew building the home from the ground up. I learned to use a hammer and skillsaw and managed not to amputate my leg or fall off the scaffolding.

1982: Movie Extra, The Right Stuff, San Francisco: I was in the elevator ‘enema scene’ as a young doctor with a clipboard as well as a couple of other moments when they needed a man with short back and sides in a white coast. It paid $50 a day and all the food you could eat for a week’s filming above Buena Vista Park off Haight Street. On the set I saw Chuck Yeager, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Jane Dornacker and of course Phil Kaufmann the director.

1982: Office Manager, Fields Construction, Sausalito, CA: I worked for Howard Fields, one of Time Magazine’s “most interesting people of the year” back in the 1970’s. Howard was a true Renaissance man who had dropped out of medical school in LA to start a company manufacturing waterbeds. He was a private pilot, sailor, and fan of Ayn Rand. He lived above his office at Schoonmaker Point in Sausalito and built commerical-sized pools in Reno and San Francisco. Tired of seeing me hammer out correspondence on an IBM Selectric he suggested I learn to use WordStar on a TRS-80 PC.

Personal Computers

1983: Freelance WordStar consultant, San Francisco: Howard introduced me to a couple of small companies who needed help with their mailing lists and customer correspondence. Then, with a few months experience under my belt, and a growing fascination with PC’s I was finally able to launch a career. Time Magazine had just named the PC as “Man of the Year” and I was in the right place at the right time, 10 years after graduating, to catch the computing wave that would define my working life from here on.

1984 – 86: Dealer Support, MicroPro, San Rafael: I hired into the three-person dealer tech support team at MicroPro where I expanded my hands-on computer knowledge from wordprocessing to databases and spreadsheets, from CP/M to MS-DOS. It was a short 10 minute commute from my home in Mill Valley (living in a cottage behind a home on Shell Road) to the old International Diamond Building next to the Civic Center in San Rafael. The company Seymour Rubinstein had started was booming. However, customer and dealer support was not a priority. When WordPerfect in Utah staffed up their support center we started to lose market share (and when CEO Glen Haney pushed for copy protection on WordStar 2000 it did not help matters). One vivid memory was a company meeting where Rubinstein mocked customers who used a mouse, since this required they take their hands of the ‘home row’ which touch-typists used.

1986: Telemarketing, Software Recording, San Rafael: After MicroPro I tried my hand a commission-only software sales for Randy Hayes’s company. I quickly went broke.

1986-88: Tech Support, Bytel, Albany: I was the sole tech support person for Genifer, the dBase III code-generator working for Dan Pines in his start-up, Bytel. It was a scrappy small company playing in the big leagues of the booming PC database market. I had fascinating conversations with users building databases used for everything from counting boll weevils in cotton fields to tracking immigrants at the immigration service (that was an interesting conversation!)

Around this time I was granted Amnesty by the US Government and given my Green Card which legally allowed to me to work in the US for the first time since 1979.

1988 – 1989: Tech Support, Personal TeX, Mill Valley: I worked for Lance Carnes in his beautiful office near the Sweetwater Bar in Mill Valley. On October 18th I’d left work on the dot at 5:00pm and was just driving through the center of town when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck at 5:05. I arrived home to a shaken-up wife clutching our six month old daughter. Later, I met Donald Knuth at a Stanford conference on TeX and extended my knowledge of this arcane programming language.

1989-1990: Tech Support, Medicus, Alameda: I worked the 6:00am to 3:00pm shift supporting both UNIX and MS-DOS versions of their medical records encoding software. I learned more that I wanted to about ICD-9 and CPT codes and the disputes that can arise over billing and denial of payment for medical services. I had a front-row seat in the dysfunctional world of American health care and medical insurance. Apparently US politicians find the system here preferable to the “socialized medicine” that the Europeans inflict on their citizens…

One day in 1990 I took a call from a recruiter who asked if I was interested in interviewing for a job at a company called Sun Microsystems in Milpitas. “Where’s Milpitas?” I asked. When I found out where, I began the next stage of my working life.

I’m delighted that transcripts of the 25 best speeches selected by Vital Speeches of the Day are now available. In addition to the overall winner there are awards for a wide range of categories; from industry verticals such as Energy and Transportation; to motivational speeches, controversial speeches, commencement addresses, eulogies and more.

It’s interesting to see that of the 25 speeches which are listed, 64% were written by men and 36% by women, while 84% were delivered by men and only 16% by woman (for a perspective on this see Felicity Barber’s excellent post on Women Speaking).

Something else which struck me was that four of the speakers are in the mold of Winston Churchill — they both wrote and deliver their own content. Indeed, speechwriter Hal Gordon was one of the speakers who wrote their own material (else, who would write speeches for the speechwriter?) and his analysis of Churchillian roots (or scaffolding) is great background to appreciate the content of his 2018 Cicero speech.

However, what stuck out a mile, is that were it not for David Murray publishing these transcripts, much of the content would never have seen the light of day. None of the speeches would have been available to those of us who were absent from the auditorium at the time it was delivered. It is frankly amazing that in the era of social media, streaming video and audio podcasts, there were only (as far as I was able to discover) a mere five of the 25 speeches available on YouTube. These are to be applauded for using technology to magnify the impact of the speech after the event (as I’ve written is possible, if not required).

These savvy speakers (or speechwriters who went the extra mile for their clients) are:

Overall winner: “The Power of a Story”, UT Austin President, Gregory L. Fenves speaking at the Holocaust Museum of Houston.

…the reality is that our lives are not only the product of our ambitions, our talents, and a singular focus. Our lives unfold as our individual story intertwines with the stories of others—it’s happening right now, while we are in this room together.That is why institutions like The University of Texas at Austin and Holocaust Museum Houston are important. They make sense of these intersections. To educate, to understand, to enlighten and to bring people together with diverse perspectives and backgrounds so that we may improve lives for present and future generations.

Nonprofit winner: “The State of Civil Discourse”, Rotary International General Secretary John Hewko speaking at Stanford University (fast forward nine minutes into the video for the content).

The transformative change we seek cannot solely be delivered by the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world. Civil discourse cannot rely on the very platforms which—if used unwisely—can perpetuate our present malaise.Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam identified a sharp rise in Americans’ civic disengagement over the last generation, with empty town hall meetings reflecting “a giant swing toward the individualist pole in our culture, society, and politics.” And his findings are still starkly relevant today.

Controversial/Highly Politicized speech winner: “Protecting Human Rights in Today’s Europe”, Michael O’Flaherty, Director, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights speech delivered delivered at University of Poznan, Poland.

We must have the courage of our convictions, the courage to speak out against human rights violations, and the courage to act. With this courage, with energy and with good will, we can overcome this crisis to ensure that human rights protection does not become a hollow shell, but remains at the beating heart of our societies.

Technology speech winner: The video is a part of the speech delivered by Dr. Jeffrey W. Evenson, Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Corning Inc. While not the full speech, this video extract is a great illustration of re-purposing content from the full-length speech delivered at the International Biennale of Glass, Sofia, Bulgaria, six months earlier.

And despite its reputation for being fragile, glass can be engineered to be incredibly strong and damage resistant. Scientists estimate glass’s theoretical strength at more than 15 Gigapascals. Now, I realize there may be a few people in the audience who don’t measure things in Pascals. So I have an
analogy that might help. Imagine a scale that measures the pressure under an elephant’s foot. To get this scale to read one Gigapascal, you would need to stack 10,000 elephants on top of each other.

Inaugural Address speech winner: “What Kind of Leaders Will We Be?”, Dr. David O. Barbe, President, American Medical Association, delivered at the AMA Annual General Meeting.

Let us be the leaders who bring consensus solutions to difficult issues. Let us be the leaders with the creativity and drive to shape the future of medicine. Let us be the leaders who mentor our next generation of physicians. Let us be the leaders John Quincy Adams envisioned when he said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more… learn more… do more… and become more… you are a leader.”

I’m sure the remaining 20 speeches are worthy of reading, however, the impact of hearing and seeing the presentations adds immeasurably to the experience. When Vital Speeches of the Day began publishing in the 1930’s recordings of speeches were few and far between. You can watch grainy video of FDR’s 1933 Inaugural Address or part of Hitler’s first address as German Chancellor . But today, with a smartphone in every pocket, it’s inexcusable that presentations are not made generally available on social media — Award Winners or not.

[I’m well aware that there might be audio or video recordings of the speeches that I missed. If anyone can point me to them, please add the relevant links in the comments below.]

Additions

Government speech winner: “Seat Belts, State Budgets and the Art of Compromise,” John Cullerton, Illinois Senate President.

Thanks to speechwriter John Patterson for his comment (below) that pointed to this video. The first 14 minutes are the scripted talk.

I was trying to get people to vote for something that told 85 percent of their constituents to change their daily behavior. That kind of change isn’t easy. In my experience, here’s how you do it: You begin with a small step forward. And then, when the world doesn’t end, you recognize success, build your base of supporters and keep stepping forward to accomplish your broader goals.

I first met Felicity in 2014 shortly after she moved from England to San Francisco. She’s a speechwriter who has worked in both the UK and USA and has expertise in B2B, finance, insurance and technology.

Felicity is currently the Executive Speechwriter at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She’s a communications expert specializing in thought leadership, storytelling and speechwriting. Prior to joining the Fed she ran her own business, Thoughtful Speech for three years. She moved to San Francisco from London in 2014 where she was a speechwriter at the global insurer, Lloyd’s of London. She has also worked as a Policy Advisor to the Home Office in London and as a Parliamentary Assistant to the Labour Party member for Islington South and Finsbury, Emily Thornberry MP. Her claim to fame is that she wrote a book that was given as a gift to Her Majesty The Queen.

On Thursday April 26th the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable will host Felicity in a free conference call.

At this event Felicity will explain why she is frustrated that there’s so little published about women’s rhetoric and speeches. As a speechwriter who loves writing for women, she’ll share what inspires her and discuss her recent posting in Vital Speeches of the Day that highlighted five of her favorite moments of women’s public speaking from 2017.

She’ll discuss what speechwriters should do differently, if anything, when writing a speech for a woman vs. a man.

To register for the event (no charge) visit the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable site. We start at 11:45am (Pacific).

(Full disclosure: Matt is the nephew of my good friend James Haig. I heard Matt speak at a recent Marin County bookstore where I purchased his book. I’ve not read any of his other writing, but see from Twitter that he has a large and loyal fan base. It was Matt who told me that he was not aware of the 2003 Pete Hamill novel on the subject of immortality and that he’d never visited Arizona before writing the book.)

How to Stop Time

I enjoyed English author Matt Haig’s latest novel How to Stop Time not only for the wonderfully evocative portrait of the many different historical periods, but for the way these are woven together into a believable whole in the protagonist Tom’s life.

Haig does this in so many ways, one example being the close of the main para on p. 325 which takes us “back down the path from where we came…as sycamore seeds spin and fall in this same forest.”

I enjoyed the focus on the interior life of the protagonist as much as the exterior events. And the subtle digs at our current crazy political situation.

While he writes stunning prose, Haig is obviously a poet at heart. The two sentences at the bottom of p.313 describing the world that remains after the death of one of the characters took my breath away.

This is a wonderful book, hugely enjoyable.

Forever

Ironically, the author claims not to be aware of Pete Hamill’s Forever: A Novel which would be a fine companion read.

There are many differences between the two novels, but they share a common theme. Hamill takes over 250 pages before his protagonist is granted a life many times longer than the usual span. Haig’s character is born with a rare condition shared by others.

Tom Hazard is free to wander the world, and one of the joys of Haig’s book is not only the way he evokes different times, but also multiple locations: Paris, the South Seas, London and New York. One of the conditions of Cormac O’Connor’s life, once he’s made into an immortal, is that he can never leave Manhattan. So he watches as New York grows from the tiny pre-Revolutionary settlement into the 21st century metropolis. The world changes around Cormac, while for Tom changes in latitudes fill the decades.

Both men have to deal with the challenge of outlasting the generations of people they live among. This begins early on for Tom when he escapes superstitious 17th Century witch-hunters and it drives him on his travels to distant lands.

Cormac is a witness to the excesses of New York: the violence, jails, brothels, plagues, Tammany Hall. Hamill relishes the tide of history that sweeps over New York, especially Irish New York.

In the modern world Tom becomes a history teacher, while Cormac tells people he’s “a kind of historian” (p. 482). Both men must be careful not to reveal too much about the past eras they in fact lived through.

Both also deal with the psychological burden of ageless living. Cormac’s “mind felt like sludge…his body felt young, and looked young, but his brain felt ancient.” (p.393) Tom Hazard suffers from debilitating headaches that mark the challenge of endless life:

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes…Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? … The memories swell. The headaches grow.” (p. 19)

Cormac is clearly Hamill’s alter ego: an Irish-American reporter in New York. He writes about the city he knows so well, in a similar way that Woody Allen’s Manhattan is a tribute to his insider knowledge of the Big Apple.

Both authors examine the peculiar challenges of relationships with women and children who have ageless lovers and fathers. Both employ the trope of the challenge of love outlasting the passage of time:

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Shakespeare – Sonnet 116

Tom Hazard is a vehicle for Haig’s research into different eras and locations. He confessed to having written about Arizona (very convincingly) before ever visiting it. But there again, neither he nor Hamill visited past times, except in their imaginations.

What price immortality?

Both of these novels are sobering checks on the wishes of some of the more outlandish desires of Silicon Valley billionaires to achieve immortality:

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.” These titans of tech aren’t being ridiculous, or even vainglorious; their quests are based on real, emerging science that could fundamentally change what we know about life and about death.

As Adi Da Samraj has written:

“Fear of death is fear of surrender to Infinity. Learn to surrender, to exist at Infinity while alive, and fear of death dissolves. Fear of death is fear of the Unknown. Realize the Wonder, the Eternal Unknowability of the Totality of Existence, and fear of death is transcended.”

“Go West, young man.”
— Horace Greeley, 1865

This is the second part of the review of my working life. Part 1, The Early Years, covered the part-time jobs I had while in school in England. In Part 2 I graduate from college and move to the States.

Student and Teacher

1972: Traffic Survey, Leicester: The summer before my final year any student who wanted to work could find a job on the traffic survey being conducted in and around Leicester. We got up before dawn, sat at intersections and counted cars. Stationed outside the local prison I was often face-to-face with uptight guards delayed for their shift by a long-haired layabout with a clip-board. A local vicar once asked me “Do you enjoy your work, my son?” and I had to honestly say, yes, I did. Fresh air and mindless checklists were a welcome change to the life of an undergraduate.

At this point in the story I must mention a 15-minute conversation that, quite simply, changed the course of my life. In my final term at Leicester I had already secured a place on a post-graduate Sociology course at the University of Bath. It would have given me a path to a PhD and a life as a Sociology professor in England. Then I had a 15 minute meeting with my tutor. He asked me what I planned to do after graduation, I told him about Bath and that “meanwhile over the summer I plan to tour the USA on a tourist visa”. “Oh”, he replied, “why not do your Masters in the US and then come back to finish your PhD here?” I had no idea you could! He suggested the names of a half-dozen American universities with good Sociology departments (Brown, Boston University, Brandeis) and after sending off applications to those colleges which all required a non-refundable $25 application fee I noticed Tufts University which did not require a fee. So I applied there, as an afterthought. I was too late to attend in the Fall of 1973 so had to apply for the 1974 academic year. Tufts was the college that gave me a scholarship and the offer of a job as a teaching assistant to cover living expenses. Academically, it was a poor choice — the focus was on quantitative studies, survey design and statistics. Not my cup of tea. It cured me of a desire to become an academic. But I instantly fell in love with America and that explains the rest of my career, and my life since. That conversation *did* change my life.

1973: Humanities Teacher, Wreake Valley College, Syston, Leicestershire: After graduating, and while waiting to go to the States for my graduate education, I was a three-day-a-week substitute teacher. In those days anyone with a BA was considered qualified to teach. There was no training. I had no clue. I was terrible teacher.

1974: Teaching Assistant, Sociology Department, Tufts University, Medford, MA: During my first year as a graduate student I was tasked with supervising Soc 101 classes. My abstract philosophical approach did not go down well with the undergrads, many of who were college athletes taking Introductory Sociology as a “gut” course. I was still a terrible teacher.

1975: Casual Labor, Cambridge, MA: When I teaching assistant job was not renewed (no surprise!) I had to find another way to put bread on the table. IRS regulations allowed me to work 20 hours a week while studying. I found work with Bobby Ferant, a local contractor, who had me doing odd-jobs remodeling commercial space in Harvard Square, digging foundations, painting hair salons and more. He used to offer me a hit from from his opium pipe on the way into work. The sixites were still alive in Boston in those days.

1975-76: Shoe Salesman, Roots, Cambridge, MA: Once I’d had enough of demolition work, painting and decorating, I found part-time work selling ‘recessed heel’ shoes in the Cambridge Roots store. The manager was a delightful Swiss woman with a passion for photography and red wine. The other employee was a Rajneesh ‘sannyasin’ who dressed in orange robes. I remember a HBS student who surveyed us as part of his study comparing Roots and the more popular Earth Shoes in the hippie retail shoe market niche. Australians would sometimes walk by the store, do a double-take, and double over in laughter. I later found out why.

1976: Taxi Driver, Ambassador Cabs, Cambridge, MA: A *very* short-lived stint as a taxi driver. I had only just learned to drive, did not know the streets, and could not understand the Boston accents of the dispatchers on the radio. Apart from that it was a piece of cake. My first fare was a blind guy I took to Church on Sunday who gave me directions from the back seat (he made the same trip every week). After getting lost trying to find the airport with an anxious passenger I packed it in.

1976: Shoe Salesman, Roots, Polk Street, San Francisco: With my East Coast experience selling shoes, my friend James (a fellow Leicester graduate) found me a fill-in job for the summer working in the Polk Street Roots store. It was located opposite the Adidam Bookstore, next door to Buzzby’s (the largest gay disco on the west coast). When the store was quiet, I was sent home early to an apartment I was “house sitting”. Which is why, early one afternoon, I opened the door to find a guy rifling through the place. He jumped out the way he’d come in: through the window and onto the fire escape. Despite everything I’d seen on The Streets of San Francisco, the detective who came by later was not much help. Where was Michael Douglas when I needed him?

1976-1977: Shoe Store Manager, Roots, Portland, OR: My first full-time paid employment! I managed the Portland store with the help of two part-time assistants, Faith and Martha. I lived in a wonderful house in SW Portland and walked down the hill to work on SW Broadway with views of Mt. Hood in the distance and the Rose Gardens above me. It was the year of a drought in Oregon so I avoided the incessant rain. Ranchers from eastern Oregon bought our high-top boots which they appreciated because “they sure keep the burrs out”.

Then it was time to return to the UK and find work, which I’ll discuss in Part 3.

Last month marked the end of my official full-time employment. This used to be called “retirement” but neither my past working life nor my future activities are so easily compartmentalized. I never really “began work” in a career role until I was in my 30’s and don’t expect to spend my future on the golf course or fishing.

However, as a way of taking stock, I decided to draw up a list of all my paid employment I can remember since my first evening newspaper round in England when I was thirteen.

To make this project manageable, and hopefully easier for you to read, I’ll take my working life a stage at a time, starting with the early years.

The Early Years

1963-65: Evening Newspaper delivery, Wistaston, Cheshire. This was my first paid job. My parents didn’t approve of me working the more lucrative morning paper round because it might make me late for school (so they said) so I jumped on my bike each weekday evening after school and cycled the leafy lanes of my home town delivering the Sentinel. This came to an end when we moved to Shavington.

1965-68: Weekend farm laborer, Jack’s Old Farm, Weston Lane, Shavington, Cheshire. I mucked out the cows in winter and helped bring in the hay in summer. Some highlights were rat catching among the sacks of grain, holding down the bullocks while they were castrated and the smell of fresh milk in the dairy. After work my Mum would make me take my jeans and shirt off outside the back door and jump in the bath to get rid of the smell of cow muck. I was, as John Fowles noted in the opening chapter of Daniel Martin:

“…a boy in his midteens, his clothes unsuited, a mere harvest helper…all life to follow…collecting this day, pregnant with being. Unharvested, yet one with this land…Inscrutable innocent, already in exile.”

1969-70: Shelf Stocker, Fine Fare Supermarket, Crewe, Cheshire: In my final couple of years in Grammar School I worked an eight-hour day each Saturday at one of the only two supermarkets in town. I was paid 19/6 which was less than £1 and while a pound was worth more then than today it was still piss-poor wages. However, us Saturday boys from the Grammar School got to hang out with the full-time workers who’d left school at 16 and shared a slice of their lives from the other side of the tracks. We stocked the shelves and talked about sex.

1970: Waiter, Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Pwllheli, North Wales: together with my school friends Alan and Bryan (pictured), Richard and Steve, we waited tables and worked as bar staff in the evenings for the happy campers in this uniquely English working-class holiday-cum-prison camp. Room and board (in a double-bunk chalet), a small stipend, and a summer of love that was a prelude to University passed in a drunken haze.

Next up, I work a couple of part-time jobs in England before moving to America to teach undergraduates, drive a cab and sell shoes.

My parents funeral took place on January 30, 2018 at Crewe Crematorium. This is the eulogy I read in celebration of their lives.

Shakespeare wrote in his play The Tempest:

We are such stuff as dreams are made on / And our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Mum and Dad were together for over 70 years and rounded out their lives when, both aged 97, they passed away together earlier this month. Over the course of their very long lives they saw many, many changes.

Mum was born on June 10, 1920 in the leafy Nottingham suburb of West Bridgeford. We always knew when it was her birthday because they played God Save the Queen on the radio, not for Gwen, but coincidentally it was also the Duke of Edinburgh’s birthday on June 10, he was a year younger than Gwen, born in 1921. Another coincidence is that 53 years ago today, on January 30, 1965, the largest funeral since the end of the war took place in London, when Winston Churchill was honored at St Paul’s. Our memorial today is a lot smaller, but no less significant for those of us here today.

Gwen was 15 when her Dad moved the family to Derby where he told her, “y’know, girls don’t really need to go to school, so you should probably find a job…” In some ways, she already did have a job. She had to mind Jack, her younger brother, most evenings, while her parents made the rounds collecting payments from the mining families they sold clothes to. Years later, she vowed to always be at home when her own children came home from school, and not leave them in an empty house. Her first job outside the house did not last long. She had a position with the Post Office transcribing telegrams for delivery, until a supervisor noticed she had atrocious spelling – something I’ve inherited.

During the war she worked as a PT instructor and helped build scale models of the French coastline that were used to train troops for the liberation of Europe.

She met Dad at Rolls Royce in Derby where he worked in the drawing office at the aircraft engine division and she was what was known as a tracer. He would offer her a lift after work on the back of his motorbike to her parents’ house on Hillsway where she was living. They were married on Feb 10, 1949 in St. Peter’s Church, Littleover. It would have been their 69th wedding anniversary in a fortnight.

Mum was the bedrock of the family. She kept her promise to always be there when Elaine and I got home from school. For many years she was the lunchtime cook at the Horseshoe Inn in Willaston where, rain or shine, she’d ride her moped the mile and a half there and back. Her most famous customer was probably the comedian Frankie Howard who stayed at the Inn when he appeared at the Town Hall in Nantwich one year.

Mum might have served chips with everything to Frankie and her lunchtime customers, but at home she was always conscious of feeding the family healthy food. I remember she started making her own yoghurt in the early 1960’s. I mean, who’d even heard of yogurt back then? For many years she always had a crop of alfalfa sprouts going on the kitchen counter. While Les could put food away like nobody’s business, she was frugal in her diet, her lunch was often just a Ryvita and an apple.

Gwen was also adept at crafts: making lampshades, arranging flowers and kitting. All her grandchildren – Christopher, Emily and Neil – were kept warm as babies with her hand knitted jumpers.

She was a stoic, uncomplaining, Derbyshire lass. My cousin Philip has researched the Adshead family (her maiden name) and found they were originally silk-weavers from Cheshire, before that industry collapsed. And so, by way of Nottingham and Derby, she returned to county of her ancestors.

Macular degeneration slowly robbed her of her sight over the last 15 years, and her hearing was not what it once was. But Gwen soldiered on: cooking, brewing endless cups of tea, washing up and generally making sure Les behaved himself in the house. Eventually, they left their bungalow at The Beeches and moved into the warm and caring environment of Brookfield House.

When she slipped away on the afternoon of Tuesday January 16th Les was asleep in bed with a chest infection. Mercifully, he did not wake up to ever hear of Gwen’s passing until he, too, passed away in his sleep at noon the very next day.

Les was born in Oulton, Staffordshire on January 1, 1921. His family go back generations in those parts, all the way to the Norman Conquest when the French nobleman De Gryphon settled in Staffordshire. He was so clearly identified with that part of England that, on their first trip to visit me in America in the late 1970’s, a chap on the ‘plane heard him chatting to Mum, tapped him on the shoulder and asked, ‘What part of Staffordshire are you from?” (This is something that always astounds the Americans I tell that story to.)

Les was taught in a two-room schoolhouse in Oulton and left school at 14 to pursue his engineering education at night school. He earned his UEI certificates in engineering drawing in 1938 and was a draughtsman in the war while also serving in the Home Guard (very rightly called Dad’s Army) during the war. His work then took him to Rolls Royce in Derby and to his wife-to-be.

After they were married, Gwen and Les first rented a flat in Crich, a safe 17 miles north of the in-laws, and then bought their first home in Horsley where they kept chickens in a huge garden and set about starting a family. Just before I was born he transferred with Rolls to the car division in Crewe, where they moved into their first house at number 2 Clyde Grove in 1952. In 1957 they moved to a semi in Sandylands, Wistaston, just off Church Lane, which Les bought for the princely sum of £2,000.

Les was extremely handy and loved tinkering at a succession of “blinking jobs”. He kept a series of second-hand cars roadworthy: rebuilding engines, re-boring cylinders, adjusting spark plugs and so on. I can still remember the license plate of his beloved Morris Minor – HWM 775. It was a constant battle. Our annual holiday trips to North Wales often involved long stop-overs at garages in the depths of Snowdonia waiting for a replacement radiator hose to be fitted that would allow us to continue the journey to the caravan at Black Rock Sands or the holiday cottage in Borth-y-Gest where we’d join my cousins Michael and Philip and their parents Marjorie and Jack.

Those cars also took us every Easter and Christmas on the long road from Crewe to Stone where we visited his Mum and his sister Rita’s family: Margret, David and Andrew are here today. Then onto Derby and Gwen’s parents and our other cousins. We’d count the Christmas trees on the way there and sometimes stop for fish and chips from a van outside the Swan with Two Necks on the way back.

Les loved his music and he’d hum along to Sing Something Simple on the car radio. Bing Crosby was a particular favorite and he knew the lyrics of many of the crooners’ hits by heart.

Dad worked tirelessly on DIY projects, wallpapering and painting a succession of homes in Wistaston, Shavington, Winterley and The Beeches in Nantwich. He converted attics into bedrooms, erected garden sheds and much, much more.
Les was admittedly accident prone. He was famously late for my cousin Philips wedding having driven the car clear across a roundabout on the journey there. His excuse? “Well, it wasn’t there last time I drove along that road!”. Never at a loss for a project, he also tried my wife Sandra’s patience on a visit to spend the holidays with us in America when he decided to build a shelf behind the cooker just as she was getting the turkey ready for the oven on Christmas morning.

He had a life-long interest in photography and when they moved out of the Beeches I sorted through a vast collection of over 6,000 photos he’d taken over the years. Following his retirement, Les took up art with his usual passion and dedication to detail. His architecturally precise paintings of Church’s Mansions and other Nantwich landmarks hang in our homes today.

Throughout their time together, Gwen and Les enjoyed their lives to the full. They visited many parts of the UK in their caravan, spent wonderful holidays in Ireland with Sandra’s parents. Richard, Sandra’s brother, and his wife Dierdra are over from Limerick. They visited National Trust gardens around the country, including, of course, those at Dorfold Hall their son-in-law Nigel and my sister Elaine maintain so well. On multiple trips to America they visited Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, Death Valley, New England and many other scenic spots.

I’d like to specifically thank Elaine and Nigel for the support they provided to Gwen and Les. If it was not for them, our parent’s final years would have been much different. Thank you.

However, as a wise man once said, all good things come to an end. When life had run its course, Les, ever the gentleman, let Gwen pass through the doorway before him, if only by a few hours. Many people have remarked how beautifully appropriate it is that a couple who were together so long were together at the end. It seems a very acceptable way to die.

I’ll leave you with another quote:

Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body.

Thank you all for coming to celebrate the 97 years Gwen and Les spent on the earth. Unlike the flowers, their memory won’t fade.

Those were my prepared remarks. However, earlier this week I spoke with Gavin and Max, the funeral directors. They explained that Gwen and Les will be placed in the Rose Garden behind the crematorium. A hole will be dug in the flower beds and our parent’s ashes will be placed in the earth. This reminded me of the lyrics to an Irish musician Bob Geldof’s song on the 1992 album ‘The Happy Club’. It wouldn’t have been Les’s cup of tea, in fact you probably couldn’t get further away from Bing Crosby. The words seem very appropriate given what Gavin and Max told me. So I’ll leave you with ‘The Soft Soil’:

Let the soil be your soft pillow
The grassy blanket keep you warm
Let the leafy branches cool you
And the blue skies keep you from all harm
Let the wind keep fresh your memory
Let it blow across the land
Let the rain refresh your spirit
Let the damp earth hold your hand.

And all the bells you’ve ever heard
Are ringing out for wat you’ve done
Like all the dreams in all the world
You’re shining reckless like the sun.

This video is a memorial to their lives.