THESE VITAL SPEECHES

8
CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS
I already knew I didn’t want to be a
corporate executive. I wanted to be a
visionary writer who lived on a houseboat.
The only problem was … how
the hell do you get to THAT?!!
I didn’t have a clue. But I did know
this: it wasn’t enough to string a few
good sentences together. You need
to have ideas. And at 17, I still didn’t
know where ideas came from. Or at
least, not good ones.
But that’s the journey, isn’t it? We set
out to find our voice. We set out to get
our 10,000 hours.
The comic Mark Maron says it
takes most comics 20 years to find their
voice. Steve Martin spent ten years
working empty rooms where no one
laughed. Ten years. When he finally
got a spot on the Tonight Show, he
thought he’d made it. The next morning,
still in the glow, he goes to the
supermarket and a woman stops him
in the aisle.
“Hey, you were on Johnny Carson
last night, weren’t you?”
“Why, yes I was.”
“Boy, you were terrible!!”
So it was back on the road again,
trying to find his voice. If he didn’t find
it in ten years, that’s was it. He was going
to give up.
When he finally had his breakthrough
on Saturday Night Live and
became an overnight sensation just
three months short of his 10-year
deadline, he should have been happy.
Except his father—who was the
head of the Newport Beach Board
of Realtors—penned a review of the
performance in the Realtor’s newsletter
and panned him. In the Realtor’s
newsletter. Not like it was his beat or
anything. Explained in detail why his
son wasn’t funny.
There’s always somebody to tell
you you can’t write. You aren’t good
enough. You aren’t worthy. And the
fact that you know you have to ignore
them and keep going doesn’t make it
hurt any less.
Arthur Miller told a story once. He
was walking down 42nd Street one
afternoon, coming out of rehearsals
for Death of a Salesman. He looks up
and there coming out of a restaurant
in front of him is the man who was his
family’s next door neighbor and the
father of his best friends growing up.
“Artie, Artie! How the hell are you?
Haven’t seen you in years.”
This is the guy on whom Miller
based the character of Willie Loman.
And he based the characters of Biff
and Happy on the man’s two sons. He
knew the guy all his life. So he asks
about the man’s family and the boys
and the guy bends his ear for half an
hour. Then finally, he goes, “So Artie,
what are you doing these days.”
“I’m a playwright.”
“Artie, that’s great. Anything I
mighta heard of ?”
“I had a play on Broadway called
All My Sons.”
And the guys eyes go wide and he
says, “Wait a minute, YOU’RE Arthur
Miller?!!”
You don’t have to sell yourself short.
Everyone else in your life will do it for
you.
***
Twenty years. My journey to find my
voice took 20 years from that day I realized
I wanted to be a visionary writer
on a houseboat. Along the way, I wrote
comedy, I wrote song lyrics, I wrote
magazine articles and edited a journal
for a non-profit.
Everybody said it was great stuff but
none of it went anywhere.
Until one year it did. One year, after
twenty years of working at it, I started
selling magazine articles. I started
selling short stories. I started getting
invited to poetry readings. I quit my
day job and started writing ad copy.
One day, a Thursday afternoon,
I came home to find the light on my
answering machine blinking, which
hadn’t been happening quite enough.
I pushed the button and heard a voice
say, “Hi, my name is Don Runkle and
I’m the chief engineer at Chevrolet.
Would you give me call?”
Talk about out of left field.
So I called him and he told me that
Road and Track magazine had sent
them a spec article I had submitted.
It was about how Chevrolet had lost
their brand mojo and what they could
do to get it back. The magazine didn’t
even send me a rejection letter. Now I
have this guy on the phone telling me
that everyone on the executive team
had read the article and they wanted to
know who I was.
He said, “We’ve been trying to articulate
this for ten years, and you did it
in ten pages. What do you do?”
And I don’t know why I said these
words but I said, “I’m a speechwriter.”
He said we need speeches and the
following Tuesday I was on a plane
to Detroit. That one time I didn’t sell
myself short … and the payoff was
huge. At 37, I vaulted straight into the
C-suite, stuck the landing and I’ve been
there ever since. And I’ve stayed freelance
for two reasons: one, I like to take
a nap; and two, because I’m not here
to support the status quo—I’m here to
tear it up.
I don’t tell my clients this but I can
tell you. I’m with the underground. I’m
here to unlock the cells. It’s a corporate
jailbreak.
I want to bust the idea that a job is
just a job and shove in a new, explosive
idea that will blow the doors off business
as usual. And here’s the idea … an
organization is not what you think it is.
A company is a giant energy conversion
machine. It converts hours
and dollars into expanded human
consciousness and expanded human
connectedness.
At its best, work is a path of enlightenment.
At its best, work doesn’t suck
the meaning out of life. At its best, work
IS the meaning of life. And I’m here
to rattle the cage of every leader who
doesn’t get that and lead like she’s a human
being first and a manager second.
Like Paul Lavallier, the character in
my book, I’m convinced you can make
a company the ultimate expression of
power to the people. And I still believe
the greatest leadership song of all times
is “All You Need is Love.” Followed
closely by “Dancing in the Streets.”
Now … about that houseboat on
San Francisco Bay: it turns out they’re
very damp and take a lot of maintenance.
And they sink, which I would
hate. So I make a life in the hills outside
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