Growing Into Your Voice
I'm in one of those between books phases - finished everything on the bedside table, pixelled-out reading the (admittedly fabulous) screeds available throughout the halls of bloggerdom, not wanting to get into any new ink&paper pleasures until my eagerly awaited copy of David's new Small Pieces book arrives...
So naturally, as a kind of karmic cleansing, perhaps, figured I'd pluck down the old copy of that book (aka "The Book That Dare Not Speak It's Name”).
I’d forgotten a lot of the really good stuff in this book. One section, in particular, that jumped out at me on the way home tonight, is the speech by John Jay Chapman inserted as a sidebar into the middle of David’s chapter on “The Longing”.
This piece, from Chapman’s Commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College in 1900, is missing from Chris Locke’s online edition of the Cluetrain, but the complete text of it is available elsewhere.
There’s much in this prescient piece that still resonates with startling clarity over a hundred years later. This is the bit that really popped my contacts out:
“I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. 'In a few years,' reasons one of them, 'I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good.' Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”
Stirring stuff, but it’s only on reading it again, in the context of everything that’s happened since the dawn of the Cluetrain, that I’ve recognized how my own courage of voice has evolved.
In Chris’s first chapter (“Internet Apocalypo”) he writes about the point in his early career when “...one afternoon I was banging out an article, and I wrote a paragraph that stopped me cold. It stopped me because something new and very different had just showed up on the screen: my own voice. It's hard to explain, but the paragraph I'd just written resonated with something that had been sleeping all my life, something potent, something deep. I realized I could say things I cared about, and I could say them in a way no one else could.”
I can’t claim to have had quite such an arresting moment of epiphany – mine has been a more gradual awakening. Yet I still see exactly what Chris is talking about.
So I fully support Chapman’s position and admire the clarion call, but I think Chris’s revelation, or something slower version of it, is probably closer to the typical experience.
I feel more like I’ve been growing into my voice through all these years of writing under the shadow of corporate wage slavery. Maybe I’m simply outing my own earlier cowardice here. But something like honesty, or maybe courage seems to be a defining characteristic of the notion of voice - at least, as it’s explored in the Cluetrain, in Gonzo Marketing, in Small Pieces and in much of these blokes’ earlier writings (Doc’s famous ’98 essay about Presentations, for example).
It’s taken me a good while to reach the point where I can write and speak with my own true voice, without fear of the Man, with as near as I can get to absolute moral honesty. And not just here, of course – in everything I do. It’s made my work better, improved the counsel I offer clients, and left me sleeping better at nights. And right there is something devoutly to be wished.
Now I don’t know why, but this also got me to thinking about one of the first times I got to really trot the voice out for real in a corporate context. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this is another Weinberger-linked story.
David and I once, briefly, worked together on some marketing strategy/positioning kinda stuff when I was running marketing at PC DOCS/Fulcrum (sadly long-since defunct). This was the forced spooging of a document management company (the PC DOCS bit) into the much cooler mindset of a recently acquired knowledge management company (the Fulcrum bit).
We tapped David to help us tell our story in something other than the standard corporate gafflebab. His depth of KM expertise, natural enthusiasm and clarity of thinking helped us all find our voices and put together some stone cold rock ‘n’ roll marketing materials. Guess I knew we’d found our voice when I stood up in front of a conference audience of 1500 punters six months later, and delivered a pitch built around the idea that they all, at heart, really wanted to be like Michael Douglas. And this was a Knowledge Management presentation, fercrissakes ;-)
It’s a loooong story, and I need time out to knit up the ravelled sleeve here, but net net it was the single most successful conference pitch I’ve ever made. The power of voice.
BTW, David’s remarkable written contribution to that particular marketing effort is still available out there, in the form of the most entertaining technology whitepaper ever produced in the history of the known universe. See for yourself (largeish pdf file). And this is from 1998, way back when The Cluetrain Manifesto was less than a twinkle in their collective eyes.
But now...
*yawn*
I'm in one of those between books phases - finished everything on the bedside table, pixelled-out reading the (admittedly fabulous) screeds available throughout the halls of bloggerdom, not wanting to get into any new ink&paper pleasures until my eagerly awaited copy of David's new Small Pieces book arrives...
So naturally, as a kind of karmic cleansing, perhaps, figured I'd pluck down the old copy of that book (aka "The Book That Dare Not Speak It's Name”).
I’d forgotten a lot of the really good stuff in this book. One section, in particular, that jumped out at me on the way home tonight, is the speech by John Jay Chapman inserted as a sidebar into the middle of David’s chapter on “The Longing”.
This piece, from Chapman’s Commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College in 1900, is missing from Chris Locke’s online edition of the Cluetrain, but the complete text of it is available elsewhere.
There’s much in this prescient piece that still resonates with startling clarity over a hundred years later. This is the bit that really popped my contacts out:
“I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. 'In a few years,' reasons one of them, 'I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good.' Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”
Stirring stuff, but it’s only on reading it again, in the context of everything that’s happened since the dawn of the Cluetrain, that I’ve recognized how my own courage of voice has evolved.
In Chris’s first chapter (“Internet Apocalypo”) he writes about the point in his early career when “...one afternoon I was banging out an article, and I wrote a paragraph that stopped me cold. It stopped me because something new and very different had just showed up on the screen: my own voice. It's hard to explain, but the paragraph I'd just written resonated with something that had been sleeping all my life, something potent, something deep. I realized I could say things I cared about, and I could say them in a way no one else could.”
I can’t claim to have had quite such an arresting moment of epiphany – mine has been a more gradual awakening. Yet I still see exactly what Chris is talking about.
So I fully support Chapman’s position and admire the clarion call, but I think Chris’s revelation, or something slower version of it, is probably closer to the typical experience.
I feel more like I’ve been growing into my voice through all these years of writing under the shadow of corporate wage slavery. Maybe I’m simply outing my own earlier cowardice here. But something like honesty, or maybe courage seems to be a defining characteristic of the notion of voice - at least, as it’s explored in the Cluetrain, in Gonzo Marketing, in Small Pieces and in much of these blokes’ earlier writings (Doc’s famous ’98 essay about Presentations, for example).
It’s taken me a good while to reach the point where I can write and speak with my own true voice, without fear of the Man, with as near as I can get to absolute moral honesty. And not just here, of course – in everything I do. It’s made my work better, improved the counsel I offer clients, and left me sleeping better at nights. And right there is something devoutly to be wished.
Now I don’t know why, but this also got me to thinking about one of the first times I got to really trot the voice out for real in a corporate context. Shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this is another Weinberger-linked story.
David and I once, briefly, worked together on some marketing strategy/positioning kinda stuff when I was running marketing at PC DOCS/Fulcrum (sadly long-since defunct). This was the forced spooging of a document management company (the PC DOCS bit) into the much cooler mindset of a recently acquired knowledge management company (the Fulcrum bit).
We tapped David to help us tell our story in something other than the standard corporate gafflebab. His depth of KM expertise, natural enthusiasm and clarity of thinking helped us all find our voices and put together some stone cold rock ‘n’ roll marketing materials. Guess I knew we’d found our voice when I stood up in front of a conference audience of 1500 punters six months later, and delivered a pitch built around the idea that they all, at heart, really wanted to be like Michael Douglas. And this was a Knowledge Management presentation, fercrissakes ;-)
It’s a loooong story, and I need time out to knit up the ravelled sleeve here, but net net it was the single most successful conference pitch I’ve ever made. The power of voice.
BTW, David’s remarkable written contribution to that particular marketing effort is still available out there, in the form of the most entertaining technology whitepaper ever produced in the history of the known universe. See for yourself (largeish pdf file). And this is from 1998, way back when The Cluetrain Manifesto was less than a twinkle in their collective eyes.
But now...
*yawn*
