Not Getting It

From today's New York Times:

And the day offered a perfect opportunity for the campaign, with a potentially embarrassing mini-scandal: a waitress’s report that Mrs. Clinton had failed to tip after eating at a Maid-Rite diner in central Iowa, an assertion that ricocheted around the Internet on Thursday.

Reached at her home in Iowa, the waitress, Anita Esterday, said that neither she nor a colleague who helped serve Mrs. Clinton recalled seeing any tip.

She said a local staff member of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was in the restaurant on Thursday to tell them that the campaign had left a tip.

She said that when she and her colleague said they had not seen a tip, the staff member gave each of them $20.

Ms. Esterday said she did not understand what all the commotion was about.

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

This is not a commentary about the Clinton campaign/candidacy or whether or not a tip was actually left or whether a staffer paid up the next day.

This is about how we in communications – and I risk journalists’ ire for lumping them with copy writers and speech writers – miss the boat. We think we know what people want to hear – what will rock their worlds. And we’re often wrong.

Ms. Esterday’s quote should be printed, framed, and sitting on the desks of everyone who writes for others—okay, I’ll limit it to speech writers.

This arrogance of message-control knows no limits – in other words, it’s not just attributable to those inside the Beltway or wrapped up in politics. It can be found in equal measures inside CEO corner offices across America.

We’re so busy crafting message we forget to listen. It takes time – it takes time to call a conference organizer, to speak with key stakeholders, to reach out to people in the community. But the ROI is enormous: a speech that touches people—that motivates them into action because it’s real versus a speech that means little to almost everybody listening and is forgotten by the time they pull out of the parking lot.

That’s the best tip I’ve gotten all year.