Watch Your Mouth

After all of these years you’d expect me to have gotten used to the idea of people failing to value things they don’t understand, but it still annoys me as much as anything else. Writers deal with this almost constantly, given the vast numbers of people who seem to think that writing is the same thing as typing, but you can also find examples in business, government, academia, and even in the military. One particularly vexing version, of which you can find examples in the news on almost any weekday lately, is people who believe that speech writers aren’t necessary; that any idiot with a microphone and a podium can just spin out oratory off of the top of their head…

The truth is that even something as trivial as a ranting blog post can take hours to craft, at least if you don’t want to sound like the kind of blogger who wears their underpants on their head and believes that the World Health Organization is beaming vegan pastry recipes directly into the President’s false teeth. Great orators – and there are far fewer of these than people seem to think – can make it look like the awe-inspiring speech they are giving is just something off the top of their heads, but that’s showmanship and acting, not wordplay. Even for very smart people, just saying the first thing that comes to mind can get you in trouble faster than you would believe…

If the public sector examples of the last two years aren’t enough for you, consider the case of “Papa” John Schnatter, founder of the Papa John’s Pizza chain. Anybody who starts with a single pizza oven located in his father’s tavern and ends up with over 5,000 retail locations and corporate earnings in the $1.7 billion range (according to Forbes) can’t exactly be a blithering idiot, but you could be excused for thinking so if you’d encountered his remarks about the NFL player protest controversy, or his more recent attempts to justify them…

You can pick up the Forbes and CNBC stories about this if you want to, or go back and check the news broadcasts for the relevant days. I’m not going to say that the issue isn’t controversial, or that Schnatter doesn’t have a right to his own opinion, but I will suggest that making unscripted remarks about an emotionally-charged topic isn’t a great idea even if you do know what you’re talking about. In this particular case, there’s something particularly tone-deaf about a wealthy and powerful white man criticizing African-American athletes for staging a respectful and non-intrusive protest against institutionalized violence aimed at their community. But as bad as that was, attempting to justify your remarks by saying that Colonel Sanders used the “N” word may be even worse…

Now, I’m not going to suggest that everyone should run all of their public remarks past their Public Relations department before speaking them; many of us don’t have a PR department, and not everyone has a spouse or a partner who can tell them when they are about to put their foot into their mouth. But, by the same token, it doesn’t take a master’s degree in Communications with a Public Relations emphasis to realize that making uninformed or casual remarks about anything as complex and emotionally charged as race relations in America is probably not something that a career in food service management would qualify you to do…

The truth is that most of us won’t ever be important enough that our remarks will be noted by millions of people, let alone result in a multi-billion dollar loss in our stock price and get our sponsorship deals with the NFL and Major League Baseball cancelled. All I’m saying is that if you are in a position where a poorly-chosen, carelessly-worded, or badly-informed remark can have a major negative impact on a company, a country, an international treaty organization, or the stakeholders whose jobs or lives may depend on those institutions, there’s nothing wrong with hiring someone who does have expertise in those areas to help you…