http://www.thinkdeeplywriteclearly.com/

Think Deeply, Write Clearly LLC, New York, NY (2026)

06/17/2024

For about 30 years my father would put on conferences with thought leaders in the death, dying, and bereavement space. At those conferences he would bring in keynotes like Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Earl Grollman, Sam Keen, among others—and there would be small breakout sessions by lesser-known people, and every once in a while I’d ask how a session went and he’d say, disdainfully, “therapy, it turned into therapy.”

I didn’t understand, at the time, but I now see his concern with it. I’m also a conference addict at this point in my life—I’m the guy who will travel the world to learn three bullet points. And I see the temptation, on various stages (some quite reputable) to turn thought leadership into therapy.

Instead of “these are all the factors of a decision regarding, for instance, American interests in global military affairs,” there will be a session dedicated to, simply, “the death of children in war” and the room will be full of empathetic discussion—devoid of many of the structural reasons for the death of children in war. Therapy, not, thought-leadership.

In these narrower spaces, I find a trend: it’s academics leading these discussions—or leaders of not for profits or NGOs.

And compare that to, for instance, the quality of thinking that’s available at conferences like the Wall Street Journal Future of Everything Conference—where some of the most successful people in the world do the speaking.

When someone is highly successful and leading a Fortune 100 company—they don’t hide behind—nor do they seem to want to hide behind—only part of the story. Even the policy makers at those conferences are thoughtful—the types of people who are willing to discuss all factors—does the United States have a responsibility to global peace (and what happens if we were to relinquish that responsibility?) and does that make us vulnerable to tacitly or actively participating in the horrors of war? And then one has to weigh the very difficult position of both sides. And recognize there will be consequences, either way.

And it has me reflecting on the ease at which we give expert status to people (particularly in the media and academic world) who are not responsible for decisions—and the repercussions of that. It’s very easy to say “the United States should not be funding the death of children” and much more difficult to say the nuanced thing “the United States has to weigh the effect of rogue nations and terrorist groups having their way with allies and free people, versus the consequences of participating in wars.”

If we stare at only a few factors, we can get a successful social media posts, or a successful conference session—but we cannot create successful policy.

Branding is not wisdom.

The threat to the U.S. is not, I think, our policies.

Our threat is the quality of our discussions around policies, in academic and media circles—who are not responsible for decisions.

05/23/2024

Of all the graduation talks this past week, the one that stands out to me the most was Ian Bremmer’s talk at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs, where he took on complexity in an environment that might be hostile to it, challenged the students to extend their curiosity (why, for instance, he asked, are students obsessed about Israel/Gaza—when the far greater threat to global security and poverty—where starvation becomes epidemic, where there has also been more death—is the war in the Ukraine—the world’s food supply is at stake)—something he did with subtlety, encouragement, and grace—in front of an audience practiced at impatience. He modeled: don’t let emotions make the world understandable—and easy—we need you to be thoughtful people—and you are.

They responded with a standing ovation.

It was a moment of American discussion, gorgeously executed. It stood in stark contrast to, that same week, a U.S. Congresswoman chiding another about “fake eyelashes getting in the way of her reading” in a congressional committee meeting that devolved to insults: “beach blonde butch body… Baby Girl…,” which happened in the same week we found out that a United States Supreme Court Justice flew the flag of the United States upside down at his residence because, as he tells it, his wife was bothered by some people on his street.

It has begged the question for me: if the people in our institutions do not lead: who does? Students, rightfully, say: Bremmer is the exception not the rule. They’re right. Reasonable people could not see a significant difference between the conversational depth of a NY Times Opinion Piece, an argument at the Supreme Court, Fox News, or in an undergraduate essay.

America, to me, is the Bremmer speech, when we are at our best. We listen, we love each other, we applaud thoughtful contributions to conversations even if we disagree with the conclusions. Free speech is sandpaper, not knives—meant to refine—not injure.

I don’t think that version of the U.S. is outdated—I think it’s just much more obvious that that’s who we are on, say, LinkedIn—or in a Board of Directors meeting—than it is in, say, the United States Congress.

Which begs the question: how do normal Americans, who are more thoughtful than the professors, the congress people, the judges, that represent us—handle a world in which the academic, political, and media institutions can’t be trusted with the conversations?

For what it’s worth, my reflection is only this: the center of gravity shifts to us. It is us, individually, who have to find the nuance of decisions—we have to seek multiple sources of input—we have to question ourselves and our communities with love and dignity.

We have to educate for this. If not in the classroom—then in the business—or in community.

If the people are superior to the institutions, it’s our job to model for the institutions—not devolve to their level.

05/14/2024

On Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast last week a libertarian and a more liberal panelist debated the merits of banning TikTok in the U.S., and what struck me about the debate is the that one panelist made a moral (not, a technical one—which would be access to American phones under TikTok’s terms of download) argument: the Chinese government is morally abhorrent, and TikTok may be used as a tool of propaganda. The libertarian argument was simple: Everything you say is true—but we are a country that welcomes free speech, criticism, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

There was more to the debate (you may enjoy listening to it) but as I’ve reflected on this issue (btw, I have a TikTok account with 4 followers—not on my phone) I’ve begun to dive into what I see as the deeper issue: it’s not whether or not people will use social media to sway opinion (foreign countries or American politicians, companies, for profits and not for profits included) the real issue, to me, is whether or not we have produced a populace, a culture, that is susceptible to propaganda or whether or not we are a country that still believes free speech is an investigative tool, not a surface-level manipulation. And if we believe that diving into problems long enough will find actionable, nuanced, solutions to them—do we educate people for that?

And for that, I return to my classroom two weeks ago when I found out that none of my eleven students who were pro-protestor at varying colleges (there were no protests on our own grounds) were aware of what had happened on October 7th .

When we discussed it, the students got silent. The world got complicated for them. We stopped discussing their opinions and discussed the factors that go into the decisions that Israel, the United States, colleges and universities, face when it comes to supporting funding wars or military operations in various places in the world—we discussed Bretton Woods and America’s promises to defend free people and free trade.

In that discussion “right,” suddenly, went away as an option—all that was left was complexity, and optimizations of suboptimal circumstances.

No, they weren’t informed enough to be trusted with policy decisions or votes on policy decisions until that point. And yes, it strikes me that politicians, professors, want to make the world sound easy to understand (oppressed/oppressors) (lower taxes/higher) and it strikes me that media is paid to keep us listening, not informed. Suddenly, then:

The threat isn’t Tiktok. The threat is internal. Our own institutions haven’t created a culture that can withstand propaganda on TikTok.

That’s the real issue, as I see it.

And it is both a cultural problem and a business one:

If our students don’t think, our employees and our entrepreneurs don’t think. Our marketers don’t think. Our media doesn’t think. Our culture doesn’t think.

If we want to protect the country—I wouldn’t aim at TikTok.

I’d aim at getting better professors in classrooms.

04/30/2024

I’ve been reflecting on the campus protests that have gripped some of the schools of the U.S. and I have concerns—not because students have opinions, or, even that their opinions may differ from my own—but that when discussing the protests in my classroom last week (we are reading a Vietnam story, I drew a bridge between the Vietnam protests on campuses and these protests) I asked “what happened
on Oct. 7 th ?” a question that I thought at least 80% of the class could give an answer to—not one, not a single student, knew what had happened.

Here’s the thing they had done: they had formed an opinion on the response—but they did not know what Israel was responding to.

From my vantage point I tried to make clear: I don’t care what you decide for yourself—what you conclude from an investigation of all factors is up to you—but, as I see it, you have a responsibility to investigate all the factors before you make a conclusion.

I went back through my university email (I never delete emails, it’s a problem) and looked for the word “Israel.” I found not a single email. No panel discussion has taken place. No speaker has come in. I looked for the word “Gaza” and found that there had been an invitation to an art installation called “A Child’s View of Gaza.” That is the entire, as far as I can tell, contribution to the conversation from the university.

And it strikes me that two things have conflated at this moment: 1. The faculty and the administration of universities are far more afraid of the student’s power in leveraging social media than in our own responsibility to be thoughtful conversation partners with the students. If a professor isn’t careful, it ends up on Rate My Professor or Instagram; and that hurts, so professors tread too lightly in investigations of student ideas.

And secondly, the students believe their future power in the world is in their personal branding not in their ability to think through and solve issues.

Let me be clear: they think that because we taught them that.

We taught them that with our own unnuanced political speech at the national and local level; with unthoughtful interviews on cable TV, uninvestigated writing at mainstream and other press outlets, and we taught them that by hiring faculty with moderate expertise in individual subjects and suboptimal expertise about how to think and approach all the things that happen in the world.

The kids jump to personal branding conclusions because MSNBC, Fox, the New York Times, and their own adjunct professors showed them how.

To me, then, this moment of reflection is also for the adults in the room—as well as the students.

If we teach students all the factors matter—then they learn that nuance—and information—matters in business, political, family, relationship solutions.

And if we teach them that the brand matters more than the solution—that’s what they bring to their lives—and that’s what they bring to the quad.

03/29/2024

Just want to give a quick shout out to the The Wall Street Journal, a place I use in my classroom discussions as sometimes an example of good writing, and sometimes an example of... not.

Today, however-- the front page of the Wall Street Journal (print edition) was a blank page-- with the headline: His Story Should Go Here, and a Byline by Evan Gershkovich (who has been in a Russian prison for a year).

I guess if I give them crap when they don't write well, I should probably point out when they do it right.

This was right.

02/28/2024

I spent an unproductive ten minutes this weekend reading a NY Times essay written by two Academics titled “Most Americans Believe The Economy Is Rigged Against Them” and quotes Americans who do. My concerns: not only did I find it poorly executed—but that the poor ex*****on creates a suboptimal conversation in the society, where there isn’t enough information to understand, or solve, the problem.

We pay a societal price for that.

Free speech, on its own, cannot solve problems (see Twitter). Speech does, however, create a frame for discussion. If a solution cannot be found in that frame, we have created a piece of personal branding—that’s all. And personal branding—from academics, from politicians—far too often masquerades as a solution to a problem. Wisdom does that. Branding does not.

For instance: that income is unequal, on its surface, doesn’t necessarily mean that an economy is “rigged.” Does Jeff Bezos live in a fundamentally different legal system than we do? (I own an LLC, it cost about $100 to set up). Are we blocked from participating in that system?

One thing that might have been discussed, but wasn’t, is the role of education in that choice. The authors, however, focus on tax rates, not education (how could Academics miss this point?). My sense is that tax rates are not equal to a solution. The difference in income between a nurse, and a nurse who owns their own home health aid business, is stark—almost certainly several million dollars over a lifetime.

Whether that business owner pays 15% corporate tax or 25% won’t change the fundamental ceiling of a business owner’s growth. Income remains unequal. In the essay, there is no adequate bridge between “government was supposed to solve this” (which they do say) and why the authors believe government (through tax rates, not education) can solve this—through what mechanism, and to what end, does adjusting tax rates take on a knowledge gap?

Education takes on knowledge gaps. Free college for all might help—but more thoughtful curriculums and more thoughtful and multidisciplinary professors, would absolutely help.

Perhaps, if nursing students (not just business students) received fundamental finance and economic information in their college years, we might solve what perhaps underpins the issue: when we say “rigged” do we mean that we are ignorant of the opportunities?

Because that’s not government “rigging” that; that’s Universities selling us on one major or another—and not investing in broader education.

When writers create boxes for discussion that cannot solve the problems we discuss—in a democracy—we create offshoots of conversations (that people vote on) that are not equal to the problems the society faces.

Which creates a society that creates noise not solutions.

We miss: Writing is an act of service, not branding.

If we do not adequately investigate problems, we cannot frame conversations toward solutions.

https://buff.ly/3TfYA6t

01/05/2024

Because I’m old, my New Years Eve was spent on my couch (my wife and I considered an NYE party on the NYC waterfront for $550, but decided we were both neither rich enough or cool enough to participate) and so between 11 and midnight I found myself petting my cat on my lap—my wife asleep—and I’m watching CNN of all things, bringing in the new year.

I’ve been reflecting on the CNN NYE show, because it’s something of a train wreck of decision making (as I see it) and some of those factors are, strangely, seen in day to day discussions with my clients as well.

CNN’s most visible star is Anderson Cooper, who hosts the NYE show with Andy Cohen (who I don’t know well, but is apparently on Bravo TV). The business decision here from Disney, if I had to guess, goes something like this: bring your biggest star out to host a night where people watch TV until midnight, and if he’s a little journalist-y and stiff, put someone charismatic and wild with him.

The effect, on paper, should be something watchable.
The effect, in real life, is a wreck of a show—humor that doesn’t land—guest performances that are odd (drag queens juggling fire-lit batons)—and, generally speaking, an entire show that mirrors(ish) the Dick Clark Rockin’ Eve shows of the past without any of the Dick Clark or Rockin or true celebrity. Mediocre entertainment, and shallow conversation.

It begs two questions, for me:
1. What is on-brand for CNN, and why do they think this show benefits them?
2. The answer to the above, in terms of benefit, is they get to sell advertising at that time of night, probably at something of a premium to their normal rate.

However, the difficulty is: they just took their major star and made him inane. We are forced to watch not Anderson Cooper in his wheelhouse (interviewing, investigating—which could be a cool show—think something like interviewing Bruce Springsteen on NYE to talk about the state of rock n roll in 2024, or interview high-profile political players we don’t often hear from in a cool way, even if they come from other countries) but instead we get Anderson Cooper looking awkward, shy, next to an upstaging and even more useless (but loud) Andy Cohen.

Did they sell advertising? Yes.

Was it worth it?

The decision making was narrow—binary. Poor advertising rates or higher ones. More viewers or fewer? But the night also stains them. It weakens their star power, and it makes them look like they’re chasing ad dollars, not serious journalism. That, in the long run, injures credibility far more (I suspect) than the ad dollars they gain for a few hours.

For my clients, this is the problem many face when they focus on LinkedIn impression metrics, not quality of writing. Inane quips get metrics, but you create no credibility with them.

Nothing exists in isolation.

Metrics mean nothing, out of context, to a deeper understanding of purpose. If we kill purpose for metrics, we deplete service to our audiences.

12/01/2023

In my college class, these final weeks of the semester, we are working on their research papers—and I always get in trouble with my English counterparts, because they would much prefer I start talking about the structure of the paper before the final third of the semester—the kids, after all, will need to know how to write Abstracts, and methodologies, etc in their future college papers.

I hear this criticism, and for ten years have been ignoring it, and will continue to do so and the reason for that is that instead of forcing a structure on the kids, we spend the first ten weeks of the class talking about little else except their reactions to New York Times essays or similar works—and so when it comes time to do their research paper, they are better observers and thinkers in the world. I’d rather have them think well about thinking and writing, and then put it into a structure, than force a structure on the thinking.

The reason this is (kinda) controversial is because we rarely just ask the question: how do you think/what do you think/why is what you think, potentially, credible and useful to other people?

We end up “teaching to the test” meaning: here’s the form you need.

The largest difficulty we face in business, and cultural, writing right now (including marketing writing, frankly) is that we all learned forms of writing, not how to apply our thinking to form. We teach recipes, but now to make the meal any good.

Here’s why we do (I think) and here’s why it feels risky to ask the question, in a business setting: how do you know that is true, how did you arrive at that conclusion in this report or piece of marketing?

We teach the world—business people, students, politicians—we teach everybody to be petrified of their own thoughts and the expression of their thoughts.

We end up in a situation where people might take personally the reflection: I don’t know how you arrived there, that conclusion?

But “how did you arrive at that conclusion” should be part of our daily lexicon—we should ask it of our essay writers in the NY Times, we should ask it of our politicians, we should ask it of our direct reports and we should ask it of our managers and supervisors and corporate leaders. We should be completely unafraid of the question: how did you arrive there—and we should, if we are good thinkers—be absolutely thrilled to answer it.

Yes, it requires putting language to our thinking.

Yes, that makes us vulnerable.

And yes, if we risk the vulnerability of our thought, and we have good thoughts and observations, we gain trust in the world.

This is why most marketing doesn’t work, most political speeches are ineffective, and educated teams still end up causing weekend editing hours for management.

Writing has never been about form.

It has always been about risking the quality of thinking we apply to the world, and then putting it into form.

11/24/2023

I had a friend who lived in Kyiv but was on vacation when the war in the Ukraine started. She would spend the next months living on people’s couches in Europe with the same suitcase full of clothes she had on vacation (wrong weather) and making do, while reports about dead friends and family would come in second hand to her. She would eventually get back to Kyiv, leave for a year, and is back there now. In the midst of one of several Zoom calls with her she would speak a sentence that has always struck me as poignant. Of how she viewed life before the war:

“Of course there were problems. But how were we to know that we were happy?”

Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday. Yes, we have it in Canada but for some reason it doesn’t hold the same weight culturally. Maybe it’s the football. But it strikes me that, in many ways, we, in the United States, are in the pre-Russian-invasion of Ukraine space. We have our problems: but how were we to know that we were happy?

I’ve found myself reflecting, in recent months and years, on the enormous gratitude I have for my American passport—the ability to start and operate a company in this country, and the ability to meet, serve, employ, network with, a vast array of brilliant people in the process of doing so. Every day, in this community, every day is a gift.

Despite my own feelings on it, though, I wouldn’t say my college students (or even all of my clients) seem, on the whole, grateful. (I likely wasn’t, as much, at age 19 either.) But we live in a moment where complexity can lead to overwhelm. And that overwhelm becomes, itself, a risk to discussion.

Complexity, as I see it, comes from two primary places: mass media and social media. That complexity is the vast amount of ways that one can look at a situation—and how we, simultaneously, respect all ways of looking at the world while maintaining a space for our own assessments—while we remain interested in learning enough, to make our own assessments.

This process isn’t easy—we weren’t educated for it—and it can be overwhelming.

But it strikes me that we entering into a period of time where our ability to discuss complexity is a necessary part of our growth trajectory: as businesses, as a nation.

If I were to offer a simple word of advice on that topic, it would be just this: it helps to be grateful. How were we to know, despite all the things that might take our attention from recognition of it, how were we to know that we were happy?

I have great faith in a country that celebrates Thanksgiving like this. That makes gratefulness a part of its culture. It is both a reflection point and a light thrown into the future.

From here: we can handle what comes, and all the complexity that comes with it.

Happy Thanksgiving my friends.

10/18/2023

There was a conference room in the company I used to work for which, for an hour each day, was reserved for lunch. There was a moment when on a given day you’d see 10-20 people during lunch and eat with them, and the topic was always politics.

Here's what I’m reflecting on: at that time, we thought there was a tremendous division between the two political parties. I was young, in my mid-twenties—there was a sense of danger in the discussion of that room, basically, every day, about the unhinged Republican president at the time. A few years later, I remember saying to some of those same people who used to meet for lunch that I was comfortable with either choice in the Barack Obama, Mitt Romney election. This was greeted with gasps of shock: how could I be comfortable with someone not from “the other party” as President? I had preferences,
but I though Mitt Romney was a smart, and honest, person (and still do).

I’ve been listening to Condoleezza Rice talks, and interviews, during my workout time these past few weeks. She’s now at Stanford University (has a beautiful way of listening, from what I can tell, to the students) and her foreign policy thoughts are well described, well thought through, she’s fully an expert in the area (she was, after all, Secretary of State) and her conclusions are darn-near Bidenesque on Ukraine, Russia, Israel.

In that lunch room, Condoleezza Rice was one of the people most discussed as a threat to the country.

So let me reframe that from my, now, twenty+ years on experience: I’m very glad to live in a country that has Condoleezza Rice’s voice in it. I appreciate what she adds to the conversation.

Reflection: absolutely everything is seen within a frame—and reacted to within a frame. We have learned to be skeptical of information, but not the frame for information. This is the critical thinking miss in school—this in the critical thinking miss in culture—this is the critical thinking miss in business.

Did that group of people in the lunch room benefit from discussing disagreements with certain U.S. policies (particularly Iraq?) Yes. Would we also have benefitted from a discussion of the frame of that information set by, essentially, the New York Times?

Absolutely. We didn’t do the last part.

When someone presents information to us, they make clear their conclusions—but more
importantly—their assumptions.

Credibility begins at the assumption, not the conclusion.

Does understanding this improve our thought leadership, our business reporting, our credibility in our fields? Of course.

There are business ramifications for that, of course. But also cultural ones.

Political division, I suspect, can end in the English classroom.

If we were willing to look at the English classroom and admit the greatest use of time in that space is a discussion of presentation: how to dissect presentations with poor assumptions—and how to write credibly, knowing our own.

09/27/2023

I was at the Fast Company Innovation conference last week, and despite the headliners and talent there (Ray Dalio, Ryan Gellert, Hans Vestberg, even Halle Berry—who recently bought a stake in a probiotic company) the vast amount of conversation was predictable, and shallow. It strikes me that we don’t have poor ideas in the world—we have excellent ideas in the world—we have poor communication about those ideas, and by extension, we live at a conversational level that dumbs down ideas.

Take the Halle Berry conversation. There is a strain of probiotic that was the “white whale” of the industry—but it couldn’t be packaged. The company she bought figured it out, and Halle Berry’s own A1C fell two points. One might reasonably consider that the best questions were to the founder of the company—How did you discover how to keep the strain alive in packaging? What does the strain do? Instead, this: what is it like to receive a call from Halle Berry? What is it like to work with her?

It strikes me that the worst thing about Fast Company’s conference is that it was put on by Fast Company. The same can be said for nightly news on CNN, MSNBC, Fox—we have taken microphones from experts and handed them to interpreters of excellence who don’t seem to have the depth orinterest in truly investigating the world. The audience is interested in insights. The interviewer is interested in branding.

If they gave Ray Dalio a microphone and said “go” for 30 minutes, everybody would learn, at a very nuanced level, what Ray Dalio thinks important to share.

If they ask Ray Dalio questions, they pin him into their frame, not his. The inexpert leads the expert. Some people (Rajkumari Neogy was excellent at this—the best in the conference) found a way to deepen the answers to nuances that the interviewer would be incapable of finding. But for the mostpart—deep excellence was on the stage—but not in the communication from the stage.

This is perhaps where political division starts—but it’s also where ineffective thought leadership, book writing, and marketing starts. If we ask an editor to seek what will “sell” not what is “useful to the reader” you get two different books. If we take a commentator’s view of the world for an accurate representation of the factors affecting the world, we invite ego fights between political parties, not solutions.

Said another way: We are a far more insightful business community, political community, family community, than the shallow insights we borrow from the people with microphones.

This is a threat to us, of course, but also an opportunity. Businesses that do not rely on a marketers advice on marketing have access to their nuances—politicians too.

Nuance separates us from the noise. Nuance carries credibility with it.

If we learn to write and speak toward it, we do not need to be beholden to the people with microphones—and we can begin to be beholden only to the quality of our own thoughts—and to the people they help.

Think Deeply, Write Clearly LLC

06/17/2024

05/23/2024

05/14/2024

04/30/2024

03/29/2024

02/28/2024

01/05/2024

12/01/2023

11/24/2023

10/18/2023

09/27/2023

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category