The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

Corporations think they know what they need to say but they can never say it when it comes to responsiveness, and empathy, but what is happening behind the scenes causing these crisis situations and what could they have said differently? In this episode of Hearsay, Michael Maslansky, Lee Carter, and Ben Feller explore different moments of crisis and share their insights on what the challenges of corporate speak are, what it cost corporations that do nothing, and the different solutions to manage a crisis.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Ben Feller’s book, Big Problems, Little Problems

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Michael Maslansky:

They said, what? Welcome to HearSay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is, it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this HearSay. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky and Partners and author of The Language of Trust.

Lee Carter:

And I’m Lee Carter, president and partner of Maslansky and Partners, and author of a book called Persuasion.

Michael Maslansky:

And we have with us today another author and partner, Ben Feller, welcome, Ben.

Ben Feller:

Hey Michael, hey Lee, good to be back on HereSay with you.

Michael Maslansky:

And why don’t you tell the name of your book since we’re talking about books.

Ben Feller:

Oh, sure. I am the author of a children’s book called Big Problems, Little Problems, which is about how to make life a little simpler for kids and parents because we need it.

Michael Maslansky:

–And may be appropriate for what we’re about to talk about today.

Ben Felle:

Absolutely.

Michael Maslansky:

So today we’re going to start with an ad. Does your company suffer from corporate speak? A tendency to not be able to say clearly, sorry, let me start that over again. Um, does your organization suffer from corporate speak? Do you find that it’s hard to say clearly what you mean? Do you try to avoid taking responsibility for your actions? by using language that people can’t understand? Do you make up terms to try and avoid talking about the things that people really want to talk about? If so, you suffer from corporate speak. Side effects may vary, but they do include loss of reputation, increased risk of litigation, lower morale, and a negative impact on profits. So if you’ve ever experienced corporate speak and want to understand what you can do about it, this is the right place. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today on HearSay. So let me start, Lee, how’d I do in describing the problem that we’re here to discuss?

Lee Carter:

I’m really more excited to talk about it now after hearing you say that. So well said. It is  a significant barrier that we have in dealing with our clients and often they don’t even realize it. In trying to make sure that they’re staying out of trouble, they get themselves into more trouble and the corporate speak can end really getting in the way of being heard the way that our clients want to be heard and I think it’s a really important lesson for everyone to learn especially as you go through and navigate some thorny communication challenges

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, so Ben, we were talking the other day about a company that many people may not have heard about. Kite, a baby clothing company. What did they do? What was their step into the breach of corporate speak?

Ben Feller:

So Kite is a clothing company based out of Texas where the CEO got into trouble with her customers and really a lot of other people who had never heard of this company because one of their employees had adopted a baby who was very sick and wanted to work from the hospital. Long story short, they couldn’t work it out and the employee was fired for not following their basic rules of showing up to work.

This became a big problem for the company because mothers were reacting to this as if to say, how would we possibly shop at a place that supposedly is supporting families and would fire one of their own moms for not understanding? So the CEO apologized. And in her first apology, it was scripted. She talked about this incredible journey of adoption and starting a family. And she tried to, I’ve been trying to reach out to apologize, we pride ourselves on being a family-oriented company, we treat everybody equally, hit set. The video completely flopped. Everybody responded to it the way the CEO eventually realized what was happening saying that was scripted, that was inauthentic. We didn’t believe you the first time and we certainly don’t believe you now. What happened after that is the CEO almost in tears said, I got to go off script and do this whole thing over. That wasn’t genuine. That wasn’t me. It’s time to start a new chapter. And she then apologized and what was really an unscripted emotional way. I’m still trying to get customers back. And so she said, you know, okay, I’m just going to do this. I just posted an official apology on Tik ToK. The comments weren’t right. I memorized it. It was a script. I just read it. I shouldn’t have done that. It was a terrible decision. Let’s do this again.

Michael Maslansky:

Okay, so you make an apology that you need to apologize for. You probably didn’t do a good job of it in the first place. But there are other examples that we see out in the world of, companies trying to avoid directly and clearly communicating in important moments and finding that those situations create more trouble than they solve. And there are a couple that come immediately to mind to me, the most important of which is when Republican Congresswoman Eliseabout the lack of response by these universities to the anti-Semitism after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. And none of the presidents seemed to be able to answer the question of whether or not anti-Semitic acts on campus breached their code of conduct. And their answer was, well, it’s context dependent which while they had very good answers for, the reality was is that it didn’t answer the question for anyone in a way that was going to be acceptable. And so they were avoiding the answer to the question because they thought that they were being clever or thought that they had to, and we’re gonna get into that in a second. Another example, a great example, United had a scandal a number of years ago where a passenger got dragged off the plane by two Chicago policemen. And they said in their response that I am sorry that we had to reaccommodate certain passengers and tried to explain away the fact that this passenger was dragged off the plane as being reaccommodated. Another example is Budweiser in response to the Dylan-Milvany crisis where their answer to the crisis was to come up with what I would call a very anodyne statement that tried to split the difference between the right and the left in an environment that required a much more kind of complex response or one that really required them to take a position. They basically said, we’re in the business of bringing people together over a beer. We didn’t intend for to divide people. Well, they already had divided people. And this answer was clearly ineffective, but I think also ineffective because it didn’t really say anything. And that’s the challenge that companies have. They run into a crisis or they end up in a crisis and they have to put out a communication or they have to decide whether or not to communicate and very often they end up with a statement that turns out to be a bad idea in retrospect. And so first thing that I think we want to talk about is why? Why do they end up in these positions? Why do these statements end up the way that they are?

Ben Feller:

So Michael, I want to turn this question back to you because the phrasing of context dependent is really troubling to me. Here’s what I mean. As a CEO of a company, if you’re asked to speak to an audience, which you’ve done many times, you’re likely to ask, what’s the context? Am I speaking to another CEO? Are we talking to a peer group? Are these potential students who might want to intern here one day? I’ve got to know my audience if I’m going to understand what I’m going to say. That makes all the sense of the world and in fact is completely relevant and important to do. When it comes to university presidents testifying on Capitol Hill, what Congresswoman Stavonik was asking these presidents is, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate their code of conduct? Seemingly a straightforward answer. And what the presidents told her was it’s context dependent. It’s a context dependent decision congressman about whether calling for genocide violates our rules. Why do you think leaders like that would fall into that kind of safety language, context caveats when in other circumstances they wouldn’t?

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, well, so I think, you know, we all, anybody who has been following this issue has probably heard plenty about the problems with the statement themselves. And so the, what I think is, is interesting about it from a purely communications perspective is that, is to first acknowledge that this is hard, right? You’re a, you’re a university president, you’re getting up in front of, of Congress to testify about a highly controversial issue. You don’t want to make a mistake. And so you should be pretty concerned about what it is that you are going to say. You also have to recognize that your public actions elsewhere are available for others to see. And so the line that you draw has to, it’s got to thread the needle you cannot make shit up, right? And that’s part of the challenge that these presidents faced is that they had this record on campus of as it related to free speech that they had to That they had to navigate particularly if they were doing something different here They had a purely technical legalistic rationale for their answer what they failed to appreciate is just how How poorly that was going to be received in the context of congressional testimony You know by the Republicans but really both sides of the aisle and so you know, first of all, this stuff is hard. And you do have to be careful about what it is that you say. I think that fundamentally what happened here and what happens in so many cases is it is a battle between lawyers who want you to be too clever, often by half, and communicators who understand the context and how to navigate it more effectively. And often the communicators are not perceived as having the same seat at the table as the lawyers. And I think that’s what happened here.

Lee Carter:

And I also think if you add in the human element that’s happening here is you’ve got two different perspectives that are often duking it out. But when the stakes are this high, you’ve got another thing that’s running around, which is fear. And when you have fear and anxiety and a whole lot of stress and a short amount of time It’s really hard to make these kinds of decisions which are really on their face They’re much more emotional than they are rational But when you can lean on a rational response say okay that feels safe It makes people feel more comfortable knowing that they are actually technically right This is safe language. This will keep me okay when it’s somehow reassuring but quite the opposite is true especially in this world because it comes across as robot talk it comes across as you’re completely out of touch and it comes across like you spent a whole bunch of time in a room with lawyers and reinforces all the narratives that are out there about you but for whatever reason because those emotions are going on in the room it makes you feel much more safe to be rehearsed to be prepped and to be advised by a lawyer.

Ben Feller:

What’s fascinating to me about that, Lee, is we’ve seen so many examples of this. And Michael listed several of them that being rehearsed as a way to be comfortable in the room doesn’t work if you actually stick to your script, because you’re going to offend so many people with this kind of corporate speak. And so in the work that we do, we bring audiences into the language to understand what they’re going to hear. And it’s still surprising to me whether it’s the university presidents, the head of the baby clothing company or others, that somebody doesn’t say, your answer is on point, it hits all the technical marks, but boy, did we leave out the human element. Let’s think about this again before you talk about it. I wonder to you, Lee, why you think someone in these companies isn’t serving the role of human tester on this language.

Lee Carter:

I think it’s really hard to put yourself in other people’s shoes right in that moment everybody’s really focused on themselves and not necessarily the other how other audiences feeling you’re technically trying to be correct you’re technically trying to make sure that you’re getting what you want to say out there  but you’re not thinking about how you’re going to be heard and there really isn’t anyone in that seat often yes there are communicators but it’s really about i think minimizing risk in those moments and trying to make sure that it’s sort of the path of least resistance that gets things through rather than saying, wait a minute, let’s hold a show here.

Michael Maslansky:

I think our experience, my experience in dealing with these situations, the CEOs when they are faced with crisis and don’t have experience dealing with crisis, they look around the table and the places that they tend to focus first and second are their general counsel and their CFO. And there are some who have trusted communications advisors, either on their leadership team or on the board that they go to and they get this counsel, but often they don’t. And I know a lot of great lawyers who are really good business lawyers and who understand this challenge intuitively, but I also know that you know, you don’t get fired for telling the CEO to say nothing, except maybe in the college president’s case, which is an extreme example, but that in most cases I think lawyers say, look, let’s say less so that we don’t create risk in litigation when in fact in this environment that we’re operating in, it does exactly the opposite. But CEOs don’t necessarily have that context. And CCOs traditionally, except that I think a very few organizations do not have the same seat at the table as the general counsel and the CFO.

Ben Feller:

I saw coverage of the actions, the apology by the Kite Baby CEO, and Ink magazine ran a headline saying the Kite Baby CEO’s actions were a disaster and perfectly legal. And then it went on to describe how the termination of this mother with a baby in the most intensive care unit was a PR disaster, but it was completely legal. As if. As long as you did that, it was defensible. And it really raises the question to your point, Michael, that is it not possible to do both? Can you be safe, cautious, aware of what your financial responsibilities are, but also be empathetic? To me, that’s the real challenge. It’s incredibly hard, but at least if you’re framing the question that way, when you’re in these moments as a leader, you’re much more likely to succeed.

Lee Carter:

I think the other thing that so many people think of is when we think of all the times that things go very wrong, we don’t always think of them when everything goes right and apology we don’t always like, well, that was a great apology. Let’s let’s store that one away. So sometimes when things go wrong, it is when people are unscripted and unprepared and you think, oh, man, they really blew it. And those are pretty obvious. But it’s not the preparation that made the mistake, right? It’s  sometimes if you’re not in touch with what’s really going on. And so having advisors that aren’t just going to help you legally understand what’s right, but really say, let’s talk about the whole context of all the players here so that we’re prepared not just for the legal risk, but also for the reputational risk and for the communication risk and our employees risk and our customers risk and all of the different social media backlash so that you can have somebody in that room that’s prepared to really push from all sides. And that’s not something that we typically see.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, and actually,  I have counseled many a chief communications officer on the importance of having a compelling counter argument to the lawyers when it comes to why you should approach crises in a certain way and how to kind of earn that seat at the table. And, you know, one of the examples is the, I think from a legal perspective, let’s say we talk about taking responsibility. It’s always a big debate in the C-suite when it comes to responding to a crisis. Do we say we’re sorry? How do we say we’re sorry? Often on one extreme is kind of avoiding anything that suggests that we are gonna take responsibility for it if we’re gonna try and fight it out in court, and the risk is a huge loss in litigation. And I think now there are plenty of examples that communicators can push back on and say, well, you may be able to suggest that there’s gonna be a billion dollar litigation judgment, but I’m gonna show you examples of where there were multi-billion dollar losses in market capitalization when you screw this up and your reputation suffers. And so it’s pretty rare to have that kind of quantifiable or to use that quantifiable number and I think communicators need to use it. So that’s one kind of big example of it. There is also, I just saw data today actually. Wells Fargo, which happily has, at this point, kind of recovered a lot of the ground that it had lost seven years ago as a result of the scandals that it went through. And you know, I could make an argument that there were a bunch of moments where they could have done things a lot differently and accelerated their trust rebuilding. Because they didn’t, it took them longer. And so you start to build that case and you say like, look, you know, it’s not just about litigation. It’s got to be about more than that.

Ben Feller:

I think to the point of taking responsibility, often what happens is leaders take responsibility when there’s no other choice left. There’s nothing left to lose. Even the risk of litigation becomes, well, look, I’m losing. I’m losing my customers. I’m losing trust. We have a lot more to worry about than the potential litigation. The example that pops to mind to me is from the CEO of the country, covered President Obama. Some of our hearsay listeners might remember that I was in the business of covering politics before I got into the business of helping clients. And the example that has always shaped my thinking on this is when the Gulf oil spill happened, which became the biggest environmental disaster in American history. And for 37 days, President Obama and his team adamantly did not take responsibility because they did not caused the leak. They talked about BP and they talked about Deepwater Horizon. They talked about the Corps of Engineers. And every day that President Obama did not take responsibility was a day that he was losing the debate until finally he came out, had a press conference and said, there’s been a lot of conversation about who’s responsible. I’m responsible. I’m the president. The buck stops with me. And it turns out that morning, I think when he was shaving his daughter Sasha came in and said, are you ever going to plug that leak? Because the footage of the oil going into the Gulf was on CNN every day. And I think, you know, sometimes it doesn’t even matter if you’re technically responsible. If you’re responsible for the trust of a brand of a population, you have to say something. And so then you would ask, well, why didn’t he do it 36 days earlier? Because it was not essential to do it. And it didn’t want to have to. It’s a pain. It’s hard to take on a problem.

Lee Carter:

I think we often hide behind the safety feeling of it, right? So there’s this idea that if you use these technically correct terms that are often in corporate speak, so that you’re somehow going to get off the hook. So like, shirking responsibility seems to be one that a lot of people try to do. It wasn’t really our fault. We didn’t own the company at that time. So instead they’ll say, you know, it wasn’t our fault, but we’re gonna start fixing it. Or the people wanna be so right and distance themselves as much as they can from whatever it is, that they, in their technical accuracy, they end up being really, really off putting. If you look back at that, example, you know, in the first apology, I think she said something along the lines of like, I’m sorry you misunderstood the policy. It’s like you’re hiding behind the policy rather than saying, I’m sorry, your baby’s in intensive care. And you know, like, you’re sorry for all the wrong things. Like, you’re sorry  you misunderstood the policy. It’s like, and it happens. And you’ve probably done it in your own, you know, in your own relationships and your own marriage and your own relationships with your kids. Sometimes it’s just easier to try and pass the buck than it is to say the buck stops with me. And it’s, we’re not gonna fight about all of this. And I remember, years ago during the financial crisis, we worked with a client who had acquired one of the companies that was behind some of the mortgage meltdown and financial crisis back then. They kept wanting to say, it wasn’t our business practices, it was the company we acquired. It wasn’t us, it was them. But we’re still going to, they’re going to have to adhere to our business practices going forward. And everyone said that didn’t matter. And so when we finally got them to say something like, you know what, there’s a lot of reasons that got us here. We’re not here to bait them what we are here to do is set it right because doesn’t matter we own this situation now and we’re gonna move things forward and that’s what we’re gonna do that’s what people want to hear you want to hear the ownership and that you want to hear that people get it and hiding behind some of this corporate speak  makes you really feel like you’re shirking responsibility

Ben Feller:

I want to add into this that I bet if we have people listening to this who are lawyers, corporate lawyers or chief financial officers, they would say, but wait a minute and have a compelling counter argument about the legal financial risk of doing exactly what you’re talking about, Lee, right? Just being empathetic, being plain spoken. And so I think the point here is not that this is easy to say from the outside, just take ownership and be responsible and empathetic and everything will be fine, but rather, who is it that’s in that conversation? Who’s in the room? And the way that we think about the way the world works is that communication is not at the end of the line when you’ve decided what to do and then how do you script it? Communications is in the center, along with the financial risk and the legal risk. And if a company is having a really honest internal debate at the right moment, it’s much more likely to produce language, authentic language from a CEO that meets all the different measures. At least that can be done without it being so challenging.

Michael Maslansky:

If there are any lawyers listening, litigators, corporate lawyers, please give me an example, because here’s the example that I’ve never seen. The suggestion is that if you communicate a statement that suggests that you are responsible for something, that you feel responsibility for something, not yes, you should hold us responsible and find us, civilly liable in court, but that, you know, we, nobody should, should feel unsafe. If our products have made you feel unsafe, then we are sorry, we have responsibility to make sure that you have come, there are at least 20 different ways to acknowledge some sort of responsibility. And I would argue that other than the most extreme versions of those, they are never the things that determine whether or not you win or lose in court. The things that determine whether or not you are held liable in court are when there is a secret email that says, we knew that this product was unsafe and we should continue to keep it on the market. It is not when that unsafe product hurts somebody and the CEO comes out and shows some empathy for the fact that somebody was hurt, even while they may be suggesting that it wasn’t their product or that was their product that caused the actual harm. I find it extraordinary to me how powerful acknowledging the responsibility that everybody assigns to you can be. The best example, Alan Shaw in the aftermath of Norfolk Southern, now they were going to be held responsible. There was no question. So his apologies were not going to make things worse. But he said, I’m sorry a million times. And I believe very strongly that from a reputation perspective and from the perspective of their ability to communicate that they were serious about fixing their problems and turning things around, it was incredibly important to their ability to do that. And that companies that don’t do that, that either try and shift responsibility, that try and avoid responsibility, but who are seen as being responsible, they set their cause back by years when they fail to do that. So with that rant over–

Lee Carter:

Ha!

Michael Maslansky:

I think it wouldn’t be right to end this episode without playing a game of what would you have said if you were in their position? And so pick one of the examples that we’ve talked about today, and how would you have either counseled a client in that circumstance or responded yourself if you were in it. Ben, let’s start with you.

Ben Feller:

I think the university presidents had, in retrospect, a really easy answer to the questions they face. Most of what we deal with is not easy, and the issue they were dealing with wasn’t. But the answer was, when they were asked, is calling for the genocide of Jews violate code of conduct, yes or no? The answer is yes. Not context dependent, no hesitation. Period. When you end the debate by not giving oxygen to it, you’ve accomplished your goal of both staying on message and not disrupting both the community that you serve and, in this case, their livelihoods. These presidents ended up getting fired after it. It wasn’t as if they came back later and said, I was misinterpreted. I stand by my remarks. They were giving apologies in videos later that day understanding only after the fact what they had gotten wrong. Should have been ready for that moment. So in that sense, I would have said, yes.

Michael Maslansky:

All right, Lee.

Lee Carter:

What Ben said. No, I’m kidding. I’m going to take Budweiser because I’ve thought a lot about that case as well. And the Budweiser case is interesting because there were so many communications that happened after. And this is usually what happens. You’re playing catch up. So you had the actual event that happened, and then you had the marketing manager get on television and say, we’re anti-frack culture. So now you’re going after all of your base and of loyal customers and then they go out and they apologize then after that to the frapple ways and after they go to the frapple ways and they have to go back and apologize lgbtq communities that all kinds of problems going on so I would try to do is getting straight from the first place and  even though what ended up happening in this uh… in this case is that by the way there was misunderstood for what it tried to do this wasn’t an advertising campaign it was an endorsement on the part of the little any it was actually they were sending out cans with a face of some of the most famous influencers out to over 100 influencers that were out there, some of whom were LGBTQ, some of them were others. So if I were Budweiser in the very beginning, I would have said, you know what? Yeah, we sent a can with Dylan Mulvaney’s face to Dylan Mulvaney, but we also sent a can to this pastor in Missouri. We also sent a can to this MAGA supporter in Iowa, because we are the beer for all Americans. We don’t judge you based on your politics or where you come from. We’re America’s beer. And that’s that. And I think if they had just been true to who they were and acknowledged what had happened, they would have been a lot better off and not had to keep going flip-flop back and forth.

Michael Maslanky:

Yeah,  they had to take a strong position and they chose a weak one. And that is where I think a lot of the risk came in. So I’m going to go back to the college presidents. I’m going to take a slightly different approach than Ben and you did. And I think the, you know, one of the underlying challenges that they needed to deal with is how they typically deal with free speech on campus and also the fact that there is a significant,  arguably, there’s been a lot of coverage of this, that the weight of moral authority on these campuses is more pro-Palestinian and arguably anti-Semitic than it is pro-Israel. And so they were feeling like they, they couldn’t give a full throated support for, or push back against their constituents who were actually protesting on campus. But I think, you know, what they were looking to do by saying context dependent is they were trying to, to technically interpret the first amendment and how it applies to their policies and that they could have done a much better job of doing that instead of saying it was context dependent, they could have chosen one specific context. There was a protest where the protesters vandalized this building and that is a violation, you know, and listed off three or four specific context dependent examples without ever having to use the term context dependent, but basically having exemplified it or turned it into examples that would have at least said yes in those specific examples. The other thing that they could have done is that, you know, it’s been a little while since I studied my constitutional law, but the definition of the First Amendment, there are limits to free speech. And all they had to do was define those protests as incitements to violence. And you could have quibbled over whether or not they were technically incitements to violence, but if they said, yes, every one of those that are calling for genocide is a specific incitement to violence, and under those circumstances, it is a violation. Now, I guess the question is, if they hadn’t taken any action against these protesters on campus, that probably would have been the next question. So they might have had problems there because I think they hadn’t punished anyone. But at the very least, they probably could have punted there to something that was a little bit more defensible than, as in your case, Ben, than what they did. you may not need to fully and directly and completely answer a question avoid the side effects of corporate speak, but it helps.

Ben Feller:

You are reminding me of one story I saw from the inside about how these decisions are made. I was covering education in Florida when the September 11th tax happened. And shortly after that, a professor at the university I covered went on the Bill O’Reilly show and Bill O’Reilly said, I’m not sure why you even agreed to come on because this guy had been previously accused of supporting terrorism. Just the very mention of that brought a whole bunch of attention to a guy who would kind of stayed under the radar and parents were saying, I want my kid off campus. You need to fire that guy. The university president said, I can’t believe you went on TV, but it’s not a fireable offense. And the university faculty said, well, you better not fire him because not only does he have tenure, but he’s got academic freedom. He’s allowed to go on TV. So if you guys remember the context of what it felt like in that week, that year, there was no room for nuance. The university president was under tremendous pressure to fire the president and her own people said, you can’t do it. And so suddenly this story in Florida became the national test case for academic freedom for about two years. And the entire time the president would tell me privately, I don’t know what to do here. I’m not a lawyer. The FBI is supposed to investigate. I’m supposed to run a university. I said, well, are you going to fire him or not? And she said, when I make a decision, you’ll be the first to know. So for two years, we had this conversation. One day they decide to fire him. And she calls me to her office and it’s just me and her and guess who else was in the room, the university general counsel. And she said, well, Ben, I have news, but I can’t go on the record with you. We can’t tell you because my lawyer says I can’t, but if I don’t tell you, I break my word to you, so I don’t know what to do. I’m like, well, if you’re looking for me to make the decision, override your lawyer and tell me because we had a deal. And she’s like, no. He can’t find out through the press. I said, well, you got to come up with an answer here because your reputation might be protected by your counsel, but your reputation with the reporter who covers you is now in danger. I went back to my office fuming, and they called me up and said, hey, we got a solution. We’re going to put the chairman of our board on the phone with you, because somehow they felt like that was enough removed from university leadership, because he was a volunteer chairman appointed. He was a business guy. And my editors are like, no, she railroaded you. That’s not good enough. A deal is a deal. I was like, let me just talk to the guy. So I put them on the phone. Yeah, Ben, uh, I understand. I’m supposed to talk to you. What do you got? I said, well, I understand the university is going to fire. professor Alarian. Is that true? Yeah. You know what, Ben, we just decided he’s a terrorist. It’s time to call a terrorist a terrorist and, uh, we think everybody’s going to be better off. What else you got? So I start writing this down. I thought the fact that they handed the control to somebody who wasn’t thinking like a lawyer, wasn’t thinking about institutional protection, but rather thinking like, our constituents, the whole country’s watching this, we gotta get this guy off campus. And we finally decided to do it. He spoke how people speak. Now they weren’t expecting that. So obviously it changed the whole tenor of the story. But you know what happened to the university? They did not get in trouble for speaking freely. And he eventually was fired.  it was amazing story played out. Eventually they he was convicted and had to leave the country. But a crazy story about how these language debates play out.

Michael Maslansky:

Wow, well, I will say I was gonna challenge you on whether or not that was actually a quick story as promised but the punchline was pretty powerful there. So I made it worth it. All right, so with that, I think we’re gonna call this one a wrap. Lee, Ben, thank you very much. It was fun. So, thanks everyone for listening. And if there are lawyers out there, I hope that you’ll write and give me the example to, you know, prove my point or disprove my point. But for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff that we’re doing, please follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky and Partners. That is all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes. We’re in the middle of season four. So stay tuned for more episodes of hearsay, because when it comes to truly effective communications. It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.