Well, in short: no.

But the real question is, when hiring creatives for your content team, must you choose between talent and attitude? That’s basically the question addressed in this story from a business to business marketing advisory about content development.  I’m not the only expert quoted. Fortunately, other journalists-turned-content-gurus share my point of view: choose a short list based on proven ability. Then hire for attitude.

Our content writers and managers are collaborators. They are great at detecting the real story that you have been struggling to tell. As one client recently told us during a message development session, “I’ve been trying for six years to get this said right…and you did it in an afternoon!”

Your story + our skills = your words. Because ultimately, yours is the voice that needs to be heard.

You have to be smart and accomplished to get into the Harvard Business School. But many women faced an additional set of hurdles once they arrived on campus: they could let the men dominate and get along, or they could be assertive and shunned.  The culture was quite familiar to fans of the movie Legally Blonde, in which a brainy Barbie shows up at Harvard Law and shows up her classmates.

As described in a beautifully written New York Times narrative, HBR leaders were appalled by that ‘false choice’ – once they figured it out. The story shows how a deep commitment, paired with insight and fearless leadership, more than doubled the proportion of HBR student women top performers in just one year.

Some of the most powerful tactics they adopted are similar to those we’ve seen work at MOVE winning companies:

Women were coached in how to step up in a group situation, how to not be talked over or overlooked when raising a hand to be heard.

Leaders restructured some course material into a collaborative team model, reinforcing the value and power of peer and influence dynamics. The traditional HBR case study method is, as described in the story, a top-down, power-riddled process with students called on the spot by professors. The new Field class structure is all about collaboration.

And to help the professions gain insight into their own assumptions, habits and – dare we say it – privilege? – the school installed tracking software that enabled them to see the gender implications of their grading decisions as they made them. To quote the story:    “New grading software tools let professors instantly check their calling and marking patterns by gender. One professor, Mikolaj Piskorski, summarized Mr. Nohria’s message later: “We’re going to solve it at the school level, but each of you is responsible to identify what you are doing that gets you to this point.”

By blending numbers and stories — the methodology used by Wilson-Taylor’s MOVE Projects — the leaders at HBS effected genuine change. The proportion of female students in the class of 2013, at 40%, was about the same as it was in in 2009 (36%). But the proportion of women in the top 5% of the class rose from 14% to 38% — in just one year.  Most companies would love to win results like that. Nice that HBR backs up how it’s done through MOVE.

P.S. — Take ten minutes to hear Brooke Boyarsky, the heroine of the NYT story, give a commencement address.

Gender miscommunication started in the Garden of Eden and has been tangling understanding ever since. When your career is at stake, it takes on a whole new dimension.

Through the Accounting MOVE Project, which measures and supports the advancement of women, the Wilson-Taylor team listens to women accountants who don’t understand what they don’t understand about making partner.

Here’s the thing: they lean in till they are nearly falling over, but when they simply ask their sponsors or mentors “What do I need to do?”, they inevitably get back a cryptic, opaque response: “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

In this piece that ran August 2, 2013 in the Chicago Tribune’s opinion section, I tell the bosses of America what they need to do to turn this conversation around.

But here’s what women need to do: be more specific. It’s not much more risk to get a lot more information. Ask, “What specific skills or experiences do I need to master to fill in the gaps that qualify me for partner?” or for your next critical career step.

When you ask a detailed question, you get a detailed answer. And just like that, you understand what you need to do next. Then, of course, you need to do it.

Here at Wilson-Taylor, we often coach each other to ‘not make the audience work too hard’ to understand what we are trying to get across.

Turns out that the most basic ground rules of good communication — good grammar — supports our advice.

With apparently very little to occupy themselves, researchers at the University of Oregon hooked up some subjects’ brains to measure what happened when they heard bad grammar. 

Poor things. Their brains had to work harder to understand the meaning of a syntactically scrambled sentence.

Maybe we should update the classic KISS formula from Keep It Simple, Sweetie, to Keep It Short and Sweet. And uncomplicated.  It’s just easier on all of us that way!

Coining a catchphrase is like catching a wave: once you get on top, it takes you whereever it wants to go.

As noted in a recent New York Times commentary, Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘lean in’ advice to women, and book title, has taken on a life of its own. In a nanosecond, ‘lean in’ has moved from emerging concept to pun platform.

Not feeling especially ambitious today? Get your lean on.

Feeling overworked? Lean over!

If I were Sheryl Sandberg, I’d lean all the way to the bank. When a phrase quickly ascends to pop culture touchpoint, every mention — direct and indirect — reinforces your influence.

Position your expertise at the right point in the news cycle. That’s what I did when I got a call to comment on the Yahoo telecommuting controversy.

They call it breaking news for a reason: it crashes like a wave into the news cycle. A corporate executive decides to cancel a much-coveted employee benefit– telecommuting — the memo leaks and all of a sudden Marissa Mayer of Yahoo finds herself at the eye of a storm of commentary about work-life balance.

Her misstep was news precisely because it was part of a much bigger, ongoing conversation about how and when we work.  When you hope to be a source for a news story because you are an expert on the topic, it’s important to distinguish between the breaking news and the news trend.

The breaking news is an opportunity for a very short, pointed observation or judgement about the situation, using the available facts. Initially, the story about  Yahoo’s cancellation of telecommuting pivoted around the apparent hypocrisy of multi-millionaire Mayer, who had a nursery built next to her own office to accommodate her own baby, denying less affluent parents the right to be close to their own babies.

As the story evolved, it opened up opportunities for comment about the perennial work-life dilemmas facing working parents. I was asked to contribute comments to a blog geared for thrifty moms about how working parents can hold onto a telecommuting arrangement and not get Yahoo’d. Because I served up tips that readers could use any time, my comments are part of the ongoing conversation, and won’t be intrinsically linked to the breaking news.

No amount of media training will overcome the lack of a message.  You know right away when someone is talking just to hear their own voice. You don’t want to be that person.

The Accounting and Financial Women’s Alliance had that problem.

Wilson-Taylor had the solution. We’d go on, but we already did, in this article just published in Signature magazine — MOVE in Signature March ’13 —  the publication for association communication executives, put out by their own association,  Association Media & Publishing.

First, it was bloggers who’d come up to you at a conference, video camera or smartphone in hand, asking for a few comments and a snip of video about industry trends.

Then local publications launched “backpack journalists,” who were expected to take notes, photos, video and audio, all at the same time, while reporting. From AOL’s Patch to cash-pinched local newspapers, staff reporters were suddenly doing all of it.

Now, big media has gone backpack. In August, the Wall St. Journal launched WorldStream. Now, WSJ reporters use their smartphones to upload micro-interviews, video snapshots of scenes, and spur-of-the-moment commentary, all the time.

What does this mean for you, the potential source?

It means that you must have a messaging formula memorized. Not a message itself — because you’ll customize what you say according to whom you are addressing. Having a formula at the ready means you can quickly frame up your comments. Even if a WorldStream reporter catches you at the baggage claim carousel at the airport, just like Mike Huckabee.

To a journalist, you’re a ‘source.’

That means that you bring insight, information and the human touch to a story. But to craft your message so that you bring the most value — to the story itself and for your own branding purposes — you need to understand what kind of source you are.

This video by Michele Weldon, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School, breaks it down. You might bring the facts and figures that form the structure of the story. You might bring the ‘big picture’ point of view that provides context. You might bring a personal point of view or meaning that makes the story relevant to readers.  Be prepared to bring all three.