It’s easy to understand the homogeneous nature of the Broadway community. They work hard to get to the top — usually a lot harder than in the other popular entertainment forms — and the financial rewards and recognition generally don’t match movies, TV etc.

But a speech isn’t just an opportunity to connect with people who share your perspectives. More importantly, it is an opportunity to build bridges to people who don’t share them. In fact, it is more important to communicate with people who don’t immediately or intuitively understand us than those who do. It is to them that ‘attention must be paid’.

In a sense, family themes were also popular at last year’s festival.  The winner of the 2009 Regards Jeunes prize went to Quebecer Xavier Dolan for J’ai tue ma mere (I Killed My Mother.) It isn’t a spoiler to tell you the lead character didn’t literally kill his mother.

But it was the voyage of discovery metaphor that was key to the speech, and it worked because it summed up the movie, Waltz’ career, and movie-goers’ reaction to his extraordinary performance. Waltz may have discovered a new continent, but a new continent also discovered him. Until a few months ago, few if any North Americans had heard of him. Basterds was his first American film, and it opened him to a U.S. audience by taking him back into German history, to a period he would rather not be associated with — a different kind of voyage. But the counterfactual account was enthusiatically embraced by both the German cast members and many Nazi victims. Or in the words of Tarantino (quoted or paraphrased by Waltz): ”This is where we’re going, but we’re going the other way.”

It would be interesting to see numbers on our industry. The White House Writers Group, of course, has provided considerable client services outside the United States, even outside this hemisphere. Ours is more of an export industry than ever, and we can expect it to become even more of one in the future. Just as technologies have made it possible to compete in communications services beyond one’s own shores, it will become an even more global market, as improvements in telecommunciations make it easier to communicate with clients and keep up-to-date on developments in international markets.

More and more, the most exportable products are ideas, and the ability to communicate them.

Who can focus on 10 movies? Who can take seriously that long a list of “excellence” in one year? And who can look forward to an Academy Awards show that will be even longer than usual? The Academy’s decision to double the number of Best Film nominees is a classic mistake in messaging — a failure to recognize that less is more.

What we have here, as Strother Martin might have pointed out in Cool Hand Luke, is a failure to communicate.

It may be that the competitive spirit one learns on in competitive sports translates into a significant advantage in business. Neither CEO gave up easily: Rosenfeld has turned Kraft into the world’s biggest confectionary company, replacing Mars. Stitzer managed to get for his shareholders a 50 percent increase over Kraft’s original offer last September.

Yes, the current unemployment stats are higher than 27 years ago. But start digging deeper and a different picture emerges. Take the November 2009 stats, for example, which also showed a 10 percent unemployment rate. Dig deeper, and you find that the unemployment rate for those with four-year college degrees actually was actually just under 5 percent. In other words, the college graduate population pulls down the overall rate. By how much? Obviously, that depends on what proportion of the workforce have four-year degrees. Currently about 30 percent of Americans over the age of 25 do. In 1982, it was less than 20 percent. So the difference in unemployment rates between now and 1982 is  accounted for by the difference in the percentage of college grads.

For young people, the lesson is clear: Get a degree. For speechwriters, the lesson is: Get a calculator, and get your money’s worth out of it. Fortunately, that’s something most of us also learn when we’re young.

This is not just a book about how Shenzhen is thriving. It is also about how Waltham, MA and Camden, S.C. are bouncing back. And it is about the fact that all communities will have to continually reinvent themselves to compete in the heightened, prolonged era of globalzation the author argues is coming. For anyone looking for a deep intellectual explanation of globalization, there might be more apporpriate books to recommend. But Sonic Boom is a valuable resource for anyone whose job includes explaining global economic change.

These are just a couple of small examples of the kind of idiomatic and cultural knowledge it is increasingly important to have, whether writing a speech, an article, a report or any other communications tool aimed at reaching a foreign audience.

A growing number of people around the world speak English. But at the same time they appreciate it when someone trying to communicate with them demonstrates a grasp of national and local idiom. Speechwriters, for example, are best-advised to eschew colloquialisms like ’shake on it’ if they are writing for an Asian audience, for whom the handshake is not a traditional symbol of agreement. There are a lot of linguistic traps out there, which is making speechwriting (and all other kinds of business writing) a more challenging field, demanding more globalized expertise.

Safire had been in the business long enough to know that the first thing you check for is the acronym — what will it spell?As Safire relates in Safire’s New Political Dictionary, he figured CRP was fine. Even if you threw in an extra “E” for ”re-elect” the worst it would spell is CREP. They announced the Committee to Re-Elect the President and, sure enough, it wasn’t long before it was dubbed CREEP.

The lesson? Watch out for those unintended acronyms, and don’t assume people will stick to the exact spelling. Take the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created in the wake of Enron. It didn’t take long for a lot of lawyers and accountants to start calling it peek-a-boo, proving you don’t have to be able to spell to come up with a soundbite.

It’s even more embarrassing when you serve up a title that can be turned into a negative acronym without playing with the initials. A few years ago the federal government of Canada proposed a new tax that would blend together the federal and provincial sales taxes. Straightforwardly enough, they called it the Blended Sales Tax. Until opponents started calling it the BS Tax. Then the name was changed to the Harmonized Sales Tax.

So it pays to check out the acronym — and look for any possible way a critic can turn it against you.