All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

So you say you wanna be a writer.

Maybe if you have a blog and want to make it more readable I could give you a few tips. But there’s too much luck involved in getting anything published on a paying basis. It’s sorta like wanting to be an actor: You can get parts in a local community theater, but that isn’t where the money is.

I misunderstood? You work in a job where you send a lot of emails, write the occasional report, and aren’t quite ready to ask an AI to do your writing for you? But when you’re done writing something you doze off mid-paragraph while proofreading it?

For this I can help.

Starting here: Don’t choose a writer you admire and attempt to mimic their style. A good writer’s style is a projection of their personality. Mimic your favorite writer and you’ll be trying to change your character.

Worse, your favorite writers are probably your favorites because they inject some entertainment into their writing. When you’re writing for a general audience that’s a good thing, so long as you don’t overdo it.

But when you’re writing for colleagues in a business setting, add entertainment and you risk making yourself the class clown. You might attract an appreciative audience in your place of work, but while your co-workers might enjoy your humor, those in a position to award you raises, promotions and bonuses won’t put you high on their lists because of it.

And so, when it comes to writing for your place of work, you’re best off keeping your humor to yourself, or, if you’re feeling the need, to a small circle of friends.

Then it’s time to get serious about what you have to say. And as is so often the case, getting serious starts with a plan. Like the one that follows. In it, you need to think about your audience, purpose, “meta-purpose,” actions needed by your audience, the document’s tone, and its grade. Just in case these aren’t too obvious to require additional explication:

Audience: Who are you writing this for? Who else are you writing it for? Who else might read it whether you want them to or not?

It’s unlikely that you have just one audience, and even if you do you can’t count on what you write not being propagated to others.

You need to know who you’re writing your document for so you can present your thoughts in ways that are as compatible as possible with how your audiences think.

One more bit about your audience: Avoid the “person from Mars” trap – the trap of assuming your audience has been living on Mars for the past 10 years and knows nothing about your subject, but also failing to provide context to someone who has been metaphorically living on Mars and needs it.

Purpose / Goal: What you hope to accomplish by writing the document. Start with the most global alternatives and then drill down a bit; the most likely global alternatives are either to inform or persuade.

If it’s to inform, ask yourself what you want your audience to be smarter about than they were when they started reading. “Who, what, when, where, why, and how” is a useful template.

If it’s to persuade, what do you figure they think about the subject now, and what would you like them to think about it when they’ve finished reading? And especially, what you would like them to do about it. Want a template? “Problem, solution, plan” is a useful framework.

“Meta” purpose: In addition to the “official” purpose, what else do you want to accomplish? For example, you might want to make your audience smarter about the challenges of processing OCR. You also might have a meta-purpose of wanting the recipients to think of you as a sophisticated and knowledgeable resource to call on when this level of expertise is needed. Or, it might be to get someone on your side of things if the subject is, say, politically contentious.

Action needed? What do you want your audience to do as a result of receiving this from you. If the answer is nothing, think hard about whether it’s a document you should send at all.

Tone: Given the audience, purpose, and action needed, will the document be more effective by being formal, or by being relaxed and casual?

Grade: Go through the document and score each paragraph as to its suitability given its audience, purpose, meta-purpose, and needed action; also whether it fits the tone you want to set.

Which leads to Bob’s last word: Don’t be an easy grader.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The first thing to understand about leadership is that effective leaders don’t get anything done. They build organizations that get things done.

The second thing to understand is that effective leaders must master eight capabilities – eight tasks, which are (1) setting direction; (2) making decisions; (3) staffing; (4) delegating; (5) motivating; (6) managing team dynamics; (7) engineering the organizational culture; and (8) communicating.

Third: Each of the eight tasks takes time – something that’s in short supply for most business executives on a typical day at the office.

Fourth? The caliber of leadership in an organization determines, more than any other single factor, the organization’s success.

One more: Many of those in leadership positions don’t particularly enjoy practicing the leadership craft. Given a choice between leading people and just telling them what to do and hoping for the best, hoping, for a certain class of executive, has a lot of appeal.

All of which helps explain, to a significant extent, the excitement many business executives seem to be feeling about artificial intelligence right now. Staff a business with AIs instead of human beings and the need to review resumes and interview applicants goes away, as does motivating the employees they’ve hired, managing team dynamics, and engineering culture.

As for communicating, that changes from listening, informing, persuading, and facilitating to the weirdly conceived “prompt engineering” … apparently, AIs aren’t I enough that they can understand what’s needed from them without translation services provided by actual humans.

It’s enough to make you wonder why you should rely on Google Translate and its competitors.

There’s one more aspect of AI’s appeal as a replacement Homo sapiens that needs attention: From the perspective of running a business, many aspects of staffing are, if we’re going to be honest with one another, annoying. Humans, but not automata, disagree with management about what constitutes fair compensation. Treat humans poorly and they become grumpy and don’t give their work their best effort. Treat them worse and they’ll complain about their managers to HR, and there’s a whole process for that.

Then there’s benefits. Health insurance isn’t just expensive. It also requires a whole department just to administer it. Not to mention the complexities associated with tracking PTO.

We’ve all read the polls, surveys, and person-in-the-street interviews reporting employee concerns about AIs taking jobs away from we mere mortals.

What I haven’t seen is frank acknowledgement that, all things considered, the executives responsible for determining how the work of the business should get done can’t get rid of those pesky human employees (PHEs) fast enough.

Here’s what else I haven’t seen: Advice to our fellow PHEs that we need to frame the conversation about PHE replacement, not as hand-wringing worry and guilt, but as a matter of competitive advantage and disadvantage. That is, PHEs are competing with AIs for each job in the organization. They (You? We?) need strategies for making ourselves more desirable than the AIs that are positioned to replace us.

One possibility, to get things started, is rooted in the difference, celebrated in There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, between processes and practices. Briefly, processes result in organizations “designed by geniuses to be run by idiots.” With process, the intelligence of experts is codified in the step-by-step process specification. With a practice, in contrast, success comes from the expertise of its practitioners.

Project management is a practice. An assembly line is a process. And right now, much of the opportunity for AI to supplant PHEs in the organization is in the process domain, where AIs probably will prove superior.

But process isn’t the only way to get work done in the business, and the role of AI in business practices will be quite different. Just as personal computers and smartphones have already resulted in “computer-enhanced humanity,” AI-based “Computer-even-more-enhanced humanity” can yield business practices that supplant rigidly specified business processes, resulting in quantum leaps in business flexibility and adaptability.

Bob’s last word: Viewed from the potential computer-enhanced humanity has for replacing inflexible processes with adaptable business practices, replacing human beings with AIs becomes a choice, not an inevitability. But PHEs can’t rely on business leaders to figure this out on their own.

It will be up to the PHEs of the world to make the pitch, and make it convincingly.

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Now on CIO.com: CIO risk-taking 101: “Playing it safe isn’t safe.” But then, neither is reckless risk-taking.

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