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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Most business writing is bloated, boring, and pointless. It doesn’t have to be this way. Here’s a grab-bag of mostly easy techniques that can help poor writers improve.

  • Avoid the passive voice. Of all the egregious sins of business writing, the passive voice is the most pervasive, and the most damaging. Sentences like, “A project will be chartered,” are common, and awful.Beyond their utility in inserting dullness, they compound the damage by preventing accountability: Everyone knows someone must charter the aforementioned project; use of the passive voice allows all readers to leave the doing of it to others.

    This characteristic of the passive voice is, undoubtedly, what makes it so popular.

  • Support your statements. Follow assertions with at least three supporting facts or arguments, because: (1) doing so provides a compelling reason to agree; (2) even for those who disagree, three supporting statements demonstrates that those who agree aren’t simply sheep; and (3) your ability to provide three separate reasons to accept the proposition demonstrates your clear-headedness.See?
  • Avoid etc. When following an assertion with three supporting facts or arguments, don’t make “etc.” one of them, because “etc.” doesn’t support anything. It’s equivalent to saying, “trust me” — the favored phrase of those who sell used cars. Every time a writer uses “etc.” to end a list, readers have every right to infer that he or she is intellectually lazy. If you find yourself tempted and can’t simply stop the comma-separated list with its last concrete entry, replace “etc.” with something more informative, like “… and other bits too numerous to mention.”
  • Differentiate “less” and “fewer.” Few among us really care if you say, “Less people use good grammar than bad,” instead of “Fewer people use good grammar than bad.” Nonetheless, getting this right makes you appear to be a clear thinker to just about every listener or reader, and with very little effort. The choice is easy: If the items are countable, use “fewer,” otherwise use “less.”It’s a minor point, (another is to never modify “unique” — if you do, you should have said “rare” in the first place) whose primary value is what it helps you say about yourself.
  • Use your vocabulary. “Thing” appears far too often in the average business report, and only because the writer was too lazy to think of a more specific noun. The same can be said of “do” as a verb, and “good” and “bad” as adjectives. Careful word choice gives you the opportunity to make careful distinctions. Take a new application for example: Designing it is different from either describing it or engineering it.So take the time to find the right word. It’s an easy thing to do.
  • Avoid superfluous modifiers. Whenever possible, choose nouns and verbs that require no adjective or adverb to clarify them. When you do use a modifier, ask yourself if it adds information, or just length.
  • Keep paragraphs short. It’s easy to get lost in a long paragraph. The blank space that separates paragraphs provides a visual marker that helps readers keep their place. The practical result: Readers only read the first few sentences of a long paragraph.
  • Order your thoughts. Streams of consciousness are self-indulgent. They give readers the impression that you’re either unable to think clearly, too lazy to organize your thoughts so as to make them clear to others, or simply indifferent as to whether anyone else should care what you think. They say, “Here are a bunch of random notions I’ve had. It’s up to you to make sense of them, although the only reason you should assume there’s sense to be made of them is your personal affection for me.”No matter what you’re trying to say, presenting your ideas in a logical order makes them credible. Failing to do so makes you, not incredible, but non-credible.
  • Organize your presentation. And use formatting to help readers follow the organization. Bullets keep separate, parallel thoughts separate and parallel. Headings and sub-headings help readers find what they’re looking for. Boldface and italics isolate the most important ideas.

Every communication you produce serves two purposes. The first is its overt reason for existence — to inform, persuade, or both. The second is to present yourself. This is more than exhibiting your talents in the best light. Each e-mail, memo or report is an opportunity to project whatever image you wish others to have of you. Creative, analytical, informed, imaginative, bold, careful … the way you write conveys an image.

Take control of it.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Among the many books I’d like to write but probably won’t, Selling Strong Engineering To Executives is high on the list. I probably won’t write it because even the best techniques aren’t reliable enough to be worth codifying. But you have to try.

Regular correspondent Jon Lee pointed out the relevance of the Challenger disaster to this topic. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, was on the Rogers Commission that investigated the tragedy. His personal observations are worth reading in their entirety. A very short version goes like this: NASA’s engineers assessed flight risks to be 1,000 times greater than the managers who decided whether missions should fly.

I’ve coined a term for this mathematical transformation: Direct Reduction In the Value of Engineering Likelihoods (DRIVEL).

NASA’s managers were, and probably still are under tremendous political pressure to get the shuttle in the air. People being what they are, they persuaded themselves the engineers were exaggerating the risks. They rationalized their DRIVEL with this “logic”: “It hasn’t happened yet.”

Publicly held corporations justify bad decisions with DRIVEL too, and they do it all the time. Every professional project manager knows this, because every one has been put in charge of at least one project whose launch has been delayed due to executive dithering but whose deadline, scope and budget remain fixed.

If it’s an internal project, the executives rationalize the DRIVEL by telling themselves the estimators padded the original schedule (guaranteeing, of course, that they’ll pad the next one). If it’s an outsourced project, they rationalize it by telling themselves it’s someone else’s problem — the company contracting to perform the work.

The contracting company applies similar DRIVEL to its computations, because it gets the revenue now. By the time the future gets here anything can happen — everyone in a position to blow the whistle can find a way to get promoted out of harm’s way or hired by a competitor. If the project manager or account manager protests, you know what happens. That’s right — the senior decision maker says (all together now, with feeling): “If you can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”

It’s always the same equation: Sound career management trumps sound engineering.

You’d think those responsible for the health of the organization would take steps to keep DRIVEL out of the decision process. You’d be wrong, because … and this insight is crucial to understanding the situation … in most large organizations the owners don’t want them to.

That isn’t the case in companies with a single owner or whose ownership is closely held. Those owners run the company, make the decisions, and will be around to be damaged by the fallout of bad engineering. Privately held corporations have their flaws, but DRIVEL-driven decision-making isn’t often among them.

Government certainly isn’t like that. We citizens have come to think of ourselves as government’s customers, not as its owners. We want the best deal, that’s all. When it comes to the public sector, many have given up entirely on the concept of a healthy organization. Few consider government’s health to be their responsibility.

In this, they are exactly the same as the owners of most publicly held corporations. They, the shareholders, don’t think as owners do either. Their stock is just a commodity, to be bought low and sold high. The board of directors and chief executive officer, who run the company on their behalf, are their agents, obliged to subordinate personal preference to the shareholders’ will. And we wonder why many are paid enough in one year to retire. (It would be interesting to compare the level of DRIVEL in companies whose shareholders care more about dividends than growth. I’d guess it would be lower, but I have no evidence either way.)

The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. Many Wall Street analysts do pay attention to planning and decisions that pay off in the longer term. They have to. Today’s profits and the next-quarter forecast are already reflected in the stock price. It’s longer-term planning that will cause a share of stock purchased today to be worth more in the future.

It is possible to sell superior engineering to executives. It isn’t easy, and you just have to remember: The engineering itself doesn’t matter to them. In the end they only care about four issues: Increasing revenue, decreasing cost, reducing risk, and how achieving one or more of these goals will affect them personally.

That’s how they define strong engineering. Your job is to help them recognize it when they see it.

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