How to write clearly for business?

In the world of social media, one must revise content to fit the audience profile. No one has time to read through paragraphs after paragraphs. As Harvard Business Review points out, in business writing, you get points for clarity, not style. Instead of trying to wax poetic about your division’s plans for the next 60 days, just make your point.

Here are three ways to do that:

1. One idea per paragraph. Novels hold several complex ideas and emotions in a single paragraph. In business writing, limit your thoughts to one per paragraph. When you have another suggestion, thought or idea, start a
   new paragraph.
2. Put your point in the first sentence. Don’t entice your readers with background information and build-up. No one has time for that. Make your primary point first. Then go into supporting detail.
3. Make it “scannable.” Few people read every word in an email. Use headers and bullet points so that your audience can quickly scan your message and understand your point.

If you would like to dig this one deeper, feel free to check the Harvard Business Review post by David Silverman.

HP’s Next CEO?

I think HP has an opportunity to become the next Apple, under the right leadership. They have the WebOS, the design architecture and the distribution network to make it happen.

The brilliant and charming Warren Bennis wrote in Learning to Lead: A Workbook on Becoming a Leader that “There is a profound difference between management and leadership, and both are important. To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.” And in one of his most famous lines, he added, “Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.”

Inspiration is half the battle. Bring in somesone who can cares, leads and inspires. Mark’s employees didn’t really like him with one of the lowest employee approval ratings in the tech industry. (BTW, Steve Jobs is at 98%, a cult like following among the employees).

http://www.thebiggertruth.com/2010/08/hps-next-ceo/

Analyst Steve Duplessie offers his suggestions for the characteristics HP should look for in the next CEO, given Mark Hurd’s sudden resignation. “HP needs to make Hurd’s former job the COO position and bring in someone who can reshape the boring old company into a hot, sexy one…This time the company [HP] is in an entirely different place and as such should look for an entirely different type of leader to propel HP to the next level…This is an opportunity for new ideas and new blood.”