The Language of Success

By Tom Sant

Language is the medium of business. To be successful, we need to communicate effectively not only when speaking but in writing as well.

Whether we are providing instructions to our colleagues, communicating with our customers, or advising our direct reports, language gauges success. We must be able to deliver clear, accurate messages that inform, persuade and motivate. Unfortunately, people lapse into habits that interfere with their ability to communicate.

In The Language of Success, author Tom Sant helps you master the lost art of clear writing and:

• eliminate ambiguities, jargon and grandiose claims
• master proper paragraph structure so the message doesn’t get muddled
• avoid misconstrued or misleading terms
• write clear concise sentences that follow the “first time right rule”
• use e-mail professionally and efficiently
• create career-enhancing reports

This book shows you how to avoid common mistakes, and to write lucid, concise, and accurate e-mails, letters, performance appraisals, and presentations.

Honest and authoritative, The Language of Success will gives you practical techniques to help you cut through the fluff, guff, geek, and hyperbole, write exceptional business documents, and get your message heard.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Jan 23, 2008
• ISBN: 9780814409732

Tom Sant

TOM SANT is a renowned proposal consultant, whose clients range from small entrepreneurial operations to Global 500 companies, including General Electric, Microsoft, Lucent, and Accenture. He is the creator of the world's most widely used proposal automation systems, ProposalMaster and RFPMaster.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Where We’re Going and Why the Trip Is Worth Taking

This book is about words, about the damage that can be done when they are used ineffectively, and about the power to be gained when they are used well. The purpose of this book is to show you how to write more effectively. It’s designed to help you produce the kinds of documents that are likely to be part of your professional life—documents that ask and answer questions, that provide information other people need to do their jobs, that communicate your opinions, or that persuade, instruct, or update. We’ll emphasize e-mail as the primary medium for delivering most of these messages for several reasons. First, e-mail has obviously become the dominant mode of communication all over the world. Second, it’s different enough from traditional ink-on-paper writing that it poses its own unique set of challenges. Along the way, I’ll provide examples of both good and bad writing for you to consider, explaining what works and what doesn’t so that you can adapt the ideas quickly to your own use.

So that’s where we’re going. Admittedly, writing is a skill that most people embrace reluctantly at best. But it’s a skill that can make a huge difference in your career. From a practical standpoint, few professional accomplishments will pay off more in terms of your personal success or the success of your company or organization than learning to communicate effectively.

In my experience, most people don’t like to write. There are exceptions, of course. I’m one of them. I usually enjoy writing, especially if there’s room for creativity or if there’s a challenge to the task. Lots of people make their living as writers, in fields like technical writing, marketing communications, journalism, public relations, sales support, proposal writing, speech writing, and so on. You have to figure most of them don’t mind writing. Other professions are virtually inseparable from the need to write—higher education, for example, where you must publish or perish, or the practice of law, where letters, contracts, and other documents are often the deliverable for which the client is paying. All the same, the people who love to write are clearly in the minority. For the vast majority of people in the workforce, writing is a necessary evil. It’s something they have to do, but they don’t see it as a core part of their professional responsibility. Writing isn’t part of their real job, they’ll tell you.

But, of course, they are wrong.

Over the past fifteen or twenty years, the nature of work has changed dramatically. More valuable than any other raw material or resource, knowledge has become the engine of economic growth and the primary driver of increased productivity. The fact is we have now completed the shift to a knowledge-based workforce, a shift just as significant in its own right as was the shift to an industrial workforce in the late nineteenth century. During the past ten years, for the first time in world history, over half of the gross domestic product of the major Western economies has been directly linked to knowledge-based activities. As a result, businesses, institutions of higher learning, government agencies, and others in this knowledge-based economy now place greater importance than ever before on finding, sharing, and using information as efficiently as possible. Useful, valuable knowledge has become the fundamental source of differentiation for both organizations and individuals.

The concept of useful and valuable knowledge is worth examining. It means doing more than simply sharing information. Facts, details, instructions, and other forms of data may be necessary, but they tend to have less value than informed insight. Think about the money and effort that organizations put into identifying and implementing best practices. Owners and senior managers don’t want some checklist of steps to follow when performing a certain task or a template for organizing certain processes. What they want is deeper insight into business process, insight that will enable them to improve bottom line results. In a knowledge-based economy, progress is measured by such factors as increased innovation, improved productivity, or better financial performance. As a result, implementing best practices is not merely a matter of collecting facts and data, but rather of identifying and disseminating knowledge. And that requires clear, effective, flexible communication.

In a knowledge-based economy, our success and our organization’s progress depend on our ability to communicate with our bosses, our subordinates, our colleagues and our customers.

Sometimes people need us to provide factual details and other forms of explicit information that are relatively uncomplicated. Here is the company’s current mileage allowance on expense accounts. How to change your password. The new starting time for the budget review meeting. Some unexpected results from our recent lab tests of titanium alloys. Third quarter sales results showed a 2 percent decline in our core markets. In these situations, we are providing others with the information they need to do their jobs. This is an important task and early in our career it’s likely to be the kind of writing we do most often.

Words to Write By . . .

Success in today’s knowledge-based economy is based on the ability to write effectively.

As we advance, as we acquire more experience and responsibility, people are likely to turn to us to provide deeper insights into the why behind those facts. Why should I change my password? What do you think caused those unexpected results you got from the new titanium alloys? Why did our sales go down in the third quarter? What they want from us now is our opinion, presumably based on our training and experience. By providing facts in combination with our expert opinion about what those facts mean, we have taken on a more complex communication challenge. As we move up in our organization, particularly if we achieve recognition as a technical expert or if we have a management role, we will do a lot more of this kind of writing.

Sometimes we need to write messages that the audience isn’t looking for at all. In these instances, we write because we need to motivate employees; we need to persuade customers, convince management, or possibly assure investors. Let’s prevent any further data losses by adhering to our information security standards! Three reasons we should change the design specs of our engine housing. The long-term outlook for the housing downturn and our plan to stabilize earnings. In these situations, we may provide facts and offer some opinions, but what matters ultimately is our ability to affect what our readers think, what they feel, or how they act. As you rise higher in an organization, you will find yourself doing a lot more motivating and inspiring than simple information sharing. This is a much more difficult task than simply providing information or even offering an opinion, but it’s usually a much more important one, too.

In the next section are two examples of e-mails written and sent out by the heads of major corporations. Both messages are grammatically correct. Both are pretty clear. Both were apparently intended to motivate the recipients. But by any reasonable standard, both messages failed to communicate. In fact, they failed so badly that they created major problems for the men who wrote them and the companies they led.

Igniting Firestorms

On September 11, 2001, life as we knew it stood still for a moment. The heartbeat of society paused. You probably remember exactly where you were and what you were doing as you watched the twin towers crumble to earth, as you saw a corner of the mighty Pentagon burning.

Millions of people went into shock. Frantically, we wondered: Is it possible someone I know, someone I love, might have been on one of those deadly flights? Who do I know who lives or works in New York? In Washington? Were they safe? No one knew much. Facts were scarce. People huddled together at work and in public spaces, clustering around televisions that endlessly repeated videotape loops of the horror. We drew our family closer to us that night. For days, maybe weeks afterward, we felt emotionally bruised. We tried to be kinder to each other, a little more patient. It was a difficult time, but in our shared grief and fear we sought to comfort one another.

Perhaps that helps explain the reaction of the employees of one large business concern based in the United States when they received a message from the founder and CEO of their company late in the evening on 9/11. Would he have a kind word, they wondered? Perhaps a moment of shared reflection or a personal connection?

When they clicked on the e-mail he had sent them, this is the message they got from their leader, a man we will call Bob:

From: Bob Teufel

Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 9:45 PM

To: The Entire Teufel Team

Subject: Staying Focused

Today we all experienced a tragedy that we will never forget. It will leave its mark on us and on the United States for generations to come.

However, we must not allow this tragedy to distract us from our purpose.

We have polled our offices and learned that we suffered no losses to members of the Teufel Team. Our facilities are open for business. So let’s stay focused and get back to work!

We have a warehouse full of products that must ship. We have new designs that must be approved. We have revenue targets we need to beat. Our customers expect us to give our promises to them. We need to support one another by keeping our attention focused on the job at hand.

We are open for business in the United States and in 22 countries around the world. I am confident each of you will refocus your energy and show up tomorrow morning, ready to get the job done!

Thanks.

Bob

Imagine how comforting that message was! About as comforting as pouring rubbing alcohol on an open wound. Okay, everybody, snap out of it and get back to work! We have a new product that needs to ship on time. Stop your sniveling and get back to what really matters—making money!

Maybe this e-mail was just an expression of frustration from an executive who saw one more obstacle thrown in his path as he barreled toward status as one of the mega-wealthy. Whatever it was supposed to be, it failed.

A friend of mine worked at this company in September 2001. His immediate reaction to the e-mail was that it was the most insensitive, self-serving, incompetent piece of writing he had seen in thirty years of business experience. From the moment that e-mail arrived, his primary goal was to escape from the business enterprise where he had worked for several years. All he wanted was to find a job somewhere else, a place where the leadership could at least pretend to feel normal human emotions. He left a few months later.

Apparently he wasn’t alone in his reaction. He told me that he didn’t meet a single person among all his fellow employees who could get past the utter insensitivity of the message. In fact, it provoked a tidal wave of anger and disgust among employees. Morale plummeted. What kind of person is he? they wondered. This is a boss who doesn’t care about us as people, they concluded, and he doesn’t seem to care about anything that doesn’t have a financial value. Not about the thousands of dead and injured, not about our personal security, not even about the fate of the nation. All he cares about is meeting the quarterly numbers to keep the stock price up.

The reaction got ugly very fast, so in an effort toward damage control, the vice president of HR issued a two-page e-mail the next day, taking a completely different tone. He announced that the company would set up a fund for the victims of 9/11 with the company matching all employee donations.

A nice gesture, but it came too late. The mask had slipped. Thanks to a thoughtless message, the CEO’s credibility was shot, and employee loyalty was seriously damaged. In spite of all the gestures, my friend’s own opinion of the e-mail hasn’t changed to this day. He still gets angry just talking about it.

The point of this story is not that a particular business leader demonstrated appalling judgment and displayed a spiritual emptiness of Saharan proportions. Rather, the point is that a single thoughtless message, tossed out upon the e-mail grid, can wreak instant havoc that is virtually impossible to fix. What we write and how we write it matters as never before. Writing well has always mattered in business, of course. What’s different now is the unparalleled power and reach of e-mail. Our mistakes are no longer confined to a small group of people who may not have had the highest of expectations for us. Now they are broadcast for the whole world to see.

Screaming in Print

The impact can be devastating. As The Wall Street Journal, the Daily Telegraph of London, and other leading publications reported in April 2001, Cerner Corporation’s stock price dropped over 20 percent after a blistering e-mail written by the CEO, attacking his senior management team for laziness and incompetence, was leaked to the press. The CEO, Neal Patterson, threatened to fire managers who didn’t shape up and gave them two weeks to whip their employees into shape. His e-mail, which had the subject line MANAGEMENT DIRECTIVE: Fix it or changes will be made, was sent to all headquarters managers with high importance.

We are getting less than 40 hours of work from a large number of our KC-based EMPLOYEES. The parking lot is sparsely used at 8AM; likewise at 5PM. As managers—you either do not know what your EMPLOYEES are doing; or you do not CARE. . . .

NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they had a 40 hour job. I have allowed YOU to create a culture which is permitting this. NO LONGER.

The e-mail then goes on to list six punitive steps that the CEO is taking, effective immediately (or, effective IMMEDIATELY, as he no doubt would have put it). These enlightened steps include closing the employee center, implementing a time clock system and requiring all employees to punch in and out, freezing all promotions, cutting staff by 5 percent across the board, and so on. Just so his managers understood where they stood in this little Greek tragedy playing out on the windswept prairies of Kansas, he told them, If you are [part of] the problem, pack your bags.

He went on to say that he knows the parking lot is not a great measurement for ‘effort’ and that results are ultimately what counts. But he doesn’t care. I am through with the debate, he told them. My measurement will be the parking lot: It should be substantially full at 7:30 AM and 6:30 PM. He orders his management team to call some 7 AM and 6 PM and Saturday morning meetings immediately. It doesn’t matter whether there’s anything to meet about, apparently. The pizza man should show up at 7:30 PM to feed the starving teams working late, he writes.

Folks this is a management problem, not an EMPLOYEE problem. Congratulations, you are management. You have the responsibility for our EMPLOYEES. I will hold you accountable. You have allowed this to get to this state. You have two weeks. Tick, tock.

Gosh, I can’t imagine why Wall Street reacted so badly to this little love letter when someone posted it anonymously on a Yahoo financial message board, can you? Aside from the aberrant use of capitals to let his managers understand he is SO SERIOUS ABOUT THIS THAT HE HAS TO SCREAM AT THEM, of course. And aside from the manic tone. Oh, and aside from the sheer illogic of demanding that people show up early and hang around late, regardless of what the financial performance of the company suggests. (The company was doing very well at that point, thank you.)

No, perhaps it was simply the core message: Something very bad has apparently happened at this company, the management team is viewed by the CEO as being lazy and/or incompetent, and the person at the top appears to be a little unstable. Stephen Davas of Goldman Sachs was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying, rather tactfully, I think, that this e-mail raised two real questions for investors. Has anything changed at Cerner to cause such a seemingly violent reaction? And is this a chief executive that investors are comfortable with? Whatever the cause, investors began selling the stock as fast as they could, and Cerner’s share price dropped 22 percent injust three days.

After the sound of his stock tumbling into the basement got his attention, Patterson, the author of the e-mail, undid the caps lock on his computer and apologized to his entire staff. It’s all a big misunderstanding, he said. No harm intended. He claimed that he was just trying to motivate his managers. I did it with a lot of satire, never thinking it would be communicated to my associates or broadcast to the outside, he explained. But I lit the match. That match has started a firestorm.¹

Well, Neal, I guess it just goes to show that not everybody has the gift for satire. That tick, tock thing at the end was pretty clever. Creepy, but clever.

Ah, the beauties of technology. The fact that both of these gaffes were broadcast over e-mail meant they were able to offend many more people much faster. Thanks to the World Wide Web, when we do something boneheaded nowadays, people in Sri Lanka and Uruguay and Wall Street can read it or watch it the next day. And dump our stock as a result.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying e-mail caused the problems with these two motivational messages. The CEOs who wrote them caused the problems. They created insensitive, rude, ineffective messages. It’s just that e-mail made the bad consequences happen faster and more widely once their messages were sent. And e-mail can do the same for you. Oh, joy.

Living in the Midst of Revolution

As I write this, I’m sitting on a train traveling north from London toward Manchester. All around me, other travelers are passing the time in the usual ways—reading novels, skimming through newspapers, dozing, chatting, eating, and working. None of these activities are much different from what a rail traveler might have done in 1860 or even in 1990.

But there is one activity going on around me that a visitor from years past would find incomprehensible. Everywhere I look, people are working on their e-mail.

Some of them are sending and receiving e-mail over their laptop computers, using a wireless connection to the Internet available to passengers on the train. Others are using cellular connections into a telecommunications carrier to receive and send e-mails from their Blackberries or other handheld devices.

Just before I started typing this, I was among them. While hurtling through the darkness somewhere between London and Manchester, I read and answered an e-mail from my 85-year-old mother who had a question about selling her house. I dealt with another from my business partner, asking if I was available to do three days of consulting in Istanbul at the end of May. And I dealt with a dozen or more other messages from clients, prospects, friends, and other members of my family.

For most of you, the response to all this is probably ho-hum, what’s new? At most you might have thought, You can do e-mail on the train in England? Cool! Otherwise, none of this sounds all that unusual.

But it’s actually quite remarkable. Unless you are a teenager, you can remember when such wireless connectivity was impossible. And if you are 35 or older, you remember when there was no such thing as e-mail. Now, Internet access and the use of e-mail as a primary means of communication are virtually universal, ranging from octogenarians like my mother to young children barely able to identify the letters on a keyboard.

The explosive growth of