Much of this material is from Walter Chen from a recent LinkedIn blog. He focuses on written communication and calls it a vital skill to success in business.
We do a lot of writing in the AIM program - and within the investments discipline. Students need to understand early that most of their communication will take the form of written reports (both internally and externally. Here is a link to all of the AIM write-ups since the fall of 2005, when the program began.
We do a lot of writing in the AIM program - and within the investments discipline. Students need to understand early that most of their communication will take the form of written reports (both internally and externally. Here is a link to all of the AIM write-ups since the fall of 2005, when the program began.
The ideal manager is often shown delivering a rousing speech
that inspires his or her troops to achieve ever greater heights. But the truth
is a lot less exciting than that. To highly effective and successful
executives, a boring, often-overlooked ability is one of the most vital skills
you can have as a manager — the ability to write.
Written communication is often better than verbal
communication because it is more consistent - it is more lasting and it raises
accountability. Written communication creates lasting consistency across an
entire team because a piece of writing is leveragable collateral from which
everyone, from marketing to sales to finance, can work and consult.
Accountability spreads as a manager’s written work product —
product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations, white papers — holds the
manager responsible for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the
clearly articulated, unambiguous vision described by the documents.
The distinction between written and verbal communication is
stark and in fact is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Good managers
want to be held accountable and aren’t looking for ways to weasel out of
responsibility. And so, good managers write, while bad managers voice their
opinion verbally (maybe through e-mail) and complain about the ‘powers above’.
“There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured
memo and not have clear thinking,” according to Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder. He
values writing over talking to such an extreme that in Amazon senior executive
meetings, “before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30
minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos.”
Writing out full sentences enforces clear thinking, but more
than that, it’s a compelling method to drive memo authors to write in a
narrative structure that reinforces a distinctly Amazon way of thinking—its
obsession with the customer. In every memo that could potentially address any
issue in the company, the memo author must answer the question: “What’s in it
for the customer, the company, and how does the answer to the question enable
innovation on behalf of the customer?”
“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to
communicate information,” according to Intel’s Andy Grove. Like Bezos, Grove finds value in
the process of writing. The surprising thing, then, is that reading what’s
written isn’t important to Grove. The main point of this self-disciplinary
process is to force yourself “to be more precise than [you] might be verbally”,
creating “an archive of data” that can “help to validate ad hoc inputs” and to
reflect with precision on your thought and approach.
Writing, according to Grove, is a “safety-net” for your
thought process that you should always be doing to “catch … anything you may
have missed.” Accountability, coherence of thought and planning, and commitment
to vision and mission are amazing benefits of what too many consider a ho-hum,
even old-fashioned, tool.