Words of February

February writing covered five industries, nine writing categories, and six communication media, spanning print, electronic and face-to-face channels. 

February Industries: Business Process Outsourcing, Energy & Communications Infrastructure, Information Technology, Pharmaceuticals, Politics

February Categories: Communication Strategy, Employee Communication, External Communication, Investor Communication, Marketing Communication, Political Campaign, Product Launch, Rebranding Initiative, Sales Meeting

February Media: Annual Report to Shareholders, Keynote Address, Marketing Brochure, Restructuring Announcement, Web Copy, White Paper

Doing all the world's work with grammar and lexicon (the working words of February):

His job is to walk into a situation he may or may not have seen before, at a company he may or may not have worked with before, in an industry he may or may not know anything about. He’s there because the situation demands an outcome that’s different from what the organization will get if it keeps doing the same things in the same ways. He asks questions, listens to the answers, formulates a hypothesis, tests it, and then puts it in motion. The value of his contribution is measured in other people’s ability to become orders of magnitude better at what they do. His client base includes a large percentage of repeat customers because of his success rate.

***

In every company, our experience and research tells us, better cash flow and greater liquidity are available to you now – in how you collect what’s owed to you, in how you pay what you owe to others, and in how you procure what you need to run your business.  The proof points are in our daily involvement with companies that are improving their operating costs, reducing their days sales outstanding, trimming their bad debt expense, lowering their unapplied cash and credits, avoiding penalty payments, securing early-payment discounts, eliminating duplicate and erroneous payments, slashing non-compliant sourcing spend and improving buying power. All of which flows to improvements in working capital.

***

We sold $400 million worth of industrial and energy cable into the terrestrial wind farm market globally in 2008. Now the offshore wind power market is poised to grow rapidly. The solar power market is expected to vastly exceed the market for wind power, helped by the fact that it requires four-to-six times as much cable as wind does. And a nuclear renaissance is expected to begin in 2011.

***

Across every aspect of our business, we look to the future: identifying unmet medical needs, broadening our sources of discovery, establishing new therapeutic platforms, and cultivating a rewarding work environment in which dedicated people come together to do important work.

***

Contractors often play an important role when you’re bringing new technology online or when you have peak demand or talent shortages. But if a contractor has been on the job for six months or more, or they’re still being used for skills that will be needed for ongoing support, they’re probably doing jobs that should be sourced internally. In addition, they tend to get hired by different functions in different parts of the enterprise, which complicates governance and forecasting of their performance. 

***

Our organizational strategy is built on the belief that competitive advantage is gained by having better people delivering superior quality with exceptional service backed by advanced technology and sustained by a best-cost position.

A word in the museum

My five-year-old grandson spends two or three hours a day drawing trains and Transformers. On Saturday I took him to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to broaden his horizons. I thought it might broaden mine too, because I usually leave the MCA thinking, what was that all about? 

We moved through each space at a non-contemplative pace, but that doesn't mean a pre-schooler isn't taking things in. As we entered the last exhibition, I saw two wheelbarrows in the middle of a room. One was filled with popped popcorn, the other with red Christmas tree balls. I was thinking, how am I going to explain this if he wants to know why this is art? 

But without pausing to think, Adam walked straight to the installation, pointed to one wheelbarrow and then the other, said, "That's harvest ... and that's Christmas harvest," turned and walked on. I didn't know he had that word "harvest," but he played it at just the right time for me. 

Words and transformation

On a cool misty long-ago night I went for a late run through the streets of my neighborhood. I had given up on a writing assignment that was due the next morning for a communication course I was taking. But in rhythm with my feet splashing on the pavement, my mind did consider what might be worth writing about. And I thought, if I were to write anything, I would want it to be about the Mississippi in flood. Beyond that, I had nothing...

Back at home, I decided to at least sit down at the computer and see if anything might happen. I slid my fingers onto the keys and wrote:

Dear Children,

Someday I must take you to see the Mississippi in flood...

And something did happen. I had a finished piece in about 45 minutes. I volunteered to read it to the class the next morning. Afterward, the instructor asked if he might have a copy to put in his lecture file.

I saw him again about six months later and he said, "You were great last week." "I was great?" "Yes, at the Air Force Academy." He taught that you are what you say, so if he has your words with him, he talks as if you, yourself, were with him. He went on: "I was teaching a course at the Air Force Academy. I had Lincoln with me. I had Jefferson with me. But because of where the conversation was going, I thought the cadets needed to hear from you. I read them your piece, and you were great. You transformed the conversation." 

This memory came back to me at lunch today as I read in the second chapter of Lincoln: the Biography of a Writer, where Fred Kaplan describes the young Lincoln's reading of two anthologies that became his "formative books." He says:

It seems almost certain that Lincoln repeatedly read both volumes from cover to cover. He had few other books to choose from, and those did not have similar range and quality. These anthologies, created in the spirit of Anglican tolerance and respect for literary history, transformed him.

It's the word "transformed" that stopped me. That word is a little overused in corporate settings, but I still put a lot of stock in it. To think that Lincoln was transformed by what he read -- and because he was transformed, his bicentennial birthday was all over the news yesterday. 

But where do the transforming words come from? In my middling experience, when the transformational teacher trotted out my words at the Air Force Academy, they existed only because of... 

an assignment...

a deadline...

a run in the dark and the mist...

a mental image of something worth writing about...

and a choice that was made between going to bed and laying fingers on a keyboard to see what might happen. 

Probably not all that different from the words that transformed Abraham Lincoln. 

Sound and texture

A friend and I were talking Sunday afternoon and he asked me about something I supposedly wrote years ago about relationships with clients. Oh yes, I said, "bidder, vendor, partner." "Yeah, that was it," he said. 

It was about six years ago. Those three words were the pillars of a presentation I made to an agency about the importance of understanding where you stood at any given time in your relationship with a client. Were you a bidder seeking to win a contract? A vendor who could be plugged into a project as needed? Or a partner in developing critical solutions? 

Someone reminds me of that presentation about once a year. Here's how I think it lives on in the minds of those who were in the audience that day: they remember (1) how they felt when they heard it, and (2) there were three words that sounded alike. 

It's no different for me. When my friend, who had heard about it second-hand six years removed, asked me about it, my mind immediately went searching for the three words and came up with "bidder, vendor, partner." And I remembered feeling as good giving it as I had ever felt in a room full of business colleagues. 

Several years ago I was asked about the possibility of doing a repeat performance at a different agency. I went back and found the original presentation and was surprised by how much substance it contained. It runs much deeper than three words. But without those three words, you have no mental gateway to it. I remember that in the early versions, I had "bidder" and "partner" but the middle word was something that didn't match the ending sound of "er." I was smart enough to hold off going public with it until I came up with the "vendor" tag. 

In the book Words that Work: It's not what you say, it's what people hear, published in 2007, Dr. Frank Luntz offers 10 rules of effective language. Rule Six is "Sound and Texture Matter." He writes:

The sounds and texture of language should be just as memorable as the words themselves. A string of words that have the same first letter, the same sound, or the same syllabic cadence is more memorable than a random collection of sounds. The first five rules in this chapter do just that: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, and novelty stand out because they all end with the same sound. 

That's good to know, but here's what happens in a corporate review process: content stomps all over sound-and-texture. Multiple reviewers take content from other sources and drop it into the draft wherever it suits them. Dr. Luntz's other nine rules get stomped too.

Unless!

Unless we're talking about a speech. With a speech, we have one decision-maker, and he or she knows to expect instant and highly personalized feedback from an audience that's sitting right in front of them. The good speakers will close the content spigot in time to think about how people are going to hear what they're saying. That's why, in my experience, if you really want to change something with words, do it in a speech. 

Going off the logic grid

An email from a long-lost friend reminded me of my time working with people who think at the speed of Moore's Law. My favorite story from that time:

I was on a year's retainer with a company that has played a leading role in the development of the PC. My job was to write about things that hadn't happened yet. That meant there were about five people in the whole company who could give me useful input, and for everybody else, their guess was as good as mine.

I'm on a conference call with about ten people who are pushing me for a publishable document by the following Wednesday. I'm saying that's fine, but I have to have content--somebody has to tell me what to say. The topic is something that hasn't been announced yet. They tell me only Mr. X knows what the story is. They check his calendar and make an appointment for me on the following Friday.

"Great," I say, "So what's my deadline?" 

"Wednesday, like the schedule says."

"So...first draft to you on Wednesday, input for the first draft on Friday?"

"Yes. The schedule is what it is."

This is the kind of moment I live for. I think logic is vastly overrated, and here we had a chance to jump completely off the logic grid. I would write the piece, we would stay on schedule, and then I would get the input for the piece. 

This company has a website you can mine six ways from Sunday. The trade press also works hard to cover their forward direction. And bless the bloggers who are trying to be the first to predict what's going to happen next. I rounded up lots of jargon from the website, some well-sourced analysis from the trade press, and the predictions of a couple of bloggers who were tech-savvy enough to follow known developments to their logical conclusion. 

I wrote the piece, submitted it on Wednesday, got it approved on Thursday, and had my input interview with Mr. X on Friday. 

When you're granted an hour on the phone with one of the key knowers in an organization that's pushing the frontiers of technology, it's amazing how liberating it is to know that the reason he agreed to speak with you in the first place has already been satisfied.  

Nailing a keynote

Just back from California and the first CEO keynote address of the year. Ten years ago it would have been 35 minutes long, but this one was 11 minutes, which felt just right.  In those 11 minutes, the word "you" was heard 25 times -- a good number. The final draft checked out on the Flesch-Kincaid readability calculator at the 9th grade level, a little higher than I would like. The first draft was just about right at the 6th grade level, and the numbers got higher with each of the four revisions. 

The speech was scheduled for Feb. 4. At the end of a read-through in the CEO's office on Jan. 30, he said, "What a great speech. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." We canceled our Feb. 2 read-through. On the plane Feb. 3 somewhere over Oklahoma, he came down the aisle with edits on a stick--nothing structural, just getting the words right for the way he talks. That night, in a read-through in front of three or four people who were hearing it for the first time, we took some changes and lost a bit of our enthusiasm. 

In a private read-through the next morning, we started feeling good about it again, and just when we thought the speech was in its final form, our CEO said, "Do you think we're missing an opportunity somewhere?" We know, by now, that a question like that is code for "I think we can still make this speech better." Back to work we went. I pointed out that three times since we'd landed I'd heard him tell a story about several people he had bumped into on the plane who were coming to the meeting for specific reasons. I thought that story belonged in the speech. He asked me to work it in. It turned out to be the cherry on top of a speech that hit all the right buttons. 

We thought we had one more rehearsal in us without starting to sound too slick, so we broke for lunch and did the final read-through on stage in the arena about two hours before the meeting started. That's where content and performance came together. And then he nailed it when it counted.