Clarity = Good Business

This isn’t a TEDdy talk, but I’ll steal from their brief and start with provocative: would you pursue excellence in your work, even if no benefit accrued to your bottom line? Just for its own sake – to satisfy clients and your own sense of pride. Would you bother?

OK, let’s slide down off the highfalutin’ pole and give it a ponder. Take Henry Miller – the writer, in case your forgot. A self-proclaimed good-for-nothing, before he was crowned king of roués, Miller actually held a job – in Manhattan, in a gigantic corporation. In his novels, he called it the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company – you may guess who they are, but I won’t name them. In our book, they’re all future clients.

I don’t remember the story, exactly, but I’ll spin up a yarn close to fact. Henry worked as a messenger, delivering telegrams. Messages went missing; the staff were all dregs; turnover muddily spun. Miller had better ideas, so get this: he barged into the president’s office and demanded a meeting. He got it – there’s a lesson there, just maybe – and ended up with a real job and a mission: sort everything out.

A born loser in all but scribbling, Henry actually succeeded. He cut staff, but raised their pay. Small bonuses went to the keenest. The bums and the drunkards were out – in the young and ambitious, for good pay and action – out of the office and into the streets; good for young fellows in days before aircon. Everything was humming a tune, as they’d say back then.

It was then that the bean counters caught the breeze. But we’re spending more on fewer staff, they moaned – where’s the savings? There are none, said Henry, but there’s no extra spending. Same money, sharper team, better results. What’s not to like? But we want savings, the bean-boys implored, then demanded.

Miller’s scheme was dismantled. They went back to the old, somehow. Under Henry’s MO, telegrams got delivered, on time, right address, message correct, money collected. With the old system, it worked just enough, cost the company the same, and customers accepted mediocre service, because they’d always had just that. Don’t count on that thinking, today, by the way. Henry never got over it, and wrote it all down. It’s funny to see how the old firm has adopted him – post-facto, a model, though ghostly employee. Golly, why didn’t we listen™, they say!

The Cosmo-D team – the decisionmakers down low, I mean, not the preened-up president – saw no value in doing the job right, just because – well, just because they could make a thing beautiful. No harm to the bottom line, they reasoned, why bother? In actual fact, I think they erred – it cost them. They should have run with old Henry.

We hear it sometimes – only occasionally, now. Company reports, annual reviews, all manner of wordy productions – Why make it great? Good enough is enough, so why worry?

Here’s why: top companies demand excellence, always. Newbies sometimes falter: one asked if we could include some errors – wrong spelling, clumsy syntax, confused grammar – in their blogposts, to make them more democratic. We kept our heads, called down no brimstone, and convinced these boobies otherwise. It was a moment, though.

If you don’t want to be good for good’s sake, consider a cold hard fact: the bottom line is beholden to your prose. In an article titled Doyoureadme? Temporal Trends in the Language Complexity of Financial Reporting, published in SSRN Electronic Journal, Danny Lesmy and Lev Muchnik of Hebrew University, and co-author Yevgeny Mugerman of Bar-Ilan University, compile and present extensive research on financial texts becoming so difficult to comprehend that “financial reporting has become inaccessible to the general public.”

“The increasing complexity of financial communications coupled with the steady erosion of the readability of financial reports poses a substantial challenge to the efficient-market hypothesis… It is essential to address the danger that financial information might become comprehensible to only a small group of elite professionals, rendering markets and the process of capital formation more and more exclusive and exclusionary.”

Ladies and gentlemen, there is your bottom line, expressed as the accessibility factor. Convince me, I invest; confuse me, I assume it’s you that’s at fault – and so I look elsewhere. In short, you have just one chance to grab ‘em.

We have always argued: clear writing captures the audience. Simple as that. It’s nice to see science catching up.

Would you like to see how we can help your bottom line via clear, engaging writing? Drop us a line at info@quartetcomm.com