Why Is Business Writing So Awful?
Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

By Jason Fried | May 1, 2010
Laurent Cillufo

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What’s bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That’s full-service generic. There’s more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value?

Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet — the marketplace?

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it. In nearly all cases, a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words — whether they’re on a website, in sales materials, or in e-mails or letters. A snappy design might catch their attention, but it’s the words that make the real connection. Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality — these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler — “stuff” that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you’ll agree.

Luckily, there are exceptions. Wonderful exceptions. These are companies with a personality and a point of view. They care enough to have their own voice. They want to communicate, not just say something. They have a story to tell, and they want to tell it well. They write to be read.

Woot is one of those companies. Woot is a Dallas-based business that sells one item a day at a deep discount. Here is how the company describes itself on its website:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it’s taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 — by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we’re still the lovable scamps we’ve always been.

Don’t you just love these people? Or maybe you hate them. Either way, I’m pretty sure you have an opinion about Woot based on this paragraph. With just a few sentences, Woot instantly set itself apart from the liquidation crowd.

Indeed, how the company communicates is a big part of how Woot built such a successful business. Woot’s deal of the day sells out just about every day. I especially love the company’s response to the “Will I receive customer support like I’m used to?” on its FAQ page:

No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don’t end up liking or you have what marketing people call “buyer’s remorse,” sell it on eBay. It’s likely you’ll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle.

It’s kind of kidding and kind of not. Some people may be offended, but big deal. Woot isn’t trying to sell to every customer. It’s trying to sell to the customers that can laugh along. Those are the people who understand what Woot is about. The company uses language as a filter.

Another favorite of mine is Saddleback Leather in San Antonio. Dave Munson, the company’s founder, clearly loves his products and his words. Here’s how he sets the scene when describing the quality of the company’s bags:

You know how when a magician exposes to the world how other magicians trick people, all of the other magicians get mad at him for spilling the beans? Well, I’m about to spill the beans and ruin it for all of those companies trying to trick you into buying their not so high quality leather…You’re about to learn what to look for and what to look out for as you shop for your next leather piece. By the way, if I soon die by a chopstick to the neck, you’ll know why. I’m a marked man.

He then dives into great detail about what makes a great leather bag great. From the type of leather and where it comes from to how it’s tanned to breakable versus nonbreakable parts (“How much is a billion dollar submarine with a plastic hatch worth?”) to the number of seams, and so on. It’s compelling and interesting. It holds your attention.

And check out how he explains his guarantee:

All of our products are fully warranted against all defects in materials and workmanship for 100 years. If you or one of your descendants should have a problem, send it back to me or one of my descendants and we’ll repair or replace it for free or we’ll give you a credit on the website (be sure to mention the warranty in your will).

Consider his choice of words. A 100-year warranty that his descendants will honor if one of your descendants needs a repair. And then he reminds you to include the warranty in your will. Who wouldn’t want to do business with this guy? And it’s all backed up with the Saddleback tag line: “They’ll Fight Over It When You’re Dead.” Beauty.

When you’re done reading this article, hit Google and search for leather bags. Then read through some of the sites you find. I bet you’ll be bored to death pretty quickly. Then visit Saddleback’s site. I bet you’ll be smiling just as fast.

Here’s one more example of writing done right: Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin, a pioneering farmer, author, and prophet of clarity. The Polyface Guiding Principles page is a study in straightforward language with a healthy hint of attitude:

Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health….We do not ship food. We should all seek food closer to home…This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens.

I especially love his take on what it means to be a farmer:

We’re really in the earthworm enhancement business. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.

Joel knows where he stands. When you read his site, you do, too. Even though Joel is a “full-service end-to-end” farmer, he’d never say it like that. He’d consider that description disrespectful to his customers, employees, plants, and animals.

The quality of the writing on sites like Woot’s, Saddleback Leather’s, and Polyface’s gives me the chills. It’s not how they look; it’s how they read. These are businesses that care about what they say and how they say it. They don’t write to fill up space on a page. They write to fill up your head. There is nothing inherently interesting about liquidators, leather, or farmers. They can make themselves boring, or they can make themselves interesting. Words do that job. Woot, Saddleback, and Polyface have all chosen to be interesting and engaging. They don’t hide behind jargon. They aren’t insecure. They aren’t afraid to tell you who they are.

I can already hear some of you saying, “Sounds great. But I can’t write.” So hire a writer. But make sure that writer truly understands your business. Remember: It’s not about telling a story. It’s about telling a true story well.

Of course, words alone won’t do it. Words are two dimensional. Your products and services provide the third dimension — depth. But when it all comes together, you’ve got a package that’s hard to ignore.

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework, which was published in March

With constant, ever-increasing demands on our time, each of us must work hard to remain effective and not just “busy.” I came accross this post by Joel Spolsky and it really hit home with me. I began to practice a lot of what Joel suggests and it is having a big and very positive impact. So much so that I wanted to share this with you.

Bob

Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn’t feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator.

By Joel Spolsky | Feb 1, 2010
Josh Titus

Cross-functional or Dysfunctional? On every project, one person should be in charge of the flow of communication. You want the decision-making process to look like Figure A — not Figure B.

Joel Spolsky is the founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City.

When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn’t want anyone to feel left out?

When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, “Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!” even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she’s your co-founder)?

When was the last time you got into a long discussion over the color palette for the new brochure with a programmer, who has nothing to do with the brochure but sure knows that he doesn’t like orange?

These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn’t need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn’t efficient.

It’s a particularly insidious problem for fast-growing start-ups. When you’re really small and you’re just starting out, you don’t have that many people, so keeping everyone in the loop on everything doesn’t really take that much time. But as you get bigger, the number of people who might potentially get involved in any particular discussion increases, and the amount of stuff you’re doing as a company increases, and the amount of time you can waste overcommunicating becomes a serious problem.

As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.

It’s not that Bob in Accounting doesn’t have anything useful to say about the photography for the new advertising campaign. Yes, Bob has a master’s in fine arts. Yes, Bob is an amateur photographer. And maybe he even has better taste than do the people in marketing. Still, Bob shouldn’t be telling the marketing manager what to do, because it’s just not efficient. In fact, it’s highly inefficient.

The cost of overcommunication within organizations was fleshed out by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks helped run the OS/360 project at IBM, building a giant operating system for the company’s mainframes. In those days, computers were large, room-size, water-cooled machines, sometimes with a massive 256,000 bytes of main memory. OS/360 was probably the largest software project ever attempted to that point. And it was monumentally late.

Every time some aspect of the project fell behind schedule, IBM assigned a few more people to the task. And what Brooks noticed, which still surprises people, is that this didn’t work. His observation came to be known as Brooks’ Law: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.

Read that sentence again, because it’s not intuitive. Brooks discovered that adding people to a project will put it further behind schedule.

How can that be? Well, when you add a new person to a team, that person needs to communicate and coordinate with all the other people on the team. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. The new kid doesn’t know what’s going on, so somebody else on the team — somebody who just last week was doing productive work — has to stop his or her work and show this newbie the ropes.

The bigger the team, the worse it gets. When you have a team of one person, you have no communication requirements. None.

Add a second person, and now you have a single connection: Adam and Mary have to talk to each other once in a while.

Now add a third person, say, Srinivas, and suddenly we’ve gone from one connection to three, since Srinivas has to talk to Adam and Mary.

Add a fourth person. I’m running out of names here to help me out — OK: Britney. If we add her, and she needs to coordinate with all of them, you get six connections.

For the mathematically inclined, the formula is that if you have n people on your team, there are (n2-n)/2 connections. This chart illustrates how this becomes a problem:

People Connections
1 0
2 1
3 3
4 6
5 10
6 15
7 21
8 28
9 36
10 45

As you can see, the communications costs start to rise pretty rapidly until, on large teams, all anyone ever has time to do is to coordinate with everyone else — and no one gets any work done. In 2006, Moishe Lettvin, a former programmer at Microsoft, wrote a blog post describing the year he spent coordinating the list of items that would be featured on one menu in Windows Vista — the menu you use to turn off your computer. (See The Windows Shutdown Crapfest.) Lettvin figured that 43 people all had a voice in designing this one menu. Forty-three! By Brooks’s formula, that means managing 903 connections. Lettvin says he spent so much time on coordination tasks that, in 12 months, he produced fewer than 200 lines of code.

As the boss, you need to design ways to reduce communications paths. Eliminate companywide mailing lists — or at least charge $1.50 to post to them. Stop having large meetings. You need a culture in which people don’t get uptight because they weren’t included in a meeting, which means you need a culture that rewards people for doing their jobs and frowns on meddling in other people’s work.

And on every project, assign one person to make sure that communication happens — but only the right communication. Otherwise the team will just start having long meetings with everyone there and, frankly, people will socialize, and bloviate, and speechify, and argue about things they don’t really care about just to hear their own voices.

I think this is probably one of those cases in which the old, 1950s style of management accidentally got something right. In those General Motors–style companies, they at least had an idea for how information needed to move up and down neat, regimented org charts, which showed a modicum of recognition that the right answer is not that every single person in the organization needs to pay attention to everything.

When you started your company, you probably did a great job of communicating. Everybody told one another everything. And your customers loved it, because when they called in to ask about their purchase order, everybody knew where it was. But as you get bigger, you can’t keep telling everybody about every purchase order, so you have to invent specific communications systems so that exactly the right people find out and nobody else. Not because it’s confidential. Because it’s a waste of time.

The Transition Curve

By Michael · Comments (0)

Crossfit Dublin

The Transition Curve is the physical representation of the emotions we experience in the pursuit of a task. This is relevant to your experience at CrossFit, work or in any of your relationships. Keep in mind, to some degree, you go through this curve on a daily basis. It happens to a different extent depending on the meaning of the event.

At the start of a task you are in “Uninformed Optimism” and have a ton of excitement to get things going. You feel that your success is inevitable. This is the excitement of starting a new job or when you start dating a new person everything is just great. As you start to experience some failure you start to slide down the curve into “Informed Pessimism”. This is where you start to ask yourself why or how you were fooled into getting so excited. You decide to suffer through things at this point because you are stuck in it now but your attitude is generally negative and your results suffer as a result.

As your lack of commitment pushes you further and further down the curve you hit the “Crisis of Meaning”. This is where total burn out occurs and realize it is time for a change. Fight or flight. You either renew your commitment to what you are doing, focus on the positive and begin to achieve again or completely walk away. The latter is aptly named “Crash and Burn”.

When you decide to stay and learn to fight you start to feel success again. You understand better the challenges you will face and you are better equipped to deal with trials in the future. At this point you feel what is called “Informed Optimism” as you have the confidence of experience.

You cannot avoid the transition curve in life or any of its stages, but you can learn to more successfully navigate it. This is done by decreasing the peaks and valleys of the curve, understanding it and knowing which stage you are at and why. When you are feeling success, use this time to prepare for when you will struggle by using that high energy to do things you usually avoid so they don’t pile up on you later. The opposite is true when you are feeling low. Push yourself down the curve so that you can have your crisis of meaning faster and look hard at what you are doing and why you are doing it. Think about what got you through a challenging time before and how you were able to do it.

Whether you use it in a workout to remain poised when your lungs are going to come up and out your throat, or in everyday life when you are staring down that all too familiar curve ball, the Transition Curve is a valuable and effective tool for success.

By: Carol Tice | March 8, 2010 8:00 AM |

I got the word this week: The Blue Ocean Cafe has closed. This cozy little diner, on the ground floor of a local condo complex in my small town, was much beloved. Why? The breakfast-focused eatery offered free waffles.Why is it out of business? It offered free waffles.

The sad tale of Blue Ocean illustrates the perils of promotions based around free stuff. They can really backfire and take your business down the drain.

I suspect the original intent was for the waffles to be free for just a short initial run, while locals were discovering the restaurant. It was designed to break loyalties to other local breakfast spots. And it succeeded in spades. Soon, every business meeting and mommy meetup in town was being held at Blue Ocean. Other local diners lowered prices on some items to try to compete. 

It was the greatest marketing tool ever–at the 4th of July parade, the owners handed out laminated waffle-shaped placards advertising the free waffles. I’ve still got mine on the fridge. Adorable.

And, since waffles were pretty much one of two main dishes along with scrambled eggs, the restaurant was probably losing money on nearly every transaction. We all knew it couldn’t go on forever. This isn’t like Adobe, where they give you the cheap Acrobat, because it hooks you into buying Flash or Creative Suite. They had no move-up product…they were just giving their core product away.

After many months, Blue Ocean set a date–the free waffles were ending. That lasted about two weeks. After being reduced to an empty, echoing shell, the restaurant owners caved: free waffles were back.

Another attempt was made–they made the waffles free but only with other purchases of a certain amount. This rule put many customers into a huff. They expected the waffles to be free in any case. Feelings were hurt.

Ultimately, the restaurant couldn’t make money with its free offer, and it couldn’t keep customers without it. Talk around town is that a rent hike was the last straw. It’s hard to sustain a rise in costs when you’re giving away your core product.

In this age of freemiums and books preaching the power of free stuff, Blue Ocean provides a cautionary tale: construct your free offer carefully. In the downturn, many retailers feel pressure to lower prices or offer giveaways. But remember, free offers should bring customers in, build loyalty, and then prep them to move up to something you get paid for. Otherwise soon, your retail space may be free for another entrepreneur to rent.