How to stop saying 'FFS' when you open emails
Unless the boss of M&S helps his teams to find and make stories, as well as tell them, his mission to simplify communications will fail
My friend, the CFO of a globally-renowned company, recently gave me a fabulous new strapline for my company, EveryRung. Which obviously I can’t use.
Discussing the way I go into businesses and teach journalistic skills so that data-driven communications are simpler, tighter and more meaningful, he said: ‘Grant, if you can stop me from saying “for f***’s sake” every time I open an internal document, that would be money well spent”.
Needless to say, he hasn’t yet spent the money. But he has provided me with a valuable insight. One that I’ve long suspected during my reinvented career but which few in business have the confidence to admit.
No matter how important, well-educated, powerful and intellectual your audience, he or she doesn’t want what you think they want.
You’ve toiled for days and weeks over the ‘perfect’ document, weighty with data and peppered with poly-syllabic utterances purloined from places like the Harvard Business Review and management text books. How proud you are of those streamlined graphs and Venn diagrams with the pretty colours and fancy fonts. And so what if it’s 96 pages long? The more material you can provide, the stronger your argument and the more confident your leader will be in making the right decision.
That’s what you think they want.
If only you could hear him or her when they open the email.
‘For f***’s sake.’
I’m pretty sure my friend will have crossed paths with Archie Norman, the straight-talking chairman of Marks & Spencer who is on a mission to revolutionise the way that companies communicate with their investors. The 68-year-old business veteran and former politician wants AGMs to be held online so as to involve far more small shareholders, so that they feel involved.
But in a recent interview with the Mail on Sunday’s Business Editor Ruth Sunderland, there was an even more telling admission that caught my eye:
As for annual reports, he says they are far 'too long'. 'At Asda annual reports were about 80 pages and we thought they were too long then. Now the M&S annual report is well over 200 pages.' While it does contain important information, he argues there is also a lot of 'guff'.
'I have never met anybody who has read all of it, except possibly our audit partner. It is not designed to tell shareholders how the company is doing, it is to tick a load of governance boxes.'
He believes shareholders would benefit from shorter but more meaningful online communications. 'We should try to make it interesting, but we have regulated annual reports to the point where they are so large they are of no use. We sent out 10,000 copies of the last annual report, this thing that nobody reads. It has added 40-50 pages this year because of the new sustainability reporting. It is absurd.'
Yes Archie, it is absurd. But unless you understand why it’s happening, I’m not sure you’re going to be able to solve it. My advice would be this: take a trip to the shop floor. The internal one, not the customer one.
There you will find teams of marketing executives, insights analysts, data experts and behavioural scientists churning out work that is undeniably brilliant. Their skills are second-to-none, except in one area - they can’t tell a story.
First, they’re frightened to because they think that the big cheeses want the whole thing. Anything less and they’d be accused of laziness.
Second, they’ve lost the ability to because process has drummed it out of them. The number of times I’ve heard younger team members moan about ‘that’s just the way we have to do it’ when they bemoan the restraints laced on their storytelling instincts.
And third, because they don’t have the time to because it’s harder to write shorter than it is longer. (No, it wasn’t Mark Twain who first came up with the quotable line ‘If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter’ but 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.)
The trouble with so much of storytelling training is that it’s only focused on that one element - telling a story. But how can you tell a story properly if you haven’t spent time finding and making it?
The reason why so many leaders say FFS when they open an email is because everyone is focused on telling stories when in fact that need to be better storyfinders and storymakers. In my opinion, using the skills of a journalist to make facts more meaningful for specific audiences so they can make better decisions.
So Archie, if you want written work to be more interesting, get your teams to close their laptops, put down their pens and step away from the whiteboard. Instead, create a newsroom mindset where people feel empowered to debate, argue, question, contradict, headline, where solutions emerge from people feeling unafraid to suggest something that isn’t quite right.
Get them to think like journalists. Just make sure they don’t behave like them, too.
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