Brief E-Book

Joseph McCormack

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 227

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Get heard by being clear and concise

The only way to survive in business today is to be a lean communicator. Busy executives expect you to respect and manage their time more effectively than ever. You need to do the groundwork to make your message tight and to the point. The average professional receives 304 emails per week and checks their smartphones 36 times an hour and 38 hours a week. This inattention has spread to every part of life. The average attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight in 2012.

So, throw them a lifeline and be brief.

Author Joe McCormack tackles the challenges of inattention, interruptions, and impatience that every professional faces. His proven B.R.I.E.F. approach, which stands for Background, Relevance, Information, Ending, and Follow up, helps simplify and clarify complex communication. BRIEF will help you summarize lengthy information, tell a short story, harness the power of infographics and videos, and turn monologue presentations into controlled conversations.

• Details the B.R.I.E.F. approach to distilling your message into a brief presentation
• Written by the founder and CEO of Sheffield Marketing Partners, which specializes in message and narrative development, who is also a recognized expert in Narrative Mapping, a technique that helps clients achieve a clearer and more concise message

Long story short: BRIEF will help you gain the muscle you need to eliminate wasteful words and stand out from the rest. Be better. Be brief.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part One: Awareness: Heightened Awareness in a World Begging for BRIEF

Chapter 1: Why Brevity Is Vital

Get to the Point or Pay the Price

Executive—Interrupted

Who's Responsible for Adapting When the Message Is Not Being Heard?

Timing Is of the Essence

BRIEF Balance: The Harmony of Clear, Concise, and Compelling

A BRIEF Timeout

Chapter 2: Mindful of Mind-filled-ness

Brevity Is Like an Instant Stress Release

Battling Overcapacity

1. Information Inundation—The Water's Rising

2. Inattention—The Muscle Is Weakening

3. Interruption—The Rate Is Alarming

4. Impatience—The Ice Is Thinning

What Does It All Mean?

Your New Reality: There's No Time for a Slow Buildup

Test Yourself

Examination of Brevity

A New Professional Standard

Notes

Chapter 3: Why You Struggle with Brevity: The Seven Capital Sins

Why Is It So Difficult?

1. Cowardice

2. Confidence

3. Callousness

4. Comfort

5. Confusion

6. Complication

7. Carelessness

Chapter 4: The Big Bang of Brevity

A Success Story

Part Two: Discipline: How to Gain Discipline to Be Clear and Concise

Chapter 5: Mental Muscle Memory to Master Brevity

The Exercise of Brevity

Chapter 6: Map It: From Mind Mapping to BRIEF Maps

Your 11th Grade English Teacher Was Right

An Outline Is Missing, and So Is the Sale

Mind Mapping and the Modern Outline

BRIEF Maps: A Practical Tool for Delivering Brevity

How a BRIEF Map Can Be Used

Wrong Approach: Bob Chooses to Share but Not to Prepare

Right Approach: Bob Prepares a BRIEF Map and Maintains Executive Support

BRIEF Maps: What's the Payoff?

Notes

Chapter 7: Tell It: The Role of Narratives

I'm Tired of Meaningless and Meandering Corporate Jargon. I'm Ready for a Good Story.

Where's the Disconnect? When a Story Is Missing

The Birth of Narrative Mapping: A Way to Organize and Deliver Your Story

Rediscovery of Narratives and Storytelling: Breaking through the Blah, Blah, Blah

Listen, I'm Ready for a Story

Think About Your Audience: Journalism 2.0 and the Elements of a Narrative

Narrative Map (De)constructed

Seeing and Hearing Is Believing: The Story of the Evolution of Commerce

Notes

Chapter 8: Talk It: Controlled Conversations and TALC Tracks

Risky Business Trip

Controlled Conversations Are a Game of Tennis, Not Golf

TALC Tracks—A Structure for Balance and Brevity

Be Prepared for Anything

Audience, Audience, Audience

Chapter 9: Show It: Powerful Ways to Make a Picture Exceed a Thousand Words

Show-and-Tell: Which Would You Choose?

You Can See the Shift

Seeing Supersedes Reading

A Visual Language

Connect an Image with Your Story

Momentary Magic: Infographics in Business

Breakdown of Complex Information

The Age of YouTube and Business

TL; DR: Too Long; Didn't Read

Notes

Chapter 10: Putting Brevity to Work: Grainger and the Al and Betty Story

Notes

Part Three: Decisiveness: Gaining the Decisiveness to Know When and Where to Be Brief

Chapter 11: Meeting You Halfway

Defeat the Villains of Meetings

Meeting Villain #1: Time

Meeting Villain #2: Type

Meeting Villain #3: Tyrants

Change the Format and Tone—Make It a Conversation

Put BRIEF Back into a Briefing

Notes

Chapter 12: Leaving a Smaller Digital Imprint

The Digital Flood

BRIEF Hall of Fame: Verne Harnish

From Social Media to Venture Capital

Social Media Squeeze

Notes

Chapter 13: Presenting a Briefer Case

Practicing What You Preach

The Discipline of Brevity

Putting the Power Back in PowerPoint

Training as a TED Talk

Chapter 14: Trimming Your Sales (Pitch)

Shut Up and Sell

Billboard on a Bumper Sticker

Time to Be Convincing and Concise

Cut to the Customer's Chase

Chapter 15: Whose Bright Idea Was That Anyway?

Your Big Idea

A Mission-Critical Narrative

Clear Picture with Radical Focus

The Entrepreneur's Dilemma: Mixed Messages

Tailor Your Pitch to Your Investor's Needs

Chapter 16: It's Never Really Small Talk

Brevity as a Conversational Life Raft

Momentary Misgivings Stall Momentum

Walk the Walk; Talk the Talk

Chapter 17: Help Wanted: Master of Brevity

Not the Time for Anxious Rambling

Let Others Lead the Conversation

Talking Your Way out of a Job Offer

For the Candidate:

For the Interviewer:

Chapter 18: I've Got Some Good News

Pay the Favor of Brevity Forward

Let the Brilliance Shine Through

Speak the Language of Success

Get into the Habit of Saying, “Thank You”

Chapter 19: And the Bad News Is…

The Bright (and Brief) Side of Bearing Bad News

Give It to Them Straight

Serving up the S#&$ Sandwich

Chapter 20: Got-a-Minute Updates

The “Say-Do” Ratio

Be Prepared to Be Lean and Drive Out Wasteful Words

The Most Important Question: Why Am I Here?

Part Four: Being BRIEF Summary and Action Plan

Resources

About the Author

Index

Cover design/Art direction: Megan Palicki

Illustration design: Joan Bueta

Copyright © 2014 by Joseph McCormack. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-70496-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-70528-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-70556-8 (ebk)

This is dedicated to my wife, Montse, the love of my life, and all my kids, who make talking at length a treasure—Monica, Andrea, Isabel, Jordi, Joanna, Marina, Tomas, Marta, and Lucas.

Foreword

When Joe asked me to write the foreword, I was literally in the middle of wrapping up my own book (Scaling Up) and I thought I couldn't do it.

I wanted to do something special (and brief!) and you know how hard it is to say something brief. Then, I changed my mind.

Read the book.

You're busy; we all are.

Be a master of brevity. Now get started.

—Verne Harnish, Founder and CEO of Gazelles

Acknowledgments

When I first told my wife, Montse, and kids that I was writing a book called BRIEF, the jokes started flying. You could only imagine their comments. My friends and extended family followed suit saying the book should be only 10 pages long.

Funny…I'm still laughing.

All kidding aside, I want to thank all of them, particularly my wife, for their constant love and support. It has been wonderful to see their nonstop encouragement.

As for my coworkers, clients, and close collaborators, this book has given me a unique opportunity to have deeper conversations and start to dream with them about the possibilities of a “less is more” world. On many occasions, they have taken time from their day job to lend me a hand. In particular, Johnny, Angelo, Angela, and Megan have been invaluable to get BRIEF airborne.

There are a few people, Meghan and Joyce at Sheffield and Christine Moore at John Wiley & Sons, whom I have depended on throughout with an honest editorial push to omit needless words and make this a better book.

Regarding my current and former clients, I have shared their insights, commentary, successes, and failures all while respecting their confidentiality and excluding any sensitive information they have shared with me. In particular, I have changed some first names and omitted surnames of those serving in our country's Special Operations community.

Finally, for all of those that I have interviewed for this book—a heartfelt thank you. Truly, this is a topic that affects us all.

Preface

Why BRIEF?

In our attention-deficit economy, being brief is what's desperately needed and rarely delivered.

When we fail to be clear and concise, the consequences can be brutal: wasted time, money, and resources; decisions made in confusion; worthy ideas rejected; people sent off in wrong directions; done deals that always seem to stall.

As the founder of a boutique marketing agency that helps clients such as Harley-Davidson, BMO Harris Bank, MasterCard, and W. W. Grainger get their stories straight, I know this is a rare skill.

For years, business and military leaders have complained to me about the same things. Mixed messages keep missing the mark. People are not on the same page. Long-winded presentations go nowhere.

For businesses to succeed in an information-laden and hyperbusy economy, the rambling has to stop. So I decided to write BRIEF, a step-by-step approach to get to the point quickly.

Anyone can learn how to make what's complex clear. After my firm was in business for just a few years, I was invited to develop an original curriculum for U.S. Special Operations Command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It turned out that some of the most elite members of our military were weak communicators. They admitted their mission-critical briefs were painfully long, buried in details, and impossible to decipher.

The transformative work with Special Operations was—and still is—incredibly rewarding. That's how BRIEF was born. It's about lean communication. It's like Six Sigma for your mouth.

After a few days in our Narrative Mapping courses, I saw an immediate shift. They were able to leverage storytelling skills and BRIEF techniques to be clear and compelling when explaining complex missions. They delivered complicated information efficiently and effectively, with clearer context and more compelling explanations. They used fewer PowerPoint presentations. As a result, the leaders fostered better and more engaging conversations.

One of the participants commented, “The difference is dramatic. Our briefs can prove that less is more.”

I believe the lessons learned with U.S. Special Operations can be used in the corporate world by those who want to be concise and clear when sharing their story.

You're busy, so I've designed the book to be immediately useful. If you read and follow along actively, you will learn to create clarity and meaning and drive out waste and confusion.

The book is organized around a new form of ADD: awareness, discipline, and decisiveness.

Part One: Awareness—the conviction to hold yourself and others to a higher standard of succinctness

Part Two: Discipline—the BRIEF approach to producing the mental muscle memory necessary to make you a lean communicator every time

Part Three: Decisiveness—the ability to recognize key moments when you need to convey what really matters effectively and efficiently

As I have seen firsthand, BRIEF tackles an issue that won't go away unless we become lean communicators and let our ideas stand out.

Are you ready?

This won't take long.