When you buy a red mini, suddenly there are hundreds of red minis on the road. My red mini of the moment is writing like a child in the work place.
First I’m hearing about Donald Trump’s style of communication in a podcast interview with Ken Blanchard (who co-wrote ‘The One Minute Manager’). Like him or loathe him, Donald Trump’s basic style is effective. (What does he want? To make America great again! How is he going to do it? By building a wall!) What I hadn’t realized, is that Ken Blanchard wrote the One Minute Manager with Spencer Johnson, who was a writer of children’s stories.
Last week I came across a blog post from within the Bank of England, which said we should be taking our lead from ‘The Cat in the Hat‘, by Dr Seuss. In his blog post, Jonathan Fullwood asks that speeches and publications in the world of Finance be easier to understand. The BBC illustrated this point with an extract from a speech by the Governor of the Bank of England.
Governor of the Bank of England version:
“People have come more cautious about their futures, and more averse to making irreversible decisions that may be exposed to some form of future ‘disaster risk’. Put another way, there may be an affect heuristic at work. To define that, put simply, this is when long after the original trigger has become a remote, perceptions endure and become embedded in economic narratives whose salience affects risk appetite and economic behaviour.”
(Extract from Uncertainty, the economy and policy. 30 June 2016)
Cat in the Hat style interpretation:
“No one knows what will happen, so they’re all scared. And that means they don’t spend any money, even when the scary thing has gone away.”
(Thanks to the BBC for their proposal that this is how Dr Seuss might have conveyed the same message.)
If my own communication is to improve, I need to overcome my predilection for verbose confabulation. I like long words because I think they sound smart. But it’s not very smart to be misunderstood.
