150 likes | 377 Views
Publish Your Plan. Stephen Lawrence and Frank Moyes Graduate School of Business University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0419. Course Outline. Course Outline. Course Outline. Publishing your Plan. Tell a story! Color? Binding? Paper? Length? Appendices?. Comments on Writing.
E N D
Publish Your Plan Stephen Lawrence and Frank Moyes Graduate School of Business University of ColoradoBoulder, CO 80309-0419
Publishing your Plan • Tell a story! • Color? • Binding? • Paper? • Length? • Appendices?
Comments on Writing • Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, 1669-1720 • Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon 1561-1626 • You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing 's curst hard reading. Richard Sheridan 1751-1816 • Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.Gene Fowler
Well Writing Good • Be succinct • Be logical • Be assertive • Revise, revise, then revise • Remember your purpose • Let your passion show • Tell a story! • Be memorable
Be Succinct Brevity is the soul of wit.Shakespeare
Be Logical I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. Galileo Galilei • Do your ideas work together? • Are there logical inconsistencies? • Are your thoughts well organized?
Be Assertive All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.Mark Twain (1835-1910) • Write with confidence • Use a confident voice even if you are not • “We feel that Unique Unicycles might achieve…” versus • “Unique Unicycles will achieve…” • Avoid the use of qualifiers • Rather, quite, hopeful, somewhat, might … • Support your assertions • Use footnotes or endnotes for assertions that may be questioned
Revise, Revise, then Revise • I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.A. J. Liebling (1904-1963) • “…rewriting is the key to improved thinking. It demands a real open-mindedness and objectivity. It demands a willingness to cull verbiage so that ideas stand out clearly. And it demands a willingness to meet logical contradictions head on and trace them to the premises that have created them. In short, it forces a writer to get up his courage and expose his thinking to his own intelligence.” Swift, “Clear writing means clear thinking means…,” HBR, Jan-Feb 1973.
Let your Passion Show Passion • Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.“ G. W. F. Hegel • As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
Tell a Story! A story is worth a thousand pictures (unknown) • A good story (and a good strategic plan) defines relationships, a sequence of events, cause and effect, and a priority among items – and those elements are likely to be remembered as a complex whole. That likelihood, supported by a substantial amount of cognitive science, argues strongly for strategic planning through story-tellingShaw, Brown, & Bromiley, “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning,” HBR May-Jun 1998.
Be Memorable netLibrary will do for electronic publishing what Gutenberg did for printing and Amazon.com has done for book retailing. netLibrary business plan, 1998
Be Professional • Grammar and spell check • Use an attractive layout • Organize layout for easy comprehension • Bullets and numbered lists • Font changes • Headings, subheadings, • Tables, charts, graphs