How to save time – and get RATED by clients
How to save time – and get RATED by clients
Most business reports are indigestible.Tony Scott offers a recipe for the weight-conscious.
Leaders of businesses and leaders of professional practices – more burdened than ever as an uncertain economy adds to their work but not to their workforces – need more than ever to drop some of the load.
Since even a cursory survey will show that they, like their clients, spend most of their time with screens and bits of paper – writing on them or reading them – diminishing that task would seem to be a particularly powerful route to lightness.
Everybody moans about having to write reports, and everybody moans about how boring most reports are to read. Few, however, put those two ideas together to come up with a solution for both complaints: write shorter. The other commonly applied tactic – read faster – doesn’t solve the problem, merely makes it easier to live with.
The leaders of consultancies and other business organisations could do much to reduce the problem themselves – and save whole forests of trees in the process – by refusing publicly to accept long reports from peers or subordinates.
A chief executive at Procter & Gamble once announced he would not read any report that filled more than one side of one sheet of paper. His lieutenants did not at first believe him. But when he politely returned longer reports to them through the internal mail – and ignored them – they rapidly got the message.
The result was not only that the chief executive saved himself hours of reading time. It was also that the lieutenants learned to think harder about what they needed to say.
Short reports have four additional advantages. First, they leave the author nowhere to hide: sloppy thinking will be apparent even to him or her. Second, they force authors straight into the meat of an issue, and out of the Background-Purpose-Method-Scope-Conclusion routine which so deadens a reader’s heart. Third, once the habit takes hold, reports take far less time to prepare and review. Fourth, and most important, clients – and bosses – prefer them.
Over more than 15 years, I’ve worked with thousands of senior businessmen and women – and hundreds of consultants – on the craft of writing reports for internal or external consumption in the private and public sectors, and have devised a simple five-stage model that seems to fit most circumstances and reduces the length of most reports by at least 80 per cent. It looks like this:
1 Remind the client (or boss) what his or her question was. There always is a question or questions of some sort, even if it or they are not explicit. Nobody ever wanted to spend much time reading or serious money buying a directionless ‘review’. Given the weeks or months between the time a client or boss asks for a report and the day it thuds on to his desk, starting your report in this way saves the reader the trouble of trying to remember why he asked you for the document – and the effort of hunting through his files when he can’t. It also helps to focus your mind very clearly on the purpose of the whole assignment.
2 Answer the question, as directly and briefly as possible. ‘Yes’, ‘No, unless…’, or ‘Buy an IBM next week’ are perfectly adequate answers for an executive summary. A crisp answer may be all that a business leader wants. But the chances are that most readers will want more. In particular, their natural response will typically be another question: ‘Why does your answer make sense?’ So…
3 Tell the reader why. The reasons for your answer will usually have to do with time, money, quality, risks or organisational convenience – from the reader’s point of view, not yours – and can be summarised in a handful of lines apiece. If detail is required, refer the reader on to a related section of…
4 Evidence: the salient facts which support each of the reasons you’ve given. This is not an excuse to throw in all your research material. It is a chance to demonstrate your ability to throw away the irrelevant. Finally, and critically…
5 Dare to stop. Repeating