What drove 39 tweeters to endorse CIO Insight’s latest monument to redundancy? I wonder how many actually read it all. I could hardly reach the first period before fatigue set in.

The blog post titled “Gartner: CIO as Business Transformation Leader,” dated November 1 and promoted on CIO Insight’s email blast last week, begins with an admonishment to CIOs: “it’s time” that they plan to emerge as a “change leader.” OK, but shouldn’t any CIO know that already?

Ten questions follow, including “What type of change is happening?,” “What is the deadline for the change?,” and “What are the constraints …?” followed by explanation and the most basic of advice. Anyone but undergraduate business students should have heard it all before.

It all takes up 1,312 words when the same ideas could have been expressed in half that. What makes people think this stuff is worth a tweet?

Most of those versatile researchers of the data-driven world — the business analysts, creative analysts, or even cowboy analysts — probably run on a different schedule from their managers. Paul Graham’s latest essay compares “manager’s schedule” and “maker’s schedule.”

I’m no analyst, just a writer. But the more analysts I meet, the more I find that analysts and journalists share a surprising number of characteristics. One of them, I think, is the tendency to run on “maker’s schedule,” as explained by Graham:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting.

Meetings are interruptions. They mess up any breadcrumb trail of thoughts that has not yet been laid down in permanent memory. That’s why I’m writing this at 11:39 at night, when I can let a ghost of an idea hang unattended without fear of new email or a phone call dissolving it. Graham writes about once keeping a dinner-to-3 a.m. workday.

Now he wears a VC hat, and he can’t avoid meetings. So he schedules “office hours” at the end of the day.

He hopes that pointing out the two kinds of schedule will make it easier for the “makers.” Their schedule tends to offend managers.

I hope this insight spreads.

What do you think? Do analysts you know work this way? Post a comment.

In his fine weblog Startup Diaries, David Silverman takes a good stab at answering the eternal question: Why is most business writing so bad?

He writes, for example, “I blame this on an educational system that rewards length over clarity. When you get tick marks for bulls’ eyes — and no demerits for the number of darts used — the student learns to overwrite in hopes that at least some of their sentences hit the mark.”

I once experimented with that theory. For one class in graduate business school, I had to write two book reviews. The first one got a bad grade despite concise, well thought out points. Even the instructor agreed. Why the bad grade? He could only cite his intuition accumulated over decades, his “onboard radar,” as he seemed to turn invisible knobs over his ears.

I loaded the second essay with as many “expensive sounding” words — as David Silverman would call them — and made sure to repeat every point at least twice. I got a very good grade.

After class, I said to him, “So, you liked this one better!” He nodded and mumbled something about “points better made.” In fact, I hadn’t even read much of the book, and I hadn’t thought much about what I did read.

That instructor retired soon after, but he left behind many credulous followers of his “onboard radar.”

So many ezines, so many pitches, so much color, so much urgency, so much of so much. And then along comes—let me check the name—yes, Gordon Daly with a little ezine that’s nothing but a short letter (look it up: letter!) and I actually read it.

I can’t explain. I don’t know what happens. It’s black on white with something colorful but not too big at the top. There are a couple of links in the second paragraph and below but not too many.

Today’s is the second one. I read the first one, too, but I brushed it off. A fluke, I said. Then I read today’s. Not a fluke. The guy has something. What is it?

He’s pitching for DataMentors. His signature identifies him as the director of marketing.

He writes simply with a hint of a story. No jargon meant to impress me (which just annoys me). No vague phrases that could apply to anything, anywhere.

Here’s yesterday’s first sentence: “If your database keeps adding the same customer records over and over again, it may be suffering from a severe technology affliction called Datadupitis (dā-tə-düp-ī-təs).” That’s funny. Not a side-splitter, but it works. It’s also a tiny surprise, just enough.

Next sentence: “The fundamental problem: your database(s) isn’t recognizing your customers.” I take off a half point for the “s” in parentheses, but I give him a full two points for getting me to read the second sentence. This is new territory.

Third sentence: “That’s a customer service wreck just waiting to happen. So, how can you expect to possibly develop a profitable relationship with them?” I get goosebumps just having read any ezine’s third sentence. More goosebumps for the simple writing.

Let me reveal something here. I don’t have anything like the problem he’s describing. I have FileMaker, and I enter everything by hand. Yet I’ve come all the way to the third sentence.

The fourth sentence gives me chills it’s so short, so simple. “A database is a wonderful thing.” Yes!! Not that a database is a wonderful thing. Sure, fine. It’s the simplicity!

Compare his opening with those of three other BI-related ezines I chose at random (and haven’t even opened before now):

• Ezine #1: Headline: “Improve Business Performance with an Open Business Intelligence (BI) Model.” Body: “A collaborative reporting architecture encourages participation across user and producer communities and fosters an iterative report development process which speeds development and adoption of the reporting application” and blah, blah, blah.
• Ezine #2: Straight to the body: “The scale and pace of today’s business change is challenging us all to do more – better, faster and with greater efficiency.”
• Ezine #3: A big, graphic headline reads, “Whitepaper of the day,” followed by a thick horizontal ad. The whitepaper’s title: “Optimizing Data Content To Improve Marketing Performance,” followed by, “The traditional data industry has not seen true innovation in decade [sic].”
• Ezine #4: Under the ezine’s name and issue number, it begins, “View these Online Events recently held on xxxx.com” followed by bullet points: “Executive Command & Control: Governance of Risk, Performance Assurance & Operational Excellence; Project Risk – Why are 50% of IT projects still failing; Improving Operational Efficiency and Business Performance in Midsize Retailers…”

Nothing concrete, no hint of a story, no surprises. They waste their bytes on me.

Good job, Gordon Daly.

Three years ago, I spent four months in my Sicilian grandmother’s home town editing a book I had begun to hate. Time cues were sparse: I church bells four times an hour, a nearby friend for coffee once a day, and cannoli once a week. To ensure I made progress, I clung to my homemade FileMaker Pro-based timekeeper.

At first, the dismal results came in every day: When I felt that I had put in a good five or six hours of steady work, the end-of-day tally—with all the breaks for email, meals, snacks, and quick walks—usually amounted to about two hours of actual work.

That’s what got me thinking. Who says one-person operations can’t use business intelligence?

I don’t want MicroStrategy to outfit my tiny office, now near San Francisco, with its latest and greatest. No, but I do want a company like Intuit, ever more interested in the one-person market, to understand that money isn’t the only data individuals should track.

Time isn’t money, it’s more important than that. Productive time is the most consistent leading indicator there is. Waste your time and you’ll have no money to track.

This is business intelligence for the lone wolf, even the herded wolf.

Sure, you can use your own FileMaker setup or any of those client-billing applications. You click this button to start a billing period and that one to end it. But that takes discipline. I don’t know about you, but I exert every ounce of mine on staying on the program. I forget to click the little button and, damn!, at what point did that consultant’s column send me into a stupor?

If there’s one thing I’d like to find under the Christmas tree, it’s an application that does personal performance analytics.

It automatically tracks and categorizes work done on the computer. Out of the office, it works on an iPhone.

It detects what time I start in the morning and what time I drift away into surfing. It knows the difference between work, goofing off or eating at my desk while I scan email.

It considers all the clues to take a guess. The little brain inside says, “Let’s see, he was clicking away at Word until 9:21…” After that point, its log shows no phone calls, no Web pages downloading, no email opened or sent. The little microphone detected less noise than usual at 9:22, so no visitors had come by. “Hmm, let’s mark it at 9:21 and see what he says.”

A more forgiving “preferences” setting might guess a few minutes later. Like a loyal assistant, it would offer its guesses for review and approval.

“Sir, I would say you had a less than productive day yesterday. Am I correct?”

“No, you fool! I was thinking!”

“How much of it was productive, sir?”

Time tracking is just the beginning. It would also let me define my own, weird key performance indicators. Did I hit my daily hurdle of contact attempts? Did I run? Did I spend enough time this week actually working?

It would scan every scrap of evidence it could get its hands on to detect patterns.

Once in a while, I issue a grand invitation to myself. Come and see the trends. Buffet served.

There, after “brief introductory remarks,” the application offers rich what-if visual analysis, Tableau-like. I see what times of day I actually produce the most words, talk the most, listen the most, field the most email. Correlate production of words and phone calls with arrival of checks. Correlate this or that individual with checks or mood.

It’s like a smart, statistics-savvy aide. The difference is that when a human aide finds you passed out from exhaustion, it brings you a glass of water. But I don’t want that. I’m a lone wolf, and I get it myself.

A friend went into business last week selling mailing lists he’s made up. Yes, that’s right, he’s selling the product of entire afternoons at the keyboard entering one false name and email address after another.

Sure enough, his first customer complained. My friend, Marco, assured him that all the names were legitimate. Not only that, he assured them they’d all opted in for body-part-enlargement email promotions. The customer never called back.

I took him aside and explained, “Marco, you lost their trust. You can’t do business without customers’ trust.”

He didn’t believe me, so I showed him an article in the current DM Review, “Trust is the New Money” by John Bostick.

“See, Marco? Trust is important. It says so right here in the first 1200 words in just about every way possible.”

After a moment’s thought, he asked, “OK, so what am I supposed to do?”

The author has thoughts on how to gain trust. I read the advice to Marco: “Process is not enough. The synergy of process and service is what’s required to be successful. Intelligent process design will get you in the game, but it won’t keep you there.”

Marco didn’t get it. “Huh?” he said.

I reassured him. “It explains. It says, ‘Process must be leveraged by the customer’s immediate experience—the benefits tied to the emotional rewards gained by those engaged in the service.’”

He looked more puzzled than ever, but I was sure it would clear up soon. They don’t waste 1400 words in serious magazines like DM Review!

I said, “Wait, Marco. Here it is. Here’s the secret.” I read, “‘Going forward, successful organizations need to weigh their limited resources against their service offerings (the core) in order to deliver a customer experience that meets or exceeds expectations.’”

He shrugged. “What the hell does that mean?”

I said, “I think what he’s trying to say is that you gotta focus on what your business is really all about. Then you have to make sure customers get what they bargain for, if not more.”

Marco’s a simple guy. “Why didn’t he just say that? Is he trying to impress someone with all that bullshit about ‘going forward’ and weighing your ‘service offerings’?”

“Well, because if the author wrote it that way, no one would believe he knew anything. He’s wants to sound professional.”

Marco thought about it. “You sound professional by not saying what you want to say?”

“No, you say it so that people who read your stuff don’t understand you and think you’re smarter than they themselves are.”

Finally, Marco understood. He’s now exceeding his customers’ expectations by delivering more made-up names than they pay for.