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CIO Insight’s monument to redundancy

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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 …?”… Read the rest “CIO Insight’s monument to redundancy”

Analysts run on “maker’s schedule”

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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.

… Read the rest “Analysts run on “maker’s schedule””

Pulling on the root of bad business writing

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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.… Read the rest “Pulling on the root of bad business writing”