Should we all learn to write better?

One Week, One Idea: Each week, I delve into strategies for tackling problems that genuinely need solving. Should you find these ideas compelling and wish to collaborate, or if you have feedback to offer, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Camille* was the best Product Manager of the 40+ people Product team I managed at Ankorstore:

• I never disagreed with Camille’s decisions. They were always fact-based & logical.
• Camille was loved by the squad (engineers & designers working on a daily basis with Camille): they gave a >90 NPS – the best peer review score across the entire product team.
• Camille’s squad reached their goal: +30% YoY growth of their north star metric, more than any other team achieved.

However, Camille was often challenged by senior stakeholders such as Directors in sales, marketing, or other Product people who weren't directly involved in Camille’s daily work. Camille did not receive a promotion to a leadership position. And to my surprise, one day the CEO asked me whether we should consider parting ways with Camille...

?

What was happening? Why such a gap between my appreciation of Camille’s work, and everybody else?

Poor communication skills

As a manager, I missed the issue at first.

Every week I spent hours going through all the details with Camille. I knew all about the users, the data, the technical complexity. So Camille’s thought process made sense to me, without the need for easy-to-read documents or meetings.??

However, for everybody else, the only way to know about Camille’s work was by reading documents or attending meetings: Product briefs, specs, OKRs, roadmaps, … and People struggled to understand any of them.

Poor communication turned out to be the glass ceiling of Camille's career at Ankorstore. When moving up the hierarchy, promotions rely more and more on senior stakeholders’ support. These leaders value clear and simple communication as they don't have time to go into all the details. So despite being one of the smartest person in the team, Camille’s unclear documents would always mean no promotion.

The multi-trillion € cost of poor written communication skills

Poor communication is not just Camille’s isolated problem.

Winston Churchill, back in 1940, published a note called “Brevity”, addressing an issue still relevant in our modern days:

“To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time. While energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points. I asked my colleagues and their staff to see to it that their reports are shorter”

Barack Obama signed in 2010 the “plain english Act”, requiring that federal agencies use clear government communication that the public can understand and use. Providing a practical guide to make federal documents simpler.

70 years after the Churchill memo, the US administration writing style problem is still there.

In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned the use of powerpoints. Even though he knew writing a 4 page plain english memo would take longer than a powerpoint. He was convinced spending more time writing clear documents was worth the effort. (I will get back to why he banned powerpoints in the next article):

Beyond powerpoints, Amazon is famous for its strict writing style policy. No later than last week, here is a post that randomly popped up on my Linkedin:

Why do great leaders, past and present, put such emphasis on their team's communication skills?

The € cost of unclear documents for modern companies

In a tech company like Amazon or Ankorstore, async discussions are the norm. Strategic Memos, product briefs, roadmap documents, sales pitches, performance reports, … are being written everyday to make new decisions. Unfortunately, from my experience, most employees (and CEOs) have just the same problem as Camille.

And for each Camille, companies pay a price:

• Wasting employees’ time. In an ideal world, stakeholders would spend 10 minutes to read a doc, give the project a go, eventually challenge some important specifics. Instead, unclear documents require hours merely to understand the chain of thoughts. They fftentimes also require a follow-up meeting. This is wasting precious hours the 5 to 10 stakeholders, for every single poorly written document. Consider employees' hourly rate, and how often companies make decisions based on docs: each Camille costs companies 10k to 50k€/year.
• Bad decisions. People make decisions based on their tree of knowledge. They build it from what they already know, and the inputs from other people. Give them unclear documents to feed their tree, and their decisions will be flawed.

Multiply the above by the number of employees around the world (in Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, ...) whose job includes writing documents to communicate ideas, strategies, or decisions. That’s trillions of € wasted every year only because of poor communication skills.

You don’t believe my calculation?

How to gain +2.5% valuation as a public company?

Arthur Levitt Jr. served as Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1993 to 2001, making him the longest-serving in SEC history.

Before Levitt took over, there was widespread criticism regarding the complexity of disclosure documents and investment prospectuses. Unclear financial documents making it hard for the average investor to make proper decisions.

In 1998, Levitt unveiled the "Plain English Handbook", which subsequently became an SEC official rule. Levitt’s initiative even empowered (and still does) the SEC to legally compel companies to rephrase their financial disclosures!

Documents should avoid 1) long sentences 2) Passive voice 3) Weak verbs 4) Overwriting 5) Abstract words 6) Jargon 7) Numerous defined terms 8) Unreadable design.?

In other words, documents should be clear, and concise:

Clearer documents. And so what?

Several studies examined the impact of financial document’s readability on the valuation of public companies. “Readability” defined as per the above Plain English standards.?

Qualitatively, studies unsurprisingly showed that readable financial documents:

• attract more investors, as a wider audience can understand them
• build trust in the company and its team, increasing the willingness to invest more $

But one study from 2017 even quantified the impact. They examined 6,500 such documents and analysed companies' valuation following annual reports publication.

Some details: On average, each document had 0.43 writing faults per sentence (Almost every 2 sentences could be more concise or clearer!). The top 10% of documents had fewer than 0.28 faults per sentence, while the bottom 10% had more than 0.53 faults per sentence.

Results:

“Our estimates suggest that a one-standard-deviation decrease in readability decreases firm value by a full 2.5%. In situations in which investors are more likely to rely on annual reports, the readability effect on firm value increases to 3.3%.“

(Note one Std deviation =? -0.1 writing fault per sentence. It’s only the difference between an average document and the top 10%)

2.5% higher valuation, only with clearer & more concise documents. This is huge!?

The Global market capitalisation of publicly listed companies is around $100 Trillion (as of December 31st, 2022). By improving a very specific type of documents (ie. public companies' financial statements), this could already bring 1-2Tn$ worth of value.?

What if we could improve all sorts of documents used by companies around the world to make decisions? (internal google docs, Notion pages, emails, fundraising decks, sales pitches…). As decision-making of every company improves, how much more efficient would the economy be?

Easily above 5Tn$ worth of value.

Now is the perfect timing to tackle the written communication problem

At this point, I hope I convinced you:

• This is a serious problem, hindering talents’ career, but also companies’ growth
• It is a multi Trillion € opportunity if someone improves - at scale - written communication skills of employees, managers, CEOs, …
• It is simple science: basic rules, already well documented, can significantly improve documents readability

When launching a new start-up, one of the most important drivers of success is timing: too early, the company will struggle to find a market. Too late, too many competitors will already be there.

So why now? My answer:

• The explosion of remote working
• Generative AI

Remote work requires more written forms of communication than ever

The share of remote workers almost doubled after Covid (from 17% to 32% worldwide, according to Gartner).

As we all know, this is a massive change in the way we work. When we don’t have all our colleagues sitting next to us, or available at the coffee machine, the vast majority of discussions become async.

The importance of writing easy-to-read documents hence became an order of magnitude higher than it was 5 years ago. Employees need to get better at it. But do they? Who is coaching them?

Why is it hard to improve everybody’s written communication skills, at scale?

There are only few ways to train people:

• Classes at school
• Feedbacks from managers
• Virtual or in-person coaching (ex. Of one for communication)?
• Online videos (Udemy, …)

1) and 2) don’t work.

Who ever attended a written communication class for business?

I couldn’t find data, but I bet the answer is almost nobody. And I don’t know any curriculum where this is a thing - at least in top french engineering, or business schools.

If people are not trained at school, they need to be trained by managers. But managers are not great either because… they didn’t learn it at school. So it will never work.

3) is too expensive to be a scalable solution. Human coaching - whether as 1:1 coaching, cohort-based-class, … - costs several thousands €.

3) and 4) also have a problem: you can learn the theory, but it doesn’t mean you apply them well. Writing better typically requires hours (and hours) of practice, feedbacks, practicing again, feedbacks again. So one-off “theory lessons”, won’t do it. It must be a continuous learning process.

Here comes GenAI

Coaching has emerged as a prominent application of GenAI. The technology has the potential to offer personalised guidance similar to that of a personal coach, but at a significantly lower cost compared to the thousands of euros asked by human coaches.

Furthermore, using GenAI almost sounds like the perfect tech for this use case.

There are debates whether LLMs models can ‘think” or perform advanced tasks. But these “plain english guides” are quite simple. We can imagine LLMs already doing a very good job at them:

• “Hey chatGPT, is there a shorter wording for this paragraph: [...]?”
• “Hey chatGPT, can you flag abstract words, or jargon?”
• …

Several "generic AI coaching" products are being built (like wave.ai). My assumption is it is very hard to build a - great - all-around solution. Especially when new technologies emerge, and nobody knows how to best use them. There is plenty of literature suggesting to focus on small niches first when launching new technologies (eg. "Zero to One", by Peter Thiel). Amazon started with Books. Apple focused on building one great computer before expanding to more products. Just to name a few.

Instead of being too generic. Why not:

• Pick one niche coaching problem (which is still a multi Tn$ niche)
• Explore how AI can be a game changing - and scalable - solution
• Build the best product for written-communication coaching

This sounds like a legit path. Why not try?

The Product to improve communication skills, at scale

Stay tuned!

This Thursday I will share

• An MVP proposal, to test quickly
• A small PoC I built, and first feedbacks
• Assumptions on how to build an outstanding product for this specific use case, better than what Google, Notion, or Jasper (already valued 1.5Bn$) will ever build
• Why I believe there is a great & profitable business model, with a likely x0m€?exit

(Code name: boss.ai)

*Camille's story is a real story, but I changed his/her name