Business writing

All organizations need people who can write well. In a world which depends so much on information and technology, organizations need people who can present information and ideas clearly. When you are on this job, you’re no longer writing for a teacher but for a living.

 

A written message …

• Gives you time to think about, organize, and edit what you want to say.
• Communicates a specific message that doesn’t wander like a phone conversation or informal dialogue.
• Provides both the sender and the receiver with the copy of important details—why the message was sent and what action should be taken. The result: official record.
• Generally carries more weight—is taken more seriously—than the spoken word.
• Can be sent to many people conveniently.

 

All business writing—no matter if you are writing a letter, a resume, or a memo—share the following characteristics:

Starting Point: Business writing begins when you have a need to make contact with another person to conduct some form of commerce.

Purpose: The purpose is to discuss, announce, clarify, or confirm a specific business-related matter. On another level, the purpose is to begin or continue some action pertaining to the matter.

Form: In business writing, it’s important to follow the basic standards of form and style. People in the workplace don’t have time for surprises. They want letters and memos to be presented in recognizable formats so they are easy to follow. Writing in the business world is a highly structured and functional form of communication.

Audience: In most cases, you are speaking to one specific individuals (or groups) about one particular form of business. Always provide your audience with the necessary information to act upon your request, concern, or announcement.

Voice: Speak clearly, concisely, and courteously in business writing. Think of your writing as one part of a direct and sincere conversation with your reader.

Point of view:  Use the first person (1) point of view in person-to-person communication and the third person in most general messages and memos.

 

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Carrying out Change

Solutions to an organization’s problems cannot be found outside the organization. An organization possesses the potential and the capability to solve its own problems. This assumption is also a value, in that it asserts that change is most successful and effective when people in an organization act collectively to generate solutions and implement actions. In other words, solutions that are imposed on an organization from outside have little chance of success. The role of leadership in change is to expose the organization to challenges and problems faced, to mobilize support for change and to create the right conditions for people inside the organization to generate ideas for improvement.

 

Organizational change, in its essence, is about bringing a change in an organization’s routines. The term routine refers to the ways in which people perform their activities in an organization. It includes rules, procedures, policies and conventions. It includes both the formal (written) aspects of an organization’s architecture and its informal (unwritten, tacit) aspects. An organization’s policy for recruiting staff is a routine. Its procedure for evaluating quality is a routine. The way in which employees in an organization actually respond to customer complaints is another routine. For a specific behavior to be an organizational routine, it must be both repetitive and widely shared.

 

The second assumption is based on both empirical and theoretical ideas in organization studies. Activities that are performed to carry out day to day tasks of an organization are also referred to as operational routines. Some organizations also develop special kinds of routines, developed with the explicit objective of modifying existing operational routines in order to enhance the organization’s effectiveness. These are referred to as dynamic capabilities. If an organization already has well-defined dynamic capabilities, there is little need for anyone to manage change. However, the need for change arises because many organizations lack such dynamic capabilities.

 

Organizations can change their routines in three ways: first, they can modify an existing routine. A modified routine is different but not fundamentally different from original routine. Second, they can discard or eliminate an existing routine. Here, the organization stops performing a particular task or activity. Third, they can establish a new routine. This may take the form of introducing a new policy, procedure or task to perform a new set of activities.

 

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Innovation Defined

Innovation is the use of new knowledge to offer a new product or service that customers want. It is invention together with commercialization. It is a new way of doing things (termed invention by some) that is commercialized. The process of innovation cannot be separated from a firm’s strategic and competitive context. The new knowledge can be technological or market related. Technological knowledge is knowledge of components, linkages between components, methods, processes, and techniques that go into a product or service. Market knowledge is knowledge of distribution channels, product applications, and customer expectations, preferences, needs, and wants. The product or service is new in that its cost is lower, its attributes are improved, it now has new attributes, it never had before, or it never existed in that market before. Often the new product or service itself is called an innovation, reflecting the fact that it is the creation of new technological or market knowledge.

Innovation has also been defined as the adoption of ideas that are new to the organization. Generating good ideas or adopting a new one, in and of itself, is only a start. To be an innovation, an idea must be converted into a product or service that customers want. Coming up with the idea or prototype—invention—is one thing. Championing it, shepherding it, and nurturing it into a product or service that customers want is another. Innovation entails both invention and commercialization.

A distinction has also been made between technical and administrative innovation. Technical innovation is about improved products, services, or processes or completely new ones. This contrasts with administrative innovation, which pertains to organizational structure and administrative processes and may or may not affect technical innovation. Technical innovation may or may not require administrative innovation. A technical innovation can be a product or a process.

Product innovations are new products or services introduced to meet an external and market need whereas process innovations are new elements introduced into an organization’s production or service operations—input materials, task specifications, work and information flow mechanisms, and equipment used to produce a product or render a service.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Homogeneous or Heterogeneous Teams and Creativity

Homogeneous teams—ones in which members have similar values and attributes—have the advantage of cohesion, and cohesion may translate into high productivity and goal accomplishment. But excessive cohesion can turn into groupthink and dumb decisions that do not respond to situational changes and contingencies. Heterogeneous teams are those whose members have diverse orientation. Agreements in such teams may be difficult; but having to reconcile diverse viewpoints may lead to more innovative solutions. In situations where creativity is important, as in strategic planning or research or ad teams, heterogeneous teams should have an advantage over homogeneous teams.

Creativity is more than fresh ideas. These ideas need to be workable. In making fresh ideas workable, the cohesive team may be at an advantage. For successful creativity therefore, fresh ideas need to be generated by heterogeneous teams but made workable by homogeneous teams. Or perhaps the heterogeneous team needs to adopt the norm that for generating fresh ideas it should leverage its internal diversity, but that for selecting a creative idea generated and making it workable the team needs to operate highly cohesively.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Characteristics of Managerial Creativity

The creative manager must be a creative human and an effective manager. He/she tends to be characterized by following group of traits:

1) Hunger for knowing curiosity, constant questioning; strong interest in stimulating ideas, theories, and philosophies, always wanting to know the ‘how’ and ‘why of things; strong interest in trying to understand people’s motives and behavior.

2) Sensitivity responsiveness to literature, arts and other fine and delicate things; interest in meeting interesting and sensitive persons; empathy for the suffering; responsiveness to beauty and elegance.

3) Complexity intuitively finding correct solutions; being a visionary; having odd, even conflicting ideas; moodiness.

4) Venturing calculated risk-taking; preference for starting own ventures; aiming big; striking out in one’s own.

5) Independence and courage questions the status quo or established order; sticking to core convictions; listens to experts but makes up own mind; clear and forceful assertion of feelings and viewpoints.

6) Reality contact initiative taking in finding out operating constraints; confidence in managing crisis; quick adjustment to new challenges and information; grip on reality despite fantasying.

7) Self-sufficiency absorbed in challenging tasks; confident in operating in alien situations; tendency to take on tough tasks; persistence in getting ventures accomplished.

The creative manager operates in a fairly tightly regulated system in which creativity failures may be penalized; creativity needs to be directed towards organizational requirements; almost all creative initiatives require approval from superiors and acceptance by colleagues and subordinates to succeed; the cynical need to be won over; opposition of vested interests to these initiatives needs to be neutralized; dedicated teams need to be developed to execute creative initiatives; creative initiatives need to confirm to evaluate and control mechanisms of the organization; changes and creative initiatives need to be synergized for maximum impact—so on and on.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Handling Failure Factors

Herebelow are some useful techniques for handling failure factors while building your business:

1) Square peg, round hole: the most important thing to remember is, don’t try to make something fit if it doesn’t. You may have a high level of expertise in the traditional paradigm, and many of those skills will serve you well in marketing. But be aware that others won’t. When you find a skill or technique just isn’t working in the new paradigm, don’t blame marketing—discard the technique. Also, be open to learning new ideas and skills that were designed with marketing in mind.

2) Don’t re-invent the wheel: After decades, the patterns for successful behavior in marketing are fairly established. It’s human nature to want to add our own flair to everything, but make sure you learn the basics first. Some people in past decades tried some ideas but they didn’t turn to be effective as they hoped. Don’t re-invent the wheel.

3) Work the plan, not the angles: Perhaps the most important general rule for avoiding unexpected failure factors is to focus on the simple business building system and stay away from sidelines and ‘new’ angles. You came to marketing to build a business, not to get bogged down in side ventures and alternative schemes. Indeed, it’s tempting to look for alternative ‘revenue streams,’ but the time you spend chasing these things would be much better spent invested in your core business. Once you’ve made a commitment to building a marketing business, that commitment should be total. Any side activity has the potential to draw away your focus—and your growing business can suffer.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Organizing your message

All business communicators face the problem of conveying a complicated web of ideas in an understandable fashion. People simply don’t remember dissociated facts and figures, so successful communicators rely on organization to make their messages meaningful.

The definition of a well-organized message varies from country to country. It generally refers to a linear message that proceeds point by point. If you’ve ever received an unorganized message, you’re familiar with the frustration of trying to sort through a muddle of ideas.

By taking a closer look at the letter, you can identify the four most common faults responsible for organization problems:

1) Taking too long to get to the point.

2) Including irrelevant material.

3) Getting ideas mixed up.

4) Leaving out necessary information.

Achieving good organization can be a challenge. Nevertheless, by working with these four common faults, you can establish what good organization means. Four guidelines can help you recognize a well-organized message:

1) Make the subject and purpose clear.

2) Include only information that is related to the subject and purpose.

3) Group the ideas and present them in a logical way.

4) Include all the necessary information.

Each guideline not only helps you communicate clearly and logically, but also ethically—by making sure you state all information as truthfully, honestly, and fairly as possible.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Plagiarism and Copyright Violation

Plagiarism and copyright violation are complicated issues, especially in modern technical writing.

Plagiarism is the practice of using someone else’s words or ideas without crediting the source. Many organizations treat authorship of internal documents, such as memos and most reports, casually; that is, if the organization asks you to update an internal procedures manual, it expects you to use any material from the existing manual, even if you cannot determine the original author.

Organizations tend to treat the authorship of published documents, such as external manuals or journal articles, more seriously. Although the authors of some kinds of published technical documents are not listed, many documents such as user’s guides do acknowledge their authors. However, what constitutes authorship can be a complicated question, because most large technical documents are produced collaboratively, with several persons contributing text, another doing the graphics, still another reviewing for technical accuracy, and finally someone reviewing for legal concerns. Problems are compounded when a document goes into revision, and parts of original text or graphics are combined with new material.

The best way to determine authorship is to discuss it openly with everyone who contributed to the document. Some persons might deserve to be listed as authors; others, only credited in an acknowledgment section. To prevent changes of plagiarism, the wisest course is to be very conservative: if there is any question about whether to cite a source, cite it.

A related problem involves copyright violation. Copyright law provides legal protection to the author of any document, whether it be published or unpublished, and whether the author be an individual or a corporation. Unfortunately, some companies will take whole sections of another company’s product information or manual, make cosmetic changes, and publish it themselves. This, of course is stealing.

But the difference between stealing and learning from your competitors can be subtle. Words are protected by copyright, but ideas aren’t. Rare is the manufacturer who doesn’t study the competitor’s users’ guides to see how a feature or task is described. Inevitably, a good idea spreads from one document to another, and then to another. If one manual contains a particularly useful kind of troubleshooting guide, pretty soon a lot of others will contain similar ones. Even though this process of imitation tends to produce a dull uniformity, it can improve the overall quality of the document. Under no circumstances, however, should you violate copyright by using another organization’s words.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Polishing Creativity

We can develop three scales to measure managerial attitude related to creativity. The first scale is labeled Valuing New Ideas, and includes items such as “Generating new ideas expands the mind.” “We need more people who are creative in business.” “New ideas create more new ideas.” “We’ll get left behind unless we spend some time on new ideas.” And “Management should be more creative.”

The second scale is labeled Belief that Creativity is only for the select few, and includes items like, “Creative people become stand-up comedians.” “Creative people wear unique glasses.” And “Creative people are always looking for another rule to break.” The higher the score on this scale, the less favorable the attitudes towards creativity.

The third scale is labeled Feeling too busy for new ideas, again a scale measuring a negative attitude to creativity. It includes such items as, “Ideas take too much time to generate.” “I don’t have much time for thinking up wild ideas, I’m too busy just getting my job done.”

Creativity training clearly alters managerial attitudes and makes them more creativity friendly.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

The Impeccable Venture Types

Two concepts that appear to have a major bearing on long-term prosperity of a business are the notion of ‘distinctive competence’ and ‘market share.’

 

A company with larger market share in its particular line of business gets more practice in performing that business than a company with a smaller market share and consequently should be able to develop through that practice a higher level of competence. At the same time, by having a larger market share a company enjoys economies of scale—quantity discounts on purchases, thinner spreading of advertising costs, and justification for greater investment in tooling and automation and for more research and development. Consequently, it has an advantage in lowering unit costs, which in turn can allow it to lower prices and thereby outsell the competition to gain still more market share, and so forth. There are research data that indicate both that more sharply defined competence, often as a result of narrower specialization, leads to greater growth, and that larger market share leads to higher profits.

 

In evaluating prospective venture ideas it therefore makes sense to as, “What will the company’s distinctive competence be?” in other words, what will it be able to do better than other companies can and why? It also makes sense to ask what share of market the company will have as compared to competitors. If it seems likely to have only a very small share of market and competitors enjoy larger shares, then it will need either some major performance improvement such as a significant special innovation or else a lot of financing to increase its share and be able to survive.

 

One ideal approach is to begin early in a new industry. When the industry is small, it should be possible for the new company to obtain a significant share without having to be large to do so. As the industry grows, the company can then grow with it, still maintaining its market share, with consequent high profits. This type of enterprise is ideal not only from the entrepreneur’s point of view, because the company prospers, but also from a funder’s point of view, because rapid growth of the company will create a profitable application for capital to expand the company’s capacity to handle increasing business. Thus to capture a major market share at the opening stage of a new industry is an ideal pattern for a growth-oriented venture.

 

A second ideal type of venture is one that captures a major share of an existing but more mature industry. The major share will generate high profits, but if the industry, because of its maturity, is not growing, then the company will not have to grow in order to maintain its market share. This will mean that it will not need external funder. From a funder’s point of view it is not particularly attractive. But from entrepreneur’s position it is, because the profits will not have to be plowed back but can rather be taken as salary, dividends, and other benefits. The trick, of course, is to capture a major share in an existing industry, and this can be done by choosing a very small industry to start in, by entering through purchase of a going concern that already has a respectable share, or by entering with a strong innovation or other competitive advantage.

 

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight