This article quotes various, high-powered and highly successful executives who understand the power of the written word. It is a must read for all of us in the Information Technology industry.
Among the nuggets in this article are the following:
- Written communication creates lasting consistency across an entire team because a piece of writing is leveragable collateral from which everyone, from marketing to sales to QA to engineering, can work and consult.
- Accountability spreads as a manager’s written work product — product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations, white papers — holds the manager responsible for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the clearly articulated, unambiguous vision described by the documents.
- Writing out full sentences enforces clear thinking . . .
- The main point of this self-disciplinary process is to force yourself “to be more precise than [you] might be verbally”, creating “an archive of data” that can “help to validate ad hoc inputs” and to reflect with precision on your thought and approach.