Publish Your Plan Stephen Lawrence and Frank Moyes Graduate School of Business University of Colorado Boulder, CO

Course Outline

Publishing your Plan Tell a story! Color? Binding? Paper? Length? Appendices?

Comments on Writing Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well. Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon You write with ease to show your breeding, But easy writing 's curst hard reading. Richard Sheridan Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead. Gene Fowler

Writing Good Be succinct Be logical Be assertive Revise, revise, then revise Remember your purpose Let your passion show Tell a story! Be memorable Well

Be Succinct Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare

Be Logical I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. Galileo Galilei Do your ideas work together? Are there logical inconsistencies? Are your thoughts well organized?

Be Assertive All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. Mark Twain ( ) Write with confidence Use a confident voice even if you are not “We feel that Unique Unicycles might achieve…” versus “Unique Unicycles will achieve…” Avoid the use of qualifiers Rather, quite, hopeful, somewhat, might … Support your assertions Use footnotes or endnotes for assertions that may be questioned

Revise, Revise, then Revise I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better. A. J. Liebling ( ) “…rewriting is the key to improved thinking. It demands a real open-mindedness and objectivity. It demands a willingness to cull verbiage so that ideas stand out clearly. And it demands a willingness to meet logical contradictions head on and trace them to the premises that have created them. In short, it forces a writer to get up his courage and expose his thinking to his own intelligence.” Swift, “Clear writing means clear thinking means…,” HBR, Jan-Feb 1973.

Let your Passion Show Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.“ G. W. F. Hegel As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. ( ) Passion

Tell a Story! A story is worth a thousand pictures (unknown) A good story (and a good strategic plan) defines relationships, a sequence of events, cause and effect, and a priority among items – and those elements are likely to be remembered as a complex whole. That likelihood, supported by a substantial amount of cognitive science, argues strongly for strategic planning through story-telling Shaw, Brown, & Bromiley, “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning,” HBR May-Jun 1998.

Be Memorable netLibrary will do for electronic publishing what Gutenberg did for printing and Amazon.com has done for book retailing. netLibrary business plan, 1998

Be Professional Grammar and spell check Use an attractive layout Organize layout for easy comprehension Bullets and numbered lists Font changes Headings, subheadings, Tables, charts, graphs