Faster to Market is not always the best policy -not what you think
Blog: Brian's Blog - Enterprise Strategy, Architecture and Management
Received a humorous, but truthful, comment on yesterday’s post. A colleague of mine pointed out my poor grammar: “Brian I love this! Can I be your blog final editor though before you post these – the grammar errors are killing me 
.” The comical excuse is that “I’m an architect or engineer, not a lit. major….” or the neurological excuse: Asperger’s Syndrome. –No, I haven’t been officially diagnosed, but those crazy online quizzes suggest I should. Other’s chalk it up to calling me, whatever reason, a typical scatterbrain genius. Yes I’ve got a high IQ, but that nor any of the other explanations are valid excuses for not trying to improve.
However, the plain fact of the matter is I’m always 100 miles ahead in my mind to what I’m writing down. Two of my mentors at Microsoft once commented separately: “Brian, you’re going to have a difficult time here in that you can go from A to Z in seconds in your head while others are having trouble just getting to B on paper”. This causes me to skip words, sentences, and even whole paragraphs. This post is an example I’ve had to go back several time to ensure I haven’t skipped something, etc. Those that follow my word may already notice the long, well extremely long sentences….well punctuation are just friendly suggestions like road signs right 
The results of which is a reliance on proofing software which doesn’t always catch everything or an editor.
As such I’m often in too much of a hurry to get my ideas down before these vanish from my current thoughts then push it out there. [Faster is not always better]
What I’ve been doing about such
A few years back I rejoined Microsoft’s MCS organization in an interesting role “IP Development Architect”. The mission for such was basically empty my head of experience on various EA topics, develop approaches for the field to use to help our clients**. Basically as one of my mentor’s called it “being a brain on a stick for sale, lease, or rent”
I took that role as a challenge to improve my writing and presentation skills; similar to the reason I took a role at IBM to learn marketing, sales, and become more outgoing (I’m an extreme introvert though you’d never know it). During the years that followed I’ve been fortunate enough to have friends and colleagues point me to resources to help, as well as technical and grammatical editors to patch up my mistakes.
During that time I started investing in books (e.g., Peter Ingle’s Organized Writing Course, Nancy Duarte’s and Martin Sykes/Nick Malik’s books on presentations, etc.) that have taught me to put together great structure to my writings and presentations. I actually get people asking me to do such for them or critique their work(specifically not grammar); which I’ve gladly done for many. So I guess I’ve overcome some portion of my communication gap.
This next twelve months with the help of my colleague, yes I’ll gladly take you up on your offer, I’ll work on the grammar portion of my writing.
** I say clients rather than customers because I’ve always believed the company should establish long term relationships rather than transactional sales. Given the company’s strategy pivot to cloud services, I hope they are successful adopting such a philosophy. The consequences of not doing so will be a loss of renewals in a future that depends upon good service and strong relationships.
Filed under: Professional Development, Writing 
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
