Search Results for: people skills

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT—Not the How

January 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

The most effective leaders provide their employees with a heartfelt portrayal of the WHY, a precise description of the WHAT, and freedom on the HOW.

The WHY encompasses a vision in a way that matters to people. As Howard Schultz, the Starbucks tycoon once said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.”

The British-American organizational consultant Simon Sinek‘s passable Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009; a good summary) identifies the difference between “giving direction and giving directions.” Great leaders, he explains, motivate with the WHY, a deep-rooted purpose, before defining the WHAT, the product or service, or the HOW, the process.

The latter, the HOW, is to be deprioritized—effective leaders leave it to their employees to figure out.

In contrast, ineffective leaders provide specificity around HOW to complete a task but fail to share the big picture, the WHY.

Don’t live in the weeds. Have faith in the ingenuity of your employees. Give much latitude in how they do things.

Idea for Impact: Define the job. Explain the responsibility. Equip your people with the tools and skills they’ll need. Establish expectations. Identify the standards. That’s the essence of delegation.

Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life

November 19, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Anil Ambani Learned the Ropes of Doing Business in India

In the Fall of 1982, Anil Ambani, scion of one of India’s wealthiest family, returned home to Mumbai, then Bombay, after attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Anil had fast-tracked through his two-year MBA program in less than 15 months.

He met up with his father Dhirubhai Ambani and announced, “Look, Dad, I’ve become an MBA, and I’m going to take a break since I worked hard. I will see you in the New Year.”

Dhirubhai asked, “I am very happy and delighted that you accomplished this. Since I did not go to any formal school or college, I do not have any degree, why don’t you tell me, from your learning at Wharton, what does an MBA stand for?”

Smug and self-satisfied, Anil replied, “That’s simple. Master of Business Administration.”

Dhirubhai countered, “An MBA represents Manē Badhā Āvō che,” (Gujarati for “I am know all.”) He explained,

You are entering India, and you need to Indianize your MBA … at Wharton School, did they teach you about customs duties, excise duties, income tax, sales tax, Parliament?

Do you know about a zero-hour question, a call-attention motion, and the difference between a starred question and an unstarred question in the Indian Parliament?

If you don’t get to know all these things, let me assure you, all your formal education is not going to help you. You need your practical Indian MBA. And I am going to create that learning environment for you so that you can get the exposure.

A formal education doesn’t necessarily teach you everything about how to navigate the real world

Dhirubhai Ambani, the prototypical crony capitalist that he was, was highlighting the importance of learning the ways and means of doing business in pre-liberalization India.

One must note that Ambani’s extraordinary rags-to-riches story was a blend of cunning, street smartness, audacious risk-taking, and an unparalleled knack for bending the rules through powerful politicians and bureaucrats. As controversial as he was, Ambani must be understood in the socio-political context of India’s post-Independence industrial milieu. He artfully exploited the opportunities those times offered.

Idea for Impact: Formal education cannot complete the kind of real-world operative skills that you need

If you’re truly serious in your desire to get ahead in business, you will need a broader grasp of your chosen discipline than you can get from formal education.

Look, listen, learn. Every industry, company, organization, and team has its own culture. Spend time observing the winners: what does success look like? Who holds power, and how are they persuaded? What are the traits of people who get ahead? Emphasize developing skills in line with the winners.
Develop a network of people who can potentially lend a hand or bail you out of a jam. Invest in the people who will listen to your ideas and support your ambitions. Get to know peers at all levels to build a support base. Any person may have the knowledge and the allegiances that they can put to work for you if they’re so inclined.
Discover how to make the most of the circumstances you’re dealt with. Don’t manipulate others for your own devices in a Machiavellian sense—although, occasionally, you may need to use duplicity for respectable purposes, i.e. where certain ends can justify certain means.

Remember, the political payoff for fostering and nurturing relationships, and for developing a vast reservoir of skills and experiences, may take months, years, or even decades.

Do Your Team a Favor: Take a Vacation

August 7, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Everyone understands that a manager should make time to check out and recharge. Yet, there’s an expectation that he remains available, plugged in, informed, and accessible while on vacation. Therefore, even when he does go away, he doesn’t truly get away.

Even the hardworking manager, when overwhelmed and overcommitted, can become a bottleneck. Refusing to take a break not only burns him out but also wreaks havoc on his team’s productivity—it hinders necessary skills building and succession planning. By butting in whenever he can, he subtly undermines his team by insinuating that his team members cannot run things on their own.

In 2012, the contact management company FullContact was in the limelight when it announced a “Paid PAID Vacation” policy. It offered its employees $7,500 every year to go on vacation with the stipulation that the employee totally disconnects. FullContact CEO Bart Lorang explained why employees and their teams can be better when they disconnect:

Once per year, we give each employee $7500 to go on vacation. There are a few rules:

You have to go on vacation, or you don’t get the money.

You must disconnect.

You can’t work while on vacation.

If people know they will be disconnecting and going off the grid for an extended period of time, they might actually keep that in mind as they help build the company. For example:

They might empower direct reports to make more decisions.

They might be less likely to create a special script that isn’t checked into GitHub [software development repository] and only lives on their machine.

They might document their code a bit better.

They might contribute to the Company Wiki and share knowledge.

Get the picture? At the end of the day, the company will improve. As an added bonus, everyone will be happier and more relaxed knowing that they aren’t the last line of defense.

Idea for Impact: Take a vacation. Empower your team. When a smart manager goes on vacation, he leaves clear directions about the critical situations under which his team should contact him. While he mentally checks out, his team members get the opportunity to stretch and show their individual and collective mettle.

Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription

May 22, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Intellectual inquiry is effortful, and you need a durable internal push to engage in it.

An inflexible approach impedes critical-thinking. I’ve discussed previously (here, here, here, and here) that a sophisticated critical-thinker considers alternative world-views that may cause him/her to philosophize differently.

For example, if you cling rigidly to a “raise taxes on the wealthiest people” position, you are possibly unwilling to contemplate that, among other problems, higher taxes disincentivize productivity, promote economic behaviors to dodge taxes, and contribute to class warfare. Examining all sensible inferences and considering a variety of possible viewpoints or perspectives may help you to arrive at more moderate, practical positions that are conceivably within acceptable limits.

Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription: Avoid Intense Ideology

One of the central wisdoms of Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice-Chairman and the distinguished beacon of multi-disciplinary thinking, is to keep an eye open for dangers that accompany in submitting to a particular ideology.

At his celebrated commencement address to the graduates of the University of Southern California Law School on May 13, 2007, Munger affirmed,

In my mind, I got a little example I use whenever I think about ideology and it’s these Scandinavian canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools in the Aaron Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100 percent. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.

I have what I call an “iron prescription” that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say, “I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it.” I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.

…

This business of not drifting into extreme ideology is a very very important thing in life if you want to have more correct knowledge and be wiser than other people. A heavy ideology is very likely to do you in.

In the era of social media and group polarization, it’s easy to slip into confirmation bias by committing yourself to a self-imposed ideology.

As I’ve mentioned previously, studies have shown that associating with likeminded folks can make you even more disdainful of contradictory viewpoints. Nothing will ruin you faster than an ideology burrowing deeper in a closed mind.

Idea for Impact: Nothing deceives you as much as extreme passion

Stay away from intense ideologies until you’ve examined the opposing viewpoint. Don’t ignore the counterevidence. Consider the other side of any thought as carefully as your own.

Postscript: Munger’s other iron prescription concerns avoiding the victim mentality: “Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… Feeling like a victim is perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so called iron prescription—I think that really works.” See my previous article on Charlie Munger and lessons on adversity.

Inspirational Quotations #775

February 10, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi

Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.
—John C. Bogle (American Mutual Fund Pioneer)

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
—Niccolo Machiavelli (Florentine Political Philosopher)

Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go.
—Billy Graham (American Baptist Religious Leader)

Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy. Don’t.
—Derek Sivers (American Entrepreneur)

I’m not into the money thing. You can only sleep in one bed at a time. You can only eat one meal at a time, or be in one car at a time. So I don’t have to have millions of dollars to be happy. All I need are clothes on my back, a decent meal, and a little loving when I feel like it. That’s the bottom line.
—Ray Charles (American Singer)

Man is the roof and crown of creation. He may be tossed about by uncertain storms of life, but the solution to it lies in his own efforts in finding an ideal, and then raising his personality, from the level of petty emotions, to the loftier heights of the chosen ideal.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Managers have traditionally developed the skills in finance, planning, marketing and production techniques. Too often the relationships with their people have been assigned a secondary role. This is too important a subject not to receive first line attention.
—William Hewlett (American Engineer, Businessperson)

Our careers aren’t paths so much as landscapes that are navigated. We’re free agents, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs—each with our own unique brand.
—Keith Ferrazzi (American Author)

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people they give up their secrets also—if you love them enough.
—George Washington Carver (American Scientist)

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American First Lady)

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
—Richard Nixon (American Head of State)

Don’t Use Personality Assessments to Sort the Talented from the Less Talented

October 25, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Personality assessments have featured in personality development and career counseling for almost a century. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and other tests form the basis for helping people deal with conflict, understand team interplay, outline career search, sharpen decision-making skills, and cope with stress.

Personality Assessments Cannot Predict Performance

Even as their use has grown significantly over the last two decades, personality assessments—including strengths inventories, and emotional intelligence assessments—have been criticized at length:

An individual’s personality cannot be summed up by a personality assessment. Individuality is described best by continuous (not discrete), normally-distributed attributes. For example, the MBTI Step I classification of individuals into 16 categories (or 4 dichotomies from Carl Jung‘s book Psychological Types (1921)) does not encapsulate the full range of personality variance.
An individual’s behavior cannot be limited to one side of a dichotomy. For instance, every person can be outgoing and assertive in the external world (extraversion,) while requiring time for some contemplation (introversion).
Many academic studies question the tests’ predictive validity and poor reliability. Moreover, personality assessments have poor test-retest consistency. Test takers have been shown to change at least one dichotomy when they take the MBTI Step I survey a second time.
Personality assessments can initiate confirmation bias (“Barnum Effect”)—the test scores are self-fulfilling because people tend to behave in ways that are predicted for them. In other words, a person who learns that he or she is “outgoing” according to MBTI may behave that way.
Personality tests are decidedly fakeable, especially when used to evaluate future career opportunities. All personality assessments are contingent on a degree of honesty, but MBTI test-takers are often motivated to match up to extraverted, sensing, thinking, and judging (ESTJ) proclivities in the modern organization.
Assessments are regularly offered as universally applicable. Not only do they tend to mirror the biases of the test developers, but also they are skewed in preference of the social groups the developer studied.

Personality Assessments are Starting Points for Change, Not a Predictor of the Outcome

Academics have long acknowledged the previously mentioned criticisms of personality assessments. They’ve argued fruitfully that many of the criticisms should be directed to how HR practitioners understand personality tests and use them in the development arena.

MBTI and many other personality assessments were never intended to sort the talented from the less talented. They are designed for the individual who takes the assessment, and not for the HR practitioner. In other words, personality assessments were designed to help individuals discover their underlying preferences regarding learning styles, problem-solving styles, self-awareness, ethical inclinations, emotional intelligence, and stress management.

Intended for Increasing Self-awareness, Not Appraisal

On the contrary, HR practitioners tend to interpret test scores speciously to gauge behavior, rather than as pointers of categorical preferences. Besides, HR practitioners often fail to factor in the test-takers’ past and current environmental influences.

And then there’s the risk of people being pigeonholed or pushed into a particular course regardless of his or her preferences. HR practitioners and career counsellors who put too much emphasis on personality assessments may compartmentalize people into rigid categories. This flies in the face of a central tenet of the MBTI premise—that individuals could choose to act against their preferred type if the occasion demands it. People’s attitudes and behaviors often change over time because of emotional experiences or socialization into specific work and social cultures.

Idea for Impact: Use Personality Assessments to Facilitate Self-Awareness, Not for Categorization or as Predictors of Achievement

If you’re a manager or a HR practitioner, don’t use personality assessments to categorize people or as predictors of achievement. Encourage people to take personality tests, but help them interpret these pieces of data about themselves—only they could make sense of test results in the context of their life history, social environment, and ambitions for career and life.

How to Buy a Small Business // Book Summary of Richard Ruback’s HBR Guide

June 26, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Beyond the capital markets and startups, I’ve been exploring buying a suitable small business to invest in and operate. To inform myself with the process of searching and valuing privately-held establishments, I recently perused Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s resourceful HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company (2017.)

The authors of this HBR Guide teach a popular Harvard Business School class on “acquisition entrepreneurship.” Their curriculum trains self-employment-inclined MBA students to search, negotiate, and buy an established business and become an entrepreneur-CEO within a year or two.

According to the authors, MBA students are drawn to their class by the prospect of a meaningful leadership responsibility earlier in their careers, as opposed to slowly climbing the corporate ladder or taking on the great risk of starting a company from scratch and establishing a viable business model.

The first section of the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business can help you decide if entrepreneurship is a good match to your temperament, lifestyle, work-experience, and career ambitions. The largest part of the book provides a comprehensive roadmap for all aspects of acquiring a business—bankrolling the search process, deal-sourcing, managing risk, organizing equity- and debt-financing, running due diligence processes, structuring the purchase, and closing the deal. The final section of the book discusses changing the leadership over and transitioning into operating management.

Reflection: Is Acquisition Entrepreneurship Right for You?

Self-employment is not for everyone. Entrepreneurs need to be smart, driven, business-savvy, self-motivated, strategic, resilient, persuasive, and be able to deal with uncertainty.
On top of the challenges of self-employment, acquiring and operating a small-business will require reaching out, projecting self-confidence, and persuading people you don’t know—business brokers, financiers, investors, regulators, sellers, employees, and customers.
During your exploration of what business to buy, you’ll have to quickly learn about unfamiliar industries, markets, and companies. As a leader, you must be able to develop cross-functional expertise quickly.

Searching: A Full-time Job in Itself

Plan to commit full-time for six months to two years to raise funds from financiers, identify and vet potential acquisition targets, and negotiate with sellers on a realistic purchase price. Afterward, plan for no less than three more months to perform due diligence and complete the transaction.
“When you are seeking out a business to buy, you might face months when you work 12 hours a day and simply not find a desirable prospect. It’s a frustrating experience with lots of effort and no reward.”
Arrange for debt and equity financing from potential backers and risk-sharing partners. Contact affluent folks in your network and investors who specialize in small-businesses. The networks of people you bring together to help your mission can also lend a hand during the deal making and the due diligence processes.
To find potential businesses to buy, try reaching out directly to businesses whose owners may be inclined to sell. Engage small business brokers (there’re some 3,000 small business brokers and intermediaries in North America,) or comb through databases of small businesses for sale.
For potential sellers, look for business owners who, after building their firms over the decades, are approaching retirement and don’t have an inheritor interested in running the business. Many aging business owners are determined to ensure that their businesses live on.

Seek Enduringly Profitable Businesses: Recurring Customers and Predictable Revenue

Look for “enduringly profitable businesses”—stable, slow-growth companies in dull-and-boring industries (such as sandblasting, equipment maintenance, industrial repair and overhaul, window-cleaning, service-providers) in small, defensible niche markets.
Seek businesses whose business-to-business customers are unlikely to switch vendors because the product or service their customers buy isn’t a big part of the costs of their business. Consequently, they’re not motivated to shop around for lower-cost vendors and squeeze margins.
Focus on businesses with yearly revenues of $5 million to $15 million and cash flows of $750,000 to $3 million.
Avoid promising start-ups and risky turnaround opportunities; “it is tempting to imagine buying a troubled business or one with uneven performance, because the purchase price would be very low. But we strongly advise against it, because you’ll have to reinvent the business model and doing so is a very difficult and risky endeavor. Instead, buy a profitable business with an established model for success—one that is profitable year after year.”
Avoid high-growth businesses because “high growth means that your new customers will quickly outnumber your existing ones. Because new customers bring new demands, there are many ways to get in trouble. New customers are, well, new; they have no loyalty to the company and no history. High growth requires great management effort. It also absorbs money rapidly, and raising that money puts a strain on the business and its owner. A rapidly growing firm also attracts competitors, which see the expanding market and the opportunity to attract new customers. So, in a high-growth business, you could work hard and still fail if you cannot keep pace with your competitors. And even if your business survives, you might find that competition has forced you to sell at low prices, so you enjoy little financial reward after all. Making this all the harder, the seller will demand a much higher price for a business that has the potential to grow quickly.”
Avoid technology-driven companies (they face shifting customer needs and therefore demand constant reinvention,) cyclical business, and businesses with well-established competitors.
Small business-owners usually don’t hire large consulting firms or investment banks to sell their businesses. Their businesses are too small to appeal to private equity firms. “We think it makes sense to buy a business with between $750,000 and $2.0 million in annual pretax profits. … At the upper end of our size range—$2 million or more in profitability—we find that institutional investors, like smaller private-equity firms, start to become interested and that competition raises the purchase price, reducing the financial benefits of owning the business.”
“EBITDA margin (EBITDA/revenue) ≥ 20% for services and manufacturing or 15% for distribution and wholesale”

A Checklist for Enduringly Profitable Businesses

Initial Filters:

Is the prospect consistently profitable?

Is it an established business instead of a startup or turnaround?

Is it in the right size range?

Is it located in a place you are willing to live?

Do you have the skills to manage it?

Does it fit your lifestyle?

Deeper Filters:

Is the prospect enduringly profitable?

Is the owner serious about selling the business?

Valuing the Company and Negotiating a Deal

Use the company’s past financial information to project future earnings and your return on investment. Then decide on how much you should pay for a small business: “You’ll need to base the offer price on the general range of 3x–5x EBITDA.” Adjust the multiple for profit margins and growth prospects.
Run a primary due diligence—“a focused period of rapid learning in preparation for making an offer. This is when you’ll test the seller’s initial claims and verify the information that has made the business appealing to you. … You’re looking for any reason that you might not want to acquire this business.”
Finance using equity and debt. “Visit banks and approach your investor network to raise money for the acquisition. You should be prepared to provide information about the business and its industry, details on the due diligence that you’ve done, your financial projections, and the deal terms that you are proposing.”
Once your offer has been accepted after negotiations, run a confirmatory due diligence “in which the company’s records will be fully open to you. You will typically have around 90 days to work with your accountant and attorney to check for any inconsistencies and red flags. … This can be an extremely nerve-racking time for both the buyer and the seller, so it’s important to be patient and calm.”

Transitioning into Leadership and Emphasizing Business-as-Usual

As part of the negotiated deal, try to get the seller to stick around for 3 to 6 months to help you in the transition.
“After closing the sale, you should focus on four tasks: introducing yourself to all your managers and employees, meeting with external stakeholders, communicating the transition plan to everyone, and taking control of your cash flow.”
“The most common trouble for small firms under new owners is running out of cash. … So set up a process whereby you approve all payments before they go out, and review your accounts-receivable balances at least weekly. You should also implement a 90-day rolling cash-flow forecast.”
Meet with all the constituencies and reassure them that they won’t see any immediate changes. Lay emphasis on “your overarching goals for the company—for example, excellent customer service, commitment to quality, a satisfying work environment—and encourage people to stay focused on their work.”
Visit every major customer as soon as you can. Keep your ears open for ideas to improve your product- and service-offerings.
Don’t make any big changes early on, get to know the business, and be very respectful of all the constituents—they know more about the business than you do.

Recommendation: Read ‘HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business’ for a Very Good Introduction on How to Buy and Organize Finance for a Business

Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business is excellent manual for prospective entrepreneurs, employees of small businesses, financiers, and value-seeking investors. You will also become acquainted about interactions with bankers, brokers, sellers, accountants, and attorneys you meet while searching for a business to buy.

We’re All Trying to Control Others

June 19, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

We're All Trying to Control Others

One of the realities of the human condition is that we’re all operating our lives by trying to make the settings around us—the environments in which we live, work, and play—to be just the way we want them to be.

However, we share these settings with other people, who themselves are trying to make their settings just the way they want them to be.

And herein is the source of a great many conflicts: as we control our worlds and our lives with the purpose of making them transpire as we’d like them to, we intercede with the controlling of others.

Conflict is not necessarily bad. It is a normal, fundamental, and pervasive facet of life. It is a natural outcome of what happens when our expectations, interests, viewpoints, inclinations, and opinions are at variance with those of others.

Every relationship is a minefield of conflict, and each instance of contradictory viewpoints brings new challenges.

The key to getting along amicably and resolving the problems of the world is working out how we can wisely facilitate our control of what is important to us without interfering with other people’s efforts at doing the same thing.

Idea for Impact: Life is negotiation. Getting what you want out of life is all about getting what you want from—and with—other people. Learning how to engage in conflict to get what you want without inflicting damage on the opportunities and the relationships is one of life’s essential and practical skills.

Writing Clearly and Concisely

February 13, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In my judgment, most books should be booklets, most booklets essays, most essays articles, most articles paragraphs, and most paragraphs should be statements.

It is far more important to write well than most folks realize. Writing not only communicates ideas, it also generates them—in the minds of both the author and the reader.

Effective Writing is a Lifelong Pursuit

One of my 2018 goals is to peruse two classic texts on writing clearly and concisely: William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (1918) and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (1980.)

Strunk and White affirm that brevity is the essence of good writing in these three sentences:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Succinctness, simplicity, and humanity are also dominant objectives in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.

On Writing Well is a celebrated guide to concise, unmistakable, and well-crafted writing. The book has sold several million copies worldwide, and is a required reading at many a university course.

Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though most people seem to think it does … Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

Zinsser’s central premise is that good writing is the result of hard work, not inborn talent. The book’s particular strength is in Zinsser’s selection of paragraphs by great writers, and his instruction on how to learn from those writers: “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”

On Writing Well is a must-read for anyone who writes and desires to his or her prose. Read Derek Sivers’ helpful synopsis of the book.

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