We play the game of business more intensely than ever with the written word—and it is high stress and high stakes. If you do not have writing skills to quickly and effectively get your message across, you will find yourself on the sidelines.

Ten Secrets to Powerful Business Writing

We have taught Ten Secrets to Powerful Business Writing to top professionals in business, government, and other sectors, our clientele ranging from The World Bank to National Institutes of Health to Apple.

Over the years, managers in all fields have come to us with essentially the same problem, whether on e-mail, tweets, blogs, technical papers, or company reports:

#1 Problem in Business Writing: Typical business writing is an unstructured brain dump that is too long for the message. It is unnecessarily complex, wordy, dense, lifeless text that makes the busy reader dig deep to find critical information—or omits it entirely.

This type of writing is more than a messaging problem. It wastes precious time of the internal staff and external clients and constituents who need to wade through it. Wasting clients’ time will lose you business more quickly than nearly any other failure in industry.

The Solution: Simplicity

“What do you look for in the writing from staff to you?”

Some years ago, we put that question to Sir William Ryrie, who headed the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). We were customizing our Ten Secrets to Powerful Business Writing seminar for their worldwide staff of investment officers.

His answer was immediate and direct:

“Please…tell them to make it simple.”

He was talking of communication he received on hundreds of multimillion-dollar investments he and management were overseeing. It was clear to this top executive at one of the world’s most powerful institutions that simplicity is a mark of brilliance. He was far too busy to decipher wordy, unnecessarily complex writing. 

Happily for them, simplicity was already exactly the goal of our training. The course’s popularity spread by word of mouth. Over the next 30 years, the Whelan Group delivered this training to IFC’s MBA-schooled financial officers in some 20 countries around the world.

How to Keep It Simple: The Synergy of the Ten Secrets

How do you write brilliantly simple? It’s easier said than done. But it can indeed be done—the trick is to find a handful of techniques that work and are easy to implement.

Our training guides participants in discovering ten powerful tools to achieve such brilliance of simplicity in all forms of business writing. And we use the word “discover” strategically. No lectures to students. Rather, this engaging course is uniquely designed to draw out the learning in a-ha!—not ho-hum—moments. Students uncover with hands-on exercises the ten tools that are more than the sum of their parts.

In a business world where the next text, e-mail, or report can make or break your career, your writing has to be all the more:

• Clear
• Concise 
• Coherent
• And, above all, simple

It must expertly capture and hold attention, be understood, and get action. Ten Secrets to Powerful Business Writing will transform your organization’s writing to be exactly that.

Learn more about Ten Secrets to Powerful Business Writing.