Business or Creative Writing? Part 2

Venting can be very helpful. The best part about venting is that, once you've vented, you start to realize that you were wrong. But you need to vent in order to realize that...

Having re-thought my earlier blog, I'm now starting to realize that not everything we learn is immediately useful. Some things take time to be useful. Others are useful in unforeseen ways.

To take a concept I learned from my Emerging Communications Technologies class, some of the most ground-breaking technologies were invented with completely different purposes from what eventually made them life-changing. Some inventions were created a full 40 years before they became widely useful.

In other words, it's important to realize that we don't know everything there is to know about what will help us down the road. Give it a try. Dare it to help you, and it just might, one of these days.

Guess I better start that research paper...

Business or Creative Writing? A Case in Point

Interesting dynamics from my "Writing for Business Professionals" class tonight. It's sitting on my mind and I need to let it out.

Despite the title of the course, the class has dealt more with creative writing than business writing. I haven't minded because the readings are interesting and I know that, more or less, being a better creative writer will help me become a better writer, period. I overlook the fact that the only business writing we have dealt with is how to edit someone else's letter or email.

However, tonight we were given the assignment of writing a research paper on some random topic that we came up with during our in-class brainstorming session, without any focus on real-world application. This brainstorming session produced such topics as the history of the high heel and the pop-tart.

In the last 10 minutes of the class, the instructor said the paper should be 5-10 pages, due next week. This is in addition to the 150 pages of creative reading to do for next week, in addition to the outline of our final project due next week. In addition to the writing project we are doing for our outside organizations. And meanwhile I'm flying to Florida from Friday - Sunday to perform a wedding.

I realize that to the business school student, this may seem trivial. But we're talking about an awful lot of work for something that is only loosely related to business writing. If the assignment were to write a case study, I would understand. To write a business plan, I would understand. But to pull out all the stops for a research paper when my business writing class is teaching me neither case studies nor business plans, and I start to rethink my investment in the class. Our class is already reeling from our final project, which is basically to write a reality TV show that talks about the different writing styles we've learned in class, such as freewriting or brainstorming. Wait, when do I learn how to write a business plan?

Thoughts? I would love to hear other people's feedback as to how I can make this research paper relevant to my business writing. Help me find the silver lining!

Thanks for letting me vent.

Interconnected Craziness

Some moments beg to be recorded in some way - you're going about your daily life and, all of a sudden, you look at your situation not from down on the dance floor but from up on the balcony, to use an expression from Professor Ron Heifetz of Harvard University. You take a step back from your routine to acknowledge the larger trends that are developing around you.

I'm sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon. My husband is speaking with his cousin in Israel, calling from a basic American cell phone to an Israeli land line. In another room, my father-in-law is using his Palm Treo to conduct business with an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, I'm running back and forth between my desktop and laptop computers, using a flash drive to transfer a file from one to another because the laptop's Internet connection is stronger and I didn't save the desktop's files onto our network. My iPhone is resting on top of the textbook Communication Technology Update.

A third computer, the slowest in the house, is sitting unused in the office, ironically right next to the wireless router.

This is the multimedia home that has been created around us. Rather, this is the multimedia home that we have created for ourselves. It is both more complex and more user-friendly than ever before. It allows us to be in more places at the same time than ever before.

It also means that three people are in the same house and don't interact with each other all. But we could if we wanted to, and that element of disconnect by choice, with the option of instantly reconnecting at will, is a key factor in our lives. Technology is moving at a lightning pace around us, and we can pick and choose when and where to harness it, and when to let it go right past us.

Thomas Friedman had a great editorial in today's New York Times. In full disclosure, I think most of his editorials are excellent, but this one in particular captured me from a marketing communications perspective.

He talks about needing a different approach or "on-ramp" when speaking to different groups about global warming. You can't walk into a dangerous neighborhood speaking to people about the danger of climate change when they're worried about drive-by shootings and neighborhood gangs. You have to phrase it in a way that actually takes into account their concerns and incentives.

This idea of different "on-ramps" or "entry points" onto the highway of a social or environmental movement highlights a basic tenet of marketing, public speaking, advertising - in short, communication - which is: know your audience. Who are they, and what message are you trying to get across? Knowing this in advance of your conversation or campaign will greatly increase the chance that the other person will hear you.

Writing for Business Professionals

While less ground-breaking, my writing class has been just as educational as my technologies class. Especially since each item we cover is relevant to my day-to-day work.

Each week, we start the class by discussing the business writing we've experienced at work over the past week - people will complain about long business emails, bad cover letters, and rambling meeting summaries.

This past week, our instructor gave us a series of 5 subject lines and asked us to make them more eye-catching, so that the reader would have more incentive to read on. The examples she provided weren't so bad, I thought, and she should have given us ones that needed more obvious help. But then I realized that in most cases, the subjects you see at work will never really be that bad - but you still need to make them better. It was a more realistic exercise.

It was an interesting exercise, and most people came up with Boston Herald-type subjects which were funny and eye-catching. However, they might have been a little TOO entertaining, prompting us to discuss the need to know the particular audience that is going to receive the email you are sending. If it's in a professional setting, an eye-catching email might be regarded as SPAM and deleted right away. Or it might simply look unprofessional.

As with almost any type of communication out there - it depends on your audience.

We've been reading two books for this course:
Effective Business Writing by Maryann Pietrowski
On Writing: A Process Reader by Wendy Bishop

The two books are like night and day - one is a short and sweet guide to business writing (itself a model for business communication), while the other is a longer and more complex discussion of the many different types of creative writing, with short and long stories for further reading. I am enjoying both books, but the creative book is really surprising me by how much I am enjoying it. I've never really studied creative writing, and I'm finding this feeds a desire I had to study the subject.

The class was split about the creative book - some people loved it like I did, while others found it a complete waste of time. But after discussion, we generally agreed that we could use more creative practices and innovations in business writing, and in business in general. Every chapter, whether relevant or not, gives you another tool for your writing toolbox.

ECT Continued

I want to mention what we've discussed in the past two ECT classes, since they mention a recurring theme.

The two Big Words in our ECT class are BANDWIDTH and CONVERGENCE. More bandwidth gives you the opportunity to send voice, video and data much faster to many destinations. When you can send and receive all three at the same time, you experience the convergence of the three.

I want to reiterate how interesting it is to understand the back-end of communications. I've spent most of my life dealing with the front-end: public speaking, interpersonal communications, coaching - in other words, interactions between people face-to-face.

In ECT, we're learning about the other side of communications - how people and machines communicate with one another from a distance, or how one facilitates the other. It's fascinating and relevant.

Anyway, we briefly went over a timeline of invention for telegraphy, telephony, radio and TV, and we realized that they were all being created at more or less the same time: from the late 1880's through today. And now, they are all converging into new devices for new uses for new audiences. You have to admit, that's pretty cool.

We read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", written in 1945 at the tail end of 1945, and realized how many of his predictions about the future have come true.

In yesterday's class, we talked about radio waves and televisions. It amazed me to learn that television is just a series of still images played at such a rapid speed that they seem to be continuous motion - like those old flip books we used to play with as children. I'm sure this is old news for many people, but I am not ashamed to be amazed by this. In fact, I maintain a generally high level of amazement about physics and chemistry in general.

We then talked about TV, specifically pixels and aspect ratios. We learned the difference between current standard televisions and the new HD televisions that will eventually phase the old ones out completely - HD has more pixels for a clearer picture, along with a movie-screen ratio of 9:16 for screen size, which makes for a rectangular image. We also learned how liquid crystal displays (LCD) work.

Again, it's very cool to understand what's all around us. To look at my digital camera in playback mode and realize that the image is created by stimulating electrons caught between two panes of glass. It's probably the same amazement that the little Berber children had in Morocco when I showed them their image in the LCD screen - either ways, it's like magic, whether you understand it or not.

Our instructor alluded to something very important towards the end of class yesterday: as bandwidth increases and convergence takes place, we as communications managers have no choice but to provide a multimedia experience for our customers. In other words, convergence is raising people's expectations of what communications should look like, and we're going to have to either manage or fulfill those expectations. It should be an interesting journey.

Update on Emerging Communications Technologies

I've been pleasantly surprised by the reading for my ECT class. I've already mentioned The Death of Distance, but it's Communications Technologies Update that has really surprised me.

It's a large book with lots of statistics and graphs. It's updated every year or so in an attempt to keep up with the latest technological innovations. For each technology, it gives you a history of it, an update on its current use, and a "what to watch" section predicting the future based on recent advances. From telephony to broadband, it describes technologies that are literally all around us but about which we know very little. It even throws in a few public policy issues by mentioning relevant legislation surrounding the technology, something that I think would make for great class discussion.

The best part about this book is that my husband knows all about the subject. So when I ready something about multiplexes, I can specifically ask him more about it.

For instance, I read a chapter on Home Networking a few weeks after Yoav had set up a network in our home. So I could think back to what he had gone through and by reading the book I could understand it more in detail. Then I could talk about it with him.

If at all possible, I recommend reading this book while sitting next to a Computer Engineer.

My only complaint about the book is that we don't discuss it in class. We have to read 3-5 dense chapters about radio, telephone and internet before class, then in class we spend 2.5 hours discussion only radio. And the lectures are planned out in advance, so it's not just that we run out of time for the rest.

While I'm getting a lot from the book, I worry that by not discussing it in class, I simply won't retain the information. And I think we have the time to discuss it, if only briefly. If I could suggest a format, I would recommend that the instructor start each class by asking for everyone's thoughts on the reading, which would prompt us to discuss what we'd learned.

MCM vs. B-School

As you may know, I heavily debated the merits of a Master in Communications Management degree versus an MBA. I had one foot in an MBA program before deciding to try the MCM first before diving into 4 crazy years of B-School madness.

However, I still debate the two, and my personal debate ends differently depending on the day - some days I believe the MBA is a better choice and that I should switch programs for next semester, while other days I realize the MCM is much better suited to my career aspirations and I should stick with it. It doesn't hurt that the MCM is much shorter, less expensive and probably easier. I didn't choose it for those reasons, but sometimes the fact that those reasons exist makes me feel like I'm wimping out or choosing the easier of two paths.

But it's not about easier vs. harder - it's about rationally deciding what's the best way to spend the next 2 - 4 years, and in fact whether or not it's worth spending 4 years as a crazy, part-time student. MCM is 2 years, MBA is 4 years.

There's no question that an MBA is a more useful degree. It teaches you the language of business, it gives you credentials (and experience) that translate worldwide and tell future employers exactly what you have studied and what you can do. It prepares you for a variety of different positions.

However, an MCM gives me a specialization. It gives consistency and breadth to my resume. It gives me specific training in an industry that I am convinced I will operate in for the next 5-10 years, whether in business or politics. Actually it's not an industry - it's a horizontal, a skill that is crucial to any industry, from medicine to finance to academia.

And in the mere two classes that I'm taking this semester, I've already used knowledge and training from both in various professional endeavors.

It's directly relevant to what I want to do. And I'm good at it.

So for today (and the past week), the MCM has won the debate. Next semester there's a course on "Financial Aspects of Business" in MCM, and I look forward to learning some necessary finance skills there.

And in the summer, there's a 2-week intensive course on international marketing that takes place on location in Rome, Italy. Given that I speak Italian fluently and want to work in Italy, this networking opportunity seems too good to pass up.

Thoughts on the Fall Schedule

I've been a little too busy to write lately with all my classes and work commitments. But I have been taking notes on what I'd like to blog about. I'm just lacking the free time to sit down without other things on my mind and be able to free write.

In general, I've been pleasantly surprised with the work load. It's heavy but not overwhelming, which means that I have quite a lot to read but I also have the time to enjoy and retain what I've read. And I've been surprised with how much I've been retaining.

Two classes per semester, in other words two nights per week, aren't easy. Add to those two nights my weekly work commitment and the weekly meeting of the new student Toastmasters club that I started, and I have only one free weekday evening - Friday, and I'm not sure that even counts as a weekday evening.

But I feel it's worth it - I have time for work, time for my classes, and one night a week free for my personal interests. I can handle this for a few years. It may be affecting my diet, though, since it means I either have junk food or bird food for dinner. And I haven't been able to keep a regular gym schedule since class started. But I'm still working things out.

This is a work in progress.