Writing Skills for Executives
- 08
- Mar
- 2016
Writing Skills for Executives
Writing skills for executives, alongside personal presentation skills, are hugely important. The more senior your leadership responsibilities the more advanced your written communication skills are expected to be. Many a promising career has been derailed by poor written communication skills. And many have blossomed after the acquisition of skills to produce compelling writing.
How to develop better writing skills for executives.
A taxing word in your ear
Prof Nigel MacLennan takes a tongue-in-cheek, ironic look at tax, its name and the factors that influence our attitudes to it.
Each of us has total faith that governments of any principle, and none, always has spent, and will spend, our hard earned taxes with the most serene wisdom imaginable. Who could possibly accuse the noble civil service of wasting our money, ever? Unthinkable: how ridiculous! No, the paragonic UKBA (UK Border Agency) when a huge backlog was discovered, were saving tens of thousands of unanswered letters, in a darkened room, in the name of philatelic appreciation.
When the education visas scandal was uncovered, entirely misunderstood were their benign motives for globally broadcasting that the UK is closed for higher education business; savings had to be made on the increasing costs of handling the annual October influx of cash-carrying overseas students arriving at Heathrow immigration counters!
While we love being forced to pay tax, for such reasonable improvements, most of us hate giving our money to help others. Who of right mind would offer hard earned money to actually help someone?
Juxtaposing our emotional reality, (never knowingly described as irony), may illustrate a powerful principle: we hate paying tax, but love helping people.
Seizure and subsequent squander of more than half our yearly earnings, is, of course, the right way to make people feel emotionally positive about paying tax. It makes us better appreciate reaching ‘tax free day,’ (approximately the 7th of July in the UK), after which time everything earned in that year is ours to keep. People should be grateful that we abolished full slavery in 1833; now they are only forced to work for half a year for no pay. Surely they know that semi-freedom tastes much better than no freedom.
Paying tax, as with all coercion, leaves us in emotional deficit, but it need not; we could turn that affective loss to feel-good gain. How? It’s in the name, stupid! Cut our losses on the use of negatively perceived ‘tax,’ and start making gains on positively viewed Social Contribution. We feel
Tax is a taxing word. Social Contribution does what is says on the tin and gives us a sense of well… making a social contribution.
“Oh, you’re just playing with words,” yelps Mr. I-Have-No-Knowledge-of-Human-Nature, with unintended irony from behind his pompous septi-barrelled name. Of course we are playing with words; that is, believe it or not, how we communicate!
Words shape our world, and we use them to shape how others see their world. To wit: while I’m persistent, you are stubborn; I’m a self-made woman (only on Friday nights at Trannie D’s), you are a LIBOR-fixing, PPI mis-selling, sub-prime mortgage conning, country bankrupting bankster; I used to be a demi-slave paying taxes; now I make a worthwhile social contribution.
Of course, this concept of naming an act to help people see what it is intended to achieve is entirely new, and radical. At no point in history has it ever been thought of, let alone used successfully. No, David Lloyd George, in 1908, when he proposed ‘National Insurance’ was (?) completely clueless of the notion.
Really, why would anyone ever want to name something so that people would know what it was used for? The idea of making people feel good about the common good will never catch on!
Tax needn’t be taxing. Indeed, making it more of a pleasure can be as simple as the addition of one plus one. Clinton’s campaign slogan: ‘It’s the economy stupid,’ plus, Lee Atwater’s observation ‘Reality is perception,’ equals people feeling good about making Social Contribution: It’s in the name, stupid!
If there is an outbreak of common sense we might decide to remove that taxing word tax from our soundscape! Will such a plea be heard? In all probability, the wax in the ears of those who tax us for years, is too thick.
Copyright Dr Nigel MacLennan
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