Nine Theses for Ethical Service Providers

Providing a service implies a duty to care. It’s less about the money than what doing something on behalf of someone entails. If you won’t honor that duty, do better or go do something else. Here are nine theses describing what a writer or any service provider owes clients.

Lazy Writers and Other Scribblers

Watch out for writers who want you to “explain it like I’m five years old.” The framing and explanation of an idea should align with the intellectual level of its intended recipient.

Brevity Is the Soul of What Now?

Calls for brevity usually entail a cynical view of one’s audience or readership. You assume people can’t or won’t take the time to care. You want to give people just the takeaways so they can go forward and take them away—without inquiry or reflection.

Escaping Authenticity

The concept of authenticity ultimately only makes sense if you see yourself and others as consumables. It reduces profound human experiences to their visibility and marketability as commodities.

The Value of Expert Language

In specialized industries like institutional finance and fintech, beware of writers and content professionals with knee-jerk reactions related to jargon, simplicity, and clarity. Those reactions are often biased and self-serving. Saying “it might be confusing” often just means “I don’t understand.” In other words, watch out for generic conventional wisdom that doesn’t apply. Don’t let […]

Why Smaller is Better

Better things are happening in private communities than the big public social networks. I’m experiencing constructive dialogue, meaningful insights, deeper affinity, and higher resonance in places like invite-only Slack channels, mastermind or other learning groups on Mighty Networks etc., newsletters, and even Telegram or WhatsApp groups. What I like best: It becomes harder and harder […]

From Order-Takers to Strategic Partners

Marketers in complex industries like institutional finance have many inner demons to wrestle. Here’s what I mean. The conventional expectation is that marketers need to straddle the line between the client and the industry. They aspire to bring relevant trends, client insights, and industry knowledge to the table. But the reality is more nuanced than […]

Writing for the World You Want

Are you serious enough about thought leadership to take your topic seriously? Once upon a time, writing gurus used to say we should write for people at a 10th-grade reading level. Then it went down to 8th. Then 6th-grade reading became the threshold. Recently, I’ve seen people seriously proposing 5th and even 3rd-grade reading levels […]

Why Your ‘Why’ Matters

Founders, innovators, product managers: When you’re building something new, it’s easy to start ignoring the why. It’s even more likely that you forget to be vocal about why. Then you finally have something ready for investors or the market—but you feel like you’re starting at zero again. Your idea of what is new and better […]

Ensuring Your Startup’s Voice is Heard

Startup founders have to be careful not to use “build mode” to hide from “communicate mode.” Here’s what happens. Many founders, especially for complex B2B products, are engineers, not advocates. They pour their heart and soul into development, but shy away from the spotlight. But if you innovate in silence, you’re missing out. You need […]

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