The Art of Concision...

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."  - Mark Twain

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."         - Albert Einstein 

I am stuck between Twain's "too long" and Einstein's "too simple".          - Too Much Den

Next month, I will begin my 19^th year as the President of a cognitive analytics company. It’s a job that has challenged the full extent of my creativity, my problem solving acumen, my sub-par diplomatic skills, and my general tendency to persevere through challenge. On the whole, I think I have earned passing grades, with one possible exception.

I am not exaggerating when I say that, on the majority of the nearly 7,000 days that I have held this job, I have devoted some portion of my day pondering how best to tell the story of what our company does. Now, I think I have at least average communication skills, and I have devoted immense effort to this problem, but somehow, I’ve not yet constructed a satisfying version of our story that is both lucid and concise.

The long version, that makes our commercial proposition clear and compelling, is too detailed and too boring for most audiences. The short version leaves most wondering what it is that we actually do. I’ve never found the middle ground that balances the two approaches.

Part of the problem is that our story is not simple. To appreciate it, one must have a smidge more than a cursory grasp of the US healthcare system, of inferential statistics, and of human cognition. However, squeezing together even a single sentence about each of these diverse and complicated topics makes for a necessarily complex plot.

I am writing this blog entry while preparing for an investor presentation and wrestling with this very problem. I am hopeful that a momentary diversion, a brief interlude with my imaginary readers, might finally shake into place the right series of thoughts, the precise words and statements that explain why our business is valuable and important.

Mark Twain implied that “time” was the key ingredient for brevity in composition, but after 18 years of trying, I’m not so sure.