Harvard Business Review Guides Ultimate Boxed Set (16 Books)

Chapter 2

Understand your readers

Communication is a two-way exercise. Without knowing something about your readers—and about psychology in general, for that matter—you’ll rarely get your ideas across. What are their goals and priorities? What pressures do they face? What motivates them?

Respect readers’ time constraints

The most important things to realize about all business audiences are these:

• Your readers are busy—very busy.
• They have little if any sense of duty to read what you put before them.
• If you don’t get to your point pretty quickly, they’ll ignore you—just as you tend to ignore long, rambling messages when you receive them.
• At the slightest need to struggle to understand you, they’ll stop trying—and think less of you.
• If they don’t ...