Paul Tudor Jones to Staff: Learn to Write or I'll Rip Up Your Memo

There's few things I hate more than 'news' articles not being written properly, something that's incredibly common these days on the Internet. I especially hate articles that start out with a couple of paragraphs of some stupid, boring, anecdotal story before even hinting at what they're about. Such things are evidence of terrible writing. I don't expect blog posts to adhere to this, but I see it so often on 'news' sites, it's horribly disgusting. Yes, there is a place for magazine stories but the news is hardly ever it. And certainly, business correspondence is the last place for that kind of literal gibberish.

Being "efficient" at what you do at the cost of seeing the full picture, attention-deficit decision making, etc, is not a good thing.

A lot of people with positions of power think they are snap decision makers. They are snap decision makers because there's nobody to challenge those decisions, and often thinking a bit more and listening more, is a good thing.

As Herbert put it in Dune, "a mentat needs data".

I liked Bezos's requirement for a 6 page memo, and time to read it, before meetings. So many times meetings start and everyone wants to share an opinion, and people don't take time to listen.

Sure, inverted pyramid is nice. But so is understanding.

I really appreciate a good long-form article -- NYT and Salon or whatever - if it's somewhat focused. So much that passes for 'journalism' these days is reformatting quick summary feeds, and it loses meaning.

Paul Tudor (I don't know why anybody calls him Mr Jones. Anybody who has ever dealt with his firm calls him Paul Tudor) knows what everybody else in finance knows: you're dealing with people who have money, and when you have money, there are many, many, people trying to solicit your interest. This is not about the blog writing style, your deep intellect, your pitch. It's about "I get 10 really smart people 10x per hour trying to communicate with me (including my own employees). My bandwith is limited. You have 10 seconds. Get my attention".

This issue is less about tech, than about the basics of trying to get through to the wealthy/privileged in what is the biggest, most brutally competitive communication arena. Literally everybody wants Paul Tudor's attention. He's a financial genius, but he's just a man with a limited attention span and dozens of solicitations per hour. Make sure your 10 seconds count.

I was a fixed income strategist for many years. Realizing that there were 30 PDFs from my competitors hitting the target's inbox every hour, my successful strategy was to do what none of them were doing: sit back, really think about what was the essence of my piece that was different from the first principal component of everybody's obvious chatter, summarize that in a single line, and put that into the subject.

Perhaps there are different models for different schedules?