The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson Page B

my best to live by the simple old mantra of, ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’ – and preferably in as few well-chosen words as possible. There are a lot of Sir Humphrey types in business who mistakenly feel they have to assert their authority by continually interjecting with some kind of a comment on anything and everything that’s being discussed, when the fact is that if they don’t have anything intelligent to add to the debate they’d come across as much smarter by shutting up and saying nothing.
    When going into print, the art of distilling one’s thoughts into as few words as possible is something that takes practice as well as that often rare commodity of time. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal summed up this conundrum when he famously wrote, ‘I am sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’ Twitter wasn’t an electronic option when Pascal was around, but with its 140-character limit, tweets have become the champion of economy in words and, as a man of few words, I must say that I love it. In anything I write I now make a conscious effort to condense the point I want to make into a Twitter-like format. Even if I only manage to get it down to a couple of hundred characters, I can still count on getting my message across much more effectively than if it were ten times the length.
    So, a word of advice here to anyone writing an initial pitch document or for that matter any written communication – and certainly if it’s coming in my direction – anything longer than a ‘one pager’ is way too long. In fact, even an email that is longer than a couple of hundred words is not going to hold my or many other people’s attention. There are only so many hours in a day and nobody has the time to wade through long, Sir Humphrey-like missives. My friend Larry Page of Google told me that his colleagues all know that sending him anything that is much longer than a tweet exponentially increases the likelihood that he will never find time to read it. Capturing someone’s attention in writing is like the process of mooring an ocean liner. First the thin lightweight rope (the tweet) gets tossed to the dockhand, this leads to a larger stronger line (the email) that eventually pulls in the big heavy mooring hawser (the full presentation). Try throwing out the heavy line first and, like a five-page email, it will likely sink without a trace.
    I LOATHE MAKING SPEECHES
    Coming from someone who does a lot of it, such a statement must come as a surprise, but it’s almost as true today as it was when I first spoke in public fifty-odd years ago. I remember being scared half to death when I had to stand up in front of my school to make a speech. It was a contest where we had to memorise a fairly short speech and present it to the school. If you stumbled at any point you were ‘gonged’ and that was it. You were out. I had actually worked very hard at getting it down pat and despite my sheer terror I managed to start out quite well but a couple of minutes into it my mind momentarily blacked out. Within a split second the G-O-N-G brought me back to reality. I still break out in a cold sweat just thinking back to the excruciating experience.
    Quite apart from the nervousness, the simple fact of the matter is that I have never particularly enjoyed public speaking and as with everything else in my life that I don’t enjoy doing I didn’t do it terribly well. Over the years I have become much more comfortable as a speaker but it still makes me nervous. It is some comfort that I am not on my own with this, as the fear of public speaking – or ‘glossophobia’ as it is clinically known – is right up there with the fear of flying as one of the most common human fears.
    One inescapable reality of business life is that the more successful you become and the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more frequent the requirement for you to step up to the microphone. Unlike in