This Friday will be my last day at Novell.

It feels pretty weird to write those nine words. I've been at Novell nearly seven years – the single longest stint of my professional career. (That doesn't even include my summer internship here during b-school.) Without a doubt, it's been one heck of a ride.

I'll look back on these seven years with a lot of good feelings. I know that I learned a lot during my time at Novell, and I hope that I accomplished a lot as well. But the number one thing that I will remember about my time at Novell is the quality of the people. The people at Novell are simply amazing. In fact, the people here are the one thing that almost prevented me from saying "yes" to an absolutely amazing career opportunity. (More on that opportunity below.) The people at Novell are genuinely good people. They are committed to the company. They are concerned about the welfare of others. They are dedicated to doing what's right. They are by far the most ethical community of which I've ever been a part. I've truly enjoyed coming to work each day to spend time with these people, and I am going to miss a great many of them.

Since the news of my departure was announced internally last week, in many ways it has felt that I've been an attendee at my own funeral – people start talking about you in the past tense and memorializing everything you've accomplished. I've joked that there are two kinds of departures – the kind where everyone is sad to see you go, or the kind where everyone is happy to see you go. There really is no middle ground. People either focus on all your positive qualities and brush away the negative, or vice versa. I'm happy to report that (I think) I fall into the former category, as, all of a sudden all sorts people are saying these amazingly nice things about me (or at least they are to my face).

What's even more amazing is that these people seem to be genuinely happy for me. They are excited for what this move means to my career, even though it means that we will no longer be working together. I've been deeply touched by their response. 

Many companies profess to being a meritocracy, but few deliver. Novell delivers. People who work hard and deliver results are rewarded with new career opportunities and new challenges. For me, that translated into three jobs in six years – each one a promotion for which I probably wasn't ready, but Novell management rolled the dice on me. For that trust, I am sincerely grateful. I absolutely made my fair share of mistakes along the way, but I like to think that I paid off their trust with demonstrable results.

If you were to ask me to name my biggest accomplishment at Novell, I would tell you that it was creating and building the Solution & Product Marketing organization. About three years ago, Novell CMO John Dragoon and I started discussing how to standardize Novell's go-to-market approach. We had multiple business segments, each with its own approach to marketing, and very limited product marketing process. After working with John to design the organization, he then made me turn around and interview for the position to lead it. I'm happy to say that John and the rest of the management team thought I would be the right person to lead the new SPM organization, and the rest is, as they say, history. It was an 18-month construction job, as we had to find the right people and build out our processes together. But the team committed itself, put in the necessary work, and delivered the results.

Over the past three years, I've had the privilege to hire nearly 30 people out of a roughly 45 person organization. The best part of my job is that I got to literally choose the people with whom I worked each day, and I've loved every minute of it. It's been such a thrill to watch these people grow as professionals and make true impact on Novell's business, and it's an honor to have been their teammate. I'm going to miss them all.

Although it was truly a difficult decision to leave Novell, I am very excited about my next role. On January 31, I'll be joining GE Healthcare IT, as the General Manager for Marketing in their Clinical Business Solutions group. I'll be responsible for leading the marketing team for GE's Centricity Electronic Medical Records (EMR) product line. EMR is a tremendous market opportunity – according to a recent survey from the Harvard School of Public Health, only about 12% of all hospitals are using EMR software today, but more than 80% of hospitals are planning to do some sort of EMR implementation in the next five years, according to the office of the National Health Coordinator for Health IT. The opportunity to join a market leader like GE to deliver a high-quality, innovative product to customers in a blazing hot market was just too good to pass up.

My decision to take the new role at GE was not so much about leaving Novell, but rather about pursuing the opportunity at GE. Whenever people ask me for career advice, I always tell them to run to something, and not to run from their current job. "Running to something" is exactly what I am doing with GE. I was (and still will be for the next four days) quite happy at Novell. I'm still bullish on the company, including the potential transformation that could come from the proposed merger with Attachmate. But when GE came knocking on my door with this opportunity, I had to consider it. The more I learned, the more excited I became about the potential of GE to lead the EMR market, the high caliber of the team that GE had assembled to pursue this market, and the role itself – both in terms of what I could contribute and what I could learn. GE will provide many growth opportunities, both professionally and personally. I just couldn't say "no."

So this is the proverbial end of the road for me at Novell. It's been a great journey. However, the technology community is very small, and the Boston tech community is even smaller. So while I may not be coming to Waltham every day, I'm not looking at this as a good-bye. Rather, I'm viewing this Friday as a day to say "See you later" to my colleagues and to thank them for everything. I've had a lot of fun, I've learned a lot, and now I can't wait to see where my GE journey takes me. This is my personal blog, so I will continue to post here. I invite you to keep reading and follow along with my new adventure.

Much as I hate to admit it, I have to give props to the folks over at Red Hat. I watched Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst on CNBC yesterday, and while it pains to me to compliment a direct competitor, I can't argue with the financial results that Red Hat is turning in. They continue to grow their revenue, operating margin and free cash flow. In his two years as CEO, Whitehurst has done a very impressive job getting that company to fire on all cylinders – and it is reflected in their stock price, which is up nearly 44% year-to-date.

The good news is that while I can appreciate Red Hat's success, there is still plenty of opportunity for SUSE Linux Enterprise to be successful. As Whitehurst noted in his interview with Jim Cramer, while Red Hat may hold the majority share of the Linux market today, Linux as a platform holds less than 20% of the overall server market. So there is still plenty of room for growth for both Red Hat and SUSE.

But how does SUSE grow? By taking a page of Red Hat's playbook, and then adopting it for SUSE's strengths.

Let's start by looking at what Red Hat does well. They focus. (This is a common theme of mine as you can read from previous blog posts like this one.) As Whitehurst so eloquently stated to Jim Cramer, Red Hat knows what business it is in – providing server operating systems to large enterprises with complex IT needs. These organizations are willing to pay a premium over Red Hat's cost of goods sold for these operating systems, but the overall price is still less than competitive operating systems from Microsoft or Oracle Solaris. Red Hat has not pursued the consumer market for either desktops or servers – Whitehurst even directed those folks to the free version of Red Hat, called Fedora. (SUSE has its own community-centric operating system that is also free, called openSUSE.) Nor has Red Hat spent a lot of time on the corporate desktop market. By pursuing this singular strategic goal – a clear target customer (large enterprises) and a clear product vision (robust server operating systems built on Linux) – Red Hat has been able to deliver outstanding results. On the power of those outstanding results, Red Hat has been able to generate the cash they need to buy companies that let them move up the open source IT stack.

There is still a lot of money left to be made in Linux operating systems. SUSE can – and will – grow market share in the broader server market by pursuing the same mission-critical operating system target as Red Hat, but SUSE needs to differentiate itself based on the power and breadth of its ecosystem. SUSE does not need to take share from Red Hat in the Linux market. SUSE needs to get the greenfield opportunities in that 80+% of the market that still isn't using Linux servers. If Red Hat is Hertz, then SUSE needs to be Avis. If Red Hat sells Kleenex, then SUSE needs to be Puffs. In a growing market like Linux – which IDC predicts will grow at 17% next year – there is room for two vendors.

SUSE is already executing on its strategy to leverage the ecosystem. For example, VMware now ships a copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise with every copy of its vSphere hypervisor at no additional cost to the customer. SUSE continues to hold roughly 80% of the market for Linux on the IBM Mainframe. SUSE has the Linux recommended by Microsoft – and Microsoft has sold more than $240M of SUSE since the partnership was announced in 2006. SUSE is the only operating system optimized to be the perfect guest on all the major hypervisors – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, and KVM. And we've got tons of mission-critical customers, ranging from Wal-Mart to Burton Snowboards to Southwest Airlines. But there is still room for improvement – better channel integration, more laser-focus on the product features that matter, and the ever-present opportunity to better understand our customers' needs.

So, my sincere congratulations to Red Hat. They outlined a strategy, they executed and now they are being rewarded financially. I respect success. And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I hope to see SUSE take a page out of that playbook and mirror that success. After all, there is enough server revenue out there for both of us.

A couple of weeks ago, I was a guest on Cloud Chasers, an Internet radio show dedicated to exploring the hype around cloud computing. This was my second visit to the show. You can listen to my first visit here, and my most recent visit here.

After my first appearance on Cloud Chasers, I blogged about the evolution of communication and how internet radio was an great way to use an old medium (radio) in a new format, thanks to the advances of technology. My co-panelist this time was Chirag Mehta (@chirag_mehta) from SAP, where is the cloud computing strategist. You should definitely follow him on Twitter if you're interested in anything cloud-related.

One of the ideas that I advocated on the show was the idea that the cloud is going to be a great big library in the sky for applications. In many respects, the cloud is going to be the next evolution of the public library, or the electric company. Let me explain.

The big promise behind cloud computing is that it moves all of the resources for enterprise IT off-site, and the enterprise needs to pay only for what it consumes. You can rent an application by the minute, by the hour, by the day, by the month. However, most CIOs want to limit the number of vendors with whom they relationships. CIOs want fewer throats to choke, because while you are renting the application, you are putting your sensitive data – in many cases, the crown jewels of your enterprise – in the cloud. So you want to make sure that you can trust the cloud vendor with your data and you'll want to set up security protocols, service level agreements, and a tight identity integration.

Which means that you will have three or four cloud vendors with whom you'll do business. When our friendly CIO is selecting cloud vendors, one of his criteria will be who has the largest selection of library books, or applications. If a cloud provider has a lot of applications, then it will be worth it for the CIO to set up the process, security and management integration points with that cloud vendor. And then just like an electric utility, the CIO will only pay for the hours that he uses the application, or reads the proverbial "book."

That's why there is a rush now for ISVs to make their applications ready for the cloud. They need to cloud enable their applications and then get them deployed in as many libraries as possible. And for the cloud vendors, there's a race on to see who will accumulate the most library books. Because if you accumulate the most library books, then you will have the most customers who want to come to your library.

Agree? Disagree? Listen to the Cloud Chasers podcast, and then leave your comments below.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the SUSE Appliance Program. The SUSE Appliance Program is a comprehensive technology and business program that helps software vendors make their applications ready for cloud computing. In the course of one year, we've had more than 82,000 users build more than 415,000 appliances that have been downloaded collectively almost three million times. By any measure, the appliance program has been a major hit.

But I don't want to write today about the success of the appliance program. If you want to read about, you can go here to read the press release or visit our new appliance marketplace, the SUSE Gallery.

What I'm interested in writing about is the disruptive business model that Novell has put in place. With our SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution, Novell holds the second place position in the Linux operating system market. According to IDC estimates, Novell has slightly more than 30% of the market share, and Red Hat, the market leader, has roughly 60% of the market share. Linux, for all intents and purposes, is essentially a commodity operating system, and Red Hat has the leadership position and the brand name recognition. Which leads to the question: "How do I grow my business when I sell Scotts' Tissue, and my competitor sells Kleenex?"

The answer is easy: Change the rules of the game. If you're in second-place, and you don't like to be there, think about how you change the situation you are in. Redefine the market. Redefine the opportunity. Do something disruptive – even if it puts part of your current business model at risk in the short-term – all so you can create game-changing growth in the long-term.

Again, this concept isn't that revolutionary, either. Professor Clayton Christiansen wrote one the business world bibles on this topic over a decade ago, The Innovators' Dilemma. And my friend Scott Anthony has built an entire consulting business called Innosight around this same model. What excites me is that Novell is actually taking a page from this playbook, and we appear to be executing successfully against it.

Here's how it is working for us. For the longest time, operating systems were distributed primarily through independent hardware vendors (IHVs) like HP, IBM, Dell and various "whitebox vendors" running Intel chips. This made sense, because if you were going to buy a big expensive server, then you needed an operating system to run it. As the market leader, Red Hat dominates the hardware channel. It's very difficult to displace an incumbent in a commodity market. Novell can offer additional margin in the channel, but on a basic server subscription sale, a couple points of margin are not always enough incentive for an IHV to tell a customer, "No, you don't want Kleenex. You want to buy facial tissue, and Scotts Tissue is the best."

However, the rise of virtualization and companies like VMware, mean that you can now run multiple operating systems on the same one server, thanks to a technology called a hypervisor. Using a hypervisor also means that the operating system no longer needs to be distributed with the hardware server. A new technology – virtualization – has disrupted the business model of operating system distribution.

That's where the appliance program comes in. Assume for a second that customers buy an operating system (OS) not for the OS itself, but rather for the applications it can run. After all, no one ever wakes up in the morning and says, "Gee, I would like to buy a new operating system today." Rather, they wake up and say, "I need to solve a business intelligence problem. I need to solve a payroll problem." And then they buy an application to address their business problem. Then they buy the operating system to support that application.

Novell's disruptive bet is that the route to market for an operating system in the future will change from the IHV to the ISV (independent software vendor). In a shift that changes twenty years of business practice, people will no longer buy an operating system when they buy their hardware; rather, they will buy the OS when they buy their software. The SUSE Appliance Program is designed to leverage that market shift, by making it easier than ever for ISVs to package an operating system and middleware with their application. Novell not only supplies the appliance assembly tools, but also the tools to maintain and update the appliance once it has been shipped.

Do we have all the answers yet? No we don't. But what we do have is a promising technology – a patent-pending process to build and support customized open source operating systems, and then build integrated software appliances on top of that customized OS. And we have a rapidly growing ecosystem that has been endorsed by folks like VMware, SAP, Adobe, and IBM.

The early returns are in, and there is a lot of momentum – both from application vendors and, more importantly, from paying customers. The challenge for Novell is to continue to execute, and to continue to take chances – even if those chances mean we are putting our traditional channels of distribution at risk. After all, when you're in second place, the only way to move into the lead is to take a calculated risk at the right time with the right tool. With the SUSE Appliance Program, I believe we have the right tool and that now is the right time. We'll see what happens.

I saw the new Leonardo Dicaprio movie, Inception, the other night. While I only understood about 75% of the movie, I did find it very entertaining. And over the past few days, I've found myself pondering how the idea from the movie can and should be applied to the business world.

Without giving away any spoilers, the movie at its core is about the idea of planting an idea in someone's head – what Leo calls "Inception." A key requirement for inception to be successful is that the inception target needs to believe that the idea is his or her own idea, otherwise, the target will reject the idea, and the inception will fail.

I'd submit that any good business leader practices inception on a daily basis. Now, we don't literally invade other people's minds like Leo does in the movie, and neither do we hire architects to create false realities. But as leaders, our job is to declare a destination and then help our teams get there. The challenge is that no one wants to be told what to do or how to do it. If you have a boss telling you exactly what to do and how to do it, well, that's called micromanagement. And a micromanaged employee is not an engaged or a successful employee.

A good leader suggests the kernel of an idea to his teammates, but gives them the room to make the idea their own. As a leader, even if you know the answer, it's always more effective – and rewarding – for other people to arrive at the same conclusion on their own. Sometimes that means giving people a portion of the story, or some of the facts, instead of the whole answer. The trick is to give enough information that people arrive at the conclusion you want, but to leave them enough room that they can figure it out themselves, or even better, come up with a better solution that you hadn't thought of.

Inception isn't only something that you can practice on people who report to you. Inception is equally important when it comes to upward management. When speaking to a general manager, or even the CEO, it's often enough to give that person one or two key facts, and then let them draw their own conclusions. It's frequently a very effective way of letting management know there is an issue inside the organization without running to them and stating, "Person XYZ isn't doing their job." Nobody likes a tattletale. But if you report on a missing business result, then management can quickly determine on their own who is not doing their job and take action.

Now, I realize this all sounds very nefarious, and that it could come across as if I am recommending that you manipulate people all day at work – or that I spend my days at Novell manipulating people. I'm not advocating (nor am I doing) that at all. Rather, I'm stating that ideas are powerful, but they are far more powerful when an individual owns an idea. A good leader plants the seed of an idea in the mind of his teammates, and then enables everyone else to own that idea so that it can grow in unexpected and wonderful ways.

Back when I was in business school at the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of my favorite professors was Howard Anderson. Howard, a very successful serial entrepreneur, founded both Battery Ventures and The Yankee Group, and in his "retirement" teaches a full course load to MBA students at Sloan. Howard's classes are a must-take for any MBA who aspires to start a business or run a business.

One of Howard's favorite things to do is ask students if they are an attacker or a defender, because if you know what kind of person you are, then that will determine the type of company you join when graduating.

The way that Howard defined attackers and defenders is simple. If you are a company at the top of your industry, then you are a defender. You have everything to lose, and very little left to gain. Sure, you need to grow your revenues and you need to remain profitable, but really, the only place for you to go is down. The prototypical defender is a company like IBM. Many people in the tech industry joke that you can never get fired for buying from IBM, nor can you get fired working at IBM. While that's probably untrue, there is probably also a little bit of truth said in jest. IBM is a profit-machine; it just keeps rolling along, and is proof of the old adage, "You need money to make money."

Conversely, if you are working at an attacker, then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The obvious example of an attacker is a start-up, where you have an idea, some talented people, and very limited resources that force you to be scrappy and think creatively. But don't assume that every attacker has to be a start-up. I'd submit a company like Novell, where I work, is an attacker. Novell at one point was a defender with its NetWare franchise, and there was this little company called Microsoft that was the attacker with its Windows NT platform. Fast-forward a decade or so, and now Microsoft is the defender and Novell is the attacker, as we try to fashion a turn-around here at Novell and return the company to glory.

It's this very reason that I turned Microsoft down when I graduated business school in 2004 to join Novell. I wanted to join an attacker. It seemed more interesting to go after the opportunity and ride the growth than it seemed to go work at a company already established on top. Besides, at Microsoft, I would have been one of 500 MBAs hired that year, and at Novell, I was the MBA hired that year. Granted, Novell had more risk in it, but with that risk came opportunity.

Being an attacker should be a liberating feeling. If you work at an attacker, that attitude should permeate everything you do. An attacker should be thinking about how do I get that edge, what chance can I take, what angel can I play that will accelerate my path to the top? An attacker can afford to take risks because they have to do so. Conversely, defenders have no incentive to take risks because if you take a risk and get it wrong, then you risk coming down from your pedestal.

I try to be an attacker in all aspects of my professional life, because I find it to be more fun. It influences the positioning work that I do … making a claim and forcing my competition to knock me from that perch. It influences my hiring philosophy, because I want my team to be driven people who will take a chance to win. It influences my attitude towards meetings, where I have a bias toward action as opposed to delaying decisions to the next meeting.

As you think about your own career, and as you ponder your next career move – whether it's today or next year or in five years – I'd submit it's important to know what kind of person you are, and what kind of role you want. An attacker in a defender company will quickly become frustrated with the slow pace of things. Similarly, a defender in an attacker company will be forced to make decisions outside his or her comfort zone at a speed he or she doesn't like.

The bottom-line is that the world needs both attackers and defenders. Neither one is better than the other… it all depends on the type of person you are. After all, neither one could exist without the other.

Tuesday morning, I went to work, went to Apple.com over my morning coffee, and signed up for a Genius Bar appointment that evening at the Apple Store in the Natick Collection .  It took me less than two minutes to make the appointment.  A simple, easy process with a nice user interface on their website. 

When I met my assigned Genius, she took one look at the phone and said “there appears to be some water damage here.  But since it wasn’t your fault, I’ll honor your warranty, and I’ll give you a new phone.”  With that, she took my phone, disappeared into the back and within five minutes, she returned with a gleaming new iPhone 3G.  No questions asked.  I signed a paper and then made my way through the throngs of people in the store out the door.

Aside from the fact that there were 60 people in an Apple Store at 9pm on a Tuesday night (which is amazing in and of itself), I was very impressed with the quality and speed of Apple’s customer service.  People everywhere discuss why Apple is so successful and why its stock price is so high.  I’d submit it’s because Apple has taken three core values and spread them across everything that they do – from product development to pricing to marketing to customer service.  While you can debate – and many people do – what these core values are, I believe that Apple tries to make everything they do innovative, easy-to-use, and friendly.  Let’s look quickly at each factor in terms of my particular customer service experience:

• Innovative.  Apple innovated around the entire customer support experience.  Instead of forcing me to spend hours on the phone with a technician in India trying to solve my problem, Apple created a network of stores that double as service centers – so I can shop while my repair is completed.  Even though Apple didn’t sell me the iPhone – AT&T did that – and even though there was no guarantee that I would buy anything else from them, and even though the damage appeared to be something that I did, Apple still gave me a new phone … Banking on the fact that if I have good experience, I would be a return customer.  While this may not seem particularly innovative, too many companies treat customer service as a requirement rather than a relationship.
• Easy-to-use.  Everyone knows the iPhone is easy to use.  That’s one of its biggest selling points.  It’s so intuitive that a three-year-old can figure it out.  Apple took that easy-to-use philosophy and extended it to their stores.  From the online appointment scheduler to the fact that the technician didn’t put me through a barrage of questions just to get a repair, everything about the experience was easy.  In fact, the most difficult thing was getting out of the store!
• Friendly.  Apple correctly recognizes the personal relationship that people have with their phones.  When you go to the Genius Bar, odds are that you’re upset because your phone isn’t working.  When I walked in last night, there was someone there to greet me and then help manage the queue process.  The technician actually seemed to enjoy helping people fix their phones, even though she had been working eight hours and there were still at least people with broken phones waiting for her help.  I can only imagine how many replacement phones she gave out last night.

Extending what are traditionally product values to the customer service experience is what truly makes Apple different.  How many companies try to innovate when it comes to customer service?  And while many companies try really hard to be friendly, too often, it feels like a forced façade.

Bottom-line: I was impressed.  I went into the Apple Store last night with a healthy dose of skepticism about what they would do for me with a blank iPhone screen.  But after 30 minutes in the store, I left feeling appreciated as a customer, and I’m far more likely to experiment with the ever-increasing amount of functionality that Apple keeps putting into the iPhone and the App Store – even if the iPhone technically belongs to my wife.

In my last blog , I talked about my sixth grade English teacher, and her comment on the relationship between writing and women's clothing. That's one of the two writing lessons that have stuck with me from my days in middle school at McDonogh School. Here's the other one.

There are certain moments in life that you never forget, and for me, it's seventh grade English class, when Mrs. Kathy Corcoran – who at that point must have been in her late forties – was talking with the class about effective writing. In order to make her point that one needed to be descriptive in one's use of language, Mrs. Corcoran jumped up on her desk, and started jumping up and down, screaming “Show, don't tell about!   Show, don't tell about!”

Obviously, the point of the story is that Mrs. Corcoran was showing us her passion, instead of just saying, “I am passionate about this topic.” And she did make her point – the image of her jumping on her desk, with her glasses falling off her nose, and her blond hair flying all directions has been burned indelibly into my memory.... much more so than if Mrs. Corcoran simply said “I am passionate that you be descriptive in your writing.”

At the risk of being pedantic, the lessons here are twofold. First, a good writer is descriptive. He or she brings the reader on a journey and shares the details that complete the picture. How does this apply to business writing? Easy. Instead of saying, “This new security software reduces cost and eliminates risk,” try writing, “This new security software reduces administration cost by 25% and makes you 30% less likely to be hacked.” Those details make the story, and the reader will keep those numbers in his or her mind. Business writing is full gobblety-gook – hence I am always telling everyone to Degeek the Speak (another of my pet phrases) – and the writer who can replace the bland corporate language with compelling details will stand out in the mind of the reader.

The second lesson from Mrs. Corcoran is that passion matters. If you are not passionate about a topic, it will come through in your writing. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't grow up dreaming of selling enterprise infrastructure software. When I was in high school, I didn't even know what enterprise infrastructure was! But I think if you ask anyone at Novell , I am absolutely passionate about my job, and it comes through everyday. I am passionate about the problems that we solve for our customer to help them improve their data center operations or their security infrastructure. I am passionate about the quality of our products and Novell's 26-year record of helping customers. And I am passionate about the practice of marketing – communicating our value to customers and prospects in clear, easy-to-understand langauge. Most of all, I am passionate about the people inside Novell – both my peers in our other organizations, and my teammates inside Solution & Product Marketing. I am passionate about helping all Novell employees succeed and reach high levels of achievement. I wear my passion on my sleeve and on my face.... and I'd submit to you that it's the primary driver of my success.

And to think I got all of that from a middle school English class.

The above quote from Mark Twain is one of my favorite quotes of all time.  That, and “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Both quotes get to a similar point… the goal of any communication is to be as brief as possible while still delivering the necessary information.  Too often as writers, we get lost in the lovely flow of words, or the sound of our voice, or we try to cram as much information as possible in whatever piece we are writing because we’re not sure what is actually important in what we are trying communicate.

Today, I was reviewing a draft of a positioning document from someone on my team.  The first page of the doc was two paragraphs.  You could say that there should be more than two paragraphs on any given page; else it is too dense for anyone to process.  More importantly. there was a lot of valuable information crammed into these two paragraphs, but I would submit that there was too much information in those paragraphs.  With all that information, how is the reader supposed to figure out what truly matters?

Eliminating words is tough.  But what you don’t say is frequently more important than what you do say.  If you focus on what truly matters, then your message will pop off the page.  Every product or solution needs to stand for something.  And every communiqué has a primary purpose.

One of my favorite exercises is to write something, and then see how I can write it shorter.  Evaluate every idea.  Does it truly need to be there?  Does it add incremental value?  Does it subtract from other concepts?  What happens it you eliminate a concept?  A sentence?  A word? 

Effective communication requires focus.  You have to know what you want to say, to whom you want to say it, and how you want to say it.  You have to know what matters.  If you don’t know, or can’t figure it out, then you wind up writing yourself to a conclusion, and most readers don't want to go on the journey with you.  They just want to show up at the destination.

In the words of my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Diane Young at McDonogh School , MD, “A good piece of writing is like a woman’s skirt.  Long enough to cover the point, but short enough to be interesting.”  While that statement may be a bit sexist, I will comment that 1) it came from my female middle-school teacher, and 2) she did have a point.

Apologies for disappearing on this blog for about six weeks.  I got a bit side-tracked.  Not only were things crazy busy at the office, but my wife and I moved houses.  Since we decided to take our kids with us, the move pretty much consumed all of my spare time.  All of our possessions are now in the new house, so I figure I can start up this blog yet again.  (Note that I said our possessions are in the house, not that we are unpacked.  That might take a little while.)

We only moved about quarter-mile from our previous house, but the funny thing about moving is that regardless of whether you move a quarter-mile or a 100-miles, there is still a certain amount of overhead associated with moving.  If you think about it, in order to move, you have to touch every single item that you own.  To help with this process, at the very end of the packing, my wife and I implemented the “one-touch rule.”  Every item got touched once, at which point we either packed it or threw it away.  A great purging and organization exercise, and a reminder of how much stuff one family can accumulate living in a house for just five years.

Anyway, I’m back now and will try to be a more diligent blogger.  By the way, if you are looking for a mover, I would highly recommend our moving company, Big Foot Moving and Storage .  Very professional, reasonable prices, and they took great care of our stuff.