Room 121: A Masterclass in Effective Business Writing

If the bottom line in business is money, the heart and soul of every transaction is a conversation. If it’s only money that is exchanged there’s no real human connection. And our lives are the poorer for it. For most of us, from our early 20s through to our mid 60s, a third to a half of our lives is spent at work. Can we afford, spiritually and emotionally — even mentally — to simply serve the bottom line? I learnt a lot about the pleasure of the market place from my father. Portly, indeed once mistaken for King Farouk of Egypt, he was a bit like the bare-breasted Buddha in the Tenth Bull of Zen: ‘Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world. My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful. … I visit the wine shop and the market, and everyone I look upon becomes enlightened.’ Dad, who worked for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Offi ce (FCO), was actually quite a dapper dresser, so on that score he departs from similarities with the sage, but in all else he realised that commerce is the currency of human connection outside of family, romance and school. It provides the everyday opportunity to engage and converse and enjoy. It’s not just about bars of soap and chicken feed, insurance policies and sachets of nails. He loved to tell me and my brothers of his visits to his Chinese launderer-come-tailor in Kuala Lumpur. These could have amounted to simple collections of his canvas sack marked with his Pythagorean ID. But no, without fail he would take a bottle of whisky, sit down and chat a while over a dram or two, before negotiating the price for this month’s laundry, darned socks or suit and shirt repairs. Years later, as a mischievous elder, he was still at it, regaling the shopkeepers down Glastonbury High Street, with my devoted mother in tow. They may have come away with 10% off here or an extra loaf of bread stuffed in the bakery bag there, but that was not really the point. The point was connection. The alternative is actually pretty deadly: automation and alienation. This is serious stuff, sociologically, not mere nice-to-have frills. These days, that is what all savvy brands want to do: connect. How? By having a conversation with their customers and potential customers. And what is conversation but imagination, story, twist, embellishment and language carrying along the facts/information/data.

My nickname - interes