沟通要多动脑少动嘴

    杰夫·贝佐斯坚持使用完整的句子。去年11月，作家本·卡斯诺查写道，亚马逊（Amazon）CEO杰夫·贝佐斯不允许管理团队在交给他的会议纪要中使用要点罗列的方式。贝佐斯的要求是在段落中正确断句，不能一目十行地看。他的理念是，如果必须以书面形式完整地阐述你的想法，将有助于想法的完善。

    卡斯诺查指出：“贝佐斯要求团队将句子写全，是希望团队成员能全面思考每个想法，从而让这些想法更能经受住时间的考验。”《财富》杂志（Fortune）近日刊登了一篇贝佐斯的专访，文中贝佐斯谈到：“如果没有想清楚，根本写不出长达6页、架构清晰的叙事备忘录。”卡斯诺查前述文章的灵感正是来源于此。

    乍一看，这一规矩有道理。但完整的句子真能解决要点罗列法的弊端，杜绝空洞堂皇的词藻堆砌吗？如今在商业沟通中，议论文很多时候被误以为就是用七年级英文老师口中的“助动词”将一堆抽象概念连起来，很多语法正确的句子都不知所云。举例来说：

    为了提供市场最佳客户体验，打造与众不同的技能组合，赋予相关机构知识、技能和内部强化，我们设立了五项至关重要的目标。

    或者是下面这封刚刚发到我邮箱的邮件。

    设计师们致力于想象和创造空间、体系、语言、工具及基础设施，为每个人和我们这个世界提供特定的关系与倾向。

    这样的句子主要给我们一点感觉，知道大概讲的是什么事情。主旨可能显而易见，但细细读来你可能会想，如果用更少的字来说，少一些故作姿态呢？我用了好一会儿才意识到这些完整的句子基本上都只是改头换面的要点列表。将所有这些词塞入同一个句子或许有道理，或许没有。往往很难分辨这样一个句子的各个部分是如何联系起来的。

    会不会问题不在于句子不完整，而在于我们用罗列法表述繁复庞大的想法时，罗列不能胜任沟通之目的？过去我们常常会罗列一些东西，这样就不必老惦记着。（做完一件事或买好一件东西，就把它从列表中删除，然后把这个列表也扔掉。）列表本来就是用完就扔的东西。

    现在，我们使用列表是因为我们觉得我们的想法过于复杂，用简单的几句话难以说清楚。《哈佛商业评论》（Harvard Business Review）撰稿人克雷格·莫科恩在最近的一篇博客中指出，现在不满足于一个头衔的人越来越多。这可以理解，但并不聪明，他指出：

    现实稍微有点残酷：在任何一个特定时间，我们在其他人的脑海中只能“占据”一个位置。人们不能同时将我们认为是项目经理、教授、律师、保险经纪人、编辑和创业家等等全部。这些头衔可能全都是真实的，但人们首先只能想到一种职业。

    给你自己6个头衔，商务社交网站LinkedIn和SEO培训师当然会鼓励你通过这种方式跨界发展。但要知道，当人类(（而不是机器人）查看你的简历时，他们可能会很困惑。

    Jeff Bezos insists on complete sentences. In November, the writer Ben Casnocha wrote about how the Amazon (AMZN) CEO doesn't allow his executive team to hand him memos dotted with bullet points. Instead, Bezos demands correctly punctuated sentences that live in paragraphs and defy easy scanning. The idea is that having to spell your idea out in full will improve it.

    "By demanding his team write everything out," Casnocha remarked, "he makes them consider all aspects of an idea to make it more durable for years to come." In Fortune's recent profile of Bezos, which inspired Casnocha's post, Bezos said, "There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

    At first glance, this rule is appealing. But are complete sentences really a fix for those bulleted lists that essentially clump together vaguely smart-sounding noun phrases? A lot of what passes for persuasive writing in business communication today are pile-ups of abstract concepts strung together with what our seventh-grade English teachers called "helping verbs," and plenty of grammatically correct sentences are still mystifying. For example:

    In order to accomplish a best-in-market customer experience, instill a differentiated skill-set, and bring the relevant institutional knowledge, skills, and facilitation expertise in-house, we have identified five mission-critical goals.

    Or this one, which also recently landed in my Inbox:

    Designers work to envision and create spaces, systems, languages, tools and infrastructure that afford specific kinds of relationships and predispositions towards each other and our world.

    Such sentences mainly give us a feeling for what they're about. The topic may be obvious, but a close reading prompts an urge to question whether it could have been said with fewer words and less grandstanding. It took me a while to realize that these complete sentences were basically gussied-up laundry lists. There may be a good reason to house all those concepts in the same sentence -- or not. It's often hard to tell how all of the sentence's parts relate to one another.

    So, what if the problem isn't incomplete sentences but the fact that we are using lists to convey big, unwieldy ideas that lists aren't capable of communicating? We used to list items so we didn't have to think about them. (Do or buy a thing, cross it off the list, then throw the list away.) Lists were disposable by design.

    Now, we use lists because we imagine our thoughts or abilities are too complex for one or two simple descriptors. In a recent blog post, Harvard Business Review contributor Greg McKeown noted an increase in the ranks of people who wouldn't pick one job title. This was understandable but not so smart, he argued:

    The slightly painful truth is, at any one time there is only one piece of real estate we can "own" in another person's mind. People can't think of us as a project manager, professor, attorney, insurance agent, editor and entrepreneur all at exactly the same time. They may all be true about us, but people can only think of us as one thing first.

    Give yourself six job titles -- LinkedIn and SEO trainers certainly encourage you to spread your bets that way -- but know that when humans, not robots, read your profile, they'll likely be overwhelmed.