Great leaders speak plainly

The best leaders are direct. They trim conjunctions and four-syllable words from their sentences.

Conversely, those fluent in corporate-speak are so concerned with saying everything that they end up saying nothing.

I saw both of these snippets from different press releases within the last 24 hours:

“From a business standpoint, we can strengthen our investment in and development of our people, our most valuable asset, as we scale our operations globally. We’re well positioned to make the lives of digital workers better by elevating work to the outcomes that matter.” From the PagerDuty press release announcing their newest VC round.

“Kevin led the construction and development of our Gigafactory in Nevada, turning what was a pile of rocks in the Sierra Nevada mountains into a factory employing 12 thousand people with greater output than the entire rest of the world’s battery factories combined, in roughly three years. That is insanely badass.” From an email Elon Musk sent to all of Tesla this morning.

Elon paints you a clear picture. PagerDuty is stuck in the clouds.

Communicating concisely and with details is a skill that Bezos, Munger, Musk, and other fantastic leaders have clearly cultivated.