I spent the last month pitching publishers. I spent Monday biting my nails and weighing offers. Today I announce the results and share what I’ve learned. HarperBusiness will publish Writing Without Bullshit in September 2016. My editor will be the estimable Hollis Heimbouch, who in an ironic twist was the editor in charge of acquiring Groundswell for Harvard Business…
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is gone. But on his way out the door, he described the company’s massive, deliberate fraud on his customers and the environment as an “irregularity.” That’s bullshit. Here’s what happened: Volkswagen jiggered the software in 11 million of its diesel cars to conceal how much they polluted. “Clean Diesel” is a pillar of Volkswagen’s marketing….
Holy cow. A phone company bought the original Internet content company. This has to have some broader significance. Look in the obligatory press release and you find . . . nothing. Except for some indigestible chunks of verbiage (thanks to Barak Kassar for pointing this out): . . . the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a…
If you like sausages, don’t ask how they’re made. But I’m happy to explain how waffles are made, including this piece about CIOs from the Wall Street Journal, titled “CIOs Redefining Role to Fuel Integration, Innovation.” VMware, the technology company, wants to impress CIOs. CIOs read articles in the Wall Street Journal‘s “CIO Journal” section. But…
While generalization in writing is a sin, drawing broad conclusions about a whole generation is far worse. Alexandra Levit’s piece about Generation Z in the New York Times is a great — that is, awful — example. The sin of generalization has three basic flavors: generalizations hedged with weasel words; unsupported broad, sweeping statements; and generalization from one…