GAHZLY

“Betty” (her adopted Western name) is a fascination and an inspiration. I was introduced to Betty while I was touring a plastics factory in Shenzhen, about forty miles west of Hong Kong in Guangdong Province. As mentioned earlier, Shenzhen is part of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) established by Deng Xioping. Now, twenty-five years later, Shenzhen’s population is roughly ten million. About six million of these people are migrant workers who return home on the weekends and live in factory dormitories during the week. Shenzhen is the largest migrant city in China. Betty was born and grew up in northern China where the native language was Mandarin. Her parents were rural farmers, but they insisted she go to school and study hard. Betty was a good student, hardworking and smart, and she was interested in many subjects. She studied Russian in elementary school, high school, and college, along with math and science. After college, Betty relocated to Shenzhen to take a ...

Writing a resume is, as argued before, quite simple; yet made difficult by the need for it to be persuasive. And to be persuasive, you must tell a story. Telling, or in this case, writing your story is hard; no doubt about it. Yet this story of how you made a real difference in the jobs that you have held is critical. It is critical because, by inference, your story causes the reader to imagine you making the same difference for him. The clear challenge is in the “how.” But to get to that answer, humor me for a moment and let’s talk about a business plan. A business plan has two objectives. The first is to raise capital or money. And the second objective is to act as an operational blueprint for when you actually start the business. The two objectives do not necessarily mesh. But writing 2 separate, 100 page business/operational plans is not practical nor desirable. The answer to satisfying both objectives with one plan is the executive summary. Once the plan is writte...

I spend a lot of time performing research for projects, and I’ve discovered that many of the companies that have the best information do the worst job of presenting it. They have the expertise, but it’s clear that the wrong people are responsible for sharing what they know. Now, it’s not really their fault. Each of us has specific skills and areas of knowledge. But just because someone in your company is an expert on a particular subject doesn’t mean that they’re also an expert at presenting what they know in written form. In fact, subject matter experts who are also effective writers are a rare breed. Some of the most brilliant people I’ve worked with were also some of the poorest writers. Or, their writing skills may have been decent — they just didn’t know how to translate their subject matter into easily understood prose. Fortunately, there’s a simple way to ensure that your company’s expertise is being presented as clearly...