To get action from busy people, your writing must cut through to the heart of the matter. It must require a minimum of time and effort on the reader’s part. The importance of this increases with the importance of your reader. At any level, readers are likely to be swamped either with paperwork or a twenty-four-hour-a-day stream of e-mail, or both. Junior executives may feel obliged to plow through everything that comes their way. The president doesn’t — and damned well won’t.
