Kao: The organizational blast radius of poorly written memos is heavily underestimated
Wes Kao · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact · Apr 6, 2025 · at 25:44
Executive communication educator Wes Kao explains why taking extra time to clarify written messages prevents massive compounding confusion across teams.
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“I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. So if you're just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people, and it's confusing, and you didn't include information you should have included, there's gonna be a bunch of back and forth. Like all 15 of these people are reading this being like, okay, what do I do with this? Whereas if you just take another look at it those 15 people would be off to the races. Like they would have read your message and then known exactly what to do next or what their part was or what you were looking for from them.”
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