Podcast — Email With Military Precision

Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I want to record

a video today. It's just about an article that's out there on the internet. Nevertheless,

I think that this is one of the most valuable and short guides to effective business communication

I've ever come across. It's an article in the Harvard Business Review Online by Kaber Seagal,

and it's entitled How to Write Email with Military Precision. A little bit of context,

I used to work at a start-up here in Israel, and a lot of people working in the Israeli

start-up ecosystem have military backgrounds, a lot of people from military intelligence

and other parts of the military. The CTO of one of these companies mentioned to me that the

Israeli army used a system for writing emails that apparently they got from the Americans.

I've no reason to disbelieve that. I wasn't in the Israeli army to confirm first-hand,

but this is basically the system. There's a little bit about it online, and this is the

first one that shows up. The first thing is this, and this is something I've been using since and

trying to advocate for in companies I've worked at. The first thing is it's a system for starting

your email with a keyword. As the author points out here, the first thing your email recipient

sees is your name and subject line. Assume these days that whoever you're sending an email to,

it's probably going to be read on a smartphone, if not a smartphone, perhaps on a tablet.

In a minority of cases nowadays, it's probably being read on a laptop or a desktop, like a proper

email client. Therefore, if you are sending email to a busy recipient, and this goes for

internal email as well, then it makes sense to prefix the subject line with a keyword that gives

an indication for what's required of the recipient. This is the system being advocated for basically.

The first thing your email... I'm reading directly from the article here. The first thing your email

recipient sees is your name and subject line. It's critical that the subject clearly states the

purpose of the email and specifically what you want them to do with your note. Military personnel

use keywords that characterize the nature of the email and the subject. Some of these keywords

include action, sign, info, decision, request, coerce. Action is for compulsory for the recipient

to take some action. Sign requires the signature of the recipient. Info is for informational

purposes only, and there is no response or action required. Decision requires that the recipient

takes a decision. Request is seeking permission or approval from the recipient. And coerce is

coordination by or with the recipient. These aren't set in stone because most people

looking at using this are not going to be in a military environment, but I think that these

are actually great. I have these printed out and pinned next to my desk, and I think they're

perfectly effective in the business environment, especially if you're dealing with senior

executives or someone who's very busy. So as I said, I've tried to advocate for this system

personally. The second thing that apparently they do is what's called Bottom Line Upfront, BLUF,

which basically is if you've ever seen a diplomatic cable, like the information that

Wikileaks leaked and is available online, you can see the interesting format that diplomatic cables

are written in. They have kind of a metadata field at the start, then they have a summary,

and then they go into the details, and those are all organized very specifically. And it sort of

reminds me of that. It's a pretty similar system. The BLUF, it's apparently in the Air Force

handbooks, and it's kind of self-explanatory. So what I like is that the author gave an example

of an actual email and how this system would work in practice. So the subject line, and this is in

obviously a business context, subject line, info, working from home. So that's how you use it. You

start with your declarative keyword, then the subject line, salutation, BLUF, the Bottom Line

Upfront, and the way this has been done here is just have that in bold, and then in background,

you go into the detail of this. So the bottom line here reads, we'll reduce the number of days

employees can work from home from three to one day per week, effective December 1st. So somebody can

just get that line and stop reading the email, or they can go in for the detail after that. So

again, I think this is a really, really effective system that has application far beyond the military

context, really effective, especially for people whose job involves communicating with very busy

people, email-centric environments. I'm a huge email fan, even though it's kind of considered

old-fashioned these days. And if you are doing that or looking to communicate more effectively

internally, then I think this is one of the best systems out there. And I'll put a link to this

excellent article from the Harvard Business Review in the description of this video. Thank you guys

very much for watching. If you want to get more videos from me, feel free to subscribe to this

YouTube channel.