15 Whose Bright Idea Was That Anyway?
One should use common words to say uncommon things. —Arthur Schopenhauer

Long story, short. The best ideas are explained simply

Your Big Idea
A number of years ago, my older sister had an inspiration for a device to track items when you lost them. She excitedly revealed her big idea during a holiday gathering. She’s not an inventor, but she spent the entire dinner talking about why this device would be a huge hit and how it would make millions of dollars.
When I asked her the (obvious) question about exactly how it would work, however, she quickly got flustered and offered up no details.
“It’s going to make millions,” she said defensively. “Trust me, it will.”
Her excitement in that moment reminded me of many executives I’ve seen who are passionate about a big idea they have—yet are missing key parts of the story. Leaders of organizations will enthusiastically explain a new strategy, mission, set of values, or culture—but because they don’t include the important information about how it’s going to happen, they lose everyone in the process. Then they can’t understand why more people don’t share their view and cannot get on the same page.
Brevity is the catalyst of insight and ideas.
When you have a brilliant idea and can clearly and quickly tell a story, word travels fast. Brevity can help make everyone see and feel as you do. Given the sheer amount of obstacles preventing countless good ideas, being clear and concise is one of your best skills

Brevity plays an essential role in framing and sharing a big idea by making it easy to understand and quick to explain. Brevity keeps an idea’s brilliance from getting lost in high-level hype or buried in the minutia.
Let’s take a closer look at a variety of examples, ranging from how successful military strategists have used narratives to organize complex mission strategies, to entrepreneurs who struggled to get out of the weeds and elevate their breakthrough idea.
A Mission-Critical Narrative
Colonel Eric Henderson is a forward-thinking military professional who embraces the strategic value of narratives. When he was deployed with the 10th Mountain Division to southern Afghanistan, he decided that he would use storytelling and the BRIEF method to simplify how his group had conceived and explained their strategic plan.

“I wanted to frame the plan as a simple narrative,” he said. “People see the world in stories, and I was convinced we could boil down our plan to a storyline—characters and all.”
When Henderson returned home a year later, he called me and left me a two-word voicemail: “It works!”
“I was blessed with the best senior communications team I’ve worked with in 25 years,” he told me later. “My public affairs offi- cer was absolutely switched on. As soon as I explained the process of using a narrative to him, he was like, ‘This rocks.’”
The commander believed in it. Several of the deputy commanders believed in it. Henderson’s boss got it. It was remarkable—since, according to Henderson, that kind of consensus is unusual in the Army.
“We had fairly strong evidence that the story we told was in fact becoming the dominant narrative in the operational area,” he said. “Even our enemies were beginning to tell portions of our story our way. People began to explain things in our terms, not theirs.
“When you sit down with the brother of a prominent Afghan leader who says, ‘Let me explain to you what’s really going on here’—and you hear him tell the story you’ve been telling all along—that’s when you know you’ve knocked it out of the park,” Henderson said.
The heavy lifting for Henderson’s communications team involved getting the rest of the company to understand the core narrative: “We tried to understand how the execution of the military operation was in fact an audience participation play—a story.”

Henderson explained that even his commander embraced the BRIEF method: “Half the commander’s job is just making sure everybody’s marching in the same direction at the same speed. If your words are a manifestation of what plans and intentions are, and if your plan really is the manifestation of your story, then the commander will tell that story over and over again every time he goes out and talks.”
Sometimes his commander had to encapsulate a 40-page campaign plan into a short presentation.
“To carry out the metaphor of the play, you got to be able to break that down to a handbill. And the handbill matters—because if you’re clever, it sticks. It will become truth. That was the way we talked to higher headquarters as well.”
Only with brevity can clarity generate more clarity

If what you hear is clear, you’re likely to grasp more than what was said. Your imagination builds on the ideas you hear and applies them to your daily problems and strategies. Your listening abilities have the power to amplify simple moments of clarity. Inspiration comes at these moments.
Having a scalable story made it easy for Henderson and his team to incorporate new events and problems into the narrative.
“Without a narrative, at least half of the engagement seems to be reactive,” he said. “They say, ‘Oh, what are we going to say about it?’ And then there’s this massive scramble. But using a narrative changes that dynamic. Instead of being rocked on the defensive, it simply becomes evidence of the truth of the story I’ve been telling from the beginning. The narrative allows you to have a brief expression—an elevator speech with a lot of context.”

Henderson continues, “You become better at explaining it. This way, when things happen, the organization’s role is not to explain what happened. Rather, it’s to explain how that bad thing fits into the story. And the narrative helps you do that: quickly, simply, and in a believable way.”
Henderson’s success with the BRIEF method during his time in action in Afghanistan demonstrates how a cohesive story can unify and simplify even the most complicated operational strategy. The narrative helped everyone on every level understand, adapt, and execute the plan.
Clear Picture with Radical Focus
Author and entrepreneur Verne Harnish has identified two keys to entrepreneurial success that reflect the value of brevity: clarity and radical focus. He offers Facebook as an example.
“It is this maniacal mission Facebook just came out of, where Zuckerberg woke up December 2011 and said, ‘Oh my God, we missed mobile.’ And he totally got the entire company radically focused on that single mission that you could summarize in a single word.”
Facebook went mobile in May of the following year.
Harnish explains that “It’s difficult for entrepreneurs, because they’ve got all symptoms of ADHD [attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder]. It’s like a shiny object. The next exciting thing grabs their attention.” These distractions cause executives to lose focus of their goal.

“It’s what Steve Jobs learned in his wilderness years at Pixar: the power of a team having a single focus. Pixar had the luxury and freedom from doing only Toy Story. They could put every ounce of their being into that film. That’s also why Apple was very disciplined and released one product every two years; not unlike what you do with a movie,” Harnish explains.
He goes on, “This radical focus is more important than ever before, mainly because you’ve got so much more competition. If you’re not maniacally dedicated to being the best at something very niche, you’re going to get crushed.”
Certainly, with that singular vision flows singular expression—and brevity is born.
The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma: Mixed Messages
Paul Koziarz and Glen Shimkus struggled when it was time to launch the digital documentation product for realtors they’d developed called Cartavi. Instead of having a simple, clear message, they were telling different stories to investors and customers. Soon, their purpose became muddled.
“Just being an entrepreneur and starting something new is a messy process. You have to develop a story that works with everybody,” Koziarz said. “We didn’t think that brevity was as important until we realized that people didn’t completely understand what Cartavi was.”
Unfortunately for Koziarz and Shimkus, their enthusiasm translated only into confusion.
“We wanted to spend hours talking about all the features and functionality, and why it made sense,” he said. “But we had a hard time figuring out which story different groups wanted to hear.”
I was able to help Koziarz and Shimkus build the story they wanted to tell to their entire audience. We landed on a clear message: they leverage technology to help realtors be more tech savvy and more responsive and to win more business. Their product, which is similar to Dropbox, could advance a realtor’s performance because it was simple, mobile, and secure. It took the paperwork out of the transaction and made realtors more effective professionals.

“That’s what we saw was resonating, because people were nodding their heads when we talked about the iPad and mobile, and simple user design,” Koziarz said. “Those were all things that they appreciated the real value of. In the end, they wanted to be responsive. They didn’t care how they were doing it, but Cartavi helped them to be more responsive to clients’ needs, even at 12 o’clock at night. They were more professional and there was way more business, because they were taking care of their clients’ needs.”
Once Cartavi started to develop and refine their concise story over the next year, the team started to notice a difference as the competition grew.
“We saw competitors incorporating pieces of our story into their own products. They were, in some cases, even emulating some of the things we were saying about our composition.”
Over the next two years, Cartavi grew by sticking to its core message.
“We didn’t have a lot of dollars then, or advertising and marketing blitz,” Koziarz said. “But we developed a lot of good relations, one of which was a DocuSign partnership. Now we’re seeing larger entities and larger franchises with big real estate brands adopting Cartavi as a viable solution to their needs for document management. It’s something we were doing in the first place—but they didn’t realize who we were.”
“The growth curve has been definitely a hockey stick. It goes straight up. It’s been pretty phenomenal.”

Tailor Your Pitch to Your Investor’s Needs
Nina Nashif is the founder and CEO of Healthbox, a platform that helps developing health care businesses prepare their pitches to venture capitalists. She trains executives to deliver exactly what investors need to know in order to make the final decision—and nothing more.
“We’ve found time and time again that these entrepreneurs begin those conversations by just ‘throwing up’ their entire business,” Nashif said. “They tell the story of how great the business is and what they’re solving and what they’re doing and everyone who loves it.”
But an unfiltered flood of information is not going to impress potential investors. They only want to know why your idea or company deserves their support.
“Most entrepreneurs are so passionate about what they’re doing that they assume that everyone is going to embrace it in the same way that they do,” Nashif said. “They’re not thinking, ‘How do I explain my business in a way that others will understand?’”
Once it’s clear,don’t try to make it clearer

Perfectionists strive to make it better and better…and better. When it comes to clarity, if you’ve made your point, don’t try to sharpen the pencil even more, because it’s probably going to break

Nashif explains that whenever an entrepreneur steps into an investor meeting, they need to be prepared to discuss the points their audience needs to hear: “Entrepreneurs end up talking about this really broad landscape instead of guiding the conversation to what an angel investor is going to be more comfortable talking about,” she said.
For instance, entrepreneurs need to account for the difference between a venture capitalist and an angel investor. You can’t create a blanket presentation for these two distinct audiences. Nashif distinguishes between the two: “Angel investors are interested in helping an entrepreneur test and validate the business and its traction in the market. A venture capitalist wants to know that you’ve already done that and how you’re growing and will become the next $100 million dollar company.”
When it comes to interviewing potential new businesses to coach, Nashif makes her decision almost immediately.
“When I’m meeting with an entrepreneur, I know within the first 5 to 10 minutes of their presentation. The first question we start with is, ‘Tell us something about your business that we didn’t learn. What are you trying to accomplish and what would you want out of working with us?’” she said. “If they start droning all over the place and just talk for an hour, I might still not know what they’re doing.”
The executive summary shouldn’t take any more than 5 minutes for someone with a great idea.
If you have a complicated business, you can start the meeting by saying—as Nashif suggests—“‘It’s a really complicated business, so I’m going to tell you what we’re trying to accomplish at a high level.’ Then you can get into the specifics around the business model or the product.”

“You need to think about how are you drawing that person in and having them be part of the conversation versus just talking and talking without making a point.”
And this is something Nashif knows about from firsthand experience: “I had a meeting to see if a top executive at one of Chicago’s health insurance companies would invest $3 million. I kept thinking about how I could give them digestible information. As I was building and continuing to communicate, I was validating that he was still interested in what I was saying and that I was meeting his needs.”
Midway through the conversation, Nashif stopped and asked, “Do you feel comfortable with the information that I’m providing? Do you feel that you have enough information to take this forward for approval to the broader executive team?”
The executive responded, “I’m understanding your business model.”
Nashif replied, “You didn’t answer my question. I asked if you were comfortable with the information I was giving you.”
It might seem bold, but you need to persistently ensure that your audience is with you throughout your pitch. Without verbal or implied signs that an investor is tracking what you’re saying, you can’t know if you’re ever going to come to an agreement. As Nashif says, “You can’t adjust if you don’t check in.”
Long story, short. The best ideas are explained simply.
Can you summarize your big idea in a few sentences?
• Practice pitching your company’s new project, goal, or mission to family members in just 5 minutes. Ask for honest feedback. Did they understand what you said?
• How can you use the BRIEF method to find clarity?