Academic to Business Communications: Making the Jump
TL;DR What academics and business people want from communications is not the same.
Members of the business and academic worlds migrate, meet, and mingle all the time. Think: the VP of marketing with 20 years of experience in CPG (consumer packaged goods) who becomes a clinical professor of marketing. Or, the PhD molecular biologist who starts a life science tech company developing molecules that will eventually lead to a new medication.
The trouble starts when each tries to use the language and structures of their home discipline to communicate with the other side.
In academic writing, you offer a hypothesis, present all the facts in an objective manner, and then offer a conclusion. The objective is to get your thinking in front of other academics (people thinking about the same topic) who will then consider all of your facts and then either validate or challenge your hypothesis/conclusion. The goal is to demonstrate your knowledge while improving the quality of the collective knowledge and thinking on a selected topic.
In business writing, you offer a thesis about a business problem and provide a prescription for how to solve it that is supported by examples (case studies, etc.), followed by a call to action. So, rather than providing people with all the facts and inviting them to reach their own conclusions, you use your expertise to offer a point of view on specific pain points and then offer a very clear success path to solving them. The goal is to establish yourself as an expert so that when a business leader sees your article (or even better, reads your book) they say, “Huh, this person sounds like they could help, let’s get them on the phone.”
If you’re an executive who is going after your doctorate in a discipline, e.g. marketing, your challenge is going to be in presenting all the facts objectively because you have been programmed from your first job to sell everything, including your ideas.
If you are an academic who is consulting to the business world, you have the opposite problem in that you have to become comfortable claiming a clear opinion about what should be done to solve the client’s pain point and then make a strong case for that approach in your communications (writing and speaking). Your biggest challenge, however, will be reminding yourself that the completeness academia prizes is actually the enemy of the clear and prescriptive communications your clients need from you.
If you’re a business person struggling with academic writing, you need an editor who specializes in that type of writing and who can help you learn to communicate in this specific way. If you’re done with your doctoral studies, for example, and are ABD (all but dissertation) there are coaches who specialize in getting you over that mountain.
If you’re an academic who wants to write a business book, you are looking for a developmental editor who has the ability and desire to read through and convert (with your help) the academic concepts into laser-focused, lean prose that can be easily consumed by your already information-overloaded clients. You also want someone who is obviously energized by this work, (i.e., has done at least one of these books before and is coming back for more!)
In both cases, you would do well to seek and editor who also can serve as a thought partner. In addition to making you sound like the best version of yourself, the editor/though partner will also serve as a reader advocate and original beta reader. An editor/thought partner also can help you identify where ideas need to be baked out more (or don’t work) and in that way will make the end product so much better and the process a lot more energizing and dare I say even fun.
Thinking about writing a book? Why not schedule a free 30-minute consultation so that I can learn more about your project and see how I might help.