This is just a quick note.  I plan to say more later.  Call this the first of my “business observations” from the 2012 elections debrief.  These won’t be about politics.  They will be about what works, what to focus on in this new day and age, this era of the new normal.

Lesson #1 – as you build all those new skills, do not skip the old skills.  Learn to write well!

If you can create algorithms, and understand numbers, that is a very, very good and in-demand skill in this new age.  The name on everyone’s lips is Nate Silver (of 538.com).  Yes, he is a geek, a nerd, a numbers guy.  But he happens to have also mastered one of the old skills.  He knows how to write.

From Felix Salmon:

Silver is the most visible of the quants, partly because of his perch at the NYT, partly because he has a new book out, and partly because he’s very good at taking his complex mathematical model and turning it into bite-sized English-language blog posts. If you think that the value of Nate Silver is in the model, you’re missing the most important part: there are lots of people with models, and most of those models are pretty similar to each other. The thing which sets Silver apart from the rest is that he can write: he can take a model and turn it into a narrative, walking his readers through to his conclusions.  (emphasis added).

No matter how brilliant your insight, if you can’t tell it in simple terms to a less-than-initiated person in your area of expertise, you will always speak to a very small audience.  So, as you focus on those math skills, don’t forget what you learned in English and Speech classes.

Nate Silver is a math guy, a numbers guy.  But, just as important!, he is a literate and clear writer.  And without that skill, his numbers would be pretty much lost on a fairly small group of experts.