Our content-making spirit
As we work on your content, we keep in mind an earlier editor of great work.
At Shorewalker DMS, we work in the spirit of Roger Sessions, the writer and composer who in 1950 took an idea from a smarter man, and made it into a single memorable sentence for the New York Times:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
The smarter man whose idea Sessions distilled was ... Albert Einstein. (Sessions is the bloke sitting next to Einstein in the picture above.)
Difficult ideas can be clearer
Most of us understand instinctively the power of expressing a simple idea clearly. Even if we hate chocolate, we understand what the company behind M&Ms is telling us when it says: "The Chocolate Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands'. We know that some marketing team worked long hours to simplify the claim of its product to just those few words. And we know why the company behind M&Ms paid them a great deal of money to do it.
Yet for some reason, people forget about such things when trying to convince other people to put their faith in some set of complex ideas. They ask people to commit their organisation's money to these ideas – and perhaps its reputation, or even its whole future. Yet they fail to invest to make those ideas as clear as they can be. They deliver their ideas in a verbal and visual soup.
The stakes are high. The investment is often worth it – particularly when rival ideas are often being wrapped up in the same soupy mess.
Making ideas understandable doesn't just "improve your communication"; it transforms those ideas from vague options to obvious ways forward. It transforms their power.
As a side-benefit, it tells your audience that you respect them enought to make your messages as clear and simple as those messages can be. (Because, let's face it, most reports are kind of a drag to read.)
At Shorewalker DMS, we spend most of our time working to make ideas crystal-clear. We can work with you and your team to do that for your ideas
As simple as possible, but not simpler
The story of Roger Sessions and Albert Einstein starts with an Einstein idea. Einstein included it in his 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University, On the Method of Theoretical Physics. It was smart, but not ear-catching: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."
Sessions took that smart but wordy original and turned it into a memorable line for a 1950 New York Times article: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Einstein read it, and adopted it enthusiastically.
Even the ideas of the most brilliant people can become stronger, not weaker, when they are refined for communication.
And that is how Shorewalker DMS aims to work.
You may think that your ideas and offerings are not e=mc². But every venture has ideas and values behind it. In our experience, they're almost always worth making simpler and clearer.
Clarity did, after all, work for Einstein.