Overall Mr. Houck gets his point across in this memo that education is very much necessary for managers at the factory. He makes some good points and gives good examples. The way that he conveys this information could be more tactful though. At times in his memo he almost sounds like he is speaking too highly of himself because he is educated. This might be offensive anyone who does not have a college education. The memo might also come across saying that the business will not be successful because its managers do not have a college education. Scott knows that Ms.
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Stroh is against a company education program already, so he has to persuade her that it is necessity to stay competitive and increase efficiency in the work place. In the second paragraph of his memo he said that before he went to college, he thought that it only took commonsense to run a business. This could be offensive to Ms. Stroh, who has spent the last 30 years running the company. He then goes on to say that “many decisions are commonsense, but decisions often only appear to be simple because the entire scope of the problem… is not well understood. Using this wording makes it sound like Scott is saying that any manager who is not college educated is incapable of making good decisions.
Ms. Stroh may see this as an insult to her due to the fact she has been running the company without the education he is uplifting so much. Another issue with Mr. Houck’s style of writing is his use of all capital letter words. “In the past, EVERY company…” or “what our managers DON’T know CAN hurt us. ” The emphasis, especially in the second example, can be seen as an insult to Ms. Stroh.
It is saying that her unwillingness to hire uneducated managers is hurting the business. While this may or may not be true, it would be better not to place the extra emphasis on these words by using capital letters, making it seem like that it is the main problem with the company. He should have used all lower case letters and had a better choice in words. For example, instead of saying “what our managers DON’T know CAN hurt us,” he could have said something along the lines of “further knowledge and education of our managers can help us be more successful and prosperous. There should not be any capital letters, negative statements, and any statements directly pointed at the reader in an offensive way. In defense of Scott Houck, he had a good point about needing more productive knowledge and keeping up with the competitors of the company. Even though he was a bit offensive to those without college, further education to the managers would help the company generously.
Knowledge on how to be more productive, successful, and prosperous could take the company further than it already is. For example, Scott mentions he had trouble with keeping up with supplies before he went to college. He said he would order different amounts each time, and sometimes it wasn’t enough and they would have to shut down the line. After attending college and learning the forecasting model, keeping up with supplies would be a lot simpler by establishing a reorder point and reorder quantity.
His points were valid and his recommendations were in the best interests of the company. His only problem is that he did not write very well for his audience (Ms. Stroh). He may have even accidentally offended Ms. Stroh, making her defensive and less receptive to his recommendations. All in all he made very good points for further educating the managers at the business, but his writing was probably not a good choice for an audience that is against what he is trying to get implemented.
