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The Communication Revolution You've Been Waiting For
In a world drowning in words, a new approach has emerged that's changing how we communicate. Every day, we're bombarded with more information than ever before - spending just 26 seconds reading content, checking our phones 344 times daily, and taking over 20 minutes to refocus after each distraction. The result? A fog of words where one-third of emails go unread, most news goes unseen, and attention spans continue to shrink.
Enter Smart Brevity - the revolutionary communication method developed by Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz. This approach has transformed how major organizations like the NFL, Roku, BP, and even the CIA communicate. It's not just about being brief; it's about being intelligently concise while maintaining depth and impact.
The book has become required reading for executives at companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Goldman Sachs. Even the Pope has embraced its principles, advising priests to cut homilies from 40 to 10 minutes! What makes Smart Brevity so powerful is its recognition of how people actually consume information today, not how we wish they would. By adapting to modern attention patterns, it offers a pathway to break through the noise and ensure your most important ideas are heard.
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Breaking Through the Noise: The Core of Smart Brevity
Smart Brevity isn't about writing short for the sake of brevity - it's about being direct, useful, and respectful of your reader's time without sacrificing substance. "Short, not shallow" is the mantra. The approach recognizes a fundamental truth: most people will scan or skip what you communicate, so make every word count.
The architecture of Smart Brevity consists of four essential components. First, a muscular "provocation" of six or fewer strong words to divert attention from competing distractions. Second, a powerful opening sentence or "lede" that's memorable, direct, and sharp. Third, context explaining "Why it matters" to provide relevance. Finally, the option to "Go deeper" for those who want more information.
This framework was inspired by David Rogers, a Wall Street Journal star and mentor to Jim VandeHei. Rogers' direct, punchy style - ruthlessly editing meandering text - helped shape the Smart Brevity approach now transforming communication at innovative organizations worldwide.
The beauty of Smart Brevity lies in its flexibility. These are guardrails, not rigid rules. The gold standard is always what's best for your audience - the clearest, most efficient structure for a reader whose attention is being pulled in a thousand directions. Think of it as musical theory: it provides logic and elegance, but that architecture leaves room for... jazz.
When the CIA faced challenges communicating critical intelligence to President Trump, they turned to these principles. Philip Dufresne, a former writer of the President's Daily Brief, transformed vague, bureaucratic CIA memos into clear, actionable intelligence: "WARNING: Taliban militants have been quiet, but our sources detect movement suggesting imminent violence. WHY IT MATTERS: American citizens should be vigilant, and the Afghan army should be ready to fight. Threat level: rising."
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The Journey to Smart Brevity
The creators of Smart Brevity didn't always practice what they preach. As journalists at Politico, they initially measured their self-worth by word count. The web delivered a humbling revelation: almost nobody read their articles in full. Data showed that 80% abandoned after the first page.
This insight led to the creation of Politico Pro, a subscription news service charging thousands of dollars. Surprisingly, only 5% of these demanding customers valued long stories. This was their epiphany: even the most sophisticated readers wanted fewer words.
They left Politico and launched Axios in 2017 with a mission to make information clean and efficient. They committed to not wasting people's time, telling them what's new, why it matters, and empowering them to go deeper if desired. Smart Brevity was born.
Nicholas Johnston, who had run Bloomberg's First Word service providing brief, dense news for Wall Street traders and Washington insiders, joined as their brevity evangelist. His directive was clear: "I don't care what the fifth word is, as long as the first four are 'Reid won't seek reelection.'" He scrawled mantras like "Have the courage to take your hands off the keyboard" and "Blocks of text sadden the eye" on their office walls.
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Audience First: The Secret to Effective Communication
The two most important words in the Smart Brevity manifesto are: audience first. When you think about serving your audience rather than your ego, you naturally reduce waste. We tend to think too much about what we want to say versus what others need to hear.
Start any communication by visualizing your specific audience. If you try to speak to everyone, you generally reach no one. Pointing to the specific person you want to reach clarifies everything enormously.
This principle was driven home for the authors during a bitter secret battle to leave Politico. As owner Robert Allbritton made their lives miserable, they were tempted to strike back. While reflecting in church, Jim heard Pastor David Glade speak about doing the right thing amid chaos. The pastor offered nine simple words that guided them: "All you can do is the next right thing." This direct, straightforward phrase exemplifies the most important lesson of modern communications: brief, smart, and direct persists.
Lisa Ross, CEO of Edelman, pleads with everyone: say what you mean, sincerely and briefly. "We hide our insecurity with extra words," she explains. Ross observes how direct messages get complicated when lawyers and communications specialists intervene, transforming something simple like "We'll return to work when people feel safe" into corporate jargon. Her advice: "People want direct, clear, and honest communication. If you try to trick me, I'm out." Ross concludes that COVID taught us that "my time is everything" and we must be efficient because "if you don't engage me, I will disconnect."
To communicate effectively: (1) Focus on ONE person you're addressing. (2) Define ONE thing you want them to remember. (3) Write like a human, for humans - be simple and conversational. (4) Write that essential thing you want them to remember first, shortening it to fewer than twelve words. (5) Then stop. When we don't know what we want to say or don't understand what we're writing about, we cover it up by saying too much - this kills effective communication.
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The Art of Being Noticed: Capturing Attention
University of Maryland professor Ronald Yaros reveals that most readers only scan content, spending just 26 seconds on a story. In this state of "continuous partial attention," as Linda Stone calls it, readers constantly think about the next notification even while looking at your words. The main "ejectors" that lose readers are: too much text, excessive jargon, too many choices, and long videos.
Venture capitalist Chris Sacca, with 1.6 million followers, advises: "Write your email and then make the first two or three sentences say everything else." The key is being direct, eliminating unnecessary information, and respecting the reader's time by focusing on essential points and eliminating everything superfluous.
Your most important words are subject lines, headlines, and first lines. The brain is programmed to make quick decisions: read or ignore, remember or forget. The dopamine rush of a great idea buys you a few more seconds of attention, while each subsequent word is a battle to maintain it.
The Axios team discovered that approximately 6 words is the optimal length for email subject lines, short enough to display completely on mobile devices. Eddie Berenbaum, president of Century 21 Redwood Realty, increases his open rates by including recognizable names like Tom Ferry (the "Tony Robbins of real estate") in his subject lines and offers useful content to maintain engagement. The rule is simple: Would you read it if you hadn't written it yourself?
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ONE Big Thing: The Power of Focus
The central message of Smart Brevity is identifying and communicating ONE important thing in ONE strong sentence. Busy people only remember fragments, don't read word for word, and constantly ask themselves: "What is this?" and "Is it worth my time?"
When Cliff Sims, a former Trump White House staffer, struggled to write his memoirs, he was advised to tell his stories orally and record them, which resulted in the successful book "Team of Vipers." Valuable advice for communicators: after an interview or event, call someone and tell them what happened - that first spontaneous explanation should be your opening sentence.
To effectively communicate your ONE big thing:
• Summarize your most important point, considering your target audience
• Skip anecdotes, jokes, or boasting
• Respect the one-sentence limit
• Don't literally repeat the joke
• Eliminate adverbs, weak words, and superfluous language
• Ask yourself: if this is the ONLY thing the person sees, is it exactly what you want them to take away?
As Jim bluntly puts it: "Nobody gives a shit if nobody sees it or reads it."
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Why It Matters: Providing Essential Context
An "axiom" - the bold headings like "Why it matters" that appear throughout the book - puts your thoughts in digestible context. Phrases like "By the numbers," "The context," or "What's happening" are clear signals that guide readers who are just glancing. Most people are too busy to understand not only what's important but also why it matters. Become their hero by explaining it clearly and illuminatingly.
The difference between weak framing and strong axioms is crucial:
"This is what's important to know" vs. "Why it matters"
"A trend we've been observing" vs. "The big picture"
"Let's look at the data" vs. "By the numbers"
"In conclusion" vs. "The bottom line"
"Why it matters" is the most effective axiom. People are busy and crave context even if they don't express it. After the axiom, explain in one or two sentences why the information is relevant: What will change? What does it signal? What's the broader context? The sentences should be direct and not redundant with your opening sentence. They should add perspective.
Read all three parts together: title, first sentence, and axiom. If this is all someone learns, does it convey the essentials in a direct and understandable way?
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Go Deeper: Maintaining Engagement
Smart Brevity packages essential information in the most digestible and engaging format. To master it, you must offer depth, details, and nuance in a quick and easy-to-read manner after your first axiom. Most people disconnect after a few dozen words, but there are tricks to maintain their attention.
Use axioms as signposts indicating where the text is going. "Go deeper" clearly establishes that you'll provide more data and context. "The big picture" is useful when expanding to give more context.
Use bullets frequently to isolate important facts or ideas. The bullet breaks up text and stands out because of the spacing it imposes. If you want to explain three or more different points, divide them into bullets.
Be bold using boldface to highlight axioms or specific words. It's more detectable than italics and shouts: "Pay attention to this!"
Mix formats by avoiding long paragraphs (maximum two or three sentences) and consecutive blocks. Use boldface, bullets, and axioms to break up the flow.
Simply stop. The biggest flaw is talking too much. Be like a monk in your discipline with words and like a zen master in the joy of saying more with less.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, writes annual letters to shareholders that reach 32,000 words. Although divided into key sections, they're not brief. His staff asked Axios to create a Smart Brevity newsletter to capture the key messages, resulting in a version 30,420 words shorter that linked to the full letter. What Jamie and his team want is for as many people as possible to read and remember their most important points, which requires distillation and hierarchy.
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The Power of Precision: Choosing the Right Words
Mark Twain said that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word... is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning." The same applies to soft versus strong words. You want to strike like lightning, not annoy like insects.
Business writing is terrible. Don't say "price point" if you mean "price." Smart writing is linear: Subject. Verb. Object. You'd never call a banana an "elongated yellow fruit," but in writing, we constantly do.
Mark Smith, a middle school teacher in Virginia, noticed that parents weren't reading his complete emails, missing key points. Inspired by Mike's newsletters, he adopted Smart Brevity, including word count and reading time. Smith puts all his key points in bold, knowing most parents only read those parts. His 13 and 14-year-old students love Smart Brevity, but not for the neurology behind it - simply because "they just want to write as little as possible."
Shorter is always better. A one-syllable word is more powerful than a two-syllable word. Use STRONG words that are vivid, precise, and visualizable, like one-syllable nouns and verbs. Purge WEAK words like "ten-dollar words" that try to make you sound smart but make you look stupid. Avoid confusing words like "could" or "may" that don't inform anything concrete.
Use active verbs that bring action: "The Taliban captured Afghanistan" instead of "The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate." Embrace strong, short phrases like "Jesus wept" - nine letters that capture humanity, humility, and emotion.
Mike attended a workshop with Paula LaRocque, a famous writing coach. She read an evocative passage about a fish and asked what made it stand out. Nobody understood: every word had just one syllable. The power was in the simplicity.
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Smart Brevity in Action: Real-World Applications
The nirvana of brevity is saying something without words. Emojis, once the domain of children and jokes, can now convey emotions, intentions, and even nuances. They're easy to overuse, but when employed with moderation and effectiveness, they're powerful.
Emojis instantly stand out in subject lines, signal tone or theme, and save time by placing the reader in the right mental space. From for attention to for data or for Hollywood references, emojis are digital art that enhances business communication. Axios adopted them to show they took their audience seriously but not themselves, creating familiarity and habit with distinctive emojis in their newsletters.
Mike Allen has written a morning newsletter every day for 15 years - more than 2,500 newsletters with barely 7 days off. This dedication made him the living incubator of Smart Brevity, developing tricks and techniques that can help you master the art of the modern newsletter.
What began as an internal email titled "How we can rock today" sent to his bosses at Politico became the influential Politico Playbook. The initial format combined fresh news, nuggets of exclusive information, and personal touches. As it gained influential subscribers, it spread like wildfire among politicians, until The New York Times described him as "The man the White House wakes up to."
Mike shares three fundamental principles for effective newsletters:
1. You are the chef - Part of what's "smart" about Smart Brevity is selection. By reducing choices for your reader, you increase their appetite for more.
2. Brevity is confidence - When Mike shifted his focus to the reader rather than himself, his word count dropped dramatically.
3. Being selfless is selfishly beneficial - When you see yourself as serving your audience, people notice, reward you, and actually read you.
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Transforming Your Workplace Communication
Smart Brevity is especially effective in the workplace, where it can radically improve your performance and visibility. In today's work revolution, with remote teams and employees demanding transparency and meaning, clear and direct communications are crucial. Most organizations suffer from unread emails, unchecked Slack messages, and overly long memos, creating confusion, especially with dispersed teams.
Geoff Morrell, former communications chief at BP, pioneered implementing Smart Brevity in a large corporation. Inspired by the "BLUF" (Bottom Line Up Front) format he saw at the Pentagon, he created an internal newsletter called "ITK" (In the Know). The success was so overwhelming that Axios trained more than 500 BP communicators worldwide, seeing open rates increase as leaders from all countries became advocates for brevity.
According to an exclusive Gallup survey, 70% of employees want shorter communications at work. Only half of employees read notes from their leaders, while the rest ignore or barely look at what reaches their screens. Improving your emails is the easiest way to win the war for attention in the workplace, especially considering that the avalanche for the average business user has skyrocketed from 50 emails daily in 2005 to 126 in 2019.
For effective emails:
1. Use short, direct, urgent subject lines that invite immediate opening
2. Place the news or question in the first sentence, always
3. Provide the "Why it matters" context to frame supporting data
4. Use bullets to facilitate quick reading of the most important points
5. Highlight key words, figures, or names in bold to create visual traps for scanning readers
6. Include clean, intuitive images to amplify important points
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Mastering Meetings, Presentations, and Public Speaking
You can transform your team's culture and performance by incorporating more intelligence and brevity into shorter meetings. The first step is learning to conduct good meetings, as three out of four people have received no training on how to do so. Meanwhile, 90% of attendees admit to daydreaming and 72% do other work during meetings.
A good meeting is determined before it begins. First, ensure you actually need a meeting. The convener should establish an objective (a direct sentence) and an agenda (three bullets maximum) in a prior email, preferably the night before. Six smart sentences are enough - you don't need Jeff Bezos' six-page memos. Outline the specific decisions or actions that need to be taken.
For presentations, the optimal approach is minimalist: the fewest words, slides, and distractions possible. Everything should amplify your essential points, never repeat or distract attention. As Edward Tufte said about PowerPoint: it's like a drug that claims to make you beautiful but makes you stupid, degrades your communication, and bores your colleagues.
The sweet spot for a great speech is making remarks worthy of the audience's time, with one main point that's memorable and lasting. History's most iconic speeches were brief: the Gettysburg Address had 272 words, JFK's famous inaugural address lasted less than 15 minutes, and John Quincy Adams highlighted only 3 inalienable rights, not 22.
According to expert Nancy Duarte, great speeches follow this structure:
1. Describe the current status quo
2. Contrast with your elevated idea
3. Move between what is and what could be
4. Make a call to action
5. End with a vivid portrait of utopia if they accept your idea
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Leading with Smart Brevity: Organizational Impact
Axios runs their entire company with Smart Brevity, which is fundamental to their management and culture, and a primary reason they win awards for having an inclusive and happy workplace. With over 500 people in a hyper-ambitious and transparent culture, all employees own stock, and leadership answers any question except individual salaries and exit reasons.
They allow anonymous questions that are read verbatim at weekly meetings. This clear, transparent communication eliminates gossip and confusion. In a world where we're all communicators but find it difficult to be heard, clear communication becomes crucial. Remote work makes rapid communications more urgent, while 30% of project failures are due to poor communications.
Axios executives regularly publish internal newsletters with creative names like "Lights," "Cranes," "Click Clack," "The Funnel," and "TopLine." These newsletters share best practices, foster healthy competition between business units, and eliminate silos. For the co-founders, they function as an early warning system to detect activities deviating from objectives.
Matt Burns, a veteran of political and corporate communications, points out a contemporary mystery: consumption habits have evolved, but corporate communication hasn't. As head of communications at several companies, Burns transformed internal communication by implementing newsletters in Smart Brevity format.
To combat the proliferation of ad-hoc emails, he created "The Rundown," a weekly newsletter that appears punctually in employees' inboxes. With a cheerful "It's Friday, GRAILERers!" and a 5-minute read, he achieved open rates close to 90%, compared to less than 33% for traditional emails.
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Inclusive Communication: Reaching Everyone
Inclusive communication is effective communication. Smart Brevity, with its direct and simple approach, naturally helps bridge differences in backgrounds and abilities, eliminating cultural biases and unnecessary complexities. This style makes content more accessible to people with learning disabilities and non-native language speakers.
Inclusive communication means being accessible and credible to all members of your audience, regardless of their gender, race, religion, identity, age, physical ability, or sexual orientation. In a diverse country and a globalized era, these principles are fundamental.
To communicate inclusively, you must recognize your own blind spots and deliberately seek diverse perspectives. As the Axios founders (three white men) point out, there are many life experiences that may be missing from your perspective.
Roy offers three fundamental principles for inclusive communication:
1. Write in simple, clear language: Facilitate understanding for everyone, especially for people with learning disabilities or those who speak English as a second language.
2. Use bullets: Separate important points into clear components, avoiding mixing concepts that might confuse the audience.
3. Make it simple and brief: Complexity confuses, abstraction alienates, and length loses your audience. Short, direct sentences unite people around a common understanding.
Roy, who is dyslexic, recognizes that although Smart Brevity wasn't created specifically for people with learning difficulties, it has proven to be a valuable tool for inclusion.
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Your Smart Brevity Toolkit: Practical Application
Smart Brevity can be quickly learned by following guiding principles and practicing consciously. It's based on four fundamental principles:
Authority: Being a trusted source of information, capable of evaluating what's important and distilling it accurately. This requires becoming an expert or finding one.
Brevity: Respecting readers' time by providing exactly what they need, staying short but not shallow.
Humanity: Communicating with the full range of human emotions, but presenting the message in a familiar and conversational way, writing as you speak.
Clarity: Being frugal with words to create accessible, clear, and scannable content, designing text for maximum impact.
The toolkit offers practical exercises to implement Smart Brevity, including reviewing titles and first sentences to make them clear, specific, and conversational. It provides concrete "before and after" examples demonstrating how to transform verbose communications into concise, effective messages. It also suggests personalizing axioms like "What's next," "The bottom line," or "The big picture" to resonate with your specific audience.
If you've made it this far, you're already ahead of your competitors by recognizing the importance of rethinking your communication. This is your opportunity to put what you've learned into practice by visiting SmartBrevity.com, where you can upload something you've written to receive an instant score and helpful feedback.
Hundreds of companies, nonprofits, and government offices use Axios HQ as an advanced version of Smart Brevity. The platform offers specific templates for different types of communications, automated scoring through AI, real-time writing guidance, collaboration tools, engagement analytics, and creation of an institutional knowledge library. All this allows users to communicate more effectively and be heard again.
