In the current issue of Harvard Business Review, David Collis and Michael Rukstad offer up a most interesting challenge to senior corporate leaders. In their article, Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?, they ask a simple yet provocative question.

Specifically, they ask if you can state what your company’s strategy is is 35 words or less? From their experience as management consultants and educators, they suggest that the succinct understanding of strategy (even among companies’ top leaders) is a rare commodity.

Enter Twitter

For all of the hand washing and whining that Baby Boomers engage in with respect to social networking, social media, and new frontiers of granular communication that connect people today–as if it will someday go away and we will all go back to the neo-lithic days of email–a new pragmatism has washed over the way we communicate. Just follow any twitter stream for a couple of hours and you can see that, along with a lot of dribble, real conversations take place all the time. And they occur in 140 characters or less.

There is something to this. Being able to communicate in few words is an emergent art, one that traditional corporates (as well as a lot of wide-eyed young entrepreneurs) have yet to figure out.

We aim to be the premier provider of turnkey services for the plastics reconfiguration industry with an aim to consolidate disparate markets in the global plastics industry is a socially responsible way so that we can integrate the supply chain environment over the short term and the long term to the advantage of both our company and the industry as a whole in a way that respects employees, communities, emerging markets, shareholders…

Please! Somebody bring the stapler so I can shoot some staples into my forehead.

Give me your entire fucking strategy in 140 characters or get off the pot!

No, really! Can you state your entire corporate strategy in 140 characters?

You might want to start practicing, because this is the way your (ex) employees now communicate.

The Butcher