What Lecturing Taught Me About Explaining a Business

I have lectured formally at universities in management, international business and business projects. It is the most useful training in communication I have ever had, and it is useful for one reason that has nothing to do with teaching: students ask what things mean.

In professional life, almost nobody does. A room of experienced people will let an unclear sentence pass rather than admit they did not follow it. Students have no such incentive. They will put a hand up and ask you to say it again in plain words, and there is nowhere to go.

Jargon is usually unfinished thinking

The first thing lecturing exposes is how much professional language is doing concealment rather than compression.

Real technical vocabulary is compression — one word standing in for a precise idea both parties already share. It saves time. But a great deal of business language is the opposite: a phrase deployed at the exact point where the thinking has not been completed, because a vague phrase sounds more confident than an honest pause.

You cannot tell which is which while you are speaking to peers. You find out immediately in front of students, because the request to explain lands precisely on the sentences that were covering for you. It is not comfortable and it is extraordinarily efficient.

If you cannot explain the constraint, you do not understand it

Most business ideas are easy to describe in their ideal form and hard to describe honestly. The difference is the constraint — the reason it is not already being done, the cost that makes it awkward, the thing that has to be given up.

Students go straight there. They will ask why a company would not simply do the obvious thing, and if your answer is a shrug dressed as strategy, they will notice. Answering that question properly forces you to know where the difficulty actually lives.

I now use this deliberately. When I cannot explain to a non-specialist why something is hard, I take it as evidence that I have not understood the situation rather than that they lack context.

Structure is a courtesy

Lecturing teaches you that attention is finite and that you are responsible for spending it well. An hour is an hour. If you spend twenty minutes on preamble, you have taken twenty minutes from someone.

So you learn to state the point first and defend it afterwards, to signal where you are, and to stop when the idea is delivered rather than when the time is filled. Every one of those habits transfers directly to a proposal, an email, a board update or a difficult conversation with a member of staff.

The mirror image is worth saying too. Poor structure is not usually a lack of skill. It is a lack of preparation being passed to the listener to absorb — which is why disorganised communication feels subtly discourteous even when the content is good.

The question you cannot prepare for

The genuinely instructive moments were never the prepared material. They were the question from the back that reframed the whole topic in a way I had not considered.

There are two ways to handle that, and only one of them works. You can defend the position you arrived with, which protects your authority for about four minutes and costs you the room. Or you can say that is a good point, I had not thought about it that way, let me think — which momentarily makes you look less certain and permanently makes you worth listening to.

I got that wrong for a while before I got it right. Being visibly willing to be corrected is the single most persuasive thing a person in front of a room can do, and it works identically in a boardroom.

What it changed about how I write

Everything I write now is tested against an imagined hand going up. Would somebody ask what that means. Is that sentence carrying an idea or covering a gap. Have I stated the constraint or only the ambition.

It has made my writing plainer and, I think, more confident rather than less. There is a widespread belief that complexity signals expertise. In my experience the opposite reads as authority: someone who can say a difficult thing simply has usually been closer to it.

It also made me quicker to notice when other people are doing it. A page of business language with no verbs, no constraints and no cost mentioned anywhere is a page where somebody has not decided yet — the written equivalent of advice with no cost attached. That is not a character judgement — I have written those pages. It is simply a reliable signal, and once you can see it you cannot unsee it.

Why I would recommend it to any founder

You do not need a university post. Explain your business to somebody with no context and no reason to be polite — a friend outside your industry, a student, anyone who will ask the naive question and wait for a real answer.

You will discover within ten minutes which parts of your business you actually understand and which parts you have only ever described. In my experience that gap is always larger than expected, and finding it in a kitchen is considerably cheaper than finding it in front of an investor.

Teaching the same thing twice is where you learn it

The first time you explain something, you are reciting your own understanding. The second time, to a different group who ask different questions, you find out where that understanding was thin.

This is why lecturing improved my grasp of subjects I already believed I knew well. Repetition with variation exposes the joints. A topic I could deliver fluently in one session would collapse in the next because somebody approached it from an angle my explanation had quietly been avoiding.

The same is true of a business. Explain your model to five different audiences — a customer, a banker, a potential partner, a member of staff, someone with no context at all — and the version that holds up in all five is the one that is actually true. The others were narratives shaped for a particular listener, and every founder has several of those without realising it.

Preparing to be interrupted

A lecture is not a speech. It is a structure you have built knowing it will be interrupted, and preparing for interruption is a different discipline from preparing to talk.

A speech has one path. Break it in the middle and the speaker is lost, because the argument was carried by sequence rather than by understanding. A lecture has to survive being entered at any point, from any angle, by someone who has not followed the previous ten minutes.

That forces a particular kind of preparation: knowing which points are load-bearing and which are illustration, so you can abandon the illustrations without losing the argument. It turns out to be exactly the skill required in a meeting that goes somewhere you did not plan — which is most meetings worth having.

I now prepare everything this way. Three things that must be understood, in any order, plus whatever supports them. If the conversation only allows one, I know which one.

Explaining to someone who has no reason to care

Not every student is interested, and there is no mechanism to make them be. That is a useful correction for anyone who spends their working life among people already invested in the subject.

In business you are almost always explaining to someone who has a reason to listen — a customer, a partner, a colleague. It is easy to mistake their attention for the quality of your explanation. A room where half the people would rather be elsewhere removes that comfort entirely.

What earns attention there is not enthusiasm and not authority. It is being useful quickly: making the first three minutes worth the time, and being honest about what the subject is not going to give them. Overselling loses a sceptical room permanently within about ninety seconds.

That translates directly. Every proposal I write now opens with what the reader gets and what it does not cover, because the fastest way to lose someone is to make them wait to find out whether this concerns them at all.