The same bad email landed in two inboxes. Told by Abdalla Kablan and Tariq Elmeri (EP 121).
A long, padded, ego-led pitch email arrived in Tariq's inbox. Around the same time, a near-identical version of the same email arrived in Abdalla's. The two had not coordinated on the observation. When they compared notes, the overlap was complete: same shape, same length, same opening, same failure mode.
The failures sat in a small number of patterns. The opening line was about the sender, not the recipient. The ask was buried at the bottom of the email, after several paragraphs of context that the recipient had not asked for. The tone confused warmth with substance. The closing requested time in a way that pushed the cost of clarification back onto the recipient.
Against this, Abdalla offered the working email style of a UK law firm he has dealt with for years. The firm's emails read, on first contact, as borderline rude. They are three to four lines long. They state the ask in the first sentence. They contain no apology for taking up the recipient's time, no preamble, no rapport-building. They accomplish, in three lines, what the padded pitch failed to accomplish in three paragraphs.
The episode's argument is that the law-firm style is not rude. It is respectful in a different and harder-to-recognise way: it assumes the recipient is busy, makes the decision easy, and removes the obligation to read past the ask.
The episode produced a working list. State the ask in the first line. Eliminate every word that does not serve the ask. Make the response a single decision rather than a chain of them. Never confuse warmth with effectiveness.
The episode treats email — boring, low-status, ubiquitous — as one of the highest-leverage skills in a knowledge career. Most Libyan and regional professionals, in Abdalla's experience, default to over-warmth and pre-amble and consequently lose decisions to people whose emails are shorter. The shared bad pitch is the worked example of the failure pattern, and the UK law firm is the worked example of the alternative.
See: Abdalla Kablan