On August 3, 2016, Samsung announced the Galaxy Note 7 to great fanfare (Samsung, 2016). This was Samsung’s most advanced handheld device ever, designed to compete with the iPhone in the white-hot smartphone market. The Note 7 went on sale in mid-August. Immediately, reports began surfacing of the phones catching on fire. By mid-September, the Note 7 was recalled. Production stopped entirely in mid-October—barely two months after its launch. The failed Note 7 cost Samsung more than $14.3 billion in direct investment, not to mention severe damage to the company’s reputation.
How could a world-class company release a flagship product that overheated and caught fire? Two words: insufficient research. The phone’s designers specified a battery that was too big for the phone’s limited cooling capacity. (In fairness to Samsung, the battery’s third-party manufacturer also had quality control issues.)
Disastrous business decisions often begin with seemingly reasonable assumptions: consumers want smartphones with longer battery life, and larger batteries last longer. Careful managers, however, demand evidence. Before making decisions, you need facts—credible, representative data. Here’s how to get it.
As discussed in Chapter 10.5, many forms of evidence are used in business writing and presentations.
Evidence can come from primary or secondary research. The strongest arguments are based on both. Primary Research is when you conduct a survey, compile sales reports, or perform an experiment. You’re creating new information. Secondary Research is when you consult an analyst’s report, search through scholarly or news articles, or pull data from a government website. You’re accessing information that already exists. Seeing what’s already been discovered can save you time and money.
Secondary Sources
Secondary research can take you many places, but you’ll usually start with an internet search. In addition to the open web, use specialized search engines to dig deeper. Industry associations may publish the information you want. Check their websites and be willing to send emails and make phone calls. Government sources are usually free but can be difficult to navigate. News sources are often available online. If not, try your library for access. To get the best of both worlds, search scholarly articles to lay a solid foundation and then pull in specific details about the current case from news sources.
Scholarly Journals:
“Scholarly” is shorthand for “produced by well-trained, careful researchers and reviewed by their field’s experts before being published.” Articles published in top academic journals have survived a rigorous peer review process—time-consuming, yes, but crucial for certifying that the contents are reliable and authoritative.
Examples: Academy of Management Review, Journal of Consumer Psychology, American Economic Journal
Trade and Industry Sources:
Use trade and industry sources to get both current and authoritative insight. Written by and for practicing professionals about issues important to that industry today, they provide you with a model for the industry’s writing style.
Examples: Advertising Age, The Progressive Grocer, SupplyChainBrain.com
Other secondary sources include reports published by industry analysts or think tanks, data published by trade associations or government websites, and official documents like financial statements or court filings. When you’re trying to find information, ask yourself, “Who would be interested in gathering this information, and how can I find out if they make it available?”
News Sources and Magazines:
Use news sources to find the most current information on a topic or to see how popular opinion is trending.
Examples: Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, BusinessInsider.com
A Note on Wikipedia
A Wikipedia search can be a good starting point for gaining a basic understanding of a topic. Well-written entries include references that lead to additional credible sources. However, Wikipedia is derivative by nature, and you can’t evaluate Wikipedia contributors' authority or purpose. Instead of citing Wikipedia, you should use it to look for original sources.
Even if you are writing on a subject you know well, you will usually get additional information from other sources. How you represent others’ ideas, concepts, and words is critical to your credibility and the effectiveness of your document. Let’s say you are reading a section of a document and find a point that relates well to your current writing assignment. How do you represent what you have read in your work? You have several choices.
One choice is simply to reproduce the quote verbatim, or word for word, making sure that you have copied all words and punctuation accurately. While you don't want to quote all the time, there are three good instances to use direct quotations: when providing objective background data and establishing the severity of a problem as seen by experts, when it's necessary to use the same phrasing due to its precision or clarity, or when it is necessary to replicate the exact wording before offering criticism.
Another common strategy is to paraphrase, or rewrite/rephrase the information in your own words. You will relate the main point, but need to take care not to copy the original. You will give credit where credit is due, but your citation/oral citation will be more informal, such as “A Wall Street Journal article dated July 8, 2009, described some of the disagreements among G-8 nations about climate change.” Here are several steps that can help you paraphrase a passage while respecting its original author:
Read the passage out loud, paying attention to the complete thought rather than the individual words.
Explain the concept in your own words to a friend or colleague, out loud, face-to-face.
Write the concept in your own words, and add one or more illustrative examples of the concept that are meaningful to you.
Reread the original passage and see how your version compares with it in terms of grammar, word choice, example, and conveyance of meaning.
If your writing parrots the original passage or merely substitutes synonyms for words in the original, return to step one and start over, remembering that your goal is to express the central concepts, not to “translate” one word into another.
When you are satisfied that your expression of the concept can stand on its own merit, include it in your document and cite the original author as the source of the idea.
Summarizing information is another common way of integrating information into your original work that requires care and attention to detail. To summarize is to reduce a concept, idea, or data set to its most basic point or element. You may have a literature survey to summarize related information in the field under consideration, or a section on background to serve a similar purpose. Suppose you are reporting on a business situation, and it occurs to you that an episode of The Office has a plot that resembles your situation. You may wish to summarize The Office episode in a few sentences before drawing parallels between it and your current situation. This may help readers to remember and understand your report. Regardless of how or where you incorporate a summary within your document, give attention to its original context and retain its essential meaning free of distortion in the new context of your writing.
Because summarizing is an act of reductionism, some of the original richness in detail that surrounds the original will be necessarily lost. Think of a photograph you have taken in the past that featured several people you know. Using a software program that allows you to modify and manipulate the image, draw a box around only one face. Delete the rest of the contents of the photo so only the information in the box remains. Part of the photo is intact, and one person has become the focal point for the image, but the context has been lost. In the same way, if you focus on one statistic, one quote, or one idea and fail to capture its background, you will take the information out of context. Context is one of the eight components of communication; without it, the process breaks down. While you cannot retain all the definition and detail of the original context in a brief summary, the effort to represent the essential point within its context is essential, or you risk distortion of the original meaning.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is neither paraphrasing nor summarizing information from other works. Plagiarism is representing another’s work as your own. Professional standards, which are upheld in all fields from architecture to banking to zoology, all involve the elements of authenticity and credibility. Credit is given where credit is due, authorities in the field are appropriately cited or referenced, and original writing is expected to be exactly that. Patch writing, or the verbatim cut-and-paste insertion of fragments, snippets, or small sections of other publications into your own writing without crediting the sources, is plagiarism. Wholesale copying of other works is also plagiarism. Both destroy your professional credibility and fail to uphold common professional standards. There is no shame in quoting someone else’s work while giving credit, nor in paraphrasing a point correctly or summarizing the research results of a study you did not perform, but there are significant consequences to representing other’s ideas as your own.
Oral Citations
In order to build credibility and let your audience know where your source material has come from, it's important to orally cite. Oral citations are important, even if you also share the source on a visual aid (i.e. slide). An oral citation should include the following information:
Author/Sponsoring Organization: Name of author (with description) or sponsoring organization (if the author is not listed)
Source Name/Source Type: Name of Source. Include source type if not widely known or part of the name. (i.e. Book, Video, Newspaper, Magazine, etc.)
Date Tag: examples include Published, Uploaded, Last Updated, Copyrighted, Last Accessed
Date: Month, Day, and Year of the publication
Example: "According to Joan Doe, in an article in The Journal of Change Management, published in January 2024..."
Attributions:
Content for this section was adapted (with additions) from
Management Communication Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Thomas, Julie Haupt, and Andy Spackman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike and made possible by Management Communications Group, Marriott School Of Business, Brigham Young University.
Content for the ''Using Your Source Material' section was adapted from the following:
Business Communication for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
References:
Lee, S. (2021, May 14). Citing Sources Orally (OER video) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xj4nT8ljf4
Samsung. (2016, August 3). Samsung unveils the new Galaxy Note7 – the intelligent smartphone that thinks big. Samsung Newsroom. https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-unveils-the-new-galaxy-note7-the-intelligent-smartphone-that-thinks-big