If there is one most irksome encumbrance to promoting urgency in the workplace, it is the person who takes a half-hour of rambling discourse to say what could be said in one sentence of 20 words. There is a curious and widespread tendency to surround the answer to a simple question with so many preliminaries and commentaries that answer itself can hardly be discerned. It is so difficult to get a direct answer out of some people that their usefulness is thereby greatly diminished. The tendency is to explain the answer before answering the question. To be sure, very few questions endure simple answers without qualifications, but the important thing is to state the essence of the matter as succinctly as possible first. On the other hand, there are times when it is important to add the pertinent background or other relevant facts to illuminate a simple statement. The trick is to convey the maximum of significant information in the minimum time, a valuable asset to anyone.