When Julie T Katzman, a former investment banker, joined the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in March this year, she embarked on a sharp learning curve. However, the most difficult phenomenon she encountered was not one she had expected – getting through the reading material: “I literally couldn’t understand what the sentences said,” she recalls. “Things were extremely inaccessible. They were so dense with jargon that they were impossible to understand.”
Since then Ms Katzman, who heads the IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), has pushed her staff to produce documents in plainer English thatcan be understood by people outside the institution. However, aside from the impenetrable literature, the contrasts between her new job and her previous work in the private sector were not as pronounced as she had anticipated.
