Martin Lukes, now a convicted criminal, was challenged by the English language but managed to become CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. His collaborator, Lucy Kellaway, is apparently very language proficient but remains a journalist with the FT.

Let’s be very clear here about causality: was it because Lukes was a male, and destined to be successfully convicted or because Kellaway was female (and destined to fail)?

On the other hand, I have worked with a Managing Director who is not dyslexic but has appalling spelling. This is aggravated when he flies into one of his many rages and fails to read the email he is sending out before he hits the ’send’ button. Known behind his back as “The Keyboard Warrior” he also uses email as a political weapon, copying in other directors as a form of intimidation. Unlike my two dyslexic colleagues, he is not admired, being a bully and pretty incompetent at his job. In this case his poor spelling is a constant amusement to his colleagues and none of his customers nor suppliers like him anyway.

So even clients can see beyond the spelling to the person beyond.

I always thought MBA programs were no more than how to chat your way into and through a contract negotiation with little brief overviews of varying aspects of the business environment paradigms of current.

At any rate, it could be that this person is a non-english as first language speaker or has trouble with train of thought thinking and slow fingers getting it composed properly or it could be the underlying discipline and training? In other words, what are the credentials under the MBA? Did that course work require massive amounts of writing or not? Did his MBA program require writing projects?

There are too many unknowns to correctly assess the proper course to take given the descriptive above.

P.S. A review of any number of online blogs points out that there are thousands of us folks online whose writing skills are not deemed to be up to par whether native english speakers or not.

The real issue is that we as the circle of people who are able to use English correctly (or the particular official language in other countries) hold a membership card for the trade union of “broadly educated people”. That trade union operates (unconsciously) as a mafia which controls everthing and we members get annoyed when we see non-members doing jobs other than cleaning the floor. We should get annoyed too, considering that our children will one day be card holders regardless of their actual level of educational achievement and will need to have good jobs reserved and waiting, and not open to just literally everyone who has the particular (say) technical expertise as if we lived in some kind of bizarre nightmare meritocracy.

Your clients are likely to be members in most cases so these emails will certainly annoy them. The extent to which this is a problem will depend on your firm. If you have genuinely innovative ideas then it’s less of a problem. If you are mostly hand-holding and collating the wisdom of others (nothing to be ashamed of as it probably provides more value to your clients than coming up with new things) then it’s a bigger problem because you can be more easily replaced. If the CEO has made it as a consultant already despite the presentational problem then presumably he has unique skills.

Also I note that you are 62, which means that you studied primary school English at a time when linguists and teachers wanted it to be more like Latin. I would be interested to know if these grammar mistakes are so called “common mistakes” meaning areas where there is simply no agreement on what is correct.
An example:
“He is taller than I.” - thought by some people to be correct on the grounds that “I” is the subject of the (implied) verb and should be in the nominative case as in Latin.
“He is taller than me.” - thought by some people to be correct on the grounds that from analysis of how English is used, pronouns appear to have a disjunctive form to be used when the pronoun is not directly in front of an explicitly stated verb (as in French when “moi” should be used according to French linguists and French people in general).

Our language, unlike French, is democratic so nobody (except English people in general) has the authority to judge who is right in the above dispute (although many claim to have such authority or to have been informed by someone who has). From your age I’m going to stereotype you and guess that you think only the first example is ok. Many of your clients might disagree especially if they are younger, so they might not think your CEO has bad grammar at all.

It’s worth mentioning that the above does not excuse everything - for example mistakes which are only common in specific regions such as London (double negatives), North-West (use of past participle instead of past tense) North-East (the reverse) and so on because we could say that English people in general have judged these things not to be ok. The question is which kind of mistakes is your CEO making?

By the way I wouldn’t expect a survey to turn up much useful because clients won’t perceive the quality of English in the emails to be a problem for them (and would anyway be embarrassed to mention it). That doesn’t mean it doesn’t look unprofessional though.