(FORTUNE Magazine) – The hottest and highest-stakes CEO succession race of the decade--and maybe of the century, no exaggeration--is the race to follow Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric, so I grab any chance I get to shed the least bit of light on it. Historically, the only match for it is probably the race Welch himself won almost 20 years ago to succeed Reg Jones. Back then GE had a market cap of just $3 billion--it seemed huge at the time--and was almost universally regarded as a proxy for the U.S. economy, unable to grow much faster. Welch blew up that perception and grew the market cap to $350 billion, a stunning record of wealth creation.

Now some poor S.O.B. has to follow this act, and interest in who that will be is understandably intense. Conventional wisdom says GE has the deepest bench in the business world (probably true), and the years-long succession process that Welch and the board have been engaged in is focused on developing and choosing the very best from a multitude of hotshots. And I think the conventional wisdom is right.

But I have to tell you, I was talking recently with the CEO of an extremely large global industrial company (in circumstances that prohibit me from naming him). Like many companies, it competes with GE in certain businesses and takes a deep interest in the Welch succession drama. I asked this CEO who Welch's successor would be, and he told me, with a straight face, he thought there was a good chance Welch would choose an outsider.

That was the craziest thing I'd ever heard, but it was the second time this CEO had said it; I'd asked him the same question last year. He doesn't care that Welch has said he'll choose an insider; he thinks, I'm unsure why, that Welch is not satisfied with any of the internal candidates. Conventional wisdom also says Welch will announce his successor next June or so, about six months before retiring at the end of next year. But this CEO thinks he'll wait until September. Why? A sort of final surprise, says this CEO. Running the world's greatest business talent mill for 20 years and then naming an outsider to succeed him would be Welch's most dramatic unconventional act in a career built on unconventional ideas.

As I say, this is total insanity. I wouldn't even mention it--if it weren't for who said it. Which I can't tell you. But all things considered, I couldn't not let you know.

Among all that's been written in praise of the late David Ogilvy (including here in FORTUNE), I've seen virtually nothing about his advice on writing. That is to overlook something important. Employers today consistently complain that employees are appallingly poor writers of the simple, clear prose that businesses run on. Ogilvy can help.

The man was one of the century's great geniuses at producing short, powerful, persuasive prose, and he was happy to tell how he did it. See his book Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963); it's out of print, but used copies are available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, and there's always the library. From the first word of its title to the last chapter of its brief text ("Should Advertising Be Abolished?"), it exemplifies what it also explains, which is how to seize and hold a reader's attention while saying what you want. If you can't be bothered to read the whole thing, which wouldn't take long, just read Chapter 6, "How to Write Potent Copy." He intended it for advertising writers, but no matter what your business or your position, potent copy is what you're trying to write.