Message Not Received. Simon Phil

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СКАЧАТЬ our messages. A multitude of misses (miscommunications, misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and mistakes) would still result. How? From the way in which we overwhelmingly choose to send our messages.

      Yes, I’m talking about the first killer app of the Internet, our widely preferred communications medium: e-mail. Many corporate folks depend almost exclusively on it as a ubiquitous communications tool. They pepper their staff, colleagues, prospects, and clients with torrents of messages. In the process, they actively resist new, user-friendly, affordable, powerful, and truly collaborative tools specifically designed to make people work, collaborate, and communicate better. (Chapter 8 introduces several exciting and progressive organizations that have adopted these new applications.)

      Technology and the Cardinal Importance of Business Communication

      In a way, nothing has changed. Business has always revolved around communication, and some people have always been better than others at writing and speaking. No one expects the squirrelly IT guy to be as debonair as the CEO or the head of sales or marketing. Not everyone can be Dale Carnegie. We expect different things from different people at work. We accept the fact that management consultants, techies, software salespeople, and chief execs may communicate in oblique manners. This holds true irrespective of the medium: writing a quick e-mail, penning a company-wide announcement, addressing thousands of people, or speaking individually to a colleague in person. For a long time now, the inability to communicate effectively has inhibited many organizations and derailed individual careers. We have always taken certain people with 50-pound bags of salt. Ignoring or tuning out blowhards may stop an oncoming migraine, but it’s hardly a good solution to the problem, much less the ideal one.

      In another way, everything has changed. Never before has the business world moved as fast as it does today – a trend that will only intensify for the foreseeable future. This is particularly true on technology-related matters. The need for clear and effective communication is more essential than ever. Not only will this problem persist if we ignore it, but it will exacerbate.

      What’s the Big Whoop?

      You may think that relying on jargon and excessive e-mails is just par for the course. What’s the big deal, anyway?

      Several reasons readily come to mind. The first is that, as mentioned earlier, the need for clear, concise, and context-appropriate communication has never been more pronounced. As Chapter 2 demonstrates, employees are inundated with messages throughout the day, many of which arrive via confusing or inscrutable e-mails. Which of the following do you think is more likely to be effective?

      ● An endless chain of baffling, jargon-laden e-mails

      ● Simple, clear, and honest conversations either in person or via a truly collaborative tool

      For a long time now, people have denounced the use of buzzwords when plain English would suffice. Yet jargon persists. The critics are helpless against “words” like incent. Beyond that, business folks turn nouns into verbs. In reality, they’re only bloviating. (The now commonplace adoptions of use case15 and price point are real pet peeves of mine.) They fail to consider the context of what they’re saying, and they speak and write with zero regard for their audiences.

      Second, you may believe that new times have always required new words and phrases. This is true, but not to the same extent currently exhibited. The verb “to Google” developed organically. Millions of people quickly understood what it meant. But what about horrible and contrived phrases such as Next-Generation Big Data Platform as a Service? Can we honestly make the same case here?

      If technology were a fleeting trend, then perhaps we could excuse the growing use of jargon, the e-mail deluge, and bad business communication in general. Unfortunately, it isn’t and we can’t. Technology is permeating every instance of our lives – and not just in the workplace. The Internet of Things is arriving as we speak. Every company is becoming a tech company; some of them just haven’t realized it yet. Few employees work in tech-free zones.

      From Pencils to WhatsApp: A Little History Lesson

      I’m no Renaissance man, but I fancy myself a student of history, particularly with respect to technology and language.16 The creative use and misuse of language predates the modern-day corporation by centuries. It is anything but a new phenomenon, and neither is our complicated relationship between communication and technology.

      Think about gadgets such as the computer, the smartphone, the Kindle, and the iPad. Compare them with the clay tablet, the printing press, the pencil, the telegraph, the typewriter, and other critical innovations from previous centuries. The former contain much more sophisticated technology than the latter, but the two groups have more in common than many people realize. Every one of these tools has faced highly influential detractors.

      Dennis Baron makes this point in his impeccably researched 2009 book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Baron examines the craft of writing via a fascinating historical lens. As he writes:

      The World Wide Web wasn’t the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words – mere shadows of speech – couldn’t adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents. Centuries later, the innovative output of Gutenberg’s printing press was faulted for disrupting the natural, almost spiritual connection between the writer and the page. Eventually, we got used to printing, but Henry David Thoreau scorned the telegraph when it was invented in 1840s because this technology for quickly transporting words across vast distances was useless for people who had nothing to say to one another. The typewriter wasn’t universally embraced as a writing tool when it appeared in the 1870s because its texts were impersonal, it weakened handwriting skills, and it made too much noise. And computers, now the writer’s tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, including destroying the English language, slowing down the writing process, speeding up writing to the point of recklessness, complicating it, trivializing it, and encouraging people to write who may, as Thoreau might put it, have nothing to say.

      I hope to avoid the latter criticism in this book.

      It turns out that, at least conceptually, writing with a pencil has a great deal in common with texting on a smartphone. Each has profound effects on how people process information and how they communicate with one another.

      Book Overview and Outline

      I like to think that business books, like their fictional counterparts, take their readers on a journey of sorts. If that’s true, then it makes sense to provide a map. This section answers the following questions:

      ● Who should go?

      ● Do I need to bring anything?

      ● Where are we going?

      ● How will we get there?

      ● Who will benefit the most from this trip?

      ● What can I expect to learn along the way?

Central Premise of Book

      The central premise of Message Not Received is quite simple and can be stated in six words:

      Most business communication simply doesn’t work.

      Because of raging СКАЧАТЬ