Читать книгу Message Not Received - Simon Phil - Страница 10

Bad business communication is a disease with significant costs and far-reaching implications. The prevalence of hackneyed and utterly meaningless terms, however, is just one of its causes.

Let’s say that I could wave my magic wand and single-handedly eliminate the use of jargon and confusing language in every organization in the world. No longer would you hear your manager say things like, “Let’s take this offline, review our learnings, engage in some blue-sky thinking, and then circle back.” Poof! Value-adds and paradigm shifts have been vanquished forever. Grammarians and English teachers around the world would rejoice in the streets.

Would this solve the business communication problem? Although we’d be off to a good start, the answer is no. Even the Orwellian abolishment of buzzwords would not guarantee that our colleagues, partners, bosses, underlings, clients, and prospects would effectively receive and understand 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.)