Dan Erwin

The Top 10 Communication Hurdles (???)

Career Track, the huge, personal development organization, recently sent me an advertisement for one of their seminars with the above title. Their (survey) research revealed these are the “toughest communication situations.” Since these “10 hurdles” have only one fundamental use—to sell the firm’s services--and since Career Track has made big bucks for years based on their marketing, I suspect the language is useful for guessing what’s bugging business people about communication.

So here are the Career Track “10,” with a few of my off-the-cuff comments.

You Can "Catch More Flies with Honey Than Vinegar," But. . . .

Why Tone Matters and how to adjust it.

FYI: Tone is essentially the attitude you reflect toward your audience, whether one-on-one, team or even large group. (E.g.: tough/sweet/stuffy, personal/impersonal, authoritative/egalitarian, submissive/demanding, respectful/taken for granted, hopeful/cynical, friendly/distant, understanding/out of touch, etc.)  Furthermore, all these attitudes demonstrate or at least imply emotional content. It is emotion that most successfully drives attention, and tone carries emotion.

 

               It ain’t what ya do.

               Hit’s the way that ya do it.

               That’s what gets results. 

Although many execs take tone seriously in face-to-face conversations, often manipulating it for their own advantage, it’s rarely discussed for business materials other those of public relations. Yet tone is just as valuable for the achieving of objectives in our writing of emails (and similar missives) as in face-to-face delivery.

Smokescreen: Does Your Company Have Something to Hide?

One of the important insights from the financial fiascos of the last few years is that senior managers and their company can’t always be trusted to act openly or ethically. The consequence of that is writ large: a huge number of people lost their jobs. Indeed, on several occasions, employees who lost their jobs have expressed their frustrations to me about their firm’s practice, telling me that they would never have guessed that of their firm’s leaders.

But then, as the conversation went on, they emphasized that a person at their level couldn’t possibly know what’s going on behind closed doors. Duhhhh. Sometimes we have to be shocked to see what was there all along. 

Leave Your Tech Gadgets Behind

Tucked away in Monday’s NYTimes business section is a highly significant—no, immensely practical—recommendation. The article by Nick Bilton initially describes the work practices of Robin Sloan, a former media manager at Twitter. As you can imagine, Sloan once taught news outlets how to use the hottest social media tools. But does Mr. Sloan follow his own recommendations? NOPE! He owns an old Nokia phone with just one application: making phone calls. He also takes notes with pen, paper and notepad. And—he reads books printed on paper—not the Kindle or the IPad.

It may be technical heresy, but it’s a very smart way of living your work life.

Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing--after they’ve tried everything else.”

  

What’s the smartest foreign policy choice for the U.S. now? Remember that good strategy is inevitably about saying yes and no to the right issues. That being the case, how should U.S. politicians be answering this question? Richard Haass, the well-known diplomat, policy author and former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, flips the switch and pushes the reset button to answer this question in his latest book. In fact, he’s playing with heresy.

Set aside your doubts. Haass has not been inspired by Wile E. Coyote.

The Political Attack on Facts

Attack advertising, specifically, the attack on facts, is far more serious than most of us imagine, impacting both business and government. What happens when campaigning and campaign data and promises become disconnected from governance?

Last week, Kathleen Hall Jamison, the well-respected Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, addressed these issues in spades at the University of. Most of us expect campaign ads to distort and deceive. But in today’s political world, according to Jamison, the more insidious threats are attacks upon governmental agencies that are non-partisan, and that provide data for the public and politicians. 

A New Way to Catch a Thief

New research, based on big data, is proven to be a highly accurate—and certainly unique—means for catching a car thief: quantify and tabulate a car owner’s posterior.

Since Aristotle there have many efforts to come up with new ways to understand and predict human behavior. But over just the past few centuries, we’ve begun to “mathematize” the subjective. We’ve tried to predict human behavior by means of (little) data.