How
We Communicate Today… and Why We Are So Bad at It!
An Excerpt from
Move the World: Persuade Your Audience, Change Minds and Achieve Your Goals
Author’s note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming
book Move the World: Persuade Your Audience, Change Minds and Achieve Your Goals which
will be published by John Wiley & Sons in April 2007. If you would like to
be kept informed of events related to the book launch as the publication date approaches,
please send your name and email address to Marni Lane, at MHLane@TheLatimerGroup.com.
We also welcome your comments, insights and experiences. Enjoy!
My professional life is dominated by communication. I
study it and coach it for a living. And, I’ll open this book with a blunt statement:
I don’t like
what I see and hear.
The American economy is no longer industrial. We are a service-based economy where
our real value is the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The American workforce is
the “hard drive” where a company’s core assets – knowledge
and relationships – are stored. This reality places far greater importance
on how business executives communicate with and lead their employees, and on how
business professionals communicate with their customers, prospects and colleagues.
No matter how we look at the modern American business economy, effective communication
is critical for growth and success.
Yet, every day of my professional life I listen to business presentations that
lack a clear point, clear recommendations and clear action steps. I listen to speeches
that lack structure and direction. I read and hear sales pitches that seem to miss
the key value of the organization or product or service being sold.
How many truly persuasive communicators have you listened to or met during your
career? How many times has someone walked into a room and just knocked you over with
their communication skills? Have you ever listened to a business presentation that
seemed to have no structure?
Have you ever been to a meeting within your organization that lasted a lifetime,
and seemingly had no point? These questions help identify the most common and critical
problems with our cultural approach to communication:
- We don’t prepare. We are all busy. As a result, millions
of sales calls, meetings and presentations are conducted without proper or sufficient
preparation.
- We don’t set goals. Precious few of us set concrete,
ambitious but realistic goals for our communication opportunities. We don’t
ask the simple questions like, “What do I want my audience to think or do
when I am done?”
- We don’t truly understand our audience. We live in
a culture dominated by airwaves filled with people giving us opinions. All too
often, the person who speaks the loudest, speaks last and does the best job spewing
their opinions wins the argument. Yet how can I persuade you to think differently
on a topic if I do not first attempt to understand your current beliefs?
- We don’t make our message memorable or digestible. With
all of the information that comes at us every single day, how can we structure
our message so that we make it easy for our audience to remember who we are and
what we say?
- We speak too long. One of my favorite quotations about
public speaking came from our 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Be
clear. Be brief. Be seated." Enough said.
These are the problems upon which this book is based. The rest of this book is
about providing you with strong, yet simple, solutions to these problems and helping
you communicate more persuasively and effectively.
 Beacon Issue -
July 2006
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