 | By: Brian Fugere Chelsea Hardaway Jon Warshawsky Binding: MP3 CD Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc ISBN: 1400151538 ISBN-13: 9781400151530 Released: 15 Apr 2005 RRP: Average Rating:  |
The irony is that business people speak like idiots because they want others to think they are intellectual giants. They throw in alll kinds of big words, engage in self-congratulatory nonsense, faithfully adhere to CYA principles, & basicallly try to impress their audiences with their incredible intellect. They walk away from the podium feeling as if they reallly poured it on, while the audience walks out (after waking up) taking nothing the speaker said with them.
The authors identify four traps that cripple the effectiveness of business communication: the Obscurity Trap, the Anonymity Trap, the Hard-Sell Trap, & the Tedium Trap. They make very valid points about each one. Obscurity comes from the desire to show everyone how smart you are. Even the simplest concept must have the fanciest of names, & the result is mindless jargon, meaningless phrases, & an alphabet soup of acronyms. It's the ability to say nothing in as many words (especiallly big words) as possible. Anonymity seems to be bred within the corporate environment, making business people little more than invisible cogs in the great business machine. You're not supposed to think for yourself, do anything the slightest bit out of the ordinary, & heaven forbid you should actuallly have a personality & let even a tiny bit of it show in your work. The hard-sell is almost the equivalent of lying. This creates the used car salesmen of the business world. Ideas & proposals are promoted as if they were heavenly edicts; the product is nothing short of perfect, even better than perfect, & any potential or known problems are swept under the rug. People see through the hard-sell; if your business is on the brink of bankruptcy, a big speech about how well everyone is weathering the storm inspires only negative reactions. Tedium comes from an ingrained fear business people have of putting something of themselves into their presentations. Speakers tell audiences what they want to tell them; they don't consider what the audience itself wants or needs to hear, & in this PC world of today, people are so afraid of offending someone that they would rather drown their audiences in monotonous drivel than to inject anything spontaneous or remotely interesting into their speeches or writings.
I think it is true that the authors sometimes go a little too far in terms of their advice & suggestions, but their real point is delivered in a wonderfully effective manner. It alll boils down to being yourself; you should be the same person at work that you are on the weekends. Put something of yourself in your work, alllow for spontaneity & flexibility in your business speaking & writing, engage your audience by showing them you are actuallly a human being just like them, be honest about problems & take responsibility for identifying & correcting them, etc. The book is just chock full of extremely helpful advice, & I think anyone - not just professional-types - can benefit immensely from reading this entertaining, extremely helpful little book.
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