Communication: A Pocket Oracle for Leaders

Copyright © 2011 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011960987

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-0664-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-0663-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-0665-4

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1. The Cost of Communication

2. Questions Propel, Statements Retard

3. Shallow Questions, Shallow Worlds

4. Who’s Responsible?

5. Information Does Not = Communication

6. Don’t Think Out Loud

7. Say What You Mean

8. Mean What You Say

9. Disambiguating

10. Need to Know

11. Optimize Return on Attention

12. Beware of Right vs. Wrong

13. Don’t Get into Other People’s Heads

14. Competence and Organizational Health

15. Create Compelling Drama

16. Competence and Communication

17. Mapping and Framing

18. Effective Communication Requires De-Centering

19. Avoid Politicizing

20. Make Your Decisions Seem Inevitable

21. Activities vs. Accomplishments

22. Outfit Your Lexicon

23. Be Cliché-Aversive

24. Learning vs. Knowing

25. Underwriting Performance: Code of Conduct

26. Be the Composer and Arranger

27. Your and Others’ Expectations

28. Advice: Getting and Giving

29. The Logistics of Intelligence

30. Mentoring

31. Opinions: Neither Defend nor Attack

32. Compliments and Criticisms

33. Your Inner Voice

34. Process vs. Consequences

35. You Are Not Omniscient

36. Don’t Be Rational unless That Is Your Strategy

37. Your Attitude toward Work

38. You Must Be Seductive

39. Communication Requires No Sender or Intention

40. Leadership, Like Life, Is a Performing Art

41. Do Not Over-Analyze Problems

42. Navigate by Your Cause

43. Be Skeptical of What You Know

44. Manage Meanings

45. Do Not Follow the Fashions

46. Imagine Strategically

47. Create Yourself in Private

48. Don’t Trust Your Experience

49. Get Better Every Day

50. Your Organization Will Make You Successful – or Not

51. Be Your Own Devil’s Advocate

52. De-Politicize at Every Opportunity

53. Be the Communication Exemplar

An Afterword: About the Book and the Author

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all of the great minds of history I have encountered in my intellectual expeditions for so fruitfully infecting my own thinking about this most basic human subject.

I am grateful to those people along the way who have either encouraged me in my persistence about this subject, or criticized me for not being more accessible in my approach.

I am grateful to all of those fellow-travelers who have loved me or hated me. Both are invaluable. One dulls, one sharpens one’s wits.

Most importantly, I am grateful to those whose lives and efforts may have been enhanced as a result of having come across my work in print, or otherwise. Everything else pales alongside that reward.

Any achievement requires the unheralded contributions of other people, living or dead, intentional or serendipitous. I have been fortunate to have known personally people of stunning intellectual prowess.

I have had remarkably stimulating conversations in my own mind with thinkers who have preceded me by centuries, if not millennia. I have had superlative mentors and teachers—who whacked me on the head when I needed it, or simply let me stew in the silence of trying to figure it out for myself.

For all of them, I am grateful. They persistently urged me to do better. One can’t do better. It is not an act of will. It is the result of growing competence. That takes smarts. It takes time. It requires the development of mind and skills.

So one can attempt to get better by knowing how. That’s the party I invite you to.

I struggle with what I have learned, and how to express it. If any of it makes a difference to you—the reader—even a bit, that would be my reward.

It has been a great ride, KT. Thank you.

Caveat

What follows is a little different. When the oracle speaks, listen… .

Never mind what seems repetitive. What’s worth learning is worth learning more than once.

1.  The Cost of Communication

First, let’s crunch some numbers.

There is no way to verify these numbers with much accuracy, except by direct experience.

Few organizations actually calculate the costs of communication. But the communication costs for a typical organization range from 40% to 60% of the total costs of running that organization.

The cost of communication in some organizations may be 95% of the total. In others, it might be 15%.

Conversations are an expense item. So are meetings. So are telephone calls. So are emails. So is surfing the web. So is answering an RFQ. So is socializing.

Organizations may expense their Customer Service. But they usually don’t track the cost of the error that may have led to the need for Customer Service in the first place. They do not track the opportunity costs of communication: If you are talking on your cell phone to X, you can’t be talking to Y on your cell phone at the same time.

People who are reading certain documents cannot at the same time be reading other documents. And the latter may offer far more payoff.

The lesson is this: The cost of communication in most organizations is the single largest cost of running that organization.

A client of mine and I invented what we called the Meeting Minder. What it tracked was the aggregate cost of all of the meeting participants—minute by minute. It worked somewhat like a taxi meter.

It put in front of everyone the cumulating cost of the meeting. This made the participants sensitive to the return on the investment. They ended up having fewer and shorter meeting. Assuming the ROI was the same (it was actually higher), the cost savings created a larger margin.

So the second lesson is this: What you don’t measure won’t be counted. And throughout this book it is a matter of counting what counts rather than what is conventionally counted. If you don’t count the cost of communication, you are missing the major source of hidden costs.

Meter the costs of all forms of communication in your organization to develop a communication ROI. Know by contribution what your overhead consists of.

2.  Questions Propel, Statements Retard

Whatever the situation, QUESTIONS propel, STATEMENTS retard.

If you are thinking about something, you will make better progress toward your conclusions by asking questions of yourself rather than telling yourself what to do.

The same is true of other people. It is questions that engage people and compel their attention. Questions provoke movement. Statements recycle thinking to a status quo.

Not just any