Thoughts on Communication

Obviously I had lots of time to think during the holiday, with no phones, no internet, no TV, no newspapers, nothing. Tranquility. But I did have things to read, which will fill a few posts now. :) For one I read the latest brand eins, being on communication. The article in question is actually available online. So here comes a few of my own thoughts inspired by those by Wolf Lotter, who wrote the article, and a great one at that.

For one he argues that companies often are already honest and that often we can’t cope because that honesty is very open and frank. Additionally, in my mind, the honesty is relatively shallow though, which is why blogs partly work because over time they give a deeper picture. This shallowness comes from the fact that these people are really only communicating bull, pseudo-values, leading to the problem that we stopped trusting them. The people talking to the press are trained to sound honest, knowing that they can’t be honest. But the thing is that being and acting is different. The article quotes an example where Deutsche Bank frankly and openly said that they need to let go 1960 people (ok, maybe still communicated a bit badly, but honest, in a shallow way). The thing is that Deutsche Bank couldn’t have really been honest because it would mean saying something like: “We need to fire 1960 people as a good sign to our shareholders, to make us look tough. Additionally, we frankly just don’t need them anymore because IT enabled us to do more with less.” But you really can’t do that. Or can you?

Communication means sharing the author of the article statees, which in his mind means that you need two sides, a kind of feedback loop. The communication problem here can be very well seen in product development though. You have people working together that don’t really talk teh same language and marketing, without deep IT knowledge possibly, tries to make everything sound grand and big and push out the marketing message that will then be “true”. This is a real problem, especially if your product is isn’t worth buying!

Another item that is interesting to note, that I tend to agree with, is that communication means that you need to really know what you want to communicate before. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Politicians might not have a solution for our problems, so they spam us dead with details. The problem is not knowing where you want to go.

So that’s really what will become more and more important. You as a company need to be very sure what you are about and where you are going, what your goals are, what your vision (yeah, mission and values and such I know ;)) is. With that in mind you need to be brutally honest. That might be hard for shareholders to swallow but companies will fare better with that. If a waiter in a restaurant forgets something (aka makes a small mistake) and simply says sorry and changes the error, would you be happy? Or would you rather have him say: “Based on my notes I have brought you what you asked for.” Honesty is a powerful tool and means you need to say you are sorry and admit mistakes and ask for help! That’s what good personal relationships build on, why wouldn’t companies?