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Time, history, and memory become qualitatively different concepts in a world where electronic mass communication is possible... This capacity of electronic mass communication to transcend time and space creates instability by disconnecting people from past traditions, but also liberates people by making the past less determinate of experiences in the present.

Two people in a conversation amount to four people talking. The four are what one person says, what he really wanted to say, what his listener heard, and what he thought he heard.

To engage in a dialogue first ask a question then listen.

Communication is the key to leadership and I cannot stress how important it is in the leadership process. As previously mentioned, repetition is crucially important. Significant issues need to be stated repeatedly... I believe managers frequently forget to do this. They state things once and assume that the message is received and understood - but often it is not. To my mind, a good yardstick is to assume only when you have stated something so often that you are fed up with saying it that your audience, or at least some of them, will have got the message and are thinking about it. That is how organizational communication works.

Most people don't listen with the intent to understand. They listen with the intent to reply. They filter everything through their own paradigm and experiences, so that what they hear may not be what you said.

Winning communicators don't strive for perfection, they strive for connection.

If we want people to listen, we must banish "but" from our vocabulary. How many times has someone told us how well we have performed -- and we were feeling good about the feedback, listening carefully -- then we have heard "but," and the positive, energizing part of the feedback was lost in the "but" and what followed it. "But" is nobody's friend -- listener or speaker. "And" provides the graceful transition, the nonthreatening bridge to mutual appreciation, the communication that builds effective relationships. Replacing "but" with "and" is the best advice I could give to the leader who listens and wants others to listen with an open mind.

Effective communication does not consist in speech. Words and phrases may be marshaled in every way, but they cannot encompass it. It must consist in the speaker, in the subject, and in the occasion.

Language is messy by nature, which is why we must be careful in how we use it. As leaders, after all, we have little else to work with. We typically don't use hammers and saws, heavy equipment, or even computers to do our real work. The essence of leadership -- what we do with 98 percent of our time -- is communication. To master any management practice, we must start by bringing discipline to the domain in which we spend most of our time, the domain of words.

Socrates says that writing forces us to follow an argument rather than to participate in it, and I think you see that all the time when the professor is giving a lecture. Students are writing their notes, trying to follow the argument, and abandon any hope of participating in it.

It is worthwhile to distinguish between two possible goals in making a PowerPoint presentation-information presentation, in which the goal is to present information to the audience, and cognitive guidance, in which the goal is to guide the audience in their processing of the presented information. When your goal is information presentation, PowerPoint slides can be full of information that may be extremely hard to process by the audience. However, since your goal is simply information presentation, you are not concerned with whether or not the audience can process the presented information.

When your goal is cognitive guidance, you want to make sure that the audience members build appropriate knowledge in their memories. Your job is to communicate in a way that will have the desired impact on the audience, so you need to design your slides so they are consistent with how people learn.

In my opinion, many of the examples of misuses of PowerPoint occur when the slides are designed to present information rather than to guide cognitive processing. In short, like any communication medium-including books-PowerPoint can be misused as a device for presenting information without regard for how the audience will process the presented information.

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Most people do have great value that they can offer, however they are poor at communicating what that value is. Therefore, often it is not the person with the most innate talent that gets hired; it is the person who can best articulate, in a winning way, what their talent is that gets them the job offer.

Turning complex issues and opportunities into effectively simple - as opposed to simplistic or easy - constructs is truly the managerial art form of this new millennium. Instead of seeking "best" or "optimal" solutions to managerial problems, organizations and the people who run them have to become more creative about how they manage clarity and simplicity. Spending an extra two or three weeks on making a project definition simpler or more accessible can save months of time in rework and maintenance from casually accepting a definition that the people actually doing the work find too complex.

Euphemisms are widely employed by corporate executives. Thus, in standard financial reporting, companies "earn profits" - a phrase that conjures up the notion of positive achievement of their own doing. In contrast, firms "suffer losses." That sounds like an unexpected blow inflicted by some sinister force in the external environment beyond corporate influence.

If you experience great difficulty in raising money, it's not because VCs are idiots and cannot comprehend your curve-jumping, paradigm shifting, revolutionary product. It's because you either have a piece of crap or you are not effectively communicating what you have. Both of these are your fault. End of discussion.

The quality of an organization is directly linked to the quality of conversations of the people in that organization.

Effective PR counselors understand the business that they represent as well as do their peers in the executive suite, and they work with them to meet the needs of the company's multiple stakeholders. They adopt a businessperson's perspective, not a journalist's. Good press is not an end in itself, and bad press is not to be avoided at any cost -- certainly not at the cost of lying. Effective PR counselors know how to balance a business's interests with those of its stakeholders to help its leaders find win-win solutions.

Among a CEO's most important responsibilities is to define workers' common mission and set the course toward it. The CEO needs to become the company storyteller, the keeper of the sustaining myth that nourishes people on their journey together. But if the CEO is, for many employees, the personification of the company, it's their immediate boss who people listen to for evidence of what really matters. Unfortunately, in most corporations, first-line supervisors are often the forgotten managers. Though surveys identify them as employees' preferred channel of communication, they often know as little as the people they are paid to supervise.

I never did give anybody hell, I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

When you write things down you confine yourself. That's why we have never used the fancy titles for empowerment, total quality, etc. Every time you talk jargon you find that people assume that they have the same thing in mind when they really don't. We don't apply labels to things because they prevent you from thinking expansively.

Formal presentations often shut down the very communication they are meant to foster. Without sufficient knowledge of the interests of the audience, a slide show says, "I've got the answers and you're here to listen." This type of presentation tends to fall short of the impact of simply asking a few well-thought-out questions earlier in the process.

To be a master communicator, all you have to do is follow a simple three-step process. First, have something good to say. Second, say it well. And third, say it often.

If you don't tell people what your beliefs are, they'll guess and hold you accountable for what they guess. Being forthright has the additional benefit of making people feel like they understand you, and it develops trust faster than any other way.

Stories are about meaning; they help explain why things could happen in a certain way. They give order and meaning to events - a crucial aspect of understanding future possibilities. Stories have many advantages. They open people up to multiple perspectivesÂ…stories help people cope with complexity.

A 'No' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

There is a near-universal tradeoff between richness and reach of information. Richness is variously the amount, quality, specificity, recency, or trustworthiness of the information shared in a transaction; and reach is the number of people or entities involved. Typically, we can transact with lots of richness if we are willing to give up reach (a conversation) or with lots of reach if we are willing to give up richness (a newspaper ad). But we cannot have both at once.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

I define dialogue as having three indispensable elements. First, park status outside - so that people feel free to interact with each other as equals. That's not easy to do. Second, suspend judgment while listening. Dialogue is the opposite of debate. You can't win or lose. You don't rush to judgment; you leave yourself open to actually hearing with empathy what other people say. Third, unearth and reveal assumptions. Make explicit the framework from which you're operating. Remarkable things happen when people talk under those conditions.

When one person speaks and is encouraged to develop his or her ideas, then it is we, the audience, who provide the challenge. We provide the democracy. In each of our hearts and minds, we absorb, judge and come to our own conclusions. The dialectic is, thankfully, not between a group of equally ignorant people thrashing out a series of arbitrary subjects about which they know little and care less. It is between an informed individual who, we hope, has thought long and hard about their own area of specialisation, and an audience which is ready honestly to assess what the speaker has to say. Democracy, like everything else, thrives on preparation.

...A good lecture raises everybody's game. There is a contract. In return for the audience's presence, the guest is expected to have done a certain amount of work. The effort put into the thinking, is, in some wonderfully proportionate transaction of courtesy, rewarded by the concentration with which it is received.

People do care about the truth of an idea, but they also want to tell stories that produce strong emotion, and that second tendency sometimes gets in the way of the first.

If we could understand what kinds of stories succeed beyond all expectations, even when they are not true, we might be able to take legitimate information, about health for example, and change people's behavior for the better.