Quotes About Communication

The style is not important. What's important is authenticity: being personal not programmatic. And frequency: closer to weekly than yearly. And of course what's most important is the message: "I saw what you did and I appreciate it.

When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value," there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.

It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don't support your change. Is it because they don't understand or because they're not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal?

If you want to change things, you've got to appeal to both. The Rider provides the planning and direction, and the Elephant provides the energy. So if you reach the Riders of your team but not the

She said, "When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.…

It's rude to make people feel they're being excluded from a conversation.

When it comes to statistics, our best advice is to use them as input, not output. Use them to make up your mind on an issue. Don't make up your mind and then go looking for the numbers to support yourself—that's asking for temptation and trouble. But if we use statistics to help us make up our minds, we'll be in a great position to share the pivotal numbers with others

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us.

Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our

contexts. To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

Influencer, by Kerry Patterson

When your finance professor starts using the word "dude," you must eliminate the word from your vocabulary.

Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

Let's face it: Most PowerPoints aren't creating a lot of emotion.

companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits.

Know what your listeners care about, so you can tailor your communication to them.

Rule #1. Simpler Is Better: Round with Enthusiasm.

Rule 2. Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.27

we've seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we'll see that the right stories make people act.

the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings.

Rule #2. Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.

Make the baskets as small as you can while retaining the wholeness of whole numbers. If 2/3rds or .67 or 67% of people didn't like the new flavor, then make them feel like people in a room. "2 out of 3 people thought cheesy marshmallow was "disgusting." Going up to 67 out of 100 would dilute understanding.

If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.