Quotes About Communication

In almost every situation, the expectation of an immediate response is an unreasonable expectation. Yet with more and more real-time communication tools creeping into daily work—especially instant-messaging tools and group chat—the expectation of an immediate response has become the new normal.

In thirty years' time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP

Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

You'll often hear that people don't like change, but that's not quite right. People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don't like is forced change—change they didn't request on a timeline they didn't choose. Your "new and improved" can easily become their "what the fuck?" when it is dumped on them as a surprise.

They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only, and fast. These words get in the way of healthy communication. They are red flags that introduce animosity, torpedo good discussions, and cause projects to be late.

There's simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.

Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand.

Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. It's completely exhausting.

The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don't waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.

Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer.

Companies love to declare "We're all family here." No, you're not.

Write to be read, don't write just to write.

Share information that's valuable and you'll slowly but surely build a loyal audience. Then when you need to get the word out, the right people will already be listening.

As a business owner, you should share everything you know too. This is anathema to most in the business world. Businesses are usually paranoid and secretive. They think they have proprietary this and competitive advantage that. Maybe a rare few do, but most don't. And those that don't should stop acting like those that do.

Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. Take writing, for example. When you get out of school, you have to unlearn so much of the way they teach you to write there. Some of the misguided lessons you learn in academia: The longer a document is, the more it matters. Stiff, formal tone is better than being conversational. Using big words is impressive. You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point.

It's no wonder so much business writing winds up dry, wordy, and dripping with nonsense. People are just continuing the bad habits they picked up in school. It's not just academic writing, either. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren't worth much outside of it.

When you treat people like children, you get children's work. Yet that's exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees.

You can't paint over a bad experience with good advertising or marketing.

To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision."‡

Stop saying ASAP. We get it. It's implied. Everyone wants things done as soon as they can be done.

But the most fortunate companies have audiences. An audience can be your secret weapon.

Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn't something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them.

If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction.