Jeff Bezos gets the "you" attitude

In business communication, there is a lot of talk about the "you" attitude or the audience-centered approach. Rather than saying "I've discovered a huge opportunity for our company," say "Our company is facing a huge opportunity." Rather than saying "We offer a choice of red, yellow, or green widgets," say "You can choose between red, yellow, or green widgets." Those are simplistic examples, but here's an article about the CEO of Amazon where he applies that attitude. Take, for example, his fifth point: Determine what your customers need and work backwards. That's certainly putting your audience first.

Liar liar pants on fire

Who knew? Until I started researching for this post, I had no idea that William Blake, the poet, was the likely source of this colorful and catchy phrase. In his 1810 poem, The Liar, he phrases it somewhat more elegantly: Deceiver, dissembler/Your trousers are alight. In any event, this colorful phrase comes to mind in this campaign season. The Tampa Bay Times maintains a useful non-partisan site called PolitiFact that fact checks the candidates' claims, with ratings on a truth-o-meter that has a setting called Pants-on-fire for the most outrageously untrue claims.

Email best practices

Do you use abbreviations in email? How about emoticons? Unless you know your recipient well, you should probably avoid both abbreviations and emoticons or smiley faces. What else can you do to make your email clear to the reader? Well, the one tip most people seem to forget is use a clear subject line. Studies show most business users can't handle more than about 50 messages a day. You know if your recipient gets that many, some of them probably aren't even opened. So help the reader out by making your purpose clear with a good subject such as Agenda for Wednesday meeting. Here are some other etiquette tips to produce better email and better results.

Try a little redundancy

So, did you watch the World Series? There was a classic miscommunication between the manager of the Cardinals, Tony LaRussa, and his bullpen coach, Derek Lilliquist, in game 5. LaRussa asked the bullpen coach to warm up two pitchers, a right handed pitcher and a left hander, and only one was warmed up. The end result was the probable loss of a game.

What could have been done differently? If the conversation had included a confirmation of the instructions back to LaRussa by the bullpen coach, both men would have been able to agree the same message was sent and received. Try incorporating a little redundancy in your communications, and see if it does not help. Here's an article with the four steps to include for clearer communication: tell, summarize, paraphrase, repeat.

How does Twitter describe our moods?

As of February 2010, Twitter was getting about 50 million tweets per day. That much data allows social scientists to study human behavior in new ways. Sociologists at Cornell studied a smaller set of tweets looking for indications about how these messages describe our moods. Apparently, moods are similar across cultures. We all seem to dislike Monday mornings, and get cheerier as we move towards the weekend. It may be that Twitter behavior doesn't generalize to all people, but it will be interesting to see over time what other conclusions can be drawn from these short messages.

What is the other 10% of the job?

So, after less than a year Leo Apotheker lost his job as CEO of Hewlett Packard, and was replaced with Meg Whitman, who had great success at eBay, a web company, but never worked in a hardware company. Why?

In an interview, HP Chairman Ray Lane said "The market’s a little confused because we’re in so many different businesses. This is 90 percent about leadership, communications, and operating execution." So, the lesson here is that communication skills are more critical than business knowledge, it seems. The article referenced above calls out four things Meg Whitman does very well that make her a good communicator.

To appear competent, smile more

Communication takes place on many levels. If you are communicating in person or via a video link, there is a lot of non-verbal communication going on. Your posture, eye contact, and facial expressions will all play a part in what you convey. Here's a fascinating talk about why you should smile. It can improve your life span, help you appear more competent, and many other things. Also, can you read the smiles of others? Test yourself to see how many fake and real smiles you can spot. Here's a hint, though: look at the eyes and other parts of the face and head.