I just finished reading The Leader's Voice by Clarke and Crossland. I got to take a class from them about a year and a half ago, and I was super impressed, but the book has been sitting on my shelf for a while and I finally picked it up and read it through.
This is by far the best book on business communication that I have ever read.
It starts out with a simple statement: the biggst problem with leadership communication is the illusion that it has occurred. This is followed with an exploration of why leaders usually fail to connect with an audience and their message goes undelivered. It breaks down communication into three separate "channels" -- factual, symbolic, and emotional -- and drives home the point that people listen on all three channels and if we as communicators fail to "transmit," if you will, on all three, people will fill in the ones we miss with whatever suits their agenda. That, it a nutshell, is the heart of most business miscommunication.
A good chunk of the book after that is a guide for how to use the three channels and integrate them into a coherent message. Towards the end o the book, it also gives good strategies for how to build a discipline around having a small number of "uber-themes" that you can use opportunistically to drive your overall communication strategy, and how to "cover the bases" of the whole matrix of public vs. private and direct vs. indirect opportunities to communicate to your desired audience.
Part of the mastery of this book is that it practices what it preaches: it artfully uses all three channels, and it never strays far from some basic themes that drive their overall message.
After taking the seminar from the authors last year and learning several of these ideas, I've been putting them into practice and it has fundamentally changed my ability to connect with other people. What the authors say really works. There are none of the over-prescriptive methods that are so typical of this genre of books: they explain the "how" and the "why," they give lots and lots of great examples of both successes and failures, and it's almost entirely buzzword-free.
As someone who is generally skeptical of business self-help books, it's strange to be saying this, but you should run out now and get this book. It's absolutely worth it.
Next up: The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson.
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