Failing to communicate means failing to manage...

The success of an industrial manufacturer is not based solely on the dynamic of supply and demand, but on the more fundamental dynamic of communication between those who sell solutions and those who need them. Nothing gets sold until it gets communicated, and yet we are reminded every day just how inefficient is this business of business communication in the digital age.

You have no doubt experienced the frustration of emailing a question to someone, only to receive a skillfully cryptic, partial answer in a return reply. People with management titles seem trained at this, as though back in college they were forced to take a 100 level defense management course, possibly called THE ART of EMAIL JIU-JITSU, the central objective of which was to maintain a passive-aggressive but seemingly sincere non-dialogue when engaging business associates and customers, in the hope that they will all go away.

In the old days of industrial business marketing, before there were virtual conference calls followed by a few rounds of email jiu-jitsu, smart administrative assistants sat in a non-virtual "meeting room" taking analog "shorthand" notes that forced you and your fellow managers to collaboratively and most of all coherently plan, organize, direct, lead and control the business. Then the next day you looked in your very real in-basket for something called the "Meeting Minutes" and by noon everybody new what had been decided upon the day prior; everybody knew exactly who was to do what, and by when, and if you didn't do what you agreed to do, well you couldn't hide behind an email. You couldn't duck, dodge or jiu-jitsu your way out of managing your end of the business; and it wasn't long before the bad managers around you – those who failed to communicate in the real business world – were promoted out of the organization.

Nothing gets sold until it gets communicated, and failing to communicate leads to the slow death of any industrial manufacturing company. One by one, your potentially effective business managers will catch themselves staring at their laptops and smart phones, mystified by the partial answers to their emails, searching their virtual in-boxes for the meeting minutes that never come, and either they will demand a better way, or they will simply leave your sinking ship.

jb
www.centrifuge-now.com