Communication in Business: Effective Ideas and Communication Tools for Leaders & Managers

Articles by Robert F. Abbott, author of A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results and the forthcoming book, Ownership Revolution: How Working People are Buying Up Big Business .

Articles about communication:

The following articles come from Abbott's Communication Letter, a free, weekly newsletter (publication suspended at the moment).   The articles explore the use of communication as a tool for achieving company, organizational, and personal objectives.

Better Internal Proposals
Take a strategic approach to internal proposals, an approach that identifies the issues, players, and consequences. This allows you to be clear and concise because you have thought your way through the proposal carefully.

What's a Good Media Story?
You can increase the effectiveness of all your communication by including at least one of the four characteristics of a good media story in your message.

The Power of 'because...'
Using the word 'because' in your message will help you write more persuasive copy and help your readers understand why they should respond to you.

Why Write Down Your Ideas?
The act and process of writing down an idea will help you implement the idea, because it will help uncover some of the assumptions and expectations underlying your idea.

Communicating CEOs
CEOs may do more than communicate, but almost everything they do will be driven or influenced by communication processes inside and outside the organization.

Strategic Clarity
Make strategic clarity, an unambiguous statement of purpose, the first step in your communication management process.

How to Connect Features and Values
Make your communication more effective by connecting the dots between features, benefits, consequences, and values.

What Should an Executive Communicate?
What executives see when they look into the future - whether that's the end of the next quarter or five years from now - provides a framework for communication with employees and other stakeholders.

Mind Mapping
Got a complex message? Help get your message across with a mind map, a diagram of the reasoning going on in your head.

Listening Strategically
To stay on top of the issues that affect your organization, and the world around it, adopt the practice of strategic listening.

Using Emotion for Persuasion
Emotion can help us get the response we want to our messages, by increasing the personal involvement of recipients.

How to Find Ideas for Articles & Speeches
Think you don't have any good ideas for articles or speeches? Think again! Just a bit of reflection and exploring should produce many of them.

Getting to Consensus
In the realm of professional communication, one of the great challenges involves getting people to pull together, to achieve some sort of consensus.

A Case of Confused Context
Context, the framework within which messages are received and interpreted, has a powerful effect on the way messages are understood.

The Adjusted Winner: An Advanced Communication Approach
A new method for dividing up assets after a breakup also provides some useful communication techniques for difficult times.

Linking Features & Benefits: Means-End Analysis
This form of analysis helps us communicate more effectively, by illuminating the important linkages among attributes, consequences, and values.

What's your Reputation Quotient?
Enjoying a good reputation with the public takes corporate communication strategies and skills in several areas.

Get Speaking
Learning to speak in public is easier if you skip the big picture and focus on learning the individual elements that add up to a good speech.

Creating More Effective Proposals
A good proposal demands not just a sales case, but also a strategy for dealing with the thoughts that go through the mind of the prospect.

Communicating with Offsite Workers
For effective communication with offsite workers, know why you want to communicate with them, and why they would want to be in touch with you.

Communicating In Chaotic Environments
Teams can develop systems to gather, process, and disseminate important information by thinking strategically about information.

Communicating Across Time Horizons
If the person or persons with whom you're communicating don't share your time horizons, your messages may not get through.

Change, or Reinforce?
Communicate more effectively by knowing the difference between messages designed to change, and those designed to reinforce.

When Gifts Say More
Do you use gifts for business communication? Many of us do, because gifts can go beyond their traditional roles, to convey messages from one person to another and to manage relationships.

Two-Step Your Communication
You can extend your communication reach and impact with the two-step strategy, which involves using influential others to pass on your message. Influential people add networks and credibility.

Dump that Overhead Projector!
Overhead projectors can weaken the impact of your presentation or speech by putting a barrier between you and the audience.

Contrarian Marketing at Benetton's
In using controversial, "hot button" advertising themes, this Italian clothing company opted for a high-risk, high-reward marketing communication strategy, one which must be done well to deliver positive results.

Communicating When A Crisis Strikes
When my Internet service provider encountered a crisis situation it responded effectively, by implementing a four-part communication strategy.

Technology & Communication
We need to consider what can happen to important messages when they are transmitted through the new media.

The Significance of the Mundane
Sometimes communication programs can be built on simple everyday ideas, not great ideas.

Story Telling With a Purpose
Increase the impact and effectiveness of your communication by telling stories - - strategically.

Manage Communication to Add Value
Functional departments such as Human Resources can add value by managing their communication flows, which involves generating unique information, condensing information, or expanding information.

Making the Intangible Real
In business communication, something tangible, even though unrelated, may help communicate the essence of an intangible. The object consumers can see or touch becomes a proxy for it.

More communication resources...

Want to make your writing more lively, more interesting, and more effective? Robert Abbott shows you three quick and easy techniques for achieving those goals, and as a result, getting better results. You get the techniques, a practice document, and an example document in one concise booklet.
http://www.effective-communication.com/booklets.htm

What do you need to know before you begin writing or designing your newsletter? Find the answers in A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results, the response-focused newsletter book. It was written by Robert F. Abbott, who wrote most of the communication articles you've seen above.

Whether you publish for employees, customers, or members, you'll save time and save money with this unique book. Read about it at:
http://www.managersguide.com/

Effective communication begins with a strategy. A plan and a statement that ensure you put your words into the right framework.

How to Craft a Communication Strategy, guides you through the four steps involved in developing a strategy and a statement for the strategy. Want to know more? http://www.effective-communication.com/booklets.htm

Newsletters for employees, customers, and others
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Contact information

Please call or write to:
Robert F. Abbott
Abbott's Communication Letter
2125 Summerfield Blvd.
Airdrie, Alberta T4B 1X2
Canada
Telephone: 403 948-7774

Email: wordengines@gmail.com or wordengines@gmail.com

URL: http://www.Communication-Newsletter.com/ (this website)

Other Resources

Communication in Business: Effective Ideas and Communication Tools for Leaders & Managers - Copyright Robert F. Abbott 1999-2006