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Nonverbal communication is not limited to eye contact and gestures. What communications scholars call “artifacts” (things we put on our bodies, such as clothes, perfume, piercings, accessories, hairstyles, etc.) may say more about us than any fleeting glance or nod.
According to a story in PR Week, what we wear at work is affected by many factors, including location, corporate culture and client base.
The bottom line is that “business casual” ain’t what it used to be.
Read the Whole Story.
The self-proclaimed King of All Media now reigns over a smaller empire. Shock Jock Howard Stern, who left the serfdom of terrestrial airwaves to relish the riches of satellite radio, now plays for a smaller audience at the palace.
According to a story in the LA Times, the move may have cost Stern up to 10 million listeners, and the power and prestige that go with them.
The Times quotes Tom Taylor, executive news editor at Radio-Info.com as saying "It's like Howard went from playing Madison Avenue to playing an upscale off-Broadway concert hall for a lot of money. He got everything he wanted in terms of money and not being bothered by the FCC, but he lost the bulk of his audience."
Of course losing listeners is only the first domino to tumble. What follows is losing movie deals, book deals and quality guests. The story points out that Stern’s one-time stable of A-list celebrity guests has been replaced by reality stars and names from the past.
The story even suggests that Stern might consider a return to the land of regulated airwaves once his current contract expires in 2010.
Stay tuned. Nobody else is.
Read the enitre story by Greg Braxton.
Improving your perception skills is a valuable step towards improving your overall communication skills and, thereby, your employability.
A simple way to do this is with a process called perception checking. With indirect perception checking, you just raise your awareness level and look for nonverbal hints to see if what you think is going on is, in fact, actually going on.
For example, an employee may perceive that his supervisor is upset with him. To asses this, he may watch how the supervisor acts around other employees. With direct perception checking, the employee would approach his supervisor and come right out and ask how he’s doing?
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that younger workers are not only resorting to direct perception checking…they’re embracing it. The Journal states that this shift towards seeking out feedback is “forcing some employers to rethink how they discuss employee performance.”
The story cited a survey that showed 85 percent of Gen Y employees believe their age-group peers want "frequent and candid performance feedback.”
Read the whole story here.
This morning, the Internet was buzzing with images of monkeys waiting on customers in a Japanese sake house. I call this type of story Fast News. Much like fast food, which entices us with lesser versions of homemade fare, Fast News tempts us with easy-to-consume facsimiles of real news. After a while, both leave us feeling empty and wanting for more.
Fast News is appearing everywhere we look and unfortunately many confuse ubiquity with quality, and availability with desire.
In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman maintained that Morse’s telegraph, which removed time and distance issues from the information-sharing process, “erased state lines” and “collapsed regions.” This happened, Postman wrote, at a “considerable cost.”
Postman quotes Henry David Thoreau, who stated in “Walden” that “We are in a great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
In other words, just because we can share information almost instantly over a great many miles, does not mean this information is necessarily worth sharing.
Yet the purveyors of Fast News share away, one after the other. Monkey see, monkey do.
Nonverbal communication is not limited to eye contact and gestures. What communications scholars call “artifacts” (things we put on our bodies, such as clothes, perfume, piercings, accessories, hairstyles, etc.) may say more about us than any fleeting glance or nod.
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