Jay Morrissey blogs on personal development issues, and much of it is about communication skills. He writes with a refreshingly simple, straightforward style that would be appropriate down to pre-intermediate students I would imagine, and even high elementary level with support such as vocab pre-teaching.

There are some nice functional phrases for dealing with verbal attacks in this post.

Oh I love this.

Exploratree is a free web-based “thinking tool” for idea generation, planning, and many other types of cognitive activity that are fundamental to any kind of project. You select from a menu of frameworks that structure the thinking process, which are similar in concept to regular BE frameworks actually. Or, you can develop your own framework.

What’s neat is that you can easily see how you can use the different frameworks to work on specific language objectives, especially structures and functions.

• the Futures Wheel framework helps your students “Think through the consequences and impacts of an event. What are the knock-on effects?” and could be useful for practicing the conditionals. You’d set it up to by using a real business situation of the student or group, then work through the Future wheel framework using conditionals.
• The Reverse Planning framework is to “work backwards from an imagined perfect future to a feasible and possible present”. You’d set this up as if the group were actually in, say, 2010, and their plans had succeeded, and they relate the imagined “history” of 2008-10 that got them there, using past tenses and storytelling techniques.
• The Compare and Contrast framework should be pretty much self-explanatory for BE teachers.

Can’t wait to try this with some clients.

Hat tip to soulsoup.

KnowHR is an all-around useful blog for BE professionals, and now it seems that they are doing a post on business slang every Monday.

Here’s the first one.

I actually heard someone say “incentivize” just yesterday.

Nice interview with substantive answers. The answers are a nice length for teaching input and discussion - I’d probably choose a few and break them up and use one to three for a class, or more for higher levels.

Best answer for our BE students:

You should rehearse at least three to four times all the way through and rehearse the first three minutes at least ten times or more. You also need to do a formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers who can give you constructive criticism.In some ways good presenting is like good writing, you’ve got to pare it down and dump the superfluous and the non-essential. But since we are so close to the material it is hard for us to see what works and what does not, or what is repetitive, etc. This is why you cannot only rehearse alone. You’ve got to rehearse in front of others so that you can experience the nerves, the blank stares, etc.

The more you rehearse the more the fear of the unknown is removed. The more the fear is removed, the more confident you will become. As you become more confident you will feel more relaxed and your confidence will shine through. The thing about confidence is that it’s impossible to fake, but with practice you will indeed become a confident speaker.

Many of our students work in multinationals, and so have limited design choices because they receive a PowerPoint “deck” they have to follow. I wonder at what point the stricter client companies will realize how they squander their intellectual assets by constraining them this way - our students basically just plug the numbers in pre-formatted slides. It’d be great if the culture moved towards allowing more flexibility in presentations.

In my experience, most of the time our students are crunching numbers until the last minute, so a full run-through is often difficult to pull off. What I do is help them develop and practice the introduction and conclusion many times, and group classes are perfect for the “formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers” that Reynolds recommends. We also make sure the key messages for each section are clearly established, and practice the transitions, intros, and conclusions for each section as well.

Here’s a neat experiment that seems to show that “naming” does influence cognitive tasks and task performance.

This has me intrigued.

I’d imagine that most BE professionals working with large corporate programs are like me - spending half their time thinking “There must be a better way”. We work with creative, high energy managers who are passionately engaged with the high-speed challenges of their job. Then we have them stop what they are doing, go sit in a classroom, turn to Unit 4, and read about what Richard Branson has accomplished (”he has started many different businesses, and he has sailed around the world in a balloon”). Then we wonder why attendance is 60%.

Anyway, we’re always looking for a way to connect language training with business goals, and the excerpt below points to a perspective that might contribute to that:

Systems, Not Programs

The HR profession is very adept at program development. Success is most often defined as creating and/or adopting best-practice programs, and HR is organized and managed accordingly. HR consulting firms align their practices with the way their clients are organized: They deliver products and programs for HR subprofessions (such as training, staffing, and compensation). But the data is indisputable: Decades of new and better programs have not delivered great results. The reason is that “world-class programs” cannot deliver performance results. Only systems deliver results.

An automobile engine is a system that requires great parts. All parts must be fully integrated and aligned to the purpose of the engine, whether that be high performance or a fuel economy. A well-built engine uses just the right parts and no more. Likewise, succession planning, training, and appraisal can be viewed as parts. Just as throwing pistons and spark plugs into an engine compartment will not deliver a satisfactory engine, neither will “world-class” HR programs deliver acceptable customer results. More and better HR programs will deliver no better performance in the future than they have in the past. Performance results require a system.

From The New Human Capital Strategy by Bradley Hall. Hat tip to KnowHR.

What would a corporate language system look like? How would it differ from a “program”? Or would there be no specific language system or program, but rather a language training componant that is subsumed within the overall human capital system? Can we emancipate corporate language training from its legacy institutional (school) origins?

From the wonderful xkcd.com.

Here’s an interesting post on Found|READ on being a “Tactician” vs being an “Inspirer”, and how that is reflected in the presentation styles of Clinton and Obama respectively, with links to video of both. This could provide some great class discussion, and Obama’s speech is masterful as always.

Also interesting is how Obama focuses his message: it’s about the audience. Rarely do you see a politician decline to talk about himself or herself. In Obama’s message the key word is “you”.

Another comment on Obama’s communication style:

Yet if Clinton’s answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy’s. “Do you remember,” Stevenson said, “that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke,’ but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’ ” At this hour, Obama is the Democrats’ Demosthenes.

Intercultural communication note: the context of these speeches is a political campaign in the US, so naturally there is a fair amount of nationalistic…I guess “fervor” could be the word. This may be off putting to some students, especially in Europe, where the culture of political communication is more emotionally restrained in my experience (and read the comments here.)

Here’s the personal “Top ten best (and worst) communicators for 2007” of Burt Decker of Decker Communications.

There are links to video examples for many of the presentations cited, including some truly disastrous performances, which would be good “awareness raising” input and tasks in class.

Note: some of the examples won’t be well known to people outside the US or US culture, but many are, such as Al Gore and Steve Jobs.