Six secrets of global communication

Communicators find real unity in all that crap

I have discovered the key to world peace.

It was there all along, forged by the common bond that brings us all together, in organizations throughout the world.

It is simply this: Communications sucks all over.

I had this epiphany in London, where communicators from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. showed up for a conference sponsored by Ragan and simply-communicate.

The presentations were terrific, but the conversation around them was even better. At one point toward the end of the conference, a communicator from the Middle East stood up and said what the rest of us were thinking: “We are all the same,” he declared. “We are all just humans.”

It was enough to make you downright weepy. There we were, a group of people from different backgrounds, religions and cultures, united in our indefatigable efforts to deal with massive volumes of corporate crap.

We are humans dealing with horrific approval processes that destroy clarity and timeliness, and with executives who insist on abstract, jargon-filled “visions” rather than bold and direct leadership. Humans trying to connect with an audience through one good sentence, image or sound bite.