Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It
by Phil Simon
The Bottom Line
Get to know your enemy of communication: jargon and email abuse.
Noah’s Review
The Importance of Communication Well Explained with Funny, Thought-Provoking Stories
I doubt it’s possible for anyone to underestimate the importance of communication, while the reality is that people sometimes just don’t think it through with a matching understanding of its potential impacts to both life and work.
What I like about the book:
- It sets the right perspective for understanding how communication influences our life and work.
- It has quite a few funny stories, starting from the very first page.
- It illustrates the status quo of email perfectly and that makes you think.
- It clarifies the critical but subtle differences among various approaches of communication (face-to-face, email, online forum, phone call, etc.)
- It makes you realize how bad it could get when you overuse jargon language.
- Part III includes many valuable advices and suggestions, which you could and should revisit from time to time as a necessary reminder.
What could be improved:
- Could point out and emphasize the topic of email earlier – I didn’t expect such a big chunk of the book would revolve around it, I expected a wider discussion about communication after reading the first few chapters. It’s not a bad thing to talk about email – I totally enjoyed the discussion, but it’d so good if the author could close the gap between expectation and the real stuff a little bit.
- Those really gem-like advice in Part III could be arranged in clearer way (better layout? more structured? etc.)
I’d highly recommend this book to everyone, who deserves to gain a better understanding of what communication means.
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Noah Fang 