Techniques for winning conversations.
1/12/2004
It's great to have a vision. But if you can't describe it, who cares? That's a key point in Leadership Unplugged, which stresses the various skills that executives need to communicate and lead. What the authors call "strategic conversations" are about defining your leadership agenda, deciding who needs to know about it, and influencing those people to make your vision a reality. As Jay Conger, a professor at London Business School, writes in the intro, the stakes are high: Managers and executives "pay a high price when they fail to understand the power of language and communications—initiatives are misdirected, resistance forms, the wrong problems are tackled," and so on. The authors—Moore a journalist at the Financial Times, Sonsino a writer and a fellow at London Business School—dive into all the important stuff. In a learned yet practical way, their chapters and charts cover speaking and listening techniques that can be applied to a wide variety of business scenarios.