Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

viii About this Book
effective. The MD’s efforts to communicate his latest corporate 
change programme may fall at the first hurdle; but rumours of 
imminent job losses can spread like wildfire. If only formal 
communication could achieve half the success of gossip!
Our organisations are networks of conversations. The unit of 
management work is the conversation; and the quality of our 
work depends directly on the quality of our conversations. How 
can we communicate more effectively? How can we begin to 
improve the quality of our conversations at work? This book 
seeks to answer those questions.
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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It’s a question I often ask at the start of training courses. How 
would you define the word ‘communication’?
After a little thought, most people come up with a sentence 
like this.
This definition appears very frequently. We seem to take it for 
granted. Where does it come from? And does it actually explain 
how we communicate at work?
The transmission model
That word ‘transmitting’ suggests that we tend to think of 
communication as a technical process. And the history of the 
word ‘communication’ supports that idea.
1
What is communication? 
Communication is the act of transmitting and receiving 
information.
( c) 2011 Kogan Page L imited, All Rights Reserved.

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2 Improve your Communication Skills
In the 19th century, the word ‘communication’ came to refer 
to the movement of goods and people, as well as of information. 
We still use the word in these ways, of course: roads and railways 
are forms of communication, just as much as speaking or 
writing. And we still use the images of the industrial revolution 
– the canal, the railway and the postal service – to describe 
human communication. Information, like freight, comes in ‘bits’; 
it needs to be stored, transferred and retrieved. And we describe 
the movement of information in terms of a ‘channel’, along 
which information ‘flows’.
This transport metaphor was readily adapted to the new, 
electronic technologies of the 20th century. We talk about 
‘telephone lines’ and ‘television channels’. Electronic 
information comes in ‘bits’, stored in ‘files’ or ‘vaults’. The words 
‘download’ and ‘upload’ use the freight metaphor; e-mail uses 
postal imagery.
In 1949, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver published a 
formal version of the transmission model (Shannon, Claude E 
and Weaver, Warren, 
A Mathematical Model of Communication
, 
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1949). Shannon and 
Weaver were engineers working for Bell Telephone Labs in the 
United States. Their goal was to make telephone cables as 
efficient as possible.
Their model had five elements: