FOLLOW THE LEADER
FURTHER QUOTATIONS ON
PROMOTION IN LEADERSHIP
- PROMOTION:
- ...you only get one chance to make a first impression...^8
- COMMUNICATION:
- Developing excellent communication skills is absolutely
essential to effective leadership. The leader must be able to
share knowledge and ideas to transmit a sense of urgency and
enthusiasm to others. If a leader can’t get a message across
clearly and motivate others to act on it, then having a message
doesn’t even matter.^9 (Gilbert Amelio, President and CEO
of National Semiconductor Corp.)
- Keep it simple...The time and energy required for effective
vision communications are directly related to the clarity and
simplicity of the message. Focused, jargon-free information
can be disseminated to large groups of people at a fraction
of the cost of clumsy, complicated communication. Techno-
babble and MBA-speak just get in the way, creating confusion,
suspicion and alienation. Communication seems to work best
when it is so direct and so simple that it has a sort of elegance.
The challenge of simple and direct communication is that it
requires great clarity of thought...It is much harder to be clear
and concise than over-complicated and wordy.^10
- Even a desirable, focused, and feasible description of the future
is useless if it is so complex that communicating it to large
numbers of people is impossible. The point here is not to take
a good idea and ‘dumb it down.’ But...communicating even
a simple vision to a large number of people can be enormously
difficult. Simplicity is essential.^11
- Repeat, repeat, repeat! The most carefully crafted messages
rarely sink deeply into the recipient’s consciousness after
only one pronouncement. Our minds are too cluttered, and
any communication has to fight hundreds of other ideas for
attention....As a result, effective information transferal almost
