Page 68 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

THE CONVERSATIONAL APPROACH 59

you can be sure that a consultant like myself should go out of his way
not to sound like a consultant. I like to tell people that if I had a
Ph.D. in communications, I probably wouldn’t want them to know
about it. Why? Because nothing gets in the way of doing business
more than language that is anything other than conversational.
Ask anyone in business today, and they will tell you that most
real business gets done outside the meetings—when we bump into
people in the corridors, pick up the phone to bounce an idea back
and forth, in snatches of conversation on the way to someplace else.
In other words, real business gets done when we exercise our most
consistently effective communications tool—ourselves. And we are
only really ourselves when we are talking to people naturally,
conversationally.
The real action comes down to face-to-face. I sometimes joke
that’s why God created golf. Ever wonder why CEOs often get auto-
matic membership in golf clubs, paid for by their companies and
shareholders? Because more deals are cut on the golf course every
year than in all the conference rooms in the world.