Education has become unbalanced because we have separated learning from wisdom; communications, because we have separated interaction from honesty; religion, because we have separated belief from doubt; sex, because we have separated passion from love. Common to all four areas, and to work-life balance too, is our failure to find relevant measures. Instead of improving how we measure success in any area we accept imperfect yardsticks and then devote our efforts to fulfilling them. The results can be fairly disastrous.

This article addresses education and communications. A future article will discuss imbalance in religion and sex.

The world now has a higher level of education for more people than ever before. Graduates abound; PhDs proliferate. It is cause for celebration because a good education is the third greatest gift we can give children. But just as we don’t give a young person a lot of money without ensuring that they understand the risks inherent in wealth, so we cannot equip them with the equally dangerous tools of knowledge – and, today, access to knowledge through the internet – without making certain that they know the risks of having information without wisdom.

The first mouse knew where the cheese was but the second mouse got it.
The four points of wisdom essential to making use of education are [i] knowing how much we don’t know; [ii] continuing to learn even when we think we are fully educated; [iii] showing that rules, laws and guidelines are for guidance, not slavish obedience, and always need common-sense interpretation; [iv] not overestimating the value of experience which, by itself, never transformed a fool into a wise man.

Here’s a tiny example of stupidity gone mad.
“Please resubmit your invoice adding the words
‘THIS INVOICE HAS BEEN COMPUTER-GENERATED
AND THEREFORE NEEDS NO SIGNATURE’
in order to avoid your having to sign it”.

This came from one of the foremost Universities in Asia.

The dash for qualifications and the reliance placed on them by employers has turned education into cramming. The consequences of this are worrying. For the employer, it implies that his judgment of a candidate can be suspended in favour of a simple weighing of the qualifications. An employee hired only because of paper qualifications is not assessed for common sense, creativity, loyalty or integrity. And yet these four attributes constitute the most important characteristics of an employee – more important than qualifications and experience.

For employees the concept of a purely qualification-based society can be disastrous. Some of the best contributors to the world, many of the great creative brains, laureate composers and writers and truly imaginative inventors would all be ruled out because they had no paper qualifications.

Neither Jack Cohen, founder of TESCO, one of the world’s largest retailers nor Michael Marks, the founder of Marks & Spencer, one of the most successful companies of the twentieth century, had any significant educational qualifications. They now employ the brightest graduates in the west, but they seek common sense and street-wisdom to complement the paper accolades.

The worst consequence of paper-driven employment is the impact on the organisation as a whole. It predetermines promotion, stifles initiative and enterprise and can even lead to employee despair.

Good education teaches us to employ colleagues who are better than we are. Doing so supports and promotes our own position. Hiring supine and conformist subordinates, however good their qualifications, undermines the organisation until it destroys itself. Education is presently unbalanced.

Another excellent way to destroy an organisation is to drown it in jargon.

One of the saddest things I have seen in my life has been the murder of language. As our technical ability to communicate quickly and efficiently has increased – exponentially in the last few years – so abuse by incompetently and unnecessarily invented language has grown to match it. Not just in one language but in all languages. Examples are not necessary. Pick up any official document, any terms and conditions, any contract between two organisations or people and you will see so many that you, too, will weep.

There are several causes. Many organisations want to confuse the customer. Did you read the small print on the last insurance or banking contract you signed? I doubt it. Even if you could see the Point 6 Font in which it was printed, it is unlikely that you would have understood more than twenty percent of the words. Besides, you were probably being urged to sign it quickly while the “special offer” lasted. This form of language abuse is theft, but don’t try prosecuting. You will already have signed away all your rights for honest dealing, competence, promptness and redress. You will very likely have been transformed from victim into perpetrator.

Then there is self-aggrandisement. Spouting a lot of words or mnemonics that others don’t understand makes some people imagine that they are more successful and important than the rest of us. They are, of course, merely making themselves appear ridiculous and insecure.

There is a good jargon game being played in business and official department meetings all round the world. On entering the meeting each participant is given a list of current jargon and incomprehensible mnemonics. As each of these is said, the meeting participants tick off the offending phrase. The first person to complete the list, because all items have been ticked, leaps to his or her feet and shouts “bullshit”.

That’s why it is called Bullshit Bingo.

A more complex slaughter of the language is caused by the widening gap between the sound-bite and the so-called research paper. We cannot avoid sound-bites, and relevant ones have been with mankind since the dawn of civilisation. The warning grunt of Neanderthal Man alerting the arrival of hostile creatures and the sigh of the lovelorn for the knowledge they are still denied are both sound-bites, and useful and expressive ones, too. But a sound-bite is to communication what a peanut is to dinner – titillating to the palate but unsatisfying to the stomach.

At the other extreme is the Research Paper. Deep studies of our world are vital and welcome. They have been the basis of our longevity, our increasingly fulfilled and pain-free lives and of our material well-being. Without them progress would be slow, sporadic and uncertain. However, truly good papers are well-researched, intelligible, devoid of unnecessary complexity and brief.

World War II was won by the Allies party because they insisted that all paper submissions were restricted to one page. Long, tortuous documents allowing the author to cover every aspect of his posterior were forbidden.

Egregious communications, from the “Welcome” door mat to the telesales caller’s chilling “How are you today?” are a form of language prostitution we could all do without. As Peter Ustinov once said in New York when bidden to ‘have a nice day’, “Thank you, but I have other arrangements”. Polite greetings of the “Good morning” and “Good-bye” sort are more honest and project a realistic view of the relationship between the parties communicating. Blaise Pascal had it right in 1851 when he apologised for writing a long letter, adding that he didn’t have time to make it a short one.

It is widely agreed that the world is becoming a more complex place. It has certainly done so in my lifetime. This should surely been seen as the signal for simpler, clearer communications, not for increasingly confusing ones. O that it were practical to impose a word tax; alas, it is not.

Easy and cheap access to communication of every sort offers the possibility of more widespread appreciation of the arts and a deeper understanding of man’s true spirituality – the beauty he creates himself with the tools he was given at birth. Do any of the Communications Degrees so ardently studied today provide this kind of appreciation? Have these courses contributed to the real quality of life?

This is what education and communication are about. More years alive are wasted if, at the end, we cannot say that we have had, within the limits imposed by our genes and the environment in which we were raised, a fulfilled life. Any education that does not contribute to all aspects of fulfillment is not education but training. Any communication that fails to enhance the quality of the precious gift we are given at birth is not informing but selling.

A good education and true communications make life wonderfully fulfilled.

John Bittleston mentors people in their businesses, their jobs and their personal lives.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you – Jean-Paul Sartre

The 21st Century has seen a shift away from shout media to discussion media, the internet blogs, wikis, forums. I call these ‘whisper’ media because whispering has that air of intimacy that characterises them. Relationships with employees are following the same trend.

‘Shout’ management still flourishes in some places. It is giving way to ‘discuss’ management. Had it done so earlier it might have prevented the arrogance that led to the near-collapse of capitalism.

Why is ‘discuss’ management only slowly taking root?

The easy answer is pride. Those who think only they know the solutions aren’t going to waste time listening to arguments of people they regard as intellectually inferior. But pride is a manifestation of the problem, not a cause of it. Indeed, I suggest that the underlying cause is a lack of personal pride or, as I would put it, confidence.

What we see as overt pride is insecurity. Not honest doubt but fundamental uncertainty about who the proud person is, what standards he aspires to, what he sees as his role in society and what his life objectives are. The shouting manager is noisy because he doesn’t want anyone to notice this weakness. He doesn’t realise that shouting simply advertises it.

We teach the theory of “Servant-Master” but fail to apply it. Intellectually we know it is right but we lack the confidence to practice it because we think to do so may show us as weak. In fact it does exactly the opposite. The truly strong do not need to shout.

There is, however, a second problem. In our search for ‘one-solution-fits-all’ we try to define the good manager as some static model fulfilling a checklist of desirable attributes. It doesn’t work like that. The very process of discussion changes the model of the manager if he or she listens to their charges and explores what is behind the feedback.

The new ‘whisper’ media are changing communications in general. Humans have always enjoyed a good gossip and provided it is not malicious, why not? Rural villagers pass on news and views over their daily chores to sate the appetite for involvement in our neighbours’ affairs.

The mass media made coffee-housing less necessary and time pressures prevented the intimate exchanges that had made society interesting, challenging and fun. The media shouted at us. We shouted at each other, often without realising that the very act of shouting is an act of aggression, whether intended or not – noisy workplaces have more disputes than quiet ones.

All that is changing fast. The twitter, the blog, the forum, the Facebook, the Linkedin and the other online societal groups make one-to-one communication easy and fast. They can be misused, but so can a motor car and a glass of wine. Handled properly the new media keep us informed without the underlying suspicion that we are being seduced into purchases and actions we don’t want.

For the same reason, they provide the valuable feedback every manufacturer has been seeking since the start of market research, with the added advantage that views can be pinpointed with remarkable accuracy and continuously plotted. A blog is as public or as private as you want to make it. Think of the implications for a new restaurant with daily assessments of what people are saying about the food and service. The customer really is King, at last.

Sensible businesses use the information provided by the new media to change and adapt their products and services, and to communicate directly with Consumer Leaders, that influential group that dictates fashion and whim and spurs us to greater achievements.

A sign of the importance of the new media is the monitoring services that are developing. Singapore has its own innovative version of this in Brandtology, a business that uses a combination of high technology and personal inspection to provide the sellers of goods and services with a day-by-day analysis of the internet criticisms and plaudits by consumers. Manufacturers can see how consumers are reacting to their long-established products as well as to newcomers just launched.

This has already been dramatically demonstrated in the computer world. For decades, computer manufacturers and software producers have dictated what sort of computer and platform the consumer may buy, with very little reference to what the consumer actually wants. I wrote an article on the ideal laptop nearly five years ago. Only now are the computer manufacturers paying heed to consumers’ demands, and all because – logically – the first subject of internet consumer comments was the computer.

Service providers are able continuously to keep tabs on the performance of their businesses in the eyes of the users and seeing how their competitors are faring at the same time. As a way of keeping a business on its toes I can think of none better.

Could a producer also manipulate the new media in somewhat the same way that the old media adapted advertisements and editorial to produce the advertorial? Such is the new software sophistication that, combined with a modest amount of personal inspection, deliberate attempts to ‘rig’ the internet comments can be identified and eliminated and only genuine observations and exchanges are examined. They are, for the most part, amateur comments, the views and feelings of the inexpert consumer. In other words, precisely what a producer needs to know.

Perception is all in a world that is so rapidly becoming part virtual, part real.

Sales training is important and I am the first to acknowledge that there are legitimate techniques for closing a sale. But the most important sales tools we have are our ears and our eyes. Someone came to me for an interview recently. Nice chap, decent, experienced but totally lacking emotional intelligence. He talked from start to finish. He was still talking as I gently pushed him into the lift and waved him goodbye. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t observe the surroundings. He didn’t ask a single question. Buy, boy, did he talk. I should think he’ll be in the ‘talking Olympics’.

Sad that the notes I had to write after his departure read like a primary school report. ‘Could do so much better.’

His inability to ask, to listen and to enthuse lost him the offer of a very good job. Even a smile would have been some compensation for his poor interactive ability but this fellow had taken gravitas to its logical conclusion – grimness.

He’s not alone in the sea of cold fishes.

When we train people to deal with others, whether they are sales people, IT technicians or doctors we must teach them first to observe. Doctors know this. “Eyes first, ears second, hands last and least, mouth not at all.” That was the dictum on which they were brought up – for diagnosis, but not often for dealing with the consequences of it.

Every interaction we have with another is about them, not about us. You may think that if both sides approach it from this point of view there won’t be much communication – each will be waiting for the other to speak. In practice there will be excellent communication.

An out of work friend came to me for advice. He’s had a bad run, not all his fault. He’s failed in a couple of jobs and he’s failing again in the present one. He asked me what I would advise him to do. I have observed this very nice man for a while now. He is depressed (but not clinically), he is dejected, he is a little sorry for himself, he is sensitive to other people’s criticism, even when they don’t mean to be critical.

Now I’m normally a kindly, sympathetic fellow. Life has been good to me; I try to be good to those it hasn’t treated so generously. But I gave him hell – well, not quite ‘hell’ but heading in that direction. Why?

The world bullies the defeated, applauds the successful. But it applauds most those who try, even when they don’t succeed. In fact, the world reserves the best of its pleasures for the enthusiastic. Not for the unrealistically effusive but for the communicators who demonstrate that they have observed the other person, have worked out the position they are in and who react to that analysis with gusto.

Genuine, sustainable enthusiasm is infectious. All those who bask in its sunshine become lively, interesting, engaged. And that’s where we came in. Every greeting must be relevant, genuine (not rote) and about the other person.

Dr Ee Peng Liang had it to a fine art. “How can I help you?” he greeted almost everyone. The difference was, he meant it.

Can you mean your greeting, too?

As with all good things, there has been a price. Sitting on the couch at home, holding hands with your nearest and dearest, watching television, has had the strange effect of isolating you from each other. You may have been literally in contact but your communication was with the TV screen, not with your spouse. You have both been receiving information, not disseminating it, seldom discussing it, hardly ever initiating it.

Finally viewers and readers have rebelled. Now they can join in the information revolution, not just with facts but with views, opinions, original thoughts. When they look up their online encyclopedia – at astonishing speed – they can add their observations, correct errors and impart newfound wisdom. And they do so; Wikipedia means what it says.

The most startling aspect of the internet is its inexorable promotion of free thought. Take the simple issue of consumer protection, something Asia has largely ignored. No country had much consumer protection until Ralph Nadar started the movement in USA in the 1960s, challenging the car giants to make motoring safer through such simple devices as seat belts. Nadar wasn’t welcomed in Asia.

But if you think consumer protection is still absent from this part of the world, think again. Most people now consult blogs before committing money to a new car, dishwasher or overseas holiday. Consumer protection has been brought to Asia by the very best people to do it – the consumers. All over the world manufacturers are having to rethink their relations with their customers and with the medium that gives people such freedom to express themselves.

You will have noticed that Tesco, one of my favourite big companies, is suing for defamation. I don’t know the circumstances of the case but I sure hope Tesco does. There are many adverse comments about any large organisation today and legal action is a potentially dangerous precedent for dealing with them. You can’t sue everyone who says your service stinks. Perhaps attending to the cause of the defamation would arouse more sympathy with the customer than trying to beat him into the ground?

But consumer protection is not the only reason why so many find recourse to expressing themselves on the internet. After one hundred years of being more or less passive consumers of the mass media, we want our say. We don’t even much mind if nobody is listening. Our ears have been battered enough; our mouths are poised to take over – and our “speakers’ corner” is right there on our laptop.

The implications of the internet’s accessibility and consumer friendliness are massive. They impact on the mass media themselves, on our personal and commercial relations with each other, on education (why learn by heart when all you need to know is a click away?) and on the core need of man today to find the wisdom to cope with his new technological age.

For those who grew up in the shadow of the last century’s mass media today’s new media present a bewildering mix of excess, and personal opportunity. Excess, because we are all overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing knowledge in the world; personal opportunity, because never before have we encountered such a menu of communication, entertainment, control. From primary schoolchild to political scion, we are each faced with a level of choice that needs a clear head and a focused purpose if we are not to sink into a pond of thoughts or retreat into a safe haven of our own virtual world.

Making use of the new opportunities requires an understanding of how our individual thinking has changed over the last twenty years. This is best illustrated by the contrast between the old desire to keep up with the neighbours and the new aspiration to stand out from the crowd. Not everyone has changed and no one person has changed totally. We still need to identify with our kaki or social group but we want to be able to express our individuality, establish our right to be seen as different and unique.

So anything we say to another must be relevant, not just in general terms but specifically now. Anything that is not useful is spam. But note that one man’s spam is another man’s nourishment. Worse, the nourishment of today becomes the spam of tomorrow if we do not attend to its relevance.

As with all promotion, a sales pitch has two jobs to do – to attract attention and to sell. You can’t sell if you don’t successfully display the wares, but just showing off the goods won’t necessarily sell them. The old lesson of getting the customer to Look, Listen, Learn and Leap still applies. Or, as I used to put it to the creative teams in the agencies I ran, “Selling is L”. (You’ve probably worked out that ‘Leap’ was ‘for the Credit Card’.)

Today’s sales story has not only to be relevant but to be fast. Just making it understandable is hard enough. The development of language, both technical and day-to-day, has put well-known encyclopaedias out of business. Hundreds of new words and thousands of new acronyms emerge very day. We need to know them, to understand them and most importantly to know who else understands them.

Defining the potential buyer is not a matter of purchasing someone else’s database, although you may have to do that at times. However, observing the golden rule that 80% of your sales come from your existing customers is still the way to maximise your potential new business. There is no database like your own, and that applies if you are a behemoth or a sprat. Understand how to build and maintain a good database and you have already made over half your sales effort.

What should you say to your intended customer?

Very, very little. Remember the old adage that “More means worse”. It is so true. Observe the long diatribes poured onto the net and ask yourself, ‘does anyone read this stuff’? The answer is ‘yes, but very few’. Then ask the more useful question ‘how many people don’t read this stuff who ought to?’ The answer is ‘many’. Then ask yourself ‘how often have I seen something I ought to read, held it for a while then clicked it away unread?’ You’ll find this is common.

Clever restaurants present a taster of their speciality. It whets the appetite. Then the customer orders the dish. Today’s clever marketing offers a hint, a summary, a teaser. It also offers the whole dish, free. Then it has you coming regularly to the restaurant and the rest is profit.