Management Communication: A Guide

This new guide offers concise, sensible, and logically organized advice to job-site writing. Very well-designed, the book features useful lists and boxes for significant points; very few pages are full blocks of text.After a description of the steps of the management communication process and discussion of communication across the business spectrum--to peers, supervisors, and subordinates--the book includes chapters on the uses of visuals, speaking, group communication, and more.Especially useful aspects include the following:1. Each chapter includes a scenario--a debate-worthy business situation, often with an international dimension--that serves as a crucible for the chapter's concepts and advice.2. Unlike many texts, this book addresses how e-mail shares main traits yet diverges from other media. The book extensively discusses the choice of the best medium for the situation--e-mail, hard copy, even oral rather than written.3. Again unlike other texts, this book has a section on Crisis Communication. From watching the news, we can judge how managers follow or do not follow the book's sound advice.This book would be fun both as a classroom text and as a resource for the office collection.

I have examined many textbooks for my advanced management communication course and was very impressed by the innovative approaches to management communication advanced in this guide. First, the book integrates management strategies with communication strategies. As the authors state right on the first page, "communication is not something you do *while* you manage; it's *how* you manage" (p. 1). This integration makes it easy for managers to build on their existing knowledge and to apply the communication strategies discussed in the book to their work. In this way, the book also demonstrates an awareness of its audience that traditional textbooks often preach, but do not always practice. Second, with roughly 200 pages, the book is also surprisingly concise, while at the same time doing more justice to the complexities of management communication than many of the traditional 600- or 700-page textbooks. Rather than presenting managers with a myriad of forms, the guide devotes considerable attention to analysis, arguing that good communication decisions, like good management decisions, are based on good analysis. The strategies for analyzing management communication go beyond the usual audience analysis in traditional textbooks and include strategies for analyzing the timing (kairos) of messages, the selection of appropriate communication technologies, and more.Third, the guide places great emphasis on digital literacies for managers. For example, the authors devote a chapter each to using communication technologies strategically, to managing virtual teams, and to working with visuals. Perhaps the most innovative aspect here is the way the guide attends to the global dimensions of communication technologies. Rather than regurgitating old stereotypes, the guide provides real-life scenarios throughout the book, which offer learners an opportunity to apply the chapter content to global situations and to question the impact stereotypes can have on communication. While traditional textbooks tend to take an international approach, providing "nationalized" editions (e.g. a Canadian edition with Canadian examples), this book transcends that paradigm and offers a global approach. Already in the scenario for the first chapter, for example, the reader learns about the communication decisions of Pekka Gallen, a manager based in London with staff deployed in Canada, France, Norway, and the U.S. Finally, there is a book that integrates management and communication theories, presents the complexities of management communication in a concise and manageable way, and helps managers prepare for a digital and global business environment!