Wim Roelandts is CEO of US based Xilinx Corporation, one of the world's leading makers of programmable logic devices (PLD) -- the brains in our car satellite navigation systems, DVD players and DSL modems. Xilinx has a well-developed communication culture led from the top by Roelandts himself.

How important is communication with your employees?
It's critical. The vision, culture, values, all these things have to set an example. You set the example by communicating continuously.
Blog -- short for web log: a web page published in the form of a regularly updated online diary containing a combination of news and opinion.

The number of blogs on the Internet has exploded in recent years. Blogdex.net, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, estimates there are now over one million blogs. Blogs are timely, picking up news via the Internet and disseminating it before the traditional media processes it through its editorial system. When written by people with specialist knowledge, infused with passion they are intensely personal.


John Patrick, president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM offers a commentary on technology and its impact on business and society at patrickweb.com. "I think blogg-ing is grossly under- estimated," says Patrick. "It is already beginning to reshape how information is created, published and shared. Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available."

Business blogs range from the esoteric like Management by Basketball, to the inside-the-company view like the blog of Sun Microsystems president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz (http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan).

Those who still doubt the power of the blog should heed the words of Matt Drudge, legendary Internet underground reporter. In a speech to the National Press Club Drudge said: "We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The Net gives as much voice to a 13-year-old computer geek as to a CEO or Speaker of the House. We all become equal."


We should all speak plainly the experts tell us. Plain language is good language. But it is not always that easy. Organisations are steeped in a culture of management speak. Still failure to communicate simply can be expensive. In 1983 computer manufacturer Coleco wiped $35 million off its balance sheet in one quarter. How? Undecipher-able product manuals for a new product. The company was deluged with product returns. A year later it went bust.


In the days of horizontal management structures execu-tives can no longer rely on hierarchical power to make things happen. Today's manage-ment is all about persuasion, influence and inspiration. Pers-onalised communication is the order of the day.

Great leaders have always instinctively understood this. Former GE CEO Jack Welch was an habitual writer of handwritten notes dispatched to workers at all levels -- from part-time staff to senior executives. Some impres-sed employees framed his notes as proof of their leader's appreciation.

How, and how often, do you communicate?
Every quarter I talk about results and about the things that did and didn't go well. This is broadcast throughout the company over the Internet

With my management staff I have a series of one-to-ones. I meet with every member of my staff for about an hour, every week or so. We talk about issues, problems, results and changes I want to see happening. The key to management is to understand what goes on in people's brains. You only get that by frequent communication, and especially by listening to what they are telling you.

Thirdly, I like to grab 10 or 15 people at the lowest level in the company, sit around the table, and let them ask me questions. When I give a talk about the issues of the company, I talk about my issues. But you're never sure that you have covered everyone else's issues.
Research by academics at the Goizueta Business School, in Atlanta, shows just how important writing skills are. A study of 1200 executives found that more than half spent at least two hours per day answering email at work and 30 percent spent an additional hour or more at home. That's about four months per year dealing with emails.

Unfortunately while the amount of time we spend writing is increasing our writing skills appear to be on the slide. As Jeff Skoll formerly President of eBay and now CEO of the Skoll Foundation noted recently: "It's funny, that in an age when email has become such a dominant form of communication, people are writing more than they ever have. They spend so much time in front of the computer these days with written communication, and yet it seems that the art of that communication has declined over the same time."
Or maybe the ability of executives to communicate in writing has never been that good. "I think it's always been terrible," says Sam Hill, author of Radical Marketing.

"Tools like PowerPoint and email, coupled with the organisational downsizing of secretaries, have given illiterate business people the ability to send babble out unedited, and this has increased visibility of the problem."
Evidence suggests, that high-tech methods of communication are not as effective as old-fashioned face-to-face interaction. About 80 per cent of human communication is non-verbal. Facial expressions, body language, eye contact these are key conduits. "A lot of people rely on their personalities to persuade others", says Professor Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University Management School. "That doesn't come out in e-mails, and even video conferencing is stultifying. That's why eyeball-to-eyeball is so important."
The non-verbal signals conveyed when people interact is a subject explored in management guru Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Blink.
In his previous besteller, The Tipping Point, Gladwell looked at the crucial moment in time at which a phenomenon makes the transition from normal behaviour to exceptional.  (This was later brilliantly developed by Insead's Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their concept of "tipping point leadership".)  In Blink, Gladwell examines how first impressions affect decision-making.

He argues that by sorting out the information communicated in the first few seconds of interaction with a person, product or idea we can all learn to make better decisions.
When you want to get an organisation on track, good communication is essential. But before you communicate it is a good idea to check everyone is listening and receptive to the message. One way of doing this explains former CEO of Allied Signal and legendary US boss Larry Bossidy is to use an "initiative" to align everyone in the organisation. He spoke to Idea-Log:

In your new book Confronting Reality you talk about ‘initiatives’ as a way to get things done, to get the ball rolling, when confronting change within the company? How do you see this working?

It isn't the specific initiative that matters. It is the fact that you cause people all over the business to work together to get them achieved. In other words it isn't just a financial person, or a marketing person, or a manufacturing person. Once you can get an attitude of culture, of people from all segments of the business working together, then you can introduce things that can bring about change more easily.

So you're looking for something to coherently bind everybody in the organisation?

Exactly it doesn't matter what it is, but something that coherently binds people and that becomes a strength of the organisation. Because then you can put other initiatives in place. And have some confidence that they are going to be able to realise them.