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Business communication for the global age Joanna Crossman, Sarbari Bordia, and Colleen Mills, McGraw-Hill, Sydney, 2011.
The importance of communication for corporate life is now well established. There is considerable evidence that companies with effective communication strategies are successful, whereas those with poor communications tend to flounder (Tourish & Hargie, 2004; Gilley et al., 2009). However, there still remain gaps between the triangular strands of the day-to-day practice of organisations, management theory, and communication research. This book sets out to bridge these gaps by examining the impact of key current themes in organisations for the practice of communication at both operational and theoretical levels. In many senses, the practice of management is now in crisis. Organisations have found that many of their prized management tools have failed to yield the expected results (Hargie & Tourish, 2009). In large measure, as the present text illustrates, this is because the communication dimensions of the decision-making process have been ignored.
Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in the number of books in the field of business communication. In general terms, these can be divided into two categories. First, there are the 'the keys to my success' texts by recognised business gurus, keen to tell and sell their story. They are usually a-theo retica I, pitched at the 'how to' or 'hints and tips' level, and, like the proverbial curate's egg, are good and bad in parts. The main problem is that more often than not their achievements owe as much to good luck as to best practice, and so the proffered 'success keys' do not fit other corporate doors. In addition, business leaders and self-made (wo)men rarely devote as much time to discussing their failures as they do to their successes and so the picture presented is rather skewed. While some of these texts make a good read, they are not particularly helpful when it...