Much before I had my management education, my father who was my first guru in many ways gave me a simple mantra for communication - " What Bannerjee says, Mukherjee must understand !"
After this, while at XLRI, Father Tome, the then Director and my Business Communication Professor fleshed this out with his many messages which have left an enduring impact on me. For instance,
i) the importance of understanding one's audience for one's communication, ii) the need to avoid abstractions and use 'thing expression' and iii) the emphasis on being simple and concise were extremely useful starting points in my corporate career.
The fact that I started my career in Sales and Sales Management helped me to appreciate further and implement this learning, dealing as I was daily with people of different backgrounds, having varied levels of education and communicating in a wide array of tongues. Later, when preparing for class as a Prof in my second avatar in my career, these made even more sense. Especially once I acquired a few years of experience as a management teacher, these messages helped immensely in my reveling in handling more abstract subjects like Ethics or Strategy - subjects which not many people like to teach.
But all this practice of four decades flies in the face of the need for political correctness dominating civilised discourse today. Some time back, in a Facebook post, while commenting in a lighter vein on a former neighbour I saw after a couple of decades, I said there was much more of him now. I was promptly accused of body-shaming (whatever that is!). I did seriously think of retorting that in turn, I was being language-shamed in the process, but let it pass.
This over-exact emphasis on political correctness even prevents one from insulting another. Wonder what would have been made of the master P G Wodehouse's remark in one of his books where one character refers to a seedy specimen as a 'son of a bachelor'!
Be that as it may, I have collected some of these examples of correctness and am sharing it for the benefit of the general public.
* A dwarf is vertically disadvantaged
* An obese person is horizontally challenged
* An idiot is cognitively insufficient
* A crook is honesty deficient
* A dustman is a refuse collector
and the one I like best, more so as I turn 65 next birthday, I am not old - I am chronologically advantaged !
After this, while at XLRI, Father Tome, the then Director and my Business Communication Professor fleshed this out with his many messages which have left an enduring impact on me. For instance,
i) the importance of understanding one's audience for one's communication, ii) the need to avoid abstractions and use 'thing expression' and iii) the emphasis on being simple and concise were extremely useful starting points in my corporate career.
The fact that I started my career in Sales and Sales Management helped me to appreciate further and implement this learning, dealing as I was daily with people of different backgrounds, having varied levels of education and communicating in a wide array of tongues. Later, when preparing for class as a Prof in my second avatar in my career, these made even more sense. Especially once I acquired a few years of experience as a management teacher, these messages helped immensely in my reveling in handling more abstract subjects like Ethics or Strategy - subjects which not many people like to teach.
But all this practice of four decades flies in the face of the need for political correctness dominating civilised discourse today. Some time back, in a Facebook post, while commenting in a lighter vein on a former neighbour I saw after a couple of decades, I said there was much more of him now. I was promptly accused of body-shaming (whatever that is!). I did seriously think of retorting that in turn, I was being language-shamed in the process, but let it pass.
This over-exact emphasis on political correctness even prevents one from insulting another. Wonder what would have been made of the master P G Wodehouse's remark in one of his books where one character refers to a seedy specimen as a 'son of a bachelor'!
Be that as it may, I have collected some of these examples of correctness and am sharing it for the benefit of the general public.
* A dwarf is vertically disadvantaged
* An obese person is horizontally challenged
* An idiot is cognitively insufficient
* A crook is honesty deficient
* A dustman is a refuse collector
and the one I like best, more so as I turn 65 next birthday, I am not old - I am chronologically advantaged !
***
No comments:
Post a Comment