Effective Communication: Part I

What does it mean to communicate effectively? Is talking and listening not the correct basis for communicating? The breakdown in what constitutes effective communication has been the direct cause of many business failures and is a huge cause of our ongoing economic struggles. Communicating effectively means to thoroughly understand a person or groups point of views and developing a means to produce their needs and wants in a mutually beneficial agreement. Great communication skills are what separate the great businesses from the average businesses and leads to the direct result of well positioning within the marketplace. As we look around at the current environment of our nation what is seen is a distorted, unorganized atmosphere due to poor communication. This miscommunication has severely fractured the foundation of the United States and plagues our ability to prosper as a whole rather than a select few. Let’s examine where the communication lapsed occurred and how it has created a ripple effect globally.

The miscommunication in terms of sound financial stability and living within ones means was a huge oversight and a terrible result of ill-conceived information communicated to the public. Let me clearly state that responsibility should be shared by both the buyers and sellers who participated in the irresponsible behavior of overindulgence and neglected self-discipline. The sellers clearly knew that the product they were providing was being sold off of an inflated perception of the “American Dream” that had many people drooling to be included within. The buyers eagerly participated in a false series of transactions that were based off of exaggerated wealth within an overpriced/ underpaid house that was beyond their affordability.  The marketplace was hyper-inflated by a real-estate market that needed an increasing amount of consistent transactions which were being backed by unsecure finances. This poor communication was all due to an insatiable amount of greed and no proper planning of how to stabilize the eventual downturn within this business cycle. The failure in communication can also be illustrated with the ignorance of people who thought they were worth more than their actual financial standings and therefore spent largely on credit building endless debt. This in turn produced an economy too dependent on one sole industry to create jobs, investments, loans and huge profits.

This brief analysis of the United State’s financial institutions failure to communicate the inefficiencies within the real estate market created a severely disabled economy on a global scale after its inevitable downfall. Why globally? It is because many nations have huge amounts of investments with the United State’s economy and are too dependent upon its productivity for it to fail. How is this so? This is because when times were great huge amounts of foreign cash and investments were pumped into the United States as credit for increased production. Everyone wanted a slice of the tasteful U.S. real estate market. What was never communicated though was the fact that households were not properly structured to maintain the high-flying lifestyle in the long-run. I am sure that this fact was known amongst financial and global leaders but was never communicated because of fear of losing out on a huge cash cow, no matter how short-lived it would inevitably last. No one wanted to take on the necessary task of communicating the eventual downfall of the system and that failed call to action depleted all that was attained during those short prospering years.

It is quite easy for things to go awry when there is no communication being administered in the proper manner. When dealing with something as broad and large as a global economy, effective communication is imperative. Choosing to withhold important information and ignoring the warning signs was conducted by nearly all involved. While blame can largely be casted upon the financial institutions, the consumers should have known things were too good to be true. The underlying factors within this deep impacting collapse was the failure to communicate the unrealistic tactics being utilized by the financial institutions to prop up the real estate market and the willing transactions amongst consumers that enabled the process of overextending the marketplace.

Stay tuned for my continual analysis of how effective communication must be utilized to produce successful environments and how it prevents detrimental disasters from occurring.