La comunicazione è oggi lo skill più importante

Ho incrociato questo articolo su Forbes ieri sera tardi e ho deciso che meritasse un post per segnalarlo e non il semplice retweet.

Il tema è quello del ruolo cruciale della comunicazione tra gli skill che una persona deve avere oggi, specie in ambito business. L’articolo è scritto da Greg Satell e qui ne riporto alcuni passaggi:

(…) if we were to remember one thing about Churchill it should be that what made him so effective was his power to communicate.  I remember being puzzled.  Growing up I had always heard about the importance of hard work, honesty and other things, but never communication.

Yet now, thirty years later, I’ve begun to understand what he meant.  As Walter Isaacson argues in his book The Innovators, even in technology—maybe especially in technology—the ability to collaborate effectively is decisive.  In order to innovate, it’s not enough to just come up with big ideas, you also need to work hard to communicate them clearly.

We tend to treat knowledge and communication as two separate spheres.  We act as expertise was a private matter, attained through quiet study of the lexicon in a particular field.  Communication, on the other hand, is often relegated to the realm of the social, a tool we use to interact with others of our species.

Yet, as Wittgenstein argued decades ago, that position is logically untenable because it assumes that we are able to communicate to ourselves in a private language.  In truth, we can’t really know anything that we can’t communicate.  To assert that we can possess knowledge, but are unable to designate what it is, is nonsensical.

It has become fashionable to say that our present epoch is an information age, but that’s not quite right.  In truth, we live in a communication age and it’s time we start taking it seriously.