Practical tools to help organizations eliminate the high price of failure to communicate
Be forewarned. Once you’ve been introduced to the concept, you can’t “un-see” the Cost of Confusion. It’s everywhere. Fortunately, this book also shows readers how to drive that cost to zero.
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Discover how organizations unknowingly sabotage success
by confusing customers, employees, patients, passengers, taxpayers, and even leaders themselves.
Learn to identify the risks and
eliminate their costly impact!
EARLY PRAISE FOR CUTTING THE COST OF CONFUSION
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Once our senior leadership grasped this concept, they realized that engaging the workforce can’t be an afterthought. Clear and compelling communication must be at the core of every strategic initiative.
MATTHEW BAKER
Capital Program Leader,
Advanced Energy Storage Materials, Albemarle
This is a great book for leaders. Instead of focusing on what they want to SAY, effective leaders focus on what their people need to HEAR and UNDERSTAND. That’s a much more powerful way to engage a workforce.
PAUL WERDER
Founder & CEO,
Lionheart Consulting
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Incorporating these concepts and methodologies has maximized the value we deliver to our clients and afforded us a powerful competitive advantage over big name consulting firms.
GREG SILLS
President,
Leading Projects LLC
I only wish Rich had written this book sooner because I would have sent it to a few big clients of ours who just couldn’t seem to get out of their own way.
DAVID SKALSKY
VP Programming and Production,
Hart Energy
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Our sales presentations were all about what our technology could do. With Rich’s help, we flipped the script. We showed buyers what THEY could do with our technology. Customers could see the value and propelled our industry-wide success.
CHRIS PARR
VP Sales and Operations,
Systems Application Engineering
Who should read this book?
Why should I read it?
This new book delivers a proven methodology to recapture millions of dollars in business value through increased productivity, cost savings, sales, and revenue.
Executive decision-makers and
discipline professionals in marketing and advertising, policymaking, organizational development, knowledge management, information technology, project management, and related fields will be empowered by this unique set of insights and tools.
Identify and quantify the risks organizations face when neglecting to educate and engage their critical audiences effectively.
For impact players, those people who want to make a difference within their companies, organizations, and public institutions.
Everyday examples, in-depth case studies, information graphics, and other resources make this book as practical as it is transformative for every business professional.
Meet the author
Photo by Norm Eder
Rich Layton
CCO・Chief Clarity Officer
Transform Communications
As CCO of Transform Communications, Rich works "under the hood" of global organizations to engage, educate, and inspire all those on whom success depends. Rich’s "secret sauce" is a disciplined methodology that blends strategic communication with risk management, empowering leaders and teams to identify and overcome their organization’s complex business, technology, and marketing challenges. The methodology and the mission are one and the same: Cutting the Cost of Confusion.
Chapters inside
1
Introduction
2
The Cost of Confusing Customers
3
The Cost of Confusing Employees
4
The Cost of Confusing Citizens
5
Confusion as a Strategy
6
Deadly Confusion
7
Cutting the Cost: A Methodology
8
Application and Case Studies
9
Conversation with a Change Agent
10
Resources
Excerpts from the book
Decreasing sales, declining market share, costly returns and eroding brand reputation are a few of the metrics signaling customers are confused.
Perhaps, they don’t understand the benefits and features or don’t appreciate how much more value a new product offers over its established competitors. For start-up ventures, particularly those in technology, the cost of confusion could even mean failure to launch.
The world’s greatest strategic initiative – the American Experiment – stands at a crossroads today due to our failure to recognize that language has just as much power to prevent communication as it does to foster it.
Too frequently, it is only through a safety recall that the role of confusion in product-related fatalities comes to light.
Some of the most high-profile cases have involved products intended for infants and young children. Sometimes, these recalls reveal the fatal consequences that can result when parents and caregivers have been confused about the intended use of a product and its possible hazards.
Without clear understanding of the inner workings of their organizations, leaders can make classic “out-of-touch” mistakes:
Overpromising to shareholders and external stakeholders, setting unrealistic targets for productivity, revenue, and growth, and imposing practices and procedures that make jobs more difficult, not less. Smart organizations don’t make those mistakes.
Calculated efforts to create confusion show no signs of stopping or being regulated effectively. The least of them cost us money and time. The largest efforts do irreparable harm, weaponizing confusion in an assault upon civil discourse and democratic societies around the globe.
Maintaining vigilance is our best defense. Our best offense is insisting on clarity and transparency. Bottom line: where there are smoke and mirrors, there is bound to be a Cost of Confusion.
This disciplined, strategic methodology brings confusion out into the open, helps quantify its risks and provides a blueprint to mitigate confusion’s impact.
The methodology integrates four functions into a unique form of Risk Management: Stakeholder Risk Management, Engagement strategy, Information Architecture and Knowledge management
The strategies in Cutting the Cost of Confusion are developed from working with clients like...
Learn to Cut the Cost any way you like
Paperback
Light on weight, heavy on methodology
Portable strategies to close the understanding gap and engage your stakeholders
Hardback
Hard-backed, easy to grasp concepts
A seriously heavy-duty book for the serious organization ready to eliminate its failures to communicate