Reviewed from a book, Talk Inc.

: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations, written by Groysberg B., Carman Nobel, a senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, had simplified the contents of the books into an article entitle The Power of Conversational Leadership. The reason for me to choose this article is to let you know the methods that had been used by some international companies in order to apply face-to-face conversation and how this approach give benefits to companys workers. From this article, we can see that the author, Carman Nobel, had pointed out four alliterative elements of good organizational elements. They are intimacy, interactivity, inclusion and intentionality. Each of them plays different roles in an organization. It is important to make sure that the information can be get across the organization which means that the bottom line also can stand up for their opinion rather than only get instruction from top management. In that article, Nobel had mention that Groysberg had explains in details about that four alliterative elements which is intimacy is all about leadership, interactivity is about channels, inclusion is about content and intentionality is about goals. Based on this article that had been writing from authors reviewed, there are few major points that I can learned from this article. First is, I now able to understand that conversation is the most crucial part in management and leadership. The management cannot be determined as success if they do not have good conversation in that company itself. Second, the size of company, whether it is huge or small, it cannot be an excuse for them to get better conversation among them. As I can see from the case of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (HPCL), although the workshops take years to complete, but at the end, all the workers from that company get their own visions. Third, it must include both form top management until the bottom worker to understand their companys goal and working together to achieve the goals. Just like what EMC had done with their workers when they had publish a book that even written from the women workers from that company. Fourth, use the technological advance as one of the mediums to encourage them to interact among each others. If they cannot see in reality, let them to be seen virtually. Fifth, the roles of leader themselves. As a leader, we can use the opportunity to become a leader by create a conversation but at the same time, adjust it to include the companys strategic goals in it. Personally, from my own opinion, I think that this article is good since I can understand and dig out the points that the author want to let me know and with the simple language that he had used, I can read this article well. It is interesting and suitable for a student like me to read it.

References

Nobel C. (2012), The Power of Conversational Leadership. Retrieved from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6876.html (July 23rd, 2012)

Appendix

The Power of Conversational Leadership

Published: July 23, 2012 Author: Carmen Nobel

When a company is small, communication among employees is as simple as rolling a desk chair around
the room to talk to the president, the admin, or the chief engineer. But as a company grows, communication becomes more difficult. And strategic direction can suffer as a result, even if those at the top assume otherwise.

"Having communication that goes bottom-up is just as important as having communication that goes top-down."
"In many cases you have an executive team that's so sure about company strategy, but then you go inside the organization and find that nobody else has a clue," says Harvard Business School Professor Boris Groysberg. "Nobody knows what strategic conversations are actually unfolding."

For that reason, many CEOs are reconsidering the classic command-and-control structure in which a few people are sending all the directives from the top of the corporate hierarchy. Instead, they are adopting a conversational approach. In their new book,Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations, Groysberg and communication professional Michael Slind show how several global companies are adopting principles of face-to-face conversation, and why this approach positively affects a company's bottom line.

"In many ways the book is not about communication as much as it is about performance," Groysberg says. "In an economic environment where there is so much uncertainty, the senior management of a company might not know where the company should be going in three years. But your frontline customer-facing people might. Having communication that goes bottom-up is just as important as having communication that goes top-down."

To try to suss out best practices for communication, the authors interviewed communications directors and CEOs at more than 100 companies. "We were struck by how often that word 'conversation' kept popping up," Slind says. "CEOs, especially, expressed an aspiration to promote a conversation in their organization. They

talked about wanting everyone to be on board with the conversation about what they want to do with the company."

Borne of those interviews, the book advocates an approach called "organizational conversation," which applies to all processes a company uses to circulate information across the organization, rather than just from the top down. "It's about creating a culture in which the communication function becomes something that more and more resembles the way that two friends would talk," Slind says.

The properties of a good organizational conversation

The book divides good organizational conversation into four alliterative elements intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionalityeach of which applies to a particular attribute of an organization. "Intimacy is about leadership," Groysberg explains. "Interactivity is about channels. Inclusion is about content. And intentionality is about goals, vision, and the strategy of getting things done."

INTIMACY: The authors note that intimacy need not require physical proximity, which would be impossible in a multinational company where employees are separated by thousands of miles. Rather, it requires emotional or mental intimacy. "It's about trust, it's about being authentic, it's about communicating your vision but also at the same time listening to what employees have to say," Groysberg says.

Talk, Inc. highlights the case of the Indian company Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd., which at the turn of the twenty-first century launched an effort to develop a new vision statement. Rather than keeping the effort confined to the C-suite, Hindustan held an extensive series of "vision workshops" where employees at all levels of the company were invited to share their thoughts.

A typical vision workshop included about 20 people and lasted three days. HPCL is a Fortune Global500 company employing more than 11,000 people, so it took years to complete the workshops. But by the end of the process, "almost every person felt that the company vision was his or her own vision," Groysberg says.

INTERACTIVITY: Once some intimacy is established, it's important to keep the conversation flowing. "It's not just that one person is both talking and listening, it means that there is a real sort of back and forth where the act of listening actually changes what you think and say," Slind explains. "As your company gets larger, that gets more difficult. But one of the ways to do it is by using technology."

The book provides a quick overview of the social technology that helps global corporate communication mimic personal conversation: internal blogs (in which leaders share their thoughts and employees have a chance to comment), wikis (which enable collaboration on corporate databases), online communities (which help far-flung employees find like-minded colleagues), Twitter (which lets employees broadcast information widely, both internally and externally), networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn (which enable information sharing among a particular group), video sharing (YouTube and the like), and web-enabled video chat (which help to mimic inperson communication).

Global computer networking giant Cisco Systems, for example, uses its own TelePresence videoconferencing technology to simulate in-person meetings among its ranksmore than 6,200 executives and some 72,000 employees in total. "You really forget that you're speaking across a fiber-optic cable," says Slind, who has observed videoconferences at the San Jose, California-based company. "You feel like you're sitting across from this person."

Slind hastens to add that technology is only as effective as those deploying it. "Interactivity isn't just about technology," he says. "It's equally important to build an interactive culture."

INCLUSION: In organizational conversation, inclusion means giving employees a chance to help tell a company's story. Ceding a measure of control over communication to employees comes with the obvious risk of uncontrolled messaging, but the authors report that the rewards of inclusion often outweigh the risks.

A traditional command-and-control company will filter a bunch of top-down messages through the communications department. But the book recommends a more organic approach. Sales teams can share success stories from the field via public video blogs, which journalists and customers may consider more authentic and more useful than slick marketing material. Furthermore, besides meeting with sales teams, customers might have a chance to meet with the no-nonsense engineers who actually created the technology.

Talk, Inc. discusses a project at EMC, a Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based storage networking company with more than 40,000 employees. In 2009, the company employees produced a book aboutthe lives of working mothers at the company, gathering personal essays by 97 women at EMC (and one essay by a man). "It bubbled up organically," Groysberg says. "And in that way the message they created was more compelling than a marketing campaign. It's helping the company to recruit women, which creates a great competitive

advantage. And internally, it has served to engage employees by letting them become content creators. That's an example of being inclusive and allowing people to have voice. And what we find is that that fundamentally will drive engagement. And engagement will drive more effort. And effort will drive individual performance, and subsequently that will drive organizational performance."

INTENTIONALITY: While the goal of organizational conversation is to draw on the characteristics of a talk between friends, it must always have an agendaand a leader must always have a goal in mind. Otherwise it might take the form of talk just for the sake of talking. The goal may be to ensure that all the employees understand the company's competitive strategy, or it may be to ask every employee to help shape that strategy. But there must be a goal, and the leader should use conversation to achieve that goal.

"Even if you can't control everything anymore you still are the leader," Slind says. "You still have responsibility for setting the tone and setting the direction. And that's what intentionality is about. As you're planning a conversation, you need to make sure that it's in alignment with your company's strategic goals. And if it's done well, the power of communication can support those goals."

The authors note that establishing a culture of conversation won't always mean hitting each of the four "I's," but stress that these elements "tend to reinforce each other" to create a highly iterative process in which good ideas have a chance not only to be heard but to be developed as well.

"A productive conversation is a source of sustainable competitive advantage," Groysberg says. "We find that if you can have good conversations in a company, you can actually achieve a lot."