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Advanced Management Communication

Barry Eckhouse

Course Schedule

Course Information: Requirements and Evaluation

Course Information: Assumptions, Abilities, and Orientation

Brief Bibliography: Managerial Communication

Instructor Biography: Barry Eckhouse

 

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Course Schedule

Class meets 8:00 - 12:15 morning session; 1:00 - 4:15 afternoon

On The Use of Exhibits

Ensuring Understanding

From Data to Chart

 

Course Information: Requirements & Evaluation

I will ask you to take two exams, write one paper with a revision, bring in examples of concepts discussed in class, and deliver a final oral presentation on an ethical or social issue. In addition, you will participate in a variety of exercises designed to improve your communication skill and knowledge of how communication works. You are evaluated primarily on improvement, on your ability to make each successive effort better than the one before. Because of this, you will compete with your classmates only on the first graded assignment; after that, you will compete with yourself. However, at the end of the course, you will take a final examination (one of the two listed above), which will insure that you have acquired a graduate-level understanding of the field and practice of management communication.

Each assignment will have published standards. If you meet these standards, you will pass the assignment. If your work is below the standards, you will be passed marginally, or you will not be passed. To pass the course, you will need to pass assignments in both writing and speaking. Work hard and take heart. Most people pass this course.

About Your Papers. The type of writing I will ask you to do is appropriate both to your standing as a graduate student and to your advanced position as a working professional in the business community. The writing will be argumentative, and it will challenge you to adopt a position on a point of controversy and then defend that position at length, while taking care to acknowledge and respond to opposing points of view. Thus, your papers should all demonstrate your efforts to persuade a skeptical reader, one who can be expected to resist your attempts at persuasion.

Beyond that, you will have only a few mechanical matters to follow. First, please be sure to make a personal copy of all written work; second, submit your papers typed and double spaced with a one-inch margin on the left and right; third, keep all of your written work together in one folder so that each time you submit an assignment, all previous work accompanies it. Your written work will not be returned at the end of the term, unless you receive a letter of marginal performance, though I will be happy to review any paper with you during my office hours. The same is true of the final examination, except that it will not be returned under any circumstances.

About Your Oral Presentations. Later in the quarter, I will give you specific guidelines for your oral presentations. However, I can tell you now that several of your oral presentations will be video taped. We use this important medium to provide you with an objective record of those areas of presentation that you will want to improve. The tape will remain running at the end of each presentation so that critical comments will be recorded along with the presentation itself. I will ask each of you to purchase a new VHS videotape before the second round of oral presentations (we will not tape the impromptu presentations). You may purchase any brand or quality as long as the box has the VHS logo stamped on it.

You will all be responsible for viewing your tapes between presentations. If you have a VCR at home or work, great. If you don't, you may use the audio-visual center in the Saint Mary's library to view your tapes. I will collect all tapes at the end of the quarter, and I will not return them. However, you may borrow them after the term to view your final presentation and make copies of them if you wish. If you decide to do this, you will have to let me know before the end of the term or within the first week of your second-quarter classes.

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Course Information: Assumptions, Abilities, and Orientation

Assumptions

Although we will not belabor the importance of effective communication or its central role in the business organization, we will want to acknowledge that almost every major survey of working professionals shows that the ability to communicate effectively ranks at the very top of contributors to job effectiveness, satisfaction, and success. Other surveys indicate that writing and speaking are the major forms of transmission in the business organization. We will assume the critical importance of effective communication in business (for those who wish to check the sources, several are attached at the end of this schedule), and we will concentrate on improving our understanding of communication and our ability as practitioners.

Abilities

This is a course of theory-based practice that teaches our students how to invent, clarify, and test ideas in preparation for their oral or written presentation. Students who pass this course will have demonstrated a significantly improved ability to think, speak, and write clearly. Because you are adults who work in an environment of conflict and uncertainty, this course develops a proficiency in a particularly appropriate form of communication -- argumentation. Such proficiency is marked by an increased ability at determining issues in a controversy, choosing from competing strategies for presentation, organizing arguments for presentation, and identifying opposing points of view. Managers who are thus enabled are better prepared to support their own positions in debate as well as to evaluate the positions of others.

While argumentation is taught through the primary skills of writing and speaking, attention is also given to developing abilities in the important though subordinate skills of critical reading (editorial technique) and evaluative listening (oral critique). As a consequence, graduates of this class should be able to participate in communication both from the sender's and receiver's points of view. Such attention to these subordinate skills produces communicators who are better able to evaluate the quality of oral and written messages.

Orientation

Central to developing skills in this course is the rhetorical orientation produced by lecture, class work, and examination. This orientation fosters a willingness to think interrelatedly about the active components in the process of communication. Those who acquire this orientation should find themselves thinking not simply about how to communicate but about how communication works. Those who have adopted this rhetorical perspective will enjoy a special edge in practice because their options for communication will be more readily apparent, and the choices they make will be informed more by reason than by subjective impulse. Such an orientation is indispensable if this course is to avoid being simply an academically-housed training program and if we are to guard against graduating practitioners who have no understanding of what guides them in their practice.

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Barry Eckhouse

Barry Eckhouse enjoys a national reputation in the field of management communication. He has taught the subject for over twenty years, and during that time has served as the founding Director of Communication for Berkeley's School of Business Administration, and as a Full Professor in the Executive MBA Program at Saint Mary's College of California.

Barry received his doctorate from Berkeley in 1977, when he was awarded a doctoral Phi Beta Kappa for his graduate research on theories and techniques of persuasion as they apply to argument in philosophy. He has remained active in the academic research community and has been invited to speak at academic research institutions such as Berkeley, Harvard, and Stanford. He is the author of Competitive Writing (McGraw-Hill, 1993), Competitive Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1995) and the forthcoming Classical Rhetoric and Modern Business (Oxford University Press, 1998).

At Berkeley, Barry created and established a complete program in management communication for graduates and undergraduates, and developed programs in the schools of Architecture and Chemical Engineering. He also created the Haas Competition, a partnership between Levi-Strauss and Berkeley's Graduate School of Business. A mock congressional hearing which continues today, this competition requires MBA students to present written and oral arguments to CEO's from leading corporations.

Barry joined Saint Mary's College and Graduate Business Programs in 1979, and now teaches both core courses and advanced electives in the MBA and Executive MBA Programs. In 1989, he received the appointment of Associate Professor, and with it, the responsibilities of teaching and designing courses within the larger college community. In 1995, he was promoted to Full Professor with tenure.

As a management consultant, Barry has served as a trainer, writer, speaker, and advisor in professional development. As the principal for Eckhouse and Associates, he has provided professional service to a variety of clients, and organizations such as Advanced Micro Devices, Amdahl, Bank of America, Bank of Canton, Clorox, Bechtel Power, Bechtel Inc., Citicorp, Electric Power Research Institute, Hitachi Data Systems, Lockheed, Pacific Bell, Pacific Telecom, Rolm, Signetics, SRI International, Utah International, and Xerox.

Earlier this year, Barry was honored to be appointed as a Carnegie Foundation Teaching Scholar. Twelve of these appointments were made nationwide for the academic year 1998-99.

For details, please see my full curriculum vitae.

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Managerial Communication

Here is annotated bibliography of references that: (1) argue for offering management communication courses in business programs, and (2) show the importance of communication skills in business. This is a modified version of material prepared by John D. Stegman, The Ohio State University.

Belohov, James A., Popp, Paul O., and Porte, Michael S. "Communication: A View from the Inside of Business," The Journal of Business Communication, 11 (1979): 53-59.

A survey of the attitudes of personnel officers of 250 large organizations concerning the need for communication courses at the graduate level. The survey found that communication skills were rated of "extreme importance" by executives of large organizations, some believing it to be the single most important function of management personnel.

Bowman, Garda W. "What Helps or Harms Promotability?" Harvard Business Review, 42 (January February 1964): 626.

In this survey of Harvard Business Review readers and other executives, the "ability to communicate" is the top-ranked criterion for managers, mentioned by 98.7 percent of respondents.

Connelly, Francis J., ed. "Accreditation Research Project Report of Phase 1," AACSB Bulletin, 14 (Winter 1980): 215.

Survey of over 1000 academic, corporate, nonprofit and societal respondents gave the "manager" (as contrasted with "leader," "administrator," and "trustee") a #1 importance ranking to all interpersonal skills, including "oral communication" and "written communication."

Edge, Alfred G. and Greenwood, Ronald. "How Managers Rank Knowledge, Skills and Attributes Possessed by Business Administration Graduates," AACSB Bulletin, 11 (October 1974): 30-34.

Survey of 430 marketing and personnel managers showed communication as the top skill desired of business administration graduates. Evangelauf, Jean. "Business Schools Urged to Alter Curricula," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 May 1985.

The article reported the findings of the Business Higher Education Forum, an affiliate of the American Council on Education. The forum's report stated that: "Business schools should seek to insure that their graduates are competent in oral and written communication, even if the students entered business programs with poor communications skills."

Fielden, John. "Educating Tomorrow's Executives," Harvard Business Review, 38 (November December,1960): 618-23.

Heisler, W. J. "Promotion: What Does it Take to Get Ahead?" Business Horizons, 21 (April 1979): 57- 63.

Survey of 200 MBA students at "two nationally renowned universities" placed "ability to communicate clearly and concisely" first in the list of "Value of Promotion Factors."

Hildebrandt, J. W., Bond, F. A., Miller, E. L., and Swinyard, W. W. "An Executive Appraisal of Courses which Best Prepare One for General Management," The Journal of Business Communication, 19 (Winter,1982): 515.

This ongoing study summarizes 1980-81 data from 1158 newly promoted executives in the United States who answered this question: "Assuming the study of business administration best prepares a young person for a career in general management, how important are the following courses as part of that preparation...." Business Communication, oral and written, was the course selected as "very important" more often than any of the other thirteen courses.

Hunger, David J., and Wheelen, Thomas L. "A Performance Appraisal of Undergraduate Business Education," Human Resource Management, 19 (Spring,1980): 24-31.

This is a survey on undergraduate business education of Business School Deans and Personnel Executives. "Both deans and personnel executives feel that undergraduate business education needs to focus primarily on the 'basics,' e.g., developing logical thinking and communication skills."

Kiechel, W. "Harvard Business School Restudies Itself," Fortune, 18 June 1979: 4858.

"FORTUNE recently interviewed recruiters from a crosssection of businesses that routinely hire high-priced MBAs . . . the most frequent observation was a simple wish that business schools do a better job teaching their students to write and speak effectively."

Stolzenberg, Ross M., Abowd, John, and Giarruso, Roseann. "Abandoning the Myth of the Modern MBA Student," Selections, The Magazine of the Graduate Management Admissions Council. Autumn 1986:921.

This article presents the preliminary summary report of GMACs New Matriculants Survey obtained from more than 2,000 students at 91 graduate schools. Respondents rated "communication skills" as the top "personal attribute to becoming a successful manager." Communication skills were rated as "very important" by 89 percent of the respondents. The study "suggests that students are more likely to choose a business school to become better communicators than to become better analysts."

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