I was invited to speak to you on Business Communication, but as I've reflected on these issues, it seems to me that the key thought is not Business Communication – which is just a meaningless piece of jargon really, but rather, reinventing conversation in a business context.

Let me say at the outset that I am not talking about the “plain English” movement, worthy as that is. The advent of plain English in annual general reports, prospectuses, life policies etc. is surely a useful tool, but it does rather tend to confirm what the punters always secretly thought – business is really boring.

Plain English is not a conversation.

Conversations are dynamic, engaging, and I would argue – a potent business tool – but we seem to have rather neglected them of late for other, more controllable, forms of communication, and I think that’s a pity. I don’t know whether it was the rise of corporate governance, or the fear of litigation that did it, but over the last decade we have developed a form of business jargon which is largely impenetrable to the great majority of Australians.

Now there are two important reasons why we should cut it out. The first is it’s bad for business, and the second is – it’s rude. It’s bad for business because it isolates us from our most important stakeholders – our customers. It’s rude because it’s isolating and exclusionary, and it makes people mad at us.

Reinventing conversation means that we accept the importance of a two-way dialogue, which involves us in listening with understanding. Most business communication these days focuses on telling people things we want them to know. A conversation provides an opportunity to find out what people would like to know about us, and then allows us to tailor make a response that has the potential to give us a significant strategic edge.

Less that sound like a statement in the bleeding obvious, consider those famous retailers of money, the banks, who seem united in their refusal to see that there’s a moose on the table, and that sending out warm, fuzzy messages, when people really, really hate you, is a complete and absolute waste of money.

Thirdly, conversation is absolutely fundamental to the creation of trust – the hallmark of all great brands.

At Saatchi & Saatchi, we define a brand as “the intangible values created by a badge of reassurance.” Now brands can have any number of intangible values associated with them, but if trust isn't one of the top two or three, you’re basically stuffed.

Everything your mother told you about trust is absolutely true. Trust is like respect – you have to earn it – and it’s dynamic – it grows over time, but it can be lost in an instant. And people don’t trust anyone who doesn't listen to them – who they don’t understand – or who they think is taking advantage of them.

Now conversations are messy things – they often don’t go according to plan – there’s always the possibility you might find out something you would rather not have known, and most companies are not set up to take account of the fact that someone might actually answer you back.

But the conversational revolution has already begun – it’s everywhere you do business – it’s immensely powerful and completely unmanageable.

In e-mail's and chat rooms around the globe people are talking to each other, and in the process they are transforming the language of business.

People communicate in cyberspace in the same way they talk. E-mail's have no punctuation and very little structure. They’re pure stream of consciousness – there are no salutations and no sign-off’s – you say what you want to say, and get off – they’re immensely efficient and supremely personal all at once.

If you don’t already know about it, may I draw your attention to a web site called cluetrain.com? It’s an infuriating, controversial web site that is nonetheless indispensable reading, particularly for anyone over 40. It contains the Cluetrain Manifesto – 95 Theses on Networked Markets.

It extols the power of conversation as the language of cyberspace, and posits that in the brave new world, the current homogenised voice of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th Century French Court.

Let me quote you the opening 5 of the 95 theses;

1. Markets are conversations
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or
humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, and uncontrolled
5. People recognise each other as such from the sound of this voice.

I must say that although there is much that I profoundly disagree with on the Cluetrain site, it has been an epiphany for me.

Our loss of conversational skills certainly predates the net, but the net will be vital to its resurrection.

I first started thinking about these issues in 1993, when I was asked to Chair the Australian Council for Women – the advisory body set up by the Federal Government to advise on our participation in the Fourth UN Conference for Women, held in Beijing in 1995.

As part of our work, we held 30 consultations with groups of women all around Australia, and those consultations had a profound effect on me in unexpected ways.

I grew up on a small farm in Queensland – I left school at 15 – bought up 2 kids on my own – and didn't settle down to being a staid old married lady with a career until I was well in my 30’s – so I would have thought that I would have no trouble talking to Australian women.

But I was mortified to discover that I might as well have been from Mars as far as many of these women were concerned. The language used by women with careers is a sort of patois – we've been hanging around blokes for so long, we've started to sound like them a bit. Our language is much more fact-oriented – it has a beginning, and a middle, and an end – and it’s often extremely boring.

Women from rural and regional Australia, women with part-time jobs, older women, women living on the fringes of capital cities don’t sound anything like us.

Invited to list their greatest concerns, our respondents would immediately launch into a story. They’d say something like “This morning the kids wouldn't get up, and I was running late for work, and when I backed the car out I ran over the dog, and when I got to the child care centre Justin had broken out in hives, and the centre wouldn't take him because they thought he was contagious, so I had to drop him round to my mothers.”

And I would write down “Child Care.”

Women without career pressures (and indeed, men without career pressures) have a much more discursive communication style than people in business – they like to have a chat – they’re not in a hurry, and they can’t understand why we are.

And it really brought home to me how differently we use the language we have in common. In more recent times, the conduct of the referendum on the republic was a spectacular example of failed communication.

The conversation that the Republicans were trying to have was not the one the voters wanted to have, and it was really damaging to Australia’s social fabric. It was a great pity, I think, that the vote seemed to divide along class lines, but the lesson to be learned from the referendum campaign is that there is no point in talking at people about what you think they should do. The majority of Australians have already decided that they want Australia to become a republic at some point, but they’re not going to be stampeded into a model they don’t want.

The damaging, divisive, and seemingly endless dialogue about reconciliation is another example of a failed conversation, where the unwillingness to say one little word has mired the entire process in recriminations on both sides.

But I predict that the most important conversation we have failed to have is on globalization. We have mistaken sullen acquiescence for consent. Many Australians remain unconvinced of the benefits of globalization. They can see what’s in it for business, but they can’t see what’s in it for them – and that’s a dangerous place to be.

With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better to have had a national conversation about the consequences of globalization, and to set in place strategies for retraining and relocation at the outset. Our loss of nerve will come back to haunt us, I suspect.

The riots in Seattle and Washington are the precursors to something much bigger, but what is fascinating about this particular civil unrest is that it is not being run by organised groups – these people are finding each other on the web – they’re talking to each other – about us – and we can’t manage it or control it – and if that doesn't frighten you, you’re not paying attention.

Much has been written in recent times about the loss of trust in our major institutions, including business. Rightly or wrongly, people don’t believe us, and don’t trust us, and that’s happened largely because the sorts of things we want to talk about are of absolutely no interest or relevance to our fellow Australians.

I suspect most Australians have decided that business will continue to push for bigger profits by cutting back on servicing and reducing staff. They certainly don’t dispute our right to do it, but they sure don’t like us for it.

And they sure as hell don’t want to have a conversation about it – so earnest lectures from business groups along the lines of “this is for your own good” simply irritate people profoundly. That nannyish, hectoring tone – you almost expect them to say “this is hurting me more than it’s hurting you” – is turning people off in droves.

So should you care about any of this? Does it matter? If you’re sitting there having a testosterone surge and thinking “Who cares – my job is to lead – I don’t have to be popular” – may I respectfully suggest you think again.

You will recall that I said at the outset that the definition of a brand is the intangible values created by a badge of reassurance, and how critical it is that one of those intangible values is trust.

There are bottom line consequences for failed conversations, for a loss of trust. Whether it happens this year, or next, or not for another decade, retailing is being changed forever by the new technology – and your single greatest weapon against the dot com’s is the power of your brand – the trust that’s generated by the experience of your brand over time. So anything that works against that trust is going to cost you money.

So what to do?

The great challenge for all of us in business is to understand that if we want to grow our businesses, develop our brands, and add value for our shareholders then we have to engage all our stakeholder groups in conversation.

We must stop telling, and start asking. We must stop answering questions nobody asked, and try to figure out the real questions people want us to respond to. We need to develop our listening skills, and every communication should be in the language of our customers, not the language of business.

As the legal consequences of running a business have escalated, we seem to have taken refuge in increasing obfuscation.

Most business communication is now so vague as to be almost meaningless – no-one knows what we stand for, what we believe, or what our values are.

Internally, think about the language that's evolved around human resources management, around marketing, corporate governance, and ask yourself do you know anyone who sounds like that?

Externally, annual general reports and media releases are the two most obvious examples of business communications that often seem to be designed with no particular target audience in mind. Why not an annual general report with pictures of your shareholders, rather than pictures of your directors. Why not set up chat rooms for directors to talk to shareholders or customers? It’s fascinating to look at companies web sites – the technology might be new, but the language certainly isn't. The net is a great place for companies to have conversations, but most companies are as flat and lifeless on the web as they are in all their other communications.

Conducting a communications audit is a great way of taking a helicopter view of your company’s ability to communicate.

When you’re back in your office, I challenge you to lay out every piece of corporate communication over the last 12 months, and take a long, hard look at yourself.

If your company was a person, would you like you? Would you take you home to meet your family or out to party with your friends? What sort of person is your company?

Are you warm, approachable, energetic, and fun? Or are you the sort of stuffy, self-opinionated bore that people hate getting trapped with at cocktail parties?

Worse still, do you suffer from multiple personalities? Do you try to be all serious and sober with your institutional investors, a party animal with your suppliers and business contacts, and a recorded message to your customers?

Clarity and consistency are the hallmarks of great communication in any field of human endeavour. You can’t be one thing to one group of stakeholders and something totally different to another group of stakeholders – you end up meaning nothing to anyone.

It’s true for great advertising, too. Simplicity is the hallmark of all great advertising. Great ideas, communicated simply – with warmth, humour, and humanity. We in advertising are the great reductionists, we refine, and refine, until we end up with a single, clear proposition that can be communicated quickly and effectively.

Advertising’s role in the marketing mix is to position the brand, and then defend that position over time. So we have to be very sensitive to any shifts in what Australians are thinking and feeling. Advertising lives in the here and now – and we are acutely conscious that if we are to intrude into busy people’s lives then we need to be respectful of their time, we need to speak their language, and we need to reflect their humanity.

If you think about the television ads you enjoy most, I suspect you’d find that most of them tell a story. They are small, but perfectly formed microcosms of life reflected back at you with warmth and style. Bad advertising has all the hallmarks of bad communications everywhere – it talks at you – it lists the features, not the benefits, it has no humanity – it shows no respect for its audience – who disrespect them right back – and most importantly, it doesn't work.

Increasingly, advertising agencies are consolidating into giant global networks, like Saatchi & Saatchi, so that we can reap the benefits of both globalization and the new technology. The business we are in is the business of ideas – communication solutions that transform our clients businesses, brands, and reputations – which all sounds very grand, and it is.

But we never forget that those ideas have to be transformed into communications that are received by an audience of one, many times over. Our skill is in understanding and interpreting human behaviour for our clients, and transforming that into communications ideas that generate sales.

Sometimes those ideas will manifest themselves in mass media, but increasingly we will be driven by the power of the idea, rather than the medium.

And while advertising is the most public face of the communication mix, it is only a part of the total brand experience. The values and culture of the organisation - the internal brand, if you like, are just as important as its public face, because that’s how customers experience the brand.

So because it’s our job, we never forget that all communication is human communication. People are endlessly fascinated with other people – it’s the basis of all mass market entertainment, and much of our communication.

If our communications reflect the human qualities we most admire or enjoy then those communications will succeed.

If we are open and transparent in our dealings with our customers, if we will allow the possibility that we, like they, might be fallible, if we deal with each other with simplicity and grace, then our businesses will prosper, our communities will thrive, and people will trust us because we deserve it.