what is important in communication

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen

Before we discuss our topic today, I want to ask you. How many emails do you send per week, how many phone calls you make per week? Or put this question into more extreme. How many word you say per day?

Why do you do that?

We need to connect with people, with our family, our friend, teammate, co-workers even with someone we don’t like to talk with, our boss.

This is what our life will be work as a engineer. Communication is unavoidable, we receive problem on a paper or email, discuss it with co-workers and other professional personnel, find some solutions, put into practice, report the solution to customer or supervisor, and listen to their feedback.

Clear communication is needed for every step. It seems obvious, but let us read a story from sept.30th 1999. “NASAs metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss” NASA lost a 125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used English units for a key spacecraft operation, according to a review finding released Thursday. They are all top engineers in United States, perhaps the best engineers in the world. 125million dollar lost just because two teams didn’t communicate clearly about the unit in the operation. This kind of story will happen again and again if we just ignore the importance of clear communication.

With the development of internet, our communication speed increases. We can read the breaking new in Washington by just sitting in front of a computer with internet. Clicking the mouse, open a news media’s webpage. We can video chat lively with our family or manufacture manger sitting on Mumbai. It creates opportunity but also challenge to us, because we have too much information. One of our daily jobs is to filter out things we don’t need. On the other hand, knowledge that we want to share with our audience maybe not reach their head. So it is important to make some of our point more significant. Make our supervisor please, when we send him/her an email.

To sum up two points I consider important in communication. First is to send accurate information and check carefully when receives it. Be critical about what we learn. Second is to make the clear, logical ideas when we need to communicate. None of us want to be ignored when we have something important to tell.

Thanks for your time. It is my honor to talk with you.