Last November, Jossey-Bass publishers released my latest book entitled “The Credible Company: Communicating with Today’s Skeptical Workforce .” Shortly after it was published, the bottom dropped out of the global economy and made that workforce both increasingly skeptical and increasingly unemployed.

The book had been fermenting in my mind and soul for some time—partly as a result of the vast amount of change the workforce had endured since my last book, “Communicating for Change,” was published in 1996, and partly because I believed that our profession has taken a wrong turn and preoccupied itself with technology and ‘conversations’ as the cure for today’s daunting internal communication challenges.

Those challenges loom larger than ever as the workplace undergoes revolutionary transformation, with more and more insecurity and greater reliance imposed on individual’s resources and responsibility for their economic well-being. An estimated 40% of company work will soon be done by outside contractors, according to Time Magazine. Free agency will more and more be the fate of today’s worker, a not altogether negative trend if people are prepared for that kind of independence and self-reliance.

In a recent webinar, I outlined my personal view of these developments and what I believe they mean for our profession. I invite you to take some time to watch the webinar replay and to reflect on its message. We at ROI Communication would be equally interested in your views of the coming challenges. How about giving us your online comments in response to this blog?

One of the saddest things about political campaigns is the abuse of language and intelligent dialogue—the tendency to make words connote something other than their real meaning and to mask intent. Or worse, to disseminate outright lies. At this phase of the presidential campaign there’s plenty of both.

For anyone interested in truthful communication, this is the season when you can engage your own communication intelligence to uncover the nature of the abuses. In the end it’s an insult to our collective intelligence for our politicians to use such tired techniques as guilt by association, name-calling and omission of pertinent facts to distort the truth. But that’s the hard currency of negative campaigning as well as an affront to the democratic process.

Regardless of our politics, we should all be on guard for these obvious abuses and respond accordingly. Watch the presidential debates as well as the political ads and analyze each attempt to propagandize rather than inform. I guarantee you that it will be an interesting and enlightening lesson in Propaganda 101 as you score each kind of subtle or not so subtle abuse.

Aside from deliberate language abuse to confuse and deceive, another less obvious abuse is careless or misleading labeling. A great example is the recent effort to stabilize the credit markets, an effort unfortunately labeled as ‘a bailout of Wall Street’ rather than ‘an attempt to rescue Main Street’ from an economic disaster. Anyone with the most basic understanding of public relations would avoid this incendiary and elementary gaff.

If it weren’t so important to our collective futures, this behavior could entertain and titillate those of us who value the power of forthright communication. Instead it’s more than a little depressing.

I’ve just returned from a long and happy vacation at the same Maine coastal cottage my family and I have visited for the last 38 summers. It’s located right smack on the Atlantic on a high rocky bluff with a 20 or 30 foot descent to the water. It’s a modest cottage in the Mid-Coast area of Maine where you can sit on the deck and gaze all day at the lobster boats sailing close to shore, pulling their traps and methodically sorting the legal from the illegal-sized lobsters.

Maine is a state that loudly proclaims itself as “Maine: the way life should be.”

I couldn’t agree more after spending three weeks every year without access to email, a cell phone or the Internet. All there is to do is to sit and read and contemplate ‘the way life should be,’ but rarely is. Every time I’m there I’m filled with the same feelings of nostalgia, liberation and nothing-to-do-or-care-about that I used to enjoy as a kid on summer vacation. A major cause of that feeling is liberation from the technology that shapes most of our work lives. If the locals want to hook up to the Internet, they have to drive several miles to an Internet Café in a corner of a bookshop. Most choose to ignore the opportunity and to live uncluttered lives without a thought about email, websites, blogs and virtual ‘friends.’

But forgive me, this blog is not about a paean to Maine or a knock on relentless technology. It’s really about a provocative book I read entitled “Just How Stupid Are We?” by Rick Shenkman, a political analyst and professor at George Mason University. The subtitle is “Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” That truth as Shenkman sees it is fairly ugly. In his view the American public is easily fooled, uninformed about the actual workings of government and power and manipulated by political operatives who know only too well how to deliver a message aimed at their fears and insecurities.

He claims that if you look at American history, it’s clear that there has been ‘a constant tension between faith in The People and contempt for them.’ The Founding Fathers, he notes, were very careful in the beginning to limit the influence of the people at the ballot box based on their fear that ordinary people would use their votes to confiscate the wealth of the many and give it to the few. If Shenkman’s argument is beginning to sound more than a bit elitist, consider the words of Alexander Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention when he was arguing against universal suffrage. “…the people when they have been un-checked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous and cruel as any king…” Shenkman is a piker compared to Hamilton and his conservative cronies.

And that’s one of the most interesting arguments in this provocative book. Conservatives have historically—until recent times—evidenced a constant mistrust of the wisdom of the people. Liberals, on the other hand, have tended to blame a variety of bogeymen, including Wall Street, corporations, the lobbyists and sinister behind the scenes power brokers for our problems. Shenkman describes this as ‘brilliant politics’ because it leaves the people off the hook whenever bad things happen.

He goes on to say that Liberals are dismayed because they tend to be held in bad repute in what historically has been a liberal democracy. The twin causes, he claims, are the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement. In his words, “Voters punished liberals at the polls not necessarily for what they had done wrong but what they had done right. This rankled.” It also left them shaking their heads because it put them at odds with their own belief in the people’s wisdom and good faith.

After stating his case, Shenkman closes with a heavy dose of hope. In the end he points to the Internet and blogging as hopeful signs that people can be engaged. He argues strongly for courses in civics and weekly testing of college students in current events as ways to raise the political IQ of Americans. He also urges that more people get actively involved in the party system where they can learn the actual working of politics and power.

As I watched the lobster boats slip over a tranquil blue ocean and past the Maine cottage, I wondered what all of this means and implies for two things I care about—first the current election and where it will take us and second what it also implies about internal communication and our need to conduct ourselves with ever more regard for the truth and the resolve not to manipulate people in the workplace as we have in the broader society.

The July-August issue of The Atlantic features a cover story entitled “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” by writer Nicholas Carr. His thesis essentially is that our online proclivities are short-circuiting our powers of concentration and affecting our ability to focus. In his words, “My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing…I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading, immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. ..Now my concentration starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Carr blames the fact that he’s been spending too much time online although he calls the web ‘a godsend to me as a writer.’ He adds, however, that the blessing of ready online information comes with a price. He observes that the net seems to be robbing him of his powers of concentration and contemplation. Again in his words, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”

That he is not imagining his loss is evidenced in the work of developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf from Tufts University. She’s an expert in the neurology of reading who claims we are ‘not only what we read but also how we read.’ In her work she’s discovered that when we read online we tend to be ‘mere decoders of information,’ a tendency that limits our ability to ‘interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction (italics mine.)

Carr ends by quoting the words of the playwright Richard Foreman in a view that resonates totally with me. He says, “I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my) ideal was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. I (now) see within us all…the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’

If the end result of our powerful, and now essential, technological tools is the loss of the ability to think beyond the mere information given, we are in serious trouble as a democratic society.

A fascinating dialogue took place online a few weeks ago. The subject was the proper role of internal communication professionals in their respective organizations. It’s a subject that badly needs airing in a time when increasingly I believe that internal communication practitioners are losing their way.

The people that were engaged in the online dialogue are all veteran communication pros with years of experience in the trenches. The dialogue was triggered by an innocent query from another participant who asked if and how electronic kiosks made sense in a decentralized manufacturing environment. One of the first responses said that the issue was not electronic kiosks; that the question should be whether and how kiosks might improve the company’s performance at that facility. He went on to say that the real need was to look at the barriers to performance in that organization and to address those barriers with appropriate strategy. His position was that essentially all that matters is serving the needs of the customers and the shareholders of that company for quality products and services. He asked pointedly whether kiosks truly serve that overriding need and whether the absence of kiosks was truly affecting company performance.

His position soon motivated a very different response from an equally passionate participant, who said—in effect—that people don’t live by bread alone. Here’s his verbatim question: “Does the whole worth of employee communication consist in solving specific business problems?…I’m troubled by the implication that if you…haven’t got your whole program focused on troubleshooting performance issues, you are functioning at some primitive level of the craft. Let’s not forget that just plugging away at the creation and maintenance of an essential climate for success can be pretty darned strategic, if you’re good at it.”

A third participant chimed in with his view that after years of studying the issue of role, he had concluded that there were at least five roles that a communication professional could play. These were: communicator; educator; change agent; small c consultant; strategist. He added, “The first corresponds with an infrastructure/channels/vehicles/content aggregation/dissemination role. The second is the training/coaching role, making others good communicators (CEOs; supervisors). The third refers to the role we play with corporate strategy execution, in particular with resulting change management programs and required large-scale culture/climate/behavioral change. The fourth is what I would call small c communication change built around specific operational process improvements. Finally the fifth, which I have labeled as strategist, focuses on being a player in the organization’s overarching strategic management process…”

Aside from the quality of this discussion is the largely ignored debate that underlies it and that needs to be engaged by more than these three veteran communication pros. What I read mostly these days about our profession is related to technology and the need to introduce more social media into our organizations. In my opinion that conversation badly misses the mark. Worse, it’s a distraction from the really important questions facing our profession and the need to debate what would constitute our value-added role in organizations in the midst of chaotic and revolutionary change. That’s a monumental question that begs to be answered in these bewildering times if we are truly going to help our organizations succeed.

I have been working on a new book entitled “The Credible Company: Communicating with Today’s Skeptical Workforce.” It’s scheduled for publication by Jossey-Bass Publishers in October of this year. After outlining what I believe is a proper communication prescription for today’s skeptical audience, I conclude that ours is a profession at a crossroads. We can sink deeper into craft, continuing the tendency to apply newer and newer technology as an end in itself with slight regard to human needs in the workplace—in the process making ourselves more and more irrelevant to our leaderships and our audiences. Or we can wake up to the complexities of getting through to a skeptical workforce with a sound strategy that addresses their needs and views.

It’s high time we began to look seriously at this issue and to put aside the narrow view that is now clouding our collective vision of the proper role of communication in the workplace.