STUDENTS' CORNER - 183

Good communication between them. Their smiles and gestures tell us; they seem to agree with each other. On some subject.

 

As pointed out in our earlier session, we shall consider now Communication skills necessary for supply chain management personnel. In fact this skill is necessary for any manager in any department; but it is one of the basic requirements of the supply chain manager.

Everyone and everywhere the importance of communication skill is talked about; there are umpteen numbers of courses offered by umpteen numbers of experts, of course, mostly for some money. That is business.

Putting aside all these learned academic courses, for the time being and looking at very living, we can learn a lot about communication. Even academics also is derived ultimately from life itself. Let us begin what life teaches us about communication.

First thing that faces us is the amazing fact that there does not seem to be effective communication almost in every walk of life. Plenty of examples can be found, too many to believe it easily and early as well.  You should have come across quarrels everywhere, both in personal and professional life. Husbands and wives quarrel; fathers and children , grown-ups quarrel; friends quarrel; seller and buyer quarrel; nations quarrel; political parties quarrel; religious peoples of different religions quarrel. But remember, they all know the language, the words and their meanings.  The question that hits us forcibly is this: even though they know words and their meanings, why there is so much of differences of opinions. Here comes the most fundamental aspect of communication. No doubt, quarrel signifies lack of understanding between two persons, two nations, two political parties, so on. To come to the point: for communication to take place, words must mean the same thing both to the speaker and to the listener; if this is missing, everything will go wrong. See, the very word God does not mean and signify the same thing to all. Therefore, to communicate, you must be sure of what the listener means when you use a word.

 Despite enormous money spent on advertisements which have verbal, visual and audio communication, we cannot say the products promoted through ads immediately see increase in sale. Why? Lot of things need to be discussed here; but now we will focus on communication. The first point is the words must mean the same thing to the speaker and to the listener, to the seller and to the buyer, to the student and to the teacher.

We will move on to the other points one by one in our session, slowly and steadily because communication marks the basic requirement for some success in life, personally and professionally.