Beth Stoops

Professor of Leadership Communication and Advanced Business Communication; Managing Director, Thunderbird Executive Education

Not all audiences are created equal. The same speaker can start the same speech with the same joke and get laughter on one day and awkward silence on the next. Effective communicators anticipate audience differences and make adjustments before stepping to the pulpit. They also monitor and respond to nonverbal signals that come during their presentations. And they remain aware of cultural preferences that vary by region and demographics.

The message being delivered does not need to change for each audience — only the organizational pattern, delivery style and supporting material. Business communication author Mary Ellen Guffey suggests specific strategies for succeeding with four common audience types.

Michael Seaver

Thunderbird School of Management

On July 10th, Thunderbird alumnus Jon Kailey ’76, retired Director of International Business Development at Owens Corning Building Materials, visited campus and gave a talk entitled “Corruption: Corporate and Citizen Costs.” Mr. Kailey served in that capacity from 1979 – 2012 and lived outside the United States for 18 years in Saudi Arabia, Chile and Mexico. At the time of his retirement, his passport had 192 pages, visits to all seven continents, and he spent time in over 70 countries. Kailey is a classic T-bird.

Although his interactive talk allowed those in attendance to relive and ask themselves “What would I have done?” in many of the cross-cultural situations he encountered, I remember one thing he said quite clearly. When asked by a student how to best leverage a Thunderbird degree and a desire to work in a variety of places globally, Kailey responded by saying, “Take assignments no one wants. In short order, you’ll become indispensable.” Sage advice, I’d say.

Lee Simmons

Entrepreneurship can be personally rewarding and good for the economy, if we wipe the stardust from our eyes. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur… The myth of footloose 25-year-olds changing the world while incidentally becoming deliriously rich has intoxicated a generation. And governments are eagerly handing out tax breaks to help them get started. After all, those new companies are engines of economic growth and job creation, right?

Well, maybe, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor George Foster. He suggests that policymakers and would-be tycoons alike could do with a sobering belt of reality. In a new multi-country study, he finds that most startups never take off — and among those that do, setbacks destroy a sizable share of the employment and revenue gains in the sector.

Yaniv Dover

Former Professor at Tuck School of Business

Yaniv Dover says a product’s early sales data may reveal how consumers influence the buying decisions of others.

Picture a tired hiker stopping to rest beneath a tree on a windy day. Before she sits down, she looks up to see if there are any loose branches the breeze is likely to dislodge. Just by studying the way a branch moves in the wind, she may observe how strongly connected to the tree it is and the likelihood that a gust of wind may cause it to fall on her head.