This blog is the second in a series of blogs on people that have added something important to the world of communications.  Today, it's Steve Jobs.  The series is personal and partial, but I welcome nominations for those you think I’ve missed.  I’m grateful to these people because understanding how we communicate is desperately important to bettering our humanity in both business and life.  Miscommunications are sometimes merely irritating, but sometimes fatal.  Business communications are usually banal and boring and only occasionally riveting.  Leadership is tougher than ever – and more than ever about communicating well.  The great business communicators can turn little companies into dominant ones and truly change the world.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs.  Maybe it’s obvious, but as he said in his wonderful Stanford commencement speech in 2005, life is obvious in retrospect – you connect the dots backward.  Without Steve the standards for business communications – not to mention equipment – would be a lot lower.  The new product announcement would be geeky and even dull, rather than the great theatre that Jobs made it.  And we never would have had the best 2 sentences on keeping it real, two sentences that always pick me up when I get down or in a rut:  “Stay hungry.  Stay foolish.” 

The reputation of all but a very, very few CEOs is vanishingly short-lived, because most of them are caretakers rather than creators.  Steve Jobs was one of the creators, and I’m grateful to him for that just about every day.

Here are three of Jobs’ best communication tips:

1.  Tell a story, don’t talk about features.  Pre-Jobs, most product announcements were of the “longer, lower, wider” variety – they boasted of features.  Jobs tells a story with his product announcements, a story about what you can do with the cool new toy he’s launching.  Try it, it works. 

2.  Keep your visuals visual.  In spite of the best efforts of communication mavens like me, there are still way too many slideware users who think of slides as speaker notes.  Jobs used plenty of visuals, but he kept them clean, simple, and full of pictures.  No bullets!  No lists!

3.  Connect to your passion.  No surprise, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless:  Jobs let his enthusiasm for the product shine through each time he launched a new Apple object.  His enthusiasm was infectious – literally – because we have these neurons called “mirror neurons” that reflect back at the other person the emotion they’re projecting to us.  We experience the same emotion that the speaker does, so if the speaker is buttoned down and boring, that’s what we’ll feel.  But if the speaker is full of passion for her subject, we’ll get that. 

Thanks, Steve.