Eighty percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it's something that's inside you.
I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.
I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.
I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.
Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.
In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we're into, provided that it's a healthy pursuit, it's a good thing.
It is acceptable to bring someone to tears if it explains to them in an emotional way why a product, a service, or a candidate is the right person, is the right thing to do.
It's all emotion. But there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional.
One of the things that you have trouble with politicians, particularly in Washington, is when you get mad at them and you can't touch them; you can't punch them; you can't yell at them.
People like me have to have the discipline only to work for clients, corporations, political people, products, services, networks that we believe in and we want to see succeed.
Republicans use think tanks to come up with a lot of their messages. The think tanks are the single worst, most undisciplined example of communication I've ever seen.
So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.
