Straight Talk
I've found that buzz phrases are often used by those who don't understand what they're talking about but want to sound as though they're in the know. For the most part, however, these executives lose the respect of most of their audience long before they use the jargon. So the speakers just end up reinforcing the notion that they don't know what they're talking about. Most of the listeners know that the boss went to some seminar and heard a motivational talk and is passing it off. It seems that the really good communicators explain what a buzzword or phrase means and how it applies--so the listeners learn something.
One of the best teaching tools that anyone could use is illustrations, or metaphors. Illustrations take a difficult idea and relate it to one that the listener already understands. In fact, this is where many of the buzz phrases or words come from.
If we, as managers and leaders in our corporations, really want to be good communicators, we need to teach when we speak. (Maybe that can be a new buzz phase.) I mean, help the listener learn what we know so he or she can then act on it. To do that, of course, the speaker must truly understand not only what he or she is saying, but also to whom he or she is talking.
James Read
Chief Technical Officer
Pifer Financial Systems
jread@pifer.com
The measure of a true expert is his or her ability to make whatever it is he or she does seem easy. The mark of a person with in-depth knowledge of a subject is that he or she can explain something so an average person can understand it. Alas, much of what passes for expertise or knowledge these days is an attempt by the ill-equipped to obfuscate the subject. Buzzwords, trite sayings and jargon are the tools these people use. True, many people are in awe or feel inferior to this sort. Sadly, many of the those who use buzzwords are in power and surround themselves with people who don't know better.
I've been involved with a number of failed high-tech ventures over the past few years. Every one of these ventures had a quality product to sell but was defeated by people spouting nonsense instead of getting down to business. In one instance, we had refocused a huge chunk of the venture capitalist's money into an unproven (and eventually fatal) market shift based on "thinking out of the box," which resulted in a "paradigm shift" for the company. Unfortunately, our vice president of marketing left a six-person department and went to a position overseeing a 200 marketing staff and a multimillion-dollar ad budget before the death of the company.
Maybe there is a purpose for all that jargon--in our vice president's case, personal advancement at a company's expense.
David Hyman
President
DLH Associates
davidh30@juno.com
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Adequate WLAN Security
I have a question about Peter Morrissey's May 13 column, "Checking Up on Your WLANs." My company recently used Orinoco equipment to deploy a WLAN at one of our offices. The routers gave me an option to secure all connections to the equipment by using MAC (Media Access Control) address authentication--as long as the MAC address is not changed or modified. In this case, the only way to connect to our network would be by stealing the card that belongs to our company. Isn't this type of security good enough to keep unauthorized radios out of our network?
Adam Janiec
CIO
Waveron Communications
Adam@waveron.com
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Peter Morrissey responds: MAC address authentication will provide a deterrent to unauthorized access. It won't be guaranteed, however, because changing the MAC address of a wireless client is possible in some cases. Someone could detect a valid MAC address, then use that address for access. A more secure solution would be to implement login/password authentication to the access point using 802.1X. This will require the installation of a RADIUS server and updates to the clients. If your clients are running Microsoft Windows XP, you may be able to take advantage of XP's built-in support for 802.1X. Keep in mind that none of these measures will prevent anyone from monitoring your network for the data. And they won't stop anyone from denying service to your network by generating radio waves in the 2.4-GHz range.
Corrections
Our May 13 Well-Connected article "Voice and Data Come Together Over IP" (page 66) should have said, "Although InfoLibria's product does not leverage existing infrastructure like Cisco and lacks its own back-end storage device like Network Appliance, MediaMalls work with applications that create content."
Our Well-Connected article "Business Apps Focus on Collaboration, Access" (page 76) should have said, "Web services are coming on strong. Microsoft .Net is just about ready to hit networks, and Sun Microsystems Sun ONE is picking up steam."
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