ABSTRACT
Communication is central to effective management and wise leadership. Barnard (1938) made this clear decades ago and it has never been truer, especially in a service-oriented knowledge-based economy. By better understanding communication, managers can enhance wise practices of their organizations. Aspects of communication inhere in three of our fi ve wisdom principles. The fi rst relevant principle asserts that wise people can reason effectively, but need to have clear understandings of the ontological categories inherent in the discourse in use. The second relevant principle, which allows for the non-rational and subjective in judgment, acknowledges that our sensory and visceral factors are important components of decision making and judgment. From this we develop three important communicative implications. One is that, because wise people understand the constructedness of phenomena in particular places and times (spatiotemporal location), they are aware of the situatedness of the discourse in textual use. Two is that, because non-language phenomena are important aspects of communication, wise people are alert to these cues. Three, effective communication invites people into your world, but more particularly accepts the invitation into the world of the other. The third relevant wisdom principle proposes that wise people are able to articulate judgments aesthetically with a grasp of the role of imagination, style, design, genre, and rhetorical skill. With these three principles in mind, this chapter develops fi ve aspects of communicating wisely:
1. Understanding the usually tacit ontological foundations of any discourse.
