1.1 Introduction

Welcome to our course on business communication!

In these five weeks we’ll be learning all about why effective communication is a key to your success in business. We’ll see that business communication is much more than just emailing your boss or speaking up at a meeting—in fact, principles of good communication can improve your performance in many aspects of your professional life. Our goal will be to understand those principles and put them into practice.

That means we’ll be covering things like emotional intelligence, social media, accessibility, business presentations, technology, and problems with communication across cultures, along with many other subjects. We’ll see lots of interesting examples and connections to real-life issues you may face at work, and we’ll have some fascinating discussions about how individuals and groups get along.

It’s going to be fun! Let’s get started.