M Power is a Melbourne based public relations company that believes communication empowers. Karen Morath is the founder and Managing Director of M Power. M Power provides consulting, training and communication services to organisations largely in the locality of Melbourne

This is m-news, M Power's monthly e-newsletter. We hope you enjoy reading it. Feel free to forward it to friends or colleagues who may find it useful.

M Power is a communication and events company. m-news includes information about related themes - six quick snippets about business, organisational and individual effectiveness, communication and public relations.

Communication empowers.

Karen Morath, managing director, M Power

The ‘quick six’ for July are

1. More tips for communicating to be understood
2. A quote we like
3. Gratuitous plug
4. PowerPoint
5. Gratuitous plug two
6. This month's book review

1. More tips for communicating to be understood

1.There are just five ways to organise information - by location, alphabet, time, category or hierarchy. They are best remembered by the acronym LATCH.

2. To decide which information is worth keeping, determine what you really want to know and having found it out, discard any additional information. By not being concerned about asking 'silly' questions, you can ask about things you really want to know, therefore showing your fascination and being able to explain the information to other people in a way they will understand.

3. Most information is useless. Give yourself permission to dismiss it. It is worthless reading something you're not interested in as you won't remember it anyway - nothing occurs during that experience that helps your insight and understanding.

Source - Richard Saul Wurman's Information Architects, Graphis Press Corp. 1996

2. A quote we like

"When assessing how bad something is, ask yourself if it will really matter in five to 10 years."

Source - read somewhere recently, apologies to original source

3. Gratuitous plug

Karen Morath has become a contributor to the new website on small business and entrepreneurship - flyingsolo.com

The site has been created for the fastest growing segment of the business community: the solo business owner. Aspiring and actual soloists will find an impressive array of free resources and advice within the site and Karen's articles will feature regularly.

4. PowerPoint

We can't stop ourselves from publishing tips on PowerPoint - there are still so many audiences dying by PowerPoint that we feel the need to do our bit to help them.

PowerPoint is the most misused presentation tool ever. The trick to a dazzling presentation is to decide what you want to say, then decide what is the best and most logical way to say it and then decide if and how PowerPoint could help. PowerPoint development should occur at the end of speech development not the beginning.

Source - Patricia Fripp, Fripp and Associates, www.fripp.com

5. Gratuitous plug two

Happy birthday to M Power which celebrates its fourth birthday this month. Thank you to everyone who gives us the opportunity to demonstrate our philosophy that 'communication empowers'.

6. This month's book review

Family First - your step-by-step plan for creating a phenomenal family, by Dr Phil McGraw (tv's Dr Phil), Simon and Schuster, 2004

OK it's an unusual choice of book for a communication newsletter but, apart from it being a great book that I am happy to recommend to parents everywhere, it really could have been subtitled 'communication empowers'.

Here are Dr Phil's thoughts on what he considers to be the five different categories of communication. They cover pretty well everything.

1. Information exchange - when you are trying to impart or gather information and they tend to be matter of fact and starightforward.

2. Persuasive communication - when you are trying to convince someone to change their mind or move their position. It's marked by passion, emotion and sometimes persistence.

3. Motivational communication - when you're trying to motivate someone to get involved, work harder or care more. These are inspirational interactions usually marked by animation or emotion.

4. Problem-solving communication - when something needs to be fixed. These are often viewed as crises and typically involve some time pressure.

5. Connection communication - when you are simply trying to connect to or relate to someone in a meaningful way. Often the hallmark of these is 'if you want a good friend, be a good friend'.

If you can identify these scenarios, and therefore work out the goal of the communication before you start, you are more likely to have success.

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