On The Most Important Skill in Business

Listening, listening, listening… says Charlie.

Are you listening to your customers?
Are you listening to your competitors?
Are you listening to your partners?
Are you listening to the listeners? RedMonk is a listening company.

For someone that talks as much as I do it might seem odd that listening is so ingrained in RedMonk’s DNA, but I am actually quite a good listener.

In an age of continuous partial attention listening skills become even more important.

Some people think blogs are just about an electronic pulpit. In many respects though the more important angle is to read blogs – with listening filters you can hear the hummingbirds wings behind the noise of the waterfall.

disclaimer: I stole the waterfall image from an Israeli software startup called Anysoft that did some very interesting work in the Windows client-side integration space but never took off. They were able to intercept calls between the Windows glass and the operating system to enable some cool stuff. the metaphor was used to describe the intercept behind the waterfall torrent of calls in the Windows environment.

Picture courtesy of Clearly Ambiguous, under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.