By Steve Adubato, PhD

Meet communication all-star Reggie Best, a successful young entrepreneur who has started several high-tech companies and is now the founder and CEO of Netilla Networks, a New Jersey company that provides "virtual private networks" - a hardware/software combination allowing secure connections to a company's internal network via the Internet from any remote location. Best has made a career of simplifying communications for businesses, and he knows how to use that skill to communicate on a non-technical, human level with his employees and customers.

Says Best, "The challenge is to bring high technology and personal communication together. The goal of marketing high technology products is to take all this fancy, sophisticated alphabet soup and to communicate it simply to the customer. Here's what this is; here's how it will impact you; here's how it will benefit you - simple as that. I have made my career on making people feel comfortable with the very complicated vocabulary of technology. People need to feel supported and understood in any business; in the high-technology end it's especially important."

Best is also aware of how his communication with his employees and colleagues inside the business also requires the human touch. "I know I have to communicate my own vision and mission on a very personal level. I can't do this by handing out a published booklet on company policy, or sending a company-wide e-mail with the mission statement as an attachment. We offer a hi-tech product, but we still need to keep in touch personally."

In many ways it's more efficient to communicate electronically with their employees. E-mails, voice mails, and faxes save time and avoid unnecessary conversation. But Best says a manager or leader can take this approach too far; "I think you lose something if you don't talk on a personal level with your employees. You can't readily convey your enthusiasm or your disappointment or your expectations without the help of body language. Your hands, your eyes, the intonation of your voice all help to convey the soul of your message. Without that, you won't get your employees to buy into your vision."

Best says this is especially important when you're first establishing a relationship with an employee or colleague and that once you establish the ground rules of that relationship, then you can begin to use electronic mail and voice mail and so on as substitutes for the face-to-face meetings. He adds, "Because we're all busy, we do need to utilize the technology tools we have to keep in touch, but we should never let that take the place of human connections."

Reggie Best has it right. Communication is all about making a human connection. None of us should risk letting technology get in the way of that goal. One of the major problems in the .com world is that too many of these now failed companies never understood how to focus on the human aspect of their business. Obsessed with bells and whistles and high-tech jargon, they were convinced that they would succeed without a core message, a concrete and viable product and a clear sense of how to connect with investors, customers and employees. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. The message is NOT in the technology. It will never be in the technology. The message of any organization can only come from those who lead it and are a part of it. Leaders in the high tech world like Reggie Best understand and live by that philosophy.

If there is a topic, issue or question related to communication and/or leadership that you would like addressed, please write to me.