James Drogan

It’s hard to know when I began to think about communication in a serious manner.  I peg it at my first job out of college as a systems engineer for IBM.  I’m fairly certain that I didn’t think of it in that manner.  I thought of flowcharts (communicating with people) and coding sheets (communicating with computers), both of which I learned little of in college.

As my career developed I expanded my communication repertoire to formal presentations, one‑on‑one conversations with business associates and customers, writing of proposals, reports, and marketing material.

When I retired from IBM I became associated with Baruch College.  This second career introduced me in a more formal way to communicate, especially through my long association with the Bernard L. Schwarz Communication Institute.

I’m indebted to all those along the path of this journey who encouraged, criticized, taught me, and, perhaps most importantly, encouraged and gave me the freedom to explore communication and its higher embodiment, conversations.  I’ve been from script to spark charts (Tufte), from simple flowcharts to complex causal loop diagrams.  And I keep learning.

I've put together a collection of papers, blog posts, the odd e‑mail, and lecture notes on the subjects of communication and conversation.  These are presented in chronological order.  Some of this material looks incomplete.  Indeed it is.  Learning is never complete.  Minimal editing has been performed on the original material.

The first paper in this anthology is a paper written to help me prepare for an April 28, 2006 conference.  Doubtless I will add to this as time goes on.

It is hoped that this collection might serve as useful reference and example.

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