Is Anybody Listening?

From William H. Whyte Jr., “Is Anybody Listening?”, Fortune, September 1950, p. 174. The article was expanded two years later into Is Anybody Listening?: How and Why U.S. Business Fumbles When It Talks with Human Beings (Simon & Schuster, 1952), written with the editors of Fortune. The quote closes the article’s recapitulation paragraph: “LET US RECAPITULATE A BIT: The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened.”

The next sentence supplies the mechanism in Whyte’s own terms: by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society. The Fortune chain runs: the speaker doesn’t listen, so the speaker doesn’t appreciate how complex the audience actually is, so the talk goes past them and the gap stays. Listening is what would force the speaker to see the complexity the simple message was glossing over.