There can’t be many things that have stayed stuck in there from my actual university days (they were ahem, a few years or so ago afterall) but one thing that certainly stayed with me is the inevitability of communication.
The idea that whatever you do and however you say it, you ARE sending a message to customers, suppliers, prospects and other key audiences.
Perhaps it was the absurd analogy of a dead person communicating that they weren’t alive by ‘not breathing’ that made it so memorable.
Whatever, I’m glad it stayed in there.
When you consider this idea, it maybe shifts the focus on ‘whether’ you communicate, onto ‘what’. Many clients now accept the idea that bad news fills a communication vacuum.
It might just be gossip or it might be malicious, but either way, it’s easy to see examples of companies getting a hard time or fending off wild rumours when there’s no official viewpoint to fall back on.