How do you think people will communicate most comfortably or most often five years from now? Ten years? Twenty years? This is not just a theoretical question, but one with incredible financial repercussions, as communications facilitators such as telephone companies, cable television companies, motion picture producers, and publishers place their bets.

"The ability to read books is disappearing," I suggested to my hosts, Jerry and Ellen Sears, while sipping organic beer in a trendy restaurant on Boulder's ultra-chic Pearl Avenue. Jerry Sears is a rainmaker. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily for law firms, helping them recruit lawyers and training underperforming associates and partners in the art of bringing in business. Ellen Sears, his life partner and business partner, is a former high-flying investment banker and high-tech pioneer. Together, they operate MentoringPros, a coaching firm that helps professional service vendors -- lawyers, accountants, consultants, and other who bill for their time -- make rain.

Jerry's business is all about improving communications. "Eighty percent of lawyers do not bring in enough business to cover their salaries," Jerry says, citing surveys his firm has conducted. Most of the professional selling courses available do little to change the numbers. Why? Because the reason people cannot sell is almost always buried deep in their psyche, imprinted by guardians at an early age, difficult to uncover and even more difficult to accept. Jerry helps people recognize their personal barriers to selling and more often than not he is able to turn around the careers of underperforming lawyers and firms.

While Jerry teaches how to improve communications, Ellen practices what Jerry preaches. She's used her knowledge of high-tech to create a series of web sites for their business that are models in good communication. Take a look a the newsletter subscription box on every page of the Mentoring Pros site. She offers subscribers the choice of HTML or text. It's a small point, but one that even big sites overlook: the customer wants to control communications, and format choices allow them some measure of feeling "in charge" of the discussion. The same spirit is reflected in offering audio as well as text. Ellen's success with serving audio on the site made it easy for me to sell her on video. Later today I will be filming Jerry's AuthorViews video for his new book on trust.

Jerry and Ellen, Jesse Vohs and I lingered at the restaurant for hours communicating about a broad range of subjects, including whether reading books is a dying skill. From my classes at Tulane and from watching my own employees, I suggested that the ability to multitask is eroding the ability to read book length works; that, in fact, watching Fox television -- with it's endless array of simultaneous audio and visual stimulation -- is incompatible with the attention span required for reading books. Book publishers and newspaper publishers are feeling the effects of this attention span erosion. They fear that we are raising a nation of people who cannot focus on anything longer than a paragraph. Since I consider myself a member of the book publishing industry, this shift is career-threatening. But Ellen Sears reminds me that I'm also an expert at online communications -- pushing around really good paragraphs as well as multimedia -- an industry whose future is bright indeed.

Most people react to this theory of the death of book reading as a tragedy. I don't. I think people are actually communicating better than ever, thanks to the ability to instantly send and receive audio and video and text messages, for free, all over the world. The point of communication is to get across. Anything that helps you get across better is good, I think. And if that means the era of the book is ending, that's okay. There's nostalgia for books, but if they no longer help you get across as well as time spent with some other form of communication, there's no reason to mourn their passing.

As we finished our coffees and prepared to relinquish the table we had held for hours, a storm descended the Rockies and filled the evening sky with charcoal clouds and flashes of lightning. "They really are rainmakers," I thought, looking across the table at Jerry and Ellen Sears. If you're a communicator who charges by the hour, you would do well to consult Jerry's decades of study into how to bring rain.

STEVE O'KEEFE
Online Communicator