A less striking but more widespread way of manipulating decision makers involves telling them what's going on in their business in a more sustained, ongoing way.   While consultants seem to be the ones most often asked to do this, savvy employees are increasingly coming to recognize the strength of contemporary executives' need to have their businesses explained to them.

Typically, an aspect of the enterprise (say, a difficult area of operations) is researched, then presenetd in the simplest and easiest-to-remember way possible.  When well crafted, this imagic view is so compelling that it almost cannot help but reside at the forefront of the executives' perceptions--often nudging aside the more complex facts of what's actually going on.

In one of the primary communications methods used by adroit contemporary perception managers, one or more decision makers is talked through a carefully-prepared presentation, eliminating any need to go off and read something.  Sometimes overhead projection equipment is used in a full-on audiovisual show, but more often, the presenter simply goes over a printed version of the material with the targeted personnel in an office or conference room.  In either event, the executive(s) get a paper copy of the presentation to follow along with and later remember it by.

This document is typically in the horizontal or "landscape" format used for slides.  Because it uses very brief bullet points instead of more traditional complete sentences, it might strike an uninitiated person as merely a kind of souvenir of a slide show.

Viewed from a slightly different perspective, the document may also appear to be an executive comic book.    Like children's comic books, it has very few words for anyone to struggle through the process of actually reading, relying instead on attractive graphical and pictorial representations to tell its story.   What words there are easy and punchy and—most important of all—don't require much assimilation or thought.

In fact, when these words are well-crafted, they do not allow much thought, because they are chosen specifically to avoid being challenged.   They don't always need to make big dramatic points, because as long as they do not provoke a direct, on-the-spot logical challenge, they can be repeated enough times in successive, ongoing presentations to become "true" (i.e., implanted in the decision maker's mindset through simple repetition--just like an advertising image). 

Indeed, among successful corporate perception managers, this method is planned out every bit as deliberately and painstakingly as an advertising campaign for a consumer product.  Skillful practitioners put tremendous care into crafting and polishing a compelling image--which can be rendered verbally in a telling "for instance," as well as in a graph or conceptualized diagram.  They know that these icons and "mental shorthand" summarizations of what's going on in the organization are what decision makers are most likely to retain and propagate onward, and thus have the highest likelihood of becoming the organization's official reality--regardless of how representative they actually are.