The most skillful practitioners of corporate passive-engagement communications currently tend to be management consultants.   Increasingly, though, the techniques are being picked up by anyone who hopes to get through to key decision makers.

In one of today's primary communications methods used by adroit contemporary perception managers, an executive is talked through a carefully-prepared presentation, eliminating the need for him to go off and read something.

Sometimes overhead projection equipment is used in a full-on audiovisual show.  In other cases, the presenter simply goes over a printed version of the material with the executive in his office.  In either event, the executive is provided a paper copy of the presentation to follow along with and later remember it by.

Because this document is typically in the horizontal or "landscape" format used for slides, and 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 nothing more than 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 a challenge. 

This is what gives them one of the most essential attributes of passive-engagement communications.