1. Week 8: Corporate Communication and the Individual
1. In all effective communication, choice and action rest with the individual.
1. Action depends on a person’s willing acceptance of a message.
2. Managers have trouble thinking of individuals unless they work directly with them.
3. Folkways
1. Individual
2. Organizational
4. When an organization trains employees to its culture, communication is easier.
2. Exercise:  Have each student take two minutes to discuss an individual he or she works with and this person’s cultural differences.
1. What folkway aids communication to this person
2. What folkway hinders communication to this person
3. NEXT week’s exercise: Show how your organization’s strategic message is effected in your department.
3. Individuals and communication
1. Managers communicate a set of possible meanings that is bounded only by the number of individuals who get the message, whether or not they were targeted for the message.
2. To overcome misunderstanding, managers communicate intensively to those on whom they depend directly to get tasks done.
3. Ranking: Some are more important than others.
1. Communicate to those employees who are key to the survival and success of a company at the present time.
4. Minimum and maximum levels of individual communication
1. Effective managers never assume that a message is understood by an individual.
2. A manager may use any verbal or nonverbal message or medium to communicate effectively to individuals.
3. One takes individuals as he or she finds them and uses methods that work currently.
4. A manager should know several tools for effective communication and be willing to use them all.
5. A manager communicates first to persons with the most power to get things done and not necessarily to the best-compensated or most highly placed individual.
6. Managers are usually better off maintaining open and clear communication lines, but they have been successful either way. Some great leaders have been secretive to a fault. The role of gossip.
7. Symbolic message sending can backfire when actions become cliches to which little attention is paid. Attacking compensation usually gains the most attention.
8. Physical distance affects communication.
9. Organizations with an integrated message fail when their common purpose becomes divorced from the marketplace.
10. Flat organizations pace an enormous burden on individual communication. This calls for loose-tight communication.
11. Individual ranking: Direct economic importance, emerging economic importance, indirect economic importance and no economic importance.
1. Budget cutting to gain consensus.
2. The core audience. Usually less than 10. Influentials may be part of core audience.
3. Openness and the core audience.
12. Transition between open and closed in a company is usually not simple. Closed companies usually build a psychological wall.
4. Individuals and corporate communication technology.
1. Information technology has reached a point where even large companies can deal with core individuals as persons and not segments, groups or other abstract collections.
2. Technology has made the detailed observation of individuals a cost-effective process.
5. Corporate communication and profiling of core individuals
1. A company should now how core individuals have used its products and perceived its policies and how they are likely to accept its ongoing activities.
2. Most companies have information about core audiences within the business processes, but information often lies in isolated operating units.
3. Reengineering often fails, Neither managers nor subordinates think about how they do what they do.
4. Defining messages by the individual might require a substantial change in a manager’s thinking.
6. Corporate communication and individual messages
1. A company can tailor a core message in many ways, based on the particular individuals to whom it is sent.
2. No one can precisely measure individual behavior. A business can only measure aspects of behavior that are important to its survival and success and can do so only within a probable range.
7. Corporate communication and individual owners.
1. An absentee owner cannot hope to understand the precise economic reality of a company because accounting language ultimately is a convention – a general agreement on usages and practices, but not necessarily a precise translation of economic activity.
2. The fluid nature of public ownership introduces uncertainties to a company, as ownership may change frequently.
3. Regulated financial communication suffers from the defect of every standardized message: Some receivers understand it and some do not.

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