1. Week 9: Corporate Communication and Messages
1. Messages are not ends. They are instruments of or complements to action.
2. Often corporate communication is taught as speech, presentation, media, grammar or writing skills, but even virtually inarticulate people send effective messages.
3. One key to clear messages is clear thinking.
4. A second key to clarity is confidence in one’s ability to master events. Conviction is a message.
1. Fear is as much at the root of confused messages as is lack of clear thinking.
2. Confidence is as much image as reality.
3. Primary messages do not have to be truthful or accurate. They need only be persuasive.
5. Exercise: Have each student take two minutes to define how a company’s strategic message is effected in his or her department.
1. What is the input to your department?
2. What is the output of your department?
3. How does the output of your department advance the intent of the strategic message?
4. NEXT week’s exercise: Rank the media in your company according to importance.
6. Corporate communication and the strategic message
1. Corporate communication is based on the strategic message.
2. The strategic message is an idea that is communicated in depth to achieve fast, coordinated action leading to economic transactions. If individuals in a business cannot express a strategic message:
1. Death of the business.
2. Intuitive and the business muddles on. The economic purpose of the business is what the business does.
3. Pulls together all disciplines in an organization.
4. Most businesses have implicit strategic messages because the managers are too busy acting to spend time examining.
5. Strategic messages do not have fixed meanings. Strict construction versus flexible intent.
6. Rewarding managers as message-models if the manager is the wrong message model.
7. To effect a strategic message, the manager must first win the power to do so.
8. The strategic message is more a synthesis of a business environment than a concept imposed on it.
9. Few managers proceed in a straight line to impose their ideas on resources, process and people.
7. Defining an explicit strategic message
1. Ask first whether you need to define one.
2. A strategic message should never state what a company should do or is going to do unless the company is ready to carry it out.
3. The result of questioning should be one simple, declarative sentence, which should summarize and state what a company does to survive and succeed.
4. A primary message should be easily translatable into subsidiary messages.
5. The translations of the strategic message into action set a company apart from competitors.
6. Quantitative translation results in specificity.
7. Specificity and relevance are, by definition, opposed to openness.
8. Good messages are short and carry the essence of a message clearly in the fewest words.
9. Deconstruct messages into individual words and explain them separately.
10. The strategic message is directive and not a vision, an order and not a romantic description.
11. One way for a manager to detail what is needed is to write a scenario of the future state. Harvey’s house of hats.
8. Credibility and the strategic message
1. No matter how one crafts a strategic message, a manager must have credibility with subordinates, customers and others to effect it.
2. To be credible, a strategic message also has to fit the personalities of the sender and receiver.
3. In the end, a strategic message is an intricate web of understanding, resources and compliance that cannot be repeated precisely in the same way in every case.
9. Assumption checking and the strategic message
1. Because every strategic message is built on assumptions about the business environment, a manager must regularly question all assumptions.
2. The most subtle error involves a manager’s behavior and needs.
3. While developing a strategic message, individuals and groups may err without ever knowing they have done so.
1. Methods to break through
2. Failures of reasoning.
3. Brilliance of mind does not stop one from making fallacious arguments.

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