1. Week 3. Corporate Communication
    1. Definition: A process that collects information from the business environment develops messages from the information and transmits them to get specific economic results.
      1. Uses multiple messages and media, both verbal and nonverbal
    2. Exercise: Have each student take a minute to name the external media that his or her company uses to influence customers and others. Have one student write them on the board and another write them on paper for typing and reproduction.
      1. Your companies communicate more than you think they do.
      2. Almost all communication relates in some way to company survival and success.
      3. Your companies use both verbal and nonverbal communication externally.
      4. NEXT week’s exercise: Prepare an inventory of internal media.
    3. External corporate communication consists of message sending intended to achieve specific economic results from those who buy goods and services as well as those who sell goods, services and resources to a seller, and it directly influences how well a seller will survive in a market.
      1. Economic results do not have to be sales. May include permission to operate.
      2. Business rarely acts alone. It communicates to actors who are essential to making and sustaining economic transactions.
      3. At one time or another any actor may hold the key to a company’s survival.
      4. Managers observe the business environment and translate information into messages tailored to the needs of external individuals who directly affect a company’s survival and success. Managers interpret the external business environment to the internal organization.
      5. Managers struggle to make messages and meanings real in the economic transaction.
        1. All industries have different rates of change that impinge on communication.
        2. A manager can never know the precise status of individuals, markets or industries. Skillful managers can gain a better understanding than others.
        3. Environmental observation – a craft in itself that is complicated to do. To most managers, understanding is intuitive, and knowledge is fragmentary.
        4. Managers run into trouble communicating externally when they distance themselves from the external environment.
        5. The manager’s challenge is to monitor all key participants in an economic transaction. This is impossible to do. Managers depend on communication systems to tell them what is going on, but they can never be sure about what they are told.
          1. Humans and point of observation limit systems.
            1. One reason why managers work together with colleagues they can trust.
          2. Market signaling to tell competitors what your intentions are.
          3. The larger a company is the more likely that its external communications will have peripheral impacts.
          4. For law-abiding companies, an economic transaction is rarely free and untouched by society. Law-abiding companies must communicate to influentials and third parties to continue to do business.
        6. Corporate advertising, public affairs and public relations deal with many external issues that threaten or hinder a company from completing economic transactions, but there are no rules that say a company must use any one of these media.
          1. Some companies can remain invisible.
          2. Some companies are visible and forced into social involvement.
          3. Some companies cannot justify their positions in society no matter how hard they try – tobacco and arms makers.
          4. There is no logic to what society accepts or condemns at a given moment. External communication does not have to be rational. In fact, often it is not.
        7. Managers use heuristics to determine what to communicate. A problem arises when managers use or communicate heuristic rules outside environments in which they work.
        8. External communication frequently fails because of noise in the business environment, competing claims, embedded biases, the heuristics of message-receivers, and other factors.
        9. No company completely controls its external business environment and no communication to external individuals can guarantee a result. People have free will and companies have little control.
        10. The role of the manager is that of observer first and message-sender second.

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