1. Week 4– Internal Corporate Communication
1. Transfers information from the business environment into the organization and directs specific activities that result in economic transactions.
1. Most conditions of the external environment apply internally.
2. Added stresses of coordinating the activities of hundreds or thousands of dissimilar individuals
3. Colliding assumptions
4. Multiple command
5. Control and information systems
6. Communications devices of many types.
2. Exercise: Students name internal media that their companies use to influence employees. 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 internal communication relates in some way to company survival and success.
3. Your companies use both verbal and nonverbal communication internally
4. NEXT week’s exercise: Examine one medium in use at your company and critique it under the eight guidelines for corporate communication.
3. A company potentially has more leverage over employees than the external environment, but not much more. Circumscribed by:
1. Law
2. Employees
3. Internal politics
4. Autocratic managers, however, still exist.
5. Internal communication coordinates the activities that are necessary to complete economic transactions and transfer wealth to owners.
1. Role of the 19th Century railroads. Top-down management.
2. Control over work forces
3. Depersonalization
4. Attempts to personalize
5. Sporadic technology developments
6. Panoptic organizations
1. Observe the organization from anywhere
2. Data floods
7. Managers control internal communication only in part. Too many elements and to many media.
1. Multidirectional communication
2. Subtexts and implicit meanings
3. Behavior change.
4. Multilingualism
8. Translation of meaning
1. Filtering by department and rank
2. Problems with cascading
3. No fractal organization
4. Customer-driven as an external/internal concept.
5. Perception
9. Technology not a solution
10. . Internal communication out of self-interest
4. Internal communication and business design
1. Classical
1. Activities to achieve objectives
2. Chain of command and hierarchical groupings
3. Line relationships
4. Focus on departmental or chain activities and not the organization a whole
2. Human Relations
1. Authority and communication: Given by message receiver and not sized by message-sender.
2. Behavior
3. Verbal and nonverbal communication
4. Individual needs and wants
5. Group dynamics
1. Conformity
2. Consensus versus authoritarian decision-making
3. Group lifecycles
4. Groupthink
5. Group culture
6. Cultural networks
7. Theory X and Theory Y
8. Goals: individual, group and performance
9. Interpersonal relationships
10. Grapevines: Essential internal communication tool.
3. Systems and internal communication
1. How parts of a business work together. Communication is fundamental to enterprise.
2. Analysis of information needs, communications channels and decision areas to minimize communications burdens.
3. Process and linkages. Closed loop system.
4. Communications network that places decisions at the point where the person holds the greatest information.
5. Information flows: All to one, circle and interlinked.
6. No system is perfect nor can it be. Events change messages and media.
7. For every rule there is an exception.

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