1. Week 5: An Approach to organizational communication
1. Eight guidelines: A way to attack to communication challenges and come to reasonable decisions.
1. Characteristics of effective messages, media and communication structure in corporate communication.
2. No success guarantee.
3. Corporate communication accepts partial knowledge as a human condition.
2. Exercise: Students critique one medium that their companies use to influence employees.
1. What is the medium’s best characteristic.
2. What is the medium’s worst characteristic.
3. What would you do to use the medium more effectively?
4. NEXT week’s exercise: Inventory sources that your companies use to understand the business environment and prepare to discuss them.
3. Simplicity: The singular focus of messages and media on survival and success of a company.
1. Uses both informational and effective message sending.
2. Relates to process design. Gets rid of processes that have no value.
3. Uses the least number of messages and media to capture information, formulate and transmit messages and gain action to maximize wealth.
4. Accounts for verbal and nonverbal communication.
5. Works for the clear expression of meaning.
6. Factors militating against simplicity.
1. Data floods.
2. Data structure.
3. Change.
4. Natural tendency to organizational complexity.
4. Time: Ideal timing delivers information at the exact moment needed to support economic transactions and employees.
1. Expanding telecommunications networks have reduced the time needed to transmit messages and elicit feedback.
2. Timely communications takes time to achieve. Systems are difficult to build and require huge assets.
3. In most corporations timing is far from ideal.
4. Timing fails when the business environment changes in chaotic ways.
5. Time is relative in corporate communication. At some point, the cost of communicating information in real time outweighs the benefit gained from it.
6. Real-time communication does not mean that a message receiver can perform a real-time action.
7. Periodicity.
5. Openness: Information collected anywhere can be communicated anywhere and in any direction to internal and external audiences who need it to support or complete economic transactions.
1. Not the same as technological openness.
2. An open technology firm can be a closed corporate communication firm. The perils of "need to know."
3. An ability to reach outside of need-to-know barriers.
4. Accessibility.
5. A relative term based on environment, security, managerial preference and individuals with which a company communicates.
6. Dependent on individuals.
6. Definition: Defined corporate communication is purposeful communication
1. Who communicates what messages through which media to message receivers who are individually identified both inside and outside an organization.
2. Linked directly to survival and success.
3. Includes both verbal and nonverbal media.
4. Starts with customers and works t the inside.
5. A continuous process of definition.
6. Definition goes wrong when too much time is spent in definition and not enough time in action. Definition is incremental and occurs over time.
7. Definition is tied to economic outcomes.
8. Known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
9. Transforms policy into system functionality. Human factors.
10. Training.
7. The Individual and corporate communication: Corporate communication does not persuade groups but individuals who accept a definition of self and of group norms.
1. Mass media is a misnomer.
2. Individuals segment themselves by self-interest, tastes, needs and desires.
3. Mass media describes the distribution of messages but not their reception.
4. Individual media: Ways of sending messages that most persuasively appeal to a specific person and motivate him or her to act in accordance with a seller’s or manager’s message.
5. Managers can appeal to group norms for action but they should never forget that below norms and abstractions are unique persons who freely accept or reject messages based on calculations of self interest and who will either act or not.
6. Individual communication places personal preference into a mass distribution network.
7. There are standard messages and tailored messages.
8. Individual communication fails when managers forget they are dealing with discrete persons.
8. Flexibility and Corporate communication: Organizations adapt messages, media and audiences as necessary to achieve results.
1. Ability to change course.
2. An ability to adapt messages and media without jeopardizing survival or success.
3. Allows for serendipity, fortuitous connections and unfortunate outcomes from using information and media in novel ways.
4. Comes from initial system design and continuous improvement.
5. Flexibility in communication goes wrong when tasks require precise communication for long periods, when individuals are inflexible by nature, when customer demands do not allow for flexibility, where material or events do not allow variance and when a product/service is jeopardized by seeming inconsistency.
9. Meaning and Corporate Communication: Message content and purpose of a communication.
1. Managers waste time and resources to send messages with no meaning or unclear meaning and no intent.
2. Ideally, every message has one meaning, one subtext, and one intent linked to corporate survival and success. This is never the case.
3. Every message has multiple meanings and subtexts. The manger must emphasize the explicit intent and hammer down subtexts that harm intent.
4. A meaningful message is full of meaning.
5. Meaningful is a relative term. Sometimes it equals elaborate exercises in message transmission while at other times, it means using the fewest words.
6. Meaningful communication is tied directly to clear, focused and credible messages.
7. Specificity is part of meaningful messages. The level of detail is a part of a manager’s judgment call.
8. Meaning includes clarifying intentions.
10. Measurement and communication
1. Communication either contributes to, or detracts from, economic transactions and corporate survival. There is no neutral communication.
2. Al communication uses resources and competes for attention. If messages have no value, they waste time and money and distract individuals from communication tat results in economic transactions and survival.
3. Measurement: evidence about which two or more independent observers can reach agreement. The ultimate business measurement is a sale or support from key constituencies. The challenge managers face is to measure how this corporate communication works compared to other types.
4. Sunset provisions in corporate communication.
5. Three challenges: inertia, management preference and deciding what to measure.
6. Measurement before and after sending a message.
7. Measurement does not have to be formal, but it grows more inaccurate as the number of message receivers grows.
8. Measurement goes wrong when individuals bring biases to their work of measurement.

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