It's Strategic--But Is It Communication?

Another great Executive Lecture on Saturday at FDU. Dr. Gary Gumpert and Dr. Susan Drucker, partners in the firm Communication Landscapers, and Dr. Paul Power, Vice-President for Research at CBS Enterprises/King World Productions. A lot to digest and distill. The series is going beautifully, with a nice mix of academics, journalists, and corporate types. The students seem thoroughly engaged.

Which brings me back to where I left off my last post--what does the academic stuff (particularly the non-quantitative, more philosophical exploration) offer to the corporate practitioner? That's the real issue, isn't it? Does the critical academic perspective offer anything to the person "doing" corporate communications? What--if anything--does the strategic approach of the practitioner offer to academia? Should an MA program in corporate and organizational communication be a vocational program in how to write better press releases, memos, and marketing plans? Is there value in seeking to understand the social and philosophical underpinnings of our notions of communication? Does theorizing about communication (something "everybody" understands) amount to empty navel gazing?

When I was a student in the MA program and was trying, along with several other students, to persuade Dr. Radford to develop a Phd. program in corporate communication, he said something that crystallized the issue for me: "Corporate communication isn't a discipline; it's a job description." At the time, I thought this was just academic snobbery. It took a while of stewing over this statement for me to realize that it actually was a pretty elegant expression of the problem I've been struggling with throughout my career. The effects-driven, process-based model that pretty much defines corporate communication practice today places understanding communication--what it is and what its broader, non-strategic ramifications are--pretty low on the practitioner's priority list--"noble goals," as one of my colleagues says when he wants to dismiss something as irrelevant. Dr. Radford's statement turns out to be a restatement of my perennial gripe that executives "don't want to communicate; they want to appear to have communicated."

This is going to take more than one post to unpack. Suffice it to say for right now that when you step back from what we normally call "corporate communication" what you're really talking about are public relations, marketing, advertising, reputation management, crisis management...and probably several more discrete functions ("job descriptions") that can be defined in terms of processes and effects. They are strategic and tactical in nature.

What I've come to question is whether and to what extent these functions have anything to do with communication.

The Box (Part 2)

So, what is this "box" we're all supposed to think "outside of"? Is this just a cute way of saying "be creative", "be original"?

If we really wanted people to be creative or original in their thoughts or actions, we would create environments (this goes for the corporate world, as well as the larger social and economic sphere) that don't punish creativity or originality. The fact of the matter is, we want people to be just creative enough and just original enough to capture and hold our attention. We want them to do little things really well, things that don't require us to step back and crane our necks to appreciate them. We want them to surprise, entertain, and amuse us by reframing what we already know.

So, are the people who ask us to "think outside the box" being disingenuous? I can't say for sure, but I doubt it. They're as tired of living "inside the box" as anyone else. What they don't "get" is that the box is all there is. "Thinking outside the box" is the adult version of the child's question, "What was there before the beginning of the universe?" The question should be unasked. There was no thing and no there and no before (since "before" presumes the existence of time, which is coextensive with the universe).

The "box" is our language, the sum total of all the discursive structures that enable us to perceive (or construct, depending on your perspective) reality.

This is all metaphysics, philosophy....what does it have to do with corporate communications?

Next post.

The Box

"What's the most `outside the box' work you've ever done for a client?" my colleague asked the account representative who was hoping to do business with us.

The rep--an articulate young woman who, during the course of several phone calls and the current face-to-face meeting had impressed me as professional and knowledgeable--was brought to an uncomfortable halt. She thought for a moment, then gave a few examples that were not "outside-the-box" by any of our standards (including, it was painfully clear, her own), and then deftly managed to move the conversation to more comfortable ground. But the damage was done.

Later, my colleagues and I all had a smug chuckle over this person's inability to come up with even one truly "outside-the-box" example of her firm's work. In this single exchange, whatever credibility she might have built up was tarred by this failure. Clearly, she and her firm were hopelessly stuck inside "the box".

It took me a walk down to the cafeteria and half a cup of coffee to realize that the rep had been tripped up by the equivalent of "What's your greatest weakness?"--the job interview question with no inherently good answer, but one that you must have an answer to in your hip pocket; because, if you don't, you're presumed to have betrayed a deep character flaw: lack of introspection and honesty about your own shortcomings. We all know the trick--be prepared to either:

a) describe a weakness that is actually a strength taken to excess, or
b) acknowledge a weakness that is common to many people and describe how you've overcome it.

"Inside the box" is the worst thing you can be in business today. And if you ask the interviewer to say exactly what she means by "outside the box", you're only digging the hole deeper. This is because "outside-the-box" people "get it"--whatever "it" is...

How many more ways could the question have been asked? "What's the most creative or original work you've done?" "Tell me about a time you had to persuade a client to do something risky and it paid off." But these questions would have invited the conversation to continue.

The "outside-the-box" question is a conversation stopper because to answer it honestly would require a discussion of what the box is, what's inside and what's outside, and why outside is better than inside. Do I care if an idea is inside or outside this box? No, I care if it works...if it measurably advances my objective. But having a defensible answer to the question is the price of admission. Like "your greatest weakness", the question presumes to gauge the candidate's ability to think on her feet but really only tests the ability to anticipate the question and construct the answer in advance. It's like one of those standardized tests that test not one's knowledge but one's facility at taking tests.

The question also involves a presumption on the part of the questioner: that she would instantly recognize an "outside-the-box" proposal as being both "outside the box" and relevant to the problem at hand. After all, recommending that the CEO dress up in a chicken suit and molest cats certainly would be "outside the box"--but I can't imagine what business purpose it would serve. Is this merely lack of imagination on my part? Am I, like our poor account rep, hopelessly "inside the box"?

Or are we really looking for people just to peek outside the box? Maybe lift one of those flaps and create a window that lets us know what's going on outside but enables us--like the innocent children we are--to pretend the box is really a rocketship on its way to parts of the universe unknown?

Getting Started

This is my first post to my new blog.

I hope this new medium will help me get my thoughts in order about this field I've devoted 20 years of my life to, as well as provide a useful forum for others who are interested in communication theory, corporate and organizational communication, journalism and media studies. Maybe this is the beginning of a doctoral dissertation--or maybe not.

So as not to commit professional suicide, I am going to steer clear of direct references to my current or any of my former employers. This is more easily said than done, given my subject; however, given my involvement on the board of advisors for the FDU MA program in corporate and organizational communication, my membership in the IABC, and my voracious and eclectic reading, I don't think I'll soon run out of things to blog about.