Corporate communication: where do we stand?

Communication World, March, 1998 by Gloria Gordon

In Los Angeles during IABC's international conference we conducted "man on the street" interviews with the following participants:

Roger D'Aprix, ABC, former principal, William M. Mercer, Inc., and now a self-employed consultant.

Ron Martin, director of communication, Seagrams, New York City (and former IABC chairman).

Paul Sanchez, international director of Watson Wyatt's Communication Consulting Practice, New York City.

Ron Sconyers, Brigadier General and director of public affairs, U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C.

Questions by Gloria Gordon

GG: What do you see as the most critical issues facing communicators in the next five years?

Ron Martin: I think things are changing so rapidly with technology that for us to keep up the skills that are going to be required to work with that technology will keep us very busy.

Just the rapid changes, the rapid development, of what's happening with technology is probably the greatest challenge we have. We will continue to work in an environment with a great deal of uncertainty. As communicators, we must learn to become comfortable with that change, which will continue - there won't be an end to it.

Ron Sconyers: We have focused so much in the past on tactical communication that we have forgotten that the business of communication has a strategic presence to it as well. It's important that we, in the near term and in the long term, have an abiding partnership with the senior leadership, whether it's the military or whether it's business, so that as we develop our visions, the communication strategy works hand-in-hand with the business strategy.

We need to realize that there's great value in what communication can do in terms of the bottom line or the profit margin or in terms of just meeting the visions and the goals of the organization.

GG: How has your communication function changed or evolved in the past five years?

Martin: Because of technology, it's changed tremendously. Five years ago we were still largely print focused, and it's amazing, over five years, how much less paper is involved in what we do, and how more and more the day-to-day basics of what we do is tied with the new technology. Everything today is online.

The expectation of our managements is that we'll be able to do less and less with paper. And when I think back five years ago, we've come a long way; a very big shift.

Sconyers: For me it's been significant, because my understanding of technology has been minimal until recently. In fact, a quick anecdote: About two-and-a-half years ago I had a young officer come to me and he said, "Boss, we need to have a home page on the Internet," and I said, "That is a great idea. What's the Internet and what's a home page?"

And from that has grown the Air Force home page, which is now averaging about three million hits a week. It's really changed the way we look at things because now we're able to bypass the media and take our story directly to the public, to the international public.

But we've got to make sure that technology is not there just because it's technology. We need to make sure that we develop the right kinds of messages and we have a strategy so that those messages get to the right target audiences.

Roger D'Aprix: I think the toughest issue is simply to understand what's happening in the marketplaces in which organizations are functioning. Communicators need to understand how all of that is affecting the strategy of their companies and how they can contribute to helping those organizations change and ultimately get people to the point where they're more effective in serving the needs of a customer.

In the last five years, there's been much emphasis on this issue of change and how to understand it and how to deal with it. I think that's the dominating factor in my experience.

In the old days, communication was a matter, essentially, of telling people what was happening. I think today it's a matter of educating them to some of these major changes that are happening in the economy. In fact, the whole shift in capitalism is with a focus on people as a primary resource, rather than simply money.

The issue with technology is to understand how to turn it into an effective tool in the work place. I don't think we're there by any means. I think what we have now is the technology without a whole lot of understanding of how to apply that technology, so I think that's the real challenge.

Paul Sanchez: In the next five years, communicators are going to be challenged to make the work that they do relevant to the business issues of every organization - whether it's for profit, whether it's small, whether it's large, whether it's a high-tech or a low-tech organization. issues of survival in a global environment are going to require that communicators be part of the discussion, be at the strategy table and make their work proactive opposed to reactive.

I'll speak to the role of communication in organizations that we consult with. Repeatedly the communication function has changed in a way that communicators now have to combine technology, they have to understand multicultural and diversity issues, they have to be sensitive to political trends, they have to understand shifts in demographics. So communicators are challenged to be social; scientists, not to be just mere craftspeople who can put nice words together. They have to go beyond that. They have to be real business strategists.