Communication Director 02 2009

www.communication-director.eu

COMMUNICATION

DIRECTOR

Magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations

04/2009

Paint a portrait

The complex relationship between communications and top executives

Critical CEO communications

Tailoring your executive’s public appearance

The dark side of leadership

Christopher Preuss at GM

The individualised approach to

Machiavelli’s The Prince as a

and Christa Carone at Xerox

positioning the company’s figurehead

how-not-to communications guide

EDITORIAL

P

erhaps now is not the best time to be a CEO. Consider the headlines over the past year or so : if you did not know any better, you might think “step ping down” is a dance craze currently all the rage among swinging CEOs, with Bank of America, MyS pace, GM , CIT Group, Nokia-Siemens Network , UniCredit Bank Austria, ING , Volvo and Porsche all announcing changes at the ver y top. At the time of going to press, corporate leaders on both sides of the Atlantic continue to be subject to vilif ication, tied to the tor ture rack of media- driven public opinion (although few cases are as immediately dramatic as in March, when the CEO of the French arm of Sony was held hostage in an of f ice overnight by laid of f employees) . So where is the communication director in all this ? As the sculptor of the chief executive’s public image, these are critical times, and this provides the perfect oppor tunity to put the complicated relationship between an organisation’s leader and their head of communications under the microscope. This is what we aim to accomplish – as much as space allows – in this issue’s Sto r y teller section. We have invited some leading communicators to share their experiences of working closely with their CEO in good times and bad, and we are par ticularly excited to bring to you interviews with Christa Carone, communicator behind the historic woman to woman CEO handover at Xerox, and J. Chris topher Preuss, head communicator at GM . Elsewhere within these pages, we look at the tragedies recently experienced by France Télécom, discover how to communicate a company into the hear t of a new market, and contemplate the inevitable pro spect of ageing in our careers. I hope you enjoy the last issue of this year, and I wish you a prosperous 2010 !

Marc-Oliver Voigt Editor -in-Chief m.voigt@communication-director.eu

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04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

“Given the wide exposure and prestige that western brands have enjoyed in countries like China or India, the reputations of those companies stand firmly cemented.”

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“We wanted to maintain a dialogue with the most concerned people locally from day one of site investigations.”

AGENDA SETTER

Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

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Proposal for nuclear disposal

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Get with the plot!

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Creativity in a crisis Atlas Copco’s innovative multimedia approach to hosting an international managerial meeting

Annika Berglund

TEAM PLAYER LEADERS CEOs in the eyes of the media

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How to improve personnel management and your career

34

Why should experienced professionals retire just because they have reached a certain age?

CEO Stockwatch by CARMA International

Chris Ball

38 The corporate and academic stand on communication

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Would a Frenchman buy Indian wine?

Bertrand Cabedoche

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Making better talent decisions

Seven simple steps to assist companies from emerging markets in breaking into Europe

Placing the right people in the right jobs at the right time is a tough but necessary task

Abhinav Kumar

David Gudanowski

Giving Europe a voice How the European Citizens’ Consultations opened a direct channel between the EU and its citzens

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An infernal spiral France Télécom serves as a painful reminder of the serious risks of organisational restructuring

STRATEGIC THINKER 22

Long term perspectives

BORDER CROSSER Experiencing the unknown

Christian Hänel

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Experiencing the unknown – leading professionals working abroad Interview with Anthony Gooch

04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

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“Members of the OECD recognise its value, but it would be asking too much of them to remain silent when a political government feels that perceived criticism is going to make its life politically uncomfortable.”

“When the first six months also involves the second biggest rights issue in history, the fatigue associated with successfully defending against a hostile takeover bid, some senior board level changes and...”

STORY TELLER

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Refuelling faith in the motor city

Just the two of us

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Informant to the CEO

Looking at the important questions of communication

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The CEO/communications director relationship determines almost every aspect of a company’s health

Successful stakeholder engagement depends on constant dialogue with your CEO

Dafydd Phillips and Richard Morgan

Rossella Gambetti and Stefania Romenti

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“A diverse leadership”

62

Find the right fit

Interview with Christa Carone

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European Association of Communication Directors

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Cynthia Wagner Weick

Photos: www.flickr.com; private

European Association of Communication Directors

Strategic relationship It is up to the communications chief to sell the strategic necessity of their function to the CEO

QUESTIONS TO...

The personal side of Communication Directors

Patricia O’Hayer

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Communications Reader

ASSOCIATION

The Prince and I Almost 500 years later, can Machiavelli’s The Prince be a learning tool for communications heads?

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BOOKS

The inexact science of finding just the right communications strategy for your chief executive

Simon Sproule

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Interview with J. Christopher Preuss

Ensuring credibilty during turmoil

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Carmen López-Lavid

Getting your CEO to commit to employee engagement will reap dividends when times are hard

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Simone Niven

04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

AGENDA SETTER Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

PROPOSAL FOR NUCLEAR DISPOSAL Two Swedish municipalities competed to be chosen as a site for the country’s first depository of high level nuclear waste, a culmination of years of communication work.

by Dafydd Phillips

SKB held open days onboard a ship used for nuclear waste transportation.

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D

oes the English concept of Nimbyism translate to other countries? NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard – a slightly sneering term applied to protestors of unwelcome planning applications, often of an environmental necessity: in other words, I don’t care what you do with the problem; I just don’t want to have 04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

to deal with it. I ask because it’s a concept clearly foreign to the good people of Östhammar, a municipality near Stockholm, who have won the privilege of being selected for the final destination for high level nuclear waste. Spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous for humans for over 100,000 years, and is stored at an interim storage facility for at least 30 years to reduce the heat by some 90 per cent. Nuclear power, and in particular this kind of mind-bogglingly hazardous level of nuclear waste, is a contentious issue, and surely not something that anyone in their right mind would welcome on their doorstep.

Which makes the work of SKB, a Swedish nuclear fuel and waste management company, all the more impressive. Founded by nuclear companies in the 1970s, SKB began its programme of preliminary investigations of potential sites in the 1980s in northern Sweden.

However, local protests persuaded SKB to desist from these investigations. Carl Sommerholt, Head of Communications at SKB, credits this climbdown with a turnaround in his company’s approach to communications.

Photo: SKB

AGENDA SETTER

WINNING ACCEPTANCE “SKB learned a very good lesson on the significance of acceptance on the work and the way the work is done,” he says. “That has, over time, transformed into a particular SKB organisational culture in the way we do whatever we do – from research to site investigations to how we meet people, how we communicate with people. These early protests were a learning curve for SKB.” The main lesson learnt was the importance of winning acceptance among the inhabitants of the potential sites, and to do this, the public face of SKB’s operations in this field moved from engineers and technologists to a range of internal people chosen from the local communities to be the conduits of open dialogue.

These were the public information officers, and their familiarity with the local community was, explains Sommerholt, essential: “We couldn’t have people coming in from HQ in Stockholm. We needed to recruit people locally that are a part of the local community. We wanted to maintain a dialogue with the most concerned people locally from day one of site investigations. The significant fact was that these are people who live in the municipalities themselves and understand what the concerns and local questions were about from the start.” The officers participated in open meetings with citizens and interested organisations in eight shortlisted areas, and accepted invitations to talk about the activities around site investigations.

For example, an inspection of the biosphere around a particular site would be announced in advance, in a way off offsetting any charges of clandestine obfuscation.

This approach was devised in-house, due to the lack of comparable long term relationship building. There was continuous feedback on the work of the public information officers to company management, and opinion polls conducted annually by market research company Synovate. But crucially, the officers were entrusted with a high degree of delegation and authority to carry out their role in a way that best fitted the needs of the local municipalities. When asked how he would compare this later approach with that of the late 80s and early 90s, Sommerholt points to the art of listening as the defining change: “Sometime it’s more important to listen than talk about our activities so we can determine what really concerns people, and focus on those questions; not focus on the technical or other issues that we may think is what really concerns people. So it’s both an attitude and approach, a total mind shift if you compare the early 1990s with the 2000s when it comes to a way of working.”

SUMMERTIME OPEN DAYS The final phase of preliminary site investigations began in 2002, with the choice of locations narrowed down to two sites in Östhammar and Oskarshamn. Both locations were determined to fit the fundamental requirements for long term safety, but

We wanted to maintain a dialogue with the most concerned people locally from day one of site investigations. such a contentious issue presented its own set of challenges. The varying degrees of risk perception demanded a consistent willingness to listen to people’s concerns and answer them, and not always aim to dispel fears or convince the doubters. One of the most striking examples of this open approach was the series of summertime open days and exhibitions held in the cargo hold of a ship actually used to transport spent nuclear fuel. Visitors were able to speak directly with experts from SKB over a coffee in this highly unusual setting.

And SKB’s efforts paid off. A poll conducted by Synovate before the final announcement on June 3 this year showed increased acceptance in both municipalities.

Seventy-nine per cent of respondents from Östhammar reported that they were ‘for’ or ‘totally for’ the project, a two per cent increase from a similar poll a year earlier, while Oskarshamn saw a one per cent increase, up to 84 per cent.

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COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

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AGENDA SETTER

Locals versus experts The success of SKB’s operation is a model of PR. From my point of view, the key words of this operation were: open dialogue, local communities, locals vs exper ts, acceptance, listening, transparency, investments. SKB has agreed from the beginning to meet the inhabitants, to listen to them and to inform them via people locally recognised. According to a golden rule of influence, communication must be honest, transparent and carried out by people close to those in a position to influence. People will tend to believe a neighbour more than an expert coming from a far away HQ. SKB completely understood this logic of listening, not convincing, and made it possible for fears to be expressed in order to be defused. Another golden rule: getting the acceptance of the people for the project. Acceptance is often more the fruit of the emotions (pathos) than of reason (logos). This is why it was so important for SKB to listen to the local communities and avoid any technocratic approach. The surveys carried out show that working locally and not technocratically functioned very well.

This operation could be used as a model within the framework of any project disturbing lives: infrastructures of transpor t, energy, plants, etc. It is also clear that the national and local culture is ver y impor tant. Swedish people are well known for their honesty and transparency, key factors in the success of this project.

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Overall Sweden’s and thereby SKB’s handling of where to put the countr y’s permanent high radioactive waste facility has been exemplary, as highlighted by this ar ticle. However, there are three fur ther variables that need to be mentioned: a) Both Östhammar and Oskarshamn, the final two candidates for the permanent high radioactive waste site already have a nuclear power plant within their municipality. Past research in the area of risk perception shows that publics are more worried about unfamiliar risks than familiar ones.

Hence, it was always more likely that the locals in these two communities would accept radioactive waste than say a community that does not have a nuclear power plant, be it Gothenburg or Umea; b) One key component of SKB’s outreach strategy was that of developing a proactive communication strategy with the publics.

By driving around with a large caravan from city to city, showing curious citizens how nuclear waste is produced, what the small pellets look like, and long term plans for that waste, trust was built up between SKB and many Swedish citizens; c) Finally, and most impor tantly, Swedes are on the whole more trusting of both their industries and their regulators, compared to many other western nations. Hence it is unlikely that the Swedish nuclear waste communication strategy will be replicated outside the Nordic region.

Stéphane Desselas

Prof. Ragnar Löfstedt

Managing Partner, Athenora Consulting, Brussels

King’s College, London

Stéphane Desselas has more than 15 years of European Union lobbying experience. Seven years ago, he founded Athenora Consulting, a European public affairs consulting firm. He is member of the worldwide network, Public Relations Global Network (PRGN).

04/2009

Trusting Swedes

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

Ragnar E. Löfstedt is professor of risk management and the director of King’s Centre for Risk Management, King’s College London, UK, where he teaches and conducts research on risk communication and management. He is also an adjunct professor at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

was Östhammar that received the dubious honour of selection to host the world’s first high level nuclear waste site. With a projected start date of 2023, all spent nuclear fuel from Swedish nuclear power plants will be disposed of in a final repository at a depth of nearly 500 metres in the crystalline bedrock, in approximately 50 kilometres of deposition tunnels. The announcement was made at a press conference held on the waste ship docked in Stockholm. The two mayors involved had agreed earlier this year to share the SKr2bn (179m Euros) of “added investment” that had been promised to the winner: 75 per cent of it to the runner-up – some consolation prize. SKB will submit a licence application next year to the government, who will have the final veto.

In a statement after the conference, Mayor Jakob Spangenberg acknowledged that there are people in Östhammar who are sceptical to a final repository in their area: “We have an important task to supervise and inspect ongoing work, and see to it that citizens and elected representatives in the municipality receive sufficient information and remain committed to the matter.” Sommerholt, meanwhile, believes SKB’s communications work is far from over: “We have employees in both municipalities,” he explains. “Of course, over the years to come we are going to increase our presence and activism, gearing up for the project that we’ll perform in Östhammar, so SKB has long term commitment to both municipalities and will have for a very long time to come.”

And with nuclear waste, a long time to come is a very, very long time indeed.

Photos: private

COMMUNICATIONS WORK FAR FROM OVER Ultimately, it

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AGENDA SETTER Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

GET WITH THE PLOT! In January, the British government announced a new third runway for Heathrow airport – but Greenpeace’s Airplot team had other ideas...

by Richard Morgan

M

ankind is destroying the planet; human life, if it carries on the way it is, is unsustainable. That is what the media, our national governments and our thermometers all tell us on a regular basis – and they are most probably correct, if you believe many of the world’s scientists. We need to be greener, they all say. We should all start fitting solar panels to our houses and recycling used goods, and we should certainly be cutting down on our use of fossil fuels, our CO2 outputs and our use of cars. Oh, and air travel. Planes are also terrible pollutants, they say.

So when the UK’s Labour government announced in January this year that it had agreed to a new third runway for London’s Heathrow airport, confusion and anger set in. The plan, announced by Geoff Hoon, then transport secretary, would mean 600 extra flights passing over London each day, and a total of 222,000 more flights coming in and out of Heathrow every year. It would also require the demolition of the 700 homes of the village of Sipson, located on the site on the proposed runway. Most significantly, though, it would make the airport the biggest single source of CO2 emissions in the country.

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ONE STEP AHEAD To many members of the British public, Labour’s message felt hollow, and the pledge that this would be a “green runway” seemed dishonest. What had probably helped inform them on the issue in advance of Hoon’s message was a communications coup achieved by Greenpeace the day before. The NGO’s Airplot campaign involved buying a piece of land on the site of the proposed runway, in an attempt to stop it being built – and the news of the purchase was released to the media the day before the government gave the runway the green light, complete with pictures of the field emblazoned in giant chalk letters with the slogan “Our Climate. Our Land”. As Ben Stewart, 04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

Greenpeace’s Head of Media, puts it: “We had a really good story. From under the noses of the government we bought their runway and we’re not giving it back to them!”

The Airplot idea was formulated a year before the third runway was given the go-ahead. “We were talking about the certain inevitability that had built up around the construction of the third runway, and how to challenge that,” Stewart says, “and we had close to a year to get it together.” It took Greenpeace a good amount of time to buy the

From under the noses of the government we bought their runway – and we’re not giving it back! land and address the various legal issues involved, partly because the plot is being split between four legal owners (Greenpeace UK and three prominent British celebrity activists) and thousands of “beneficial owners” (who have rights and responsibilities in relation to the property), and partly because secrecy levels around the planned purchase were high.

After the land was bought, and the government’s announcement on the runway drew closer, Stewart knew Greenpeace would have to choose the right moment to com-

AGENDA SETTER

Members of the public and Greenpeace activists joined the villagers of Sipson in protesting against a third runway being built at Heathrow.

municate the plan. “There was a lot of activity in the run-up to that announcement,” he says. “There was a lot of media interest in the story, and we didn’t reveal what we had done – we waited until the day before the announcement, and released the news at that point. We rode on the back of that huge interest in the coming announcement, and because we pre-empted the announcement by a day, I think the media understood this idea that it was a guerrilla landowning blocking thing that had outflanked the government.”

Photo: Jiri Rezac/Greenpeace

A POLARISING ORGANISATION Many of the visual images that accompanied the Labour announcement the following day were of the Airplot land itself. It seemed that Greenpeace had timed their communications to perfection. “We decided to not release it on the same day as the announcement because we thought we might get swamped by the announcement and just be another commentator,” says Stewart, “so that day before was the perfect space to occupy.” Greenpeace is typically seen as a polarising organisation. It has its

fervent supporters and its constant critics; indifference to it is rare. But in the case of Airplot, the campaign seemed to immediately secure a wide range of backing, including that of media outlets typically seen as less supportive of the NGO’s activities. “We ensured that we didn’t ‘ghettoise’ Airplot in the Guardian and Independent [more liberal UK newspapers] media area,” says Stewart. “Instead, we appreciated that we had something that was going to excite a lot of people. So, for example, we put efforts into making sure we got on the [BBC’s] Jeremy Vine radio show that day, where you reach five or six million people. We gave a big push to getting this story in the Times, the Mail and the Sun [more conservative press]. Some of the media who aren’t our natural supporters got on board, and we had a lot of fun with that. And we knew they would. So we used Airplot as an opportunity to get coverage in areas we wouldn’t always get positive coverage.”

The campaign was not just wheeled out in the traditional press, though. Airplot’s online community is where the group is coaxing members of the public to sign up to the campaign. The goal is to get 100,000 people involved.

So far, nearly 60,000 people have joined the plot. Stewart agrees that social media is an important method of communication for Greenpeace. “We invest a lot in getting the word out through social networking,” he says. “Airplot was a plan to get tens of thousands of people to sign up to own the land, and that wasn’t going to happen with postcards and paper and pens – that was going to happen through driving people to our website and getting them to sign up there. We have also gone through all the wellknown social networking tools and set up Facebook pages 04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

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AGENDA SETTER

Plotting real-world change Celebrities, politicians, scientists and thousands from all over the world are joining the Airplot campaign. “An effective campaign!” one could say. But why? Most simply: using the Internet to not only inform but primarily to mobilise to offline actions. The Airplot website is informative, skilfully juxtaposing images of departing planes with those of melting glaciers, and intertwining statistics on carbon emissions with emotional testimonies by local residents. Most importantly, it offers concrete solutions to the diagnosed problem (“join us!”) and aims to generate offline action. The website provides toolkits on how to recruit others, create projects, organise events and get the campaign message across to public officials and local media. All that an Internet user needs to become politically active. But is that all the campaign needs for the construction plans to be stopped? Ultimately, such a halt will not be decided because someone posts another video or bakes a giant cake shaped like a runway strip to later email its photo to a politician. Rather, it will be pressure exerted by public opinion that could influence the government.

To create such pressure, the campaign needs to spawn more national and international media coverage than it did in its first few weeks. Certainly, cake baking and flashmob picnics show the campaign can generate grassroot actions. Now it is time to translate these actions into persistent media coverage to show that the Airplot campaign can generate public pressure and a real-world change.

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Heathrow has recently been voted the worst airport in the world for the second year running, so it’s no wonder the Airplot campaign has won backing from beyond its traditional base. It has seized the media agenda, got active involvement from ‘national treasure’ celebrities and made participation easy, while tapping into the sense of an Englishman’s home being his castle. But for all its apparent unpopularity, Heathrow is still one of the world’s busiest airports and British Airways’ landing slots alone are worth £2bn. And with new Gatwick Airport owners GIP itching for a return on their hefty £1.5bn purchase, a tarmac arms race is surely on. With just over half the potential 100,000 Airplotters signed up, keeping the campaign’s lifeblood flowing during the normal glacial-speed planning process is a real challenge. I have seen email updates encouraging Airplotters to organise themed activities and write to their local MP, but the campaign could shout much louder. How about a 24hour webcam showing the actual plot or an interactive virtual plot to stimulate sign-up and a sense of involvement?

What about a village fete for supporters in Sipson? Or auctioning the plots of turf and scattering them among their new owners, replacing them with fresh grass to create a giant Airplot logo for real?

BAA would seem to have retreated for now, but this is once again the calm before the storm. Greenpeace will need to step up the fight all over again to stop Airplot losing the plot for real.

Prof. Magdalena Wojcieszak

Kay Williamson

Assistant Professor, IE University

Managing Director, Gravitas Public Relations

Magdalena Wojcieszak is an assistant professor in political communication at the IE University in Segovia, Spain. Her research focuses on deliberation, polarisation, collective action and public opinion. She holds a master’s in sociology from Warsaw University as well as a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

04/2009

Calm before the storm

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

Kay Williamson has worked in PR and journalism since 1980 and specialises in strategy, crises, healthcare and the environment. Her firm Gravitas Public Relations is dedicated to improving the quality of life for people and the planet by promoting all things that deliver a better environment.

and Twitter, etc, and we made videos specifically to be used on the web that went viral. We try to garner an awful lot of attention on the web, and in this case, that did happen.”

KEEPING PEOPLE ON BOARD The one difficulty for the Airplot campaign has been the drawn-out nature of the runway plan’s progression. Greenpeace have been signing people up since January; now, nearly a year later, keeping people interested can be challenging. “That is a problem,” Stewart acknowledges. “We need to innovate and not be boring or predictable. We’re trying very hard to do that.” Could people end up getting sick of the whole affair? “I do worry about carbon fatigue,” he says.

“I think there will be an awful lot of attention on the Copenhagen climate conference at the end of the year, and I do worry that after that the media will think they have done as much on climate change as they can do for a while. I’m already finding in my conversations with journalists that there are many things around climate change which they feel have been done to death. These are the kind of things we need to tackle.”

Airplot’s communications seem to have worked. On October 11, the Times newspaper reported that Heathrow’s operator, BAA, had all but given up on the third runway idea. The Conservative party, widely tipped to form the next UK government, are also opposed. Greenpeace cannot take sole responsibility for this outcome, of course, as numerous organisations had been fighting the same cause. But the Airplot field will long stand in the memory as the little piece of land that helped save the village of Sipson, millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions, and the outflanking of an entire government.

Photos: IE University; Gravitas Public Relations

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LEADERS CEOs in the eyes of the media

CEO STOCKWATCH Watching the people who run the commercial world provided by CARMA International

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The appearance of green shoots of recovery furnished hope that the world economy might be emerging from the doldrums over July, August and September, the period covered by Carma International’s latest survey of media reporting of the world’s leading commercial figures. However, nervousness persisted that the green shoots might be choked by the weeds of recession or wilt in bleak conditions ahead. Clouds looming included the likelihood that unemployment would continue to rise for some time to come and the need for western nations to tackle their burgeoning debt levels. Against this economic backdrop, many commercial leaders continued to express caution on the business outlook.

In the political arena, US President Barack Obama, his honeymoon in office now over, battled to win approval from lawmakers for his healthcare reforms. In the UK, the two main political parties discussed the need for spend-

ing cuts as the British parliament attempted to rebuild its credibility following the damaging MP expense claims scandal.

Top 20 CEOs worldwide | Top CEOs by volume in Q3

Top 20 CEOs in Europe | Volume of coverage in Q3

General Motors / Henderson News Corporation / Murdoch Berkshire Hathaway / Buffett Bank of America / Lewis Google / Schmidt Citigroup / Pandit Deutsche Bank / Ackermann AIG / Benmosche Porsche / Wiedeking Apple / Jobs Telstra / Thodey BHP Billiton / Kloppers Yahoo / Bartz ANZ / Smith Kraft / Rosenfeld Microsoft / Ballmer British Airways / Walsh Morgan Stanley / Mack Goldman Sachs / Blankfein Walt Disney / Iger

ter’s survey of media coverage of CEOs continues to show the effects of economic turbulence on the business landscape. Two veterans of media limelight attracted the most coverage over the three months, Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. The top name in last quarter’s survey, Fritz Henderson of General Motors, slipped to fourth position. Sergio Marchionne of Fiat, last quarter’s second most reported CEO, fell to outside the top 20, as did Robert Nardelli of Chrysler and Alan Mulally of Ford Motors, suggesting that commentators’ interest in the efforts of carmaker chiefs to restructure the industry had decelerated. In contrast, Porsche’s Wendelin Wiedeking moved

Deutsche Bank / Ackermann Porsche / Wiedeking British Airways / Walsh Fiat / Marchionne UBS / Grubel Royal Bank of Scotland / Hester Renault Nissan / Ghosn Volkswagen / Winterkorn Cadbury Schweppes / Stitzer Lloyds Banking Group / Daniels Continental / Neumann Daimler / Zetsche Arcelor / Mittal Societe generale / Oudea Commerzbank / Blessing EDF / Gadonneix WPP / Sorrell Sberbank / Gref BMW / Reithofer Ryanair / O’Leary

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INFLUENCE OF ECONOMIC TURBULENCE This quar-

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180

240

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90

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up to ninth position, from 16th in the previous survey. Bankers and CEOs of financial institutions continued to generate media interest in their efforts to mend the damage wrought by the financial crisis and held eight of the top 20 slots. Public rage on pay packages and bonuses continued to fuel reporting, while the contentious issue of effective regulation also generated commentary. Besides Warren Buffett, Kenneth Lewis of Bank of America stayed in third place, with Vikram Pandit of Citigroup finishing sixth (up from fourth) and Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank seventh (up from 14th). American bankers John Mack of Morgan Stanley and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs ranked 19th and 20th respectively. Eric Liddy was replaced in the top 20 following his retirement by Robert Benmosche (eighth), the new CEO at troubled US insurer AIG. Mike Smith of ANZ came in at 14th as commentators followed Smith’s pursuit of his ambition to turn ANZ from the smallest of the big four Australian banks into a super regional player in Asia, with 20 per cent of earnings from outside Australia and New Zealand by 2012. In contrast with the efforts of banks stricken by the credit crisis to shed assets, Smith struck deals to buy RBS’s Asian business and ING’s 51 per cent stake in a wealth management joint venture over the period. Besides Mike Smith, CEOs of other Australian companies, or those with an Australian connec-

tion, were also among new entrants to this quarter’s survey, with David Thodey, the new incumbent at Telstra, the Australian telecoms giant, appearing in 11th place, and Marius Kloppers of BHP Billiton, the Anglo/Australian mining conglomerate, placed 12th.

NEWCOMERS Close to half of the top 20 names came in from outside in the latest survey. On the other hand, eight names were demoted to lower rankings (not including Eric Liddy). Carol Bartz of Yahoo entered at 13th place, thrust into the spotlight by her Internet search deal with Microsoft to help the two companies challenge chief rival Google. She joins two other IT leaders in the top 20: Apple’s Steve Jobs, who returned from medical leave to finish 10th, and Eric Schmidt of Google in fifth.

The remaining new entrants to the top 20 positions were Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft, whose hostile bid for rival confectioner Cadbury propelled her into the rankings at 15th, Willie Walsh of British Airways at 17th, John Mack of Morgan Stanley at 18th and Robert Iger of Walt Disney at 20th.

The survey’s analysis of the focus of articles on the leading CEOs showed that finance issues continued to dominate coverage, accounting for 54 per cent of the articles tracked, reflecting ongoing concerns about the impact of

Quality of CEO coverage | Percentage of favourable, neutral and unfavourable coverage favourable

neutral

unfavourable

Iger Blankfein Mack Walsh Ballmer Rosenfeld Smith Bartz Kloppers Thodey Jobs Wiedeking Benmosche Ackermann Pandit Schmidt Henderson Lewis Buffett Murdoch

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20%

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70%

80%

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LEADERS

Themes most beneficial for CEOs | Favourability of topics % favourable

% neutral

% unfavourable

100% 80% 60% 40% 20%

Finance

Management

Products

Commercial

Legal

Governance

Labour

Environment

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the recession on companies’ financial health. The next biggest concern, accounting for 20 per cent of reporting, was management. In a change from the previous survey, a focus on products/services accounted for the next highest proportion of overall reporting, though at seven per cent (up from six per cent), this category still represented just a small proportion of the overall volume of articles tracked. Nevertheless, if a greater focus on products/services proves to be a

persistent, longer term trend, this should be good news for CEOs. CARMA’s analysis consistently demonstrates that media coverage that links CEOs to products/services tends to be more favourable than reporting that focuses narrowly on financial performance.

GM AND APPLE AHEAD The CEOs within the top 20 who generated the highest number of articles on products/ services were Fritz Henderson of General Motors and Steve Jobs at Apple, both with 18, followed by Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation and Eric Schmidt of Google, each with 16, Robert Iger of Walt Disney (15), Carol Bartz of Yahoo (12) and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (9).

Of these, however, only one article – for Rupert Murdoch – achieved a positive rating. That the remaining articles focused on products/services had a neutral impact on the CEO’s media profile suggests that business leaders have more work to do in learning how to associate themselves with their company’s products/services in the most favourable light. A case in point is Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, whose announcement of Yahoo’s technology alliance with Microsoft received a chilly reception from Yahoo’s investors, who had expected her to be more hard-nosed in securing upfront cash from Microsoft for the deal. “So much for the ‘boatload of money’ Carol Bartz wanted from Microsoft in return for a search deal. Instead, Yahoo’s chief executive settled for a deal that wouldn’t fill

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a bathtub,” commented the Wall Street Journal US in an article of July 30. Once again, the environment and society accounted for the smallest share of the overall volume of articles. Within the top 20 CEOs, only Willie Walsh of British Airways achieved media coverage of environmental policies, with six articles, of which one was rated as favourable. Five CEOs secured media coverage on social issues, led by Warren Buffet of Berkshire Hathaway, with six, and followed by Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs with three, Josef Ackermann with two, and Rupert Murdoch and Willie Walsh with one each. These articles focused on social issues among the top 20 CEOs were all rated neutrally.

Themes most associated with CEOs | Share of coverage of issues in media Governance (2%) Labour (1%)

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FRITZ HENDERSON OF GENERAL MOTORS Fritz

Henderson of General Motors, after taking over at the wheel of the stricken Detroit carmaker at the end of March, had steered the ailing giant carmaker into bankruptcy in June. With the clock ticking for the company to secure approval for its restructuring by July 10 – or lose its government funding and be forced into liquidation – Henderson set about his task of reviving the wounded dinosaur. GM’s Action Hero Lauded for Driving Hard Reforms, said a Financial Times headline on July 6. In contrast with the more leisurely pace of the old company culture, the article commented that under Henderson’s leadership participants at meetings are often back in their offices shortly after lunch: “‘It’s much more action-packed than it used to be,’ says one person familiar with the meetings. ‘Now every discussion ends with a decision’.”

The company passed a milestone on July 10 with its exit from bankruptcy protection: “From this point on, our efforts are dedicated to customers, cars, culture and repaying the taxpayer,” said Henderson (the Financial Times, July 11). Henderson’s new initiatives included plans to launch a “Tell Fritz” website allowing people to share their views with senior management. He would respond to input every day, pledged Henderson. GM Takes New Direction, said the headline in The Wall Street Journal US (July 11, which quoted Henderson as saying: “Business as usual is over at GM…Everyone at GM must realise this and be prepared to change, and fast”).

The volume of reporting testifies to Henderson’s proactive approach to communicating his plans to consumers and the media. Commentators noted the contrast between Henderson’s public relations engagement and the quieter approach of Chrysler’s top management, headed by Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne. In an article headlined GM and Chrysler Take Different Routes as They Look Towards Re-

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covery, the Financial Times commented that “Henderson has hosted numerous webchats and media conferences lately in an attempt to persuade car buyers, especially Americans, that the dinosaur of old is managing to turn itself into a nimble, cutting edge enterprise.” (August 15). In contrast, Chrysler had discontinued its monthly sales data briefings and was solely represented at a motor industry conference by a public affairs manager.

However, the article said it was too early to judge which of the two companies is on the right track. It noted that some outsiders question whether the flurry of activity at GM is “more representative of style than substance”. Henderson’s approach attracted reporting beyond the US and Europe, with Brazil’s leading financial publication, Valor Economico, observing that Henderson’s attempt to build a friendlier public image was clearly different to the approach of Rick Wagoner, who had “the strategy of ‘acts not words’ when it came to communication” (July 21, PR Efforts Make Fritz Henderson GM’s New Face).

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NEGOTIATIONS OVER OPEL Meanwhile, talks to sell GM’s European operations under its Opel brand progressed slowly. GM’s reshaped board asked the management team led by Henderson to seek further information from the German government before deciding whether to back a bid from a consortium led by Magna International, the Canadian parts maker, and Russia’s state-controlled Sberbank, or an alternative from RHJ International, the private equity group based in Brussels. Russian newspaper Vedomosti followed the progress of talks between GM and the Magna/ Sberbank group and the difficulties Henderson faced in trying to convince shareholders of the need for the sale. It commented that the board of directors had asked Henderson to explain how GM was planning to compete in Europe if it lost control over Opel: “Is a deal with Magna really necessary?” (September 10).

The board finally opted for the Magna deal. “The directors concluded that management had left the company with no viable alternatives,” said the Wall Street Journal US (September 11). It commented that “GM’s internal wrangling over Opel puts added pressure on Mr Henderson, whose long-term prospects as CEO are unclear.” But controversy did not end with the board’s decision: the German government had indicated it would provide state funding only for the Magna bid, provoking questions about whether the deal would breach European rules on fair competition. Moreover, a sizeable amount of the 4.5 billion Euros offered in subsidies

by Berlin to support the Magna/Sberbank deal appeared to be destined to modernise the Russian car industry.

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Once again, analysis of the top ranking CEOs in the European and North American media reveals that the names that attracted the most coverage differed markedly in each region. GM’s Fritz Henderson generated the most articles in both continents, while Ken Lewis of Bank of America took second place in terms of coverage in North American media, but was only ranked fifth in European media. Three other names besides Henderson and Lewis featured in the top ten in both continents: Rupert Murdoch, fourth in Europe and third in North America, Warren Buffett, sixth in Europe and fourth in North America, and Eric Schimdt, ninth in Europe and seventh in North America. Interestingly, the bulk of articles for each of the top two names globally, Murdoch and Buffett, appeared in Asian media.

In European media, only four of the top ten most reported names were CEOs of European companies, with Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank and Wendelin Wiedeking of Porsche taking second and third place. Karl-Thomas Neumann of Continental AG, who took over as CEO of the German car parts maker in September, appeared at seventh place in European media; and Willie Walsh of British Airways finished tenth. In contrast, the top names in North American titles are all CEOs of American companies.

In terms of the focus of reporting, finance issues and management issues continued to be the dominant themes in both European and North American titles, though the volume of articles focused on finance matters was more than double those focused on management in both regions. Together, in each continent, these themes accounted for more than 70 per cent of the total articles tracked. They also accounted for the bulk of reporting across global media as a whole. Though the preoccupation with these themes represents a long-term trend, it is no surprise that they have been of particular interest during these months of economic and financial market turmoil. In Europe, legal and regulatory issues accounted for the next highest volume of articles, instead of commercial issues, which this time came fourth. Legal and regulatory issues were a particular concern in Germany and France, while commercial matters were a key focus in Germany and Russia.

In contrast, in North America, products/services was again the subject of the third highest number of articles, while reporting on commercial issues was almost non-existent. Once again, environmental and social issues were poorly represented in reporting across both continents.

RUPERT MURDOCH OF NEWS CORPORATION Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal in 2007, one of America’s more high-minded newspapers, seemed aimed at enhancing the image of his newspaper em-

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pire. However, in July this year he found himself answering questions about the conduct of journalists at News International, owned by News Corp. The scandal involved allegations that journalists at the News of the World had paid for private investigators to hack into the mobile phones of numerous high profile figures.

Murdoch quickly denied knowledge of any payments made to settle legal cases in which the company’s reporters might have been involved in criminal activity: “If that had happened, I would know about it,” he was quoted as saying by the Financial Times (July 9). This was followed by the Metropolitan Police’s refusal to reopen a criminal investigation into the allegations. Nevertheless, denials failed to quell media interest in the scandal.

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Loss-making News Pins Hopes on Pay Sites (Australian Financial Review, August 7)

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News Corp’s Murdoch Cites Pickup in US Ad Market (Wall Street Journal Europe, September 17)

The Financial Times mocked Rupert Murdoch’s refusal to talk about the scandal in an interview with his own Fox Business cable channel at a media conference he was attending in Idaho: “I’m not talking about that issue at all today… I’m far too removed around here,” it quoted him

as saying. The FT quipped: “It is a long way from Sun Valley to the Street of Shame. That was the implausible excuse used by Rupert Murdoch.” Besides being potentially career threatening for some of Murdoch’s employees, said the FT, the scandal “also promises to revive Mr Murdoch’s former reputation, summed up by his Private Eye nickname, the Dirty Digger (‘Dirty Digger’ Has Blagged His Way Into the Headlines, Financial Times, July 11).

In August, News International revealed losses of 3.4 billion US dollars for the year to June 30 and Murdoch declared his intention to charge for all the online content of his newspapers and television news channels. Loss-making News Pins Hopes on Pay Sites, said the headline in the Australian Financial Review of August 7. Murdoch predicted that if the move was successful, it would be followed by all media. This prompted further media comment: “You’ve probably heard that paywalls – those virtual barriers that divide websites into free and non-free sections – look likely to be erected all over the Internet, now that Rupert Murdoch has opened the floodgate…” said the Australian Financial Review (Murdoch Paywall a Comic Suggestion, August 11). Murdoch attempted to put the difficulties of the past year behind him towards the end of the three months, with more cheerful comments about the company’s prospects at a conference in New York: Upbeat Murdoch Rejoices at Healthier US Economy, said the headline in the Australian Financial Review (September 17) and News Corp’s Murdoch Cites Pickup in US Ad Market (Wall Street Journal Europe, September 17). Despite the gleeful media scrutiny of the illegal mobile hacking scandal and the announcement of hefty losses at News Corp, the tone of coverage of Murdoch was generally neutral, and there was even one positive comment. This is a fair result for the veteran media mogul – testifying his shrewd ability to handle the press.

JOSEF ACKERMANN OF DEUTSCHE BANK Josef

Ackermann of Deutsche Bank, an influential but often controversial figure in Germany, also faced risk to his reputation as results emerged of an inquiry into a spying scandal within the bank. Ackermann had initiated an inquiry into allegations of unauthorised surveillance of board members and investors and had hired a leading law firm to conduct it.

The outcome was that the bank fired two executives, including Deutsche Bank’s head of investor relations, in July.

“The affair risks the reputation of the bank, not least in Germany, where corporate snooping and unauthorised use of data are viewed with particular hostility. It is also an unwelcome distraction for Josef Ackermann,” said the Financial Times (July 21). With a criminal investigation looming 04/2009

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that banks needed to accept the need for tougher capital requirements. He also added his voice to calls for a prudent approach to regulating the financial system (Financial Times, September 9).

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over his company’s role in the affair, Josef Ackermann was “the latest chief executive in Germany to get an uncomfortable reminder of how seriously the country takes any whiff of corporate spying. The extent to which Mr Ackermann will have to accept the blame for any action by Deutsche Bank, or the outside detective agencies it employed, remains to be seen.” (Deutsche Bank Spying Claim Opens Old Wounds, Financial Times, July 22).

The scandal may have somewhat overshadowed the positive news of a better than expected 68 per cent jump in net Deutsche Bank | Bullish claims Deutsche Bank Spying Claim Opens Old Wounds (Financial Times, July 22)

Merkel Fends Off Criticism of Ties to Deutsche Bank Chief (Wall Street Journal US, August 27)

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Deutsche Bank Profit Leaps 68% (Wall Street Journal Europe, July 29)

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profits, though Ackermann was cautious about the outlook, and announced an increase in provisions for bad debts. He said the bank’s business model positioned it to “take full advantage of opportunities, as and when business conditions improve” (Wall Street Journal Europe, July 29). Ackermann met further controversy when suggestions emerged that Angela Merkel had hosted a private birthday party at the chancellery for the Deutsche Bank leader at taxpayers’ expense.

However, Ackermann’s standing as a senior and powerful German banking veteran were enhanced by his comments 04/2009

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WENDELIN WIEDEKING OF PORSCHE Wendelin Wiedeking of Porsche had the dubious distinction of clocking the highest number of unfavourable reports of CEOs in the limelight, as his ambitious plan to take over Volkswagen (VW) skidded out of control. As the feud headed towards a showdown, Wiedeking’s position looked increasingly shaky as his adversary, the ruthless Ferdinand Piech, head of VW’s supervisory board and a big shareholder in Porsche, appeared to gain the upper hand. On July 23, Wiedeking was ejected from the driving seat, ending his 25-year career at Porsche and paving the way for a merger between the two companies. Wiedeking’s departure inspired a rash of articles musing on his fall from a great height. The Wall Street Journal Europe (July 24) recalled that Wendelin Wiedeking was “once dubbed ‘King Wendelin’ for steering the iconic sportscar maker from the brink of collapse to the pinnacle of profitability”. “From hungry wolf to sacrificial lamb”, commented the Wall Street Journal Europe in another article (Wheels Fall Off After Porsche Chief ’s Failed Bid for VW”, July 24). “How things have changed for Wendelin Wiedeking, ousted as chief executive of Porsche Automobil Holding SE. He is the main loser from Porsche’s attempted takeover of Volkswagen AG.” Wiedeking left with a hefty 50 million Euros payoff, sparking outrage in Berlin, where his record pay cheques had long been “a source of political friction,” said the Financial Times. “Mr Wiedeking’s compensation and eventual payoff documented how far ‘the gambling mentality of global casino-capitalism’ had infected ‘so-called down to earth German companies’”, it commented. The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which also followed the saga closely, blamed Wiedeking’s “lack of political sense” for Porsche’s failure to take over VW (July 20).

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WILLIE WALSH OF BRITISH AIRWAYS Willie Walsh of British Airways, despite piloting the airline through unusual turbulence, presided over a stellar performance in its stock, which rose around 78 per cent over the three-month period.

Yet much of the coverage was focused on Walsh’s efforts to reduce costs and pay at the struggling airline. Walsh had warned that British Airways was in “a fight for survival” and the worst of the recession for the airline industry was “still ahead” (BA Launches Fresh Round of Cuts, Financial Times, July 4).

Media reporting followed the progress of increasingly tense pay and productivity negotiations with employees’ biggest trade unions. BA Seeks Acas Help With Union Negotiations, said the Financial Times headline on July 2.

Walsh was reported to be trying to thrash out a deal with cabin crew personnel, who were angry that the airline was planning to employ more short-term workers on lower salaries, (BA Faces World With Less Premium Travel, Financial Times, July 15).The crisis forced the airline to raise cash in mid July from the sale of bonds and a new banking facility. The 1.1 billion US dollar funds raked in put Walsh in Walsh | Article focus

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a buoyant mood: “This puts to bed any suggestion that BA is in any sort of risk short term… relative to competitors, this puts us in a very strong position.” Walsh continued in pugnacious form as he unveiled a 148 million GBP quarterly loss. Trading conditions continued to be “very challenging” and there were “no signs of improvement”. However, the airline was performing better than rivals as it was taking a lead in cutting costs, he insisted (Financial Times, August 1).

Despite the crisis, Walsh achieved media coverage for the launch of business only flights from City Airport (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal Europe, September 30). He also deserves credit for achieving a favourable article on environmental issues. Addressing the United Nations climate change meeting in New York on behalf of IATA, the trade body for airlines, Walsh promised that by 2050 the industry would cut its carbon emissions to 50 per cent of 2005 levels, reported the Economist of September 26 – October 2. The

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article questioned the reality of Walsh’s bold promise, but did not dispute it.

CARMA’s latest survey once again highlights the importance of active engagement with the media for business leaders as a means of explaining their strategies effectively to the public, governments and regulators. Economic turbulence has brought increased government involvement in industries. The upheaval appears to be ushering in a new era of ‘government activism’, in which governments may emerge as key partners with industry. However, the dangers that overregulation and government intervention could stifle competition remain. With the business landscape still changing, business leaders need to seize the opportunity to make their views heard in the debate about the role of governments in regulating and supporting business.

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STRATEGIC THINKER The corporate and academic stand on communication

WOULD A FRENCHMAN BUY INDIAN WINE? Entering the European market is a tough task for companies from emerging markets – but there are seven steps to success.

by Abhinav Kumar

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wo things occurred last Sunday in Paris that set me thinking. As I was strolling outside the Café de la Paix in the Opera district, I was approached by a demure man peddling brochures on the streets. While I usually avoid retail solicitations, it was a lengthy red light on the pedestrian crossing and so I agreed to hear his pitch. It left me astounded. He was the spearhead of a campaign for a Japanese jeans company which had just launched its first 04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

retail outlet store in France. I dined that day with a journalist friend, who told me about an Indian wine company that had gone into collaboration with a local company to sell Indian wines to France.

GARGANTUAN TASK Talk about an uphill task! Somehow the vision of any of my couture conscious

STRATEGIC THINKER

French friends wearing tight machine-fitted Japanese jeans and drinking imported Indian wines is exceedingly hard to imagine. And there lies the gargantuan challenge for communicators from the emerging world who look to carve a position for their companies in the old world. The reverse, however, is not true. Emerging economies have grown up on a diet of European and American brands. In the streets of Rio de Janeiro you see children playing football barefoot, but wearing Adidas armbands and with Nike Swoosh logo footballs. Since Nokia’s 1987 PR coup of Mikhail Gorbachev using their handset to call Moscow from Helsinki, almost every second cell phone in Russia today is a Nokia.

In India, driving a Mercedes continues to represent the highest display of wealth and luxury. IT managers often interchangeably use the words SAP and ERP, turning the German software giant into a generic brand. Since opening its first office in Shanghai more than 100 years ago, Nestle has seen three generations of Chinese growing up with Swiss chocolates and coffee. Given the wide exposure and prestige that western brands have enjoyed in these countries, the reputations of those companies stand firmly cemented.

No such luck for the Japanese jean maker.

THE RISE AND RISE OF THE EMERGING WORLD Yet more and more eastern and emerging market companies will wash up on European shores in the days to come.

After two hundred years of staying firmly rooted in the west, the world’s economic centre of gravity is clearly shifting to the east. Emerging countries now account for almost 50 per

cent of the world’s GDP, and expect to capture two thirds of all future growth of the world economy. A fact further exacerbated by the current economic crisis that has the developed world comprising flat or contracting economies in 2009. In contrast, the emerging economies are growing at an average rate of 6.1 per cent. Symbolically, HSBC’s CEO has decided to shift his office from London to Hong Kong in February 2010. This September, the G20 superseded the G8 as the main economic council for the future, hence including 11 new emerging countries, which were earlier unrepresented in the G8. The east is starting to rise faster than ever. While they certainly represent a growing market for western firms as well, the emergence of these economies will also lead to their domestic companies becoming stronger and looking to get more global. More and more companies such as Embraer, Hyundai, Cemex, Gazprom and Tata are and will continue to look at replicating the successes in their home markets into Europe as well.

There is, of course, a long road ahead. Of the top 100 most valuable global brands published by Business Week, only nine were from the east (seven from Japan and two from Korea). Only 90 of the Fortune global 500 were from emerging economies, with another 68 from Japan. Interestingly, from a reputation point they did better – 81 of Forbes top 200 most reputable companies in 2009 were from emerging economies, including my own company, clocking in at a proud 11th spot.

CLIMBING THE GREAT WALL OF EUROPE Few communications heads from any of these companies would deny that there are significant challenges to be overcome in their quest for forging European reputations. Three towering challenges trouble the sleep of these communicators:

A) Awareness – the rule is simple. Just as children are nat-

urally suspicious of strangers, nobody wishes to do business with those they do not know personally, or at least by reputation. While many emerging companies have been dominant 800 pound gorillas in their home markets, they are simply not known in Europe. This is perfectly natural, since they have not previously sold in, advertised to or communicated much in this part of the world. The challenge is more often than not internal. It is exceedingly hard for some gorillas to understand that they are no longer the king of the jungle but the new kid on the block, who needs to introduce himself and make friends.

B) Bias – especially of national perception. As the title of this article attempts to provocatively spell out, we do live in a world of perceptions. How Europeans perceive 04/2009

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the national or cultural identity of the home country of a company will undoubtedly play into its reputation. India’s reputation for software excellence helps its IT companies, Taiwan’s reputation for high technology helps its semiconductor companies, Israel’s reputation for security helps it security product firms. But companies selling Chilean wines, Japanese jeans and, say, Russian chocolate – as good as their products might be – have a harder task at hand. They need to first overcome negative perception barriers, and only then can they get on with building their individual company brand and reputations.

C) Community – in Europe, a sense of community is of paramount importance. Even the UK is often considered the odd man out and routinely subject to friendly baiting by the mainland for standing apart on the Eurozone and the Schengen Agreement. While nationalism and europeanism keep competing for first and second place, foreignism is certainly a distant third. It is critically important for a foreign company to shed the foreign tag and be seen as a company that is a good citizen, contributing to the economy and development of the EU.

THE SEVEN STEPS TO SUCCEED IN EUROPE There

is, of course, no magic formula to overcome these challenges. The best solution remains a sustained long term communications and marketing strategy, to progressively build the company reputation and presence in media and industry circles. As they build this strategy, there are seven critical steps that emerging market companies must consider for powering up their reputations:

1. Face reality: the step one for getting anywhere. Do not

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assume your hair is in place; look into the mirror. Companies need to audit their current reputation and positioning in the various European markets important to them.

The results can be surprising for those used to dominating their home markets. It is also particularly important to gauge any national/cultural perceptions that could create dissonance with your brand. We personally always have our PR agencies do a dipstick check on the market before we commence a programme in any new country.

2. Build a unique story: most newcomers from the emerging world would usually find themselves entering a crowded marketplace, where the incumbents they need to compete with are already well entrenched. Hence there is an immense onus on them to differentiate themselves in order to gain the attention of their target audience. Look at the European airlines sector for example. It already contains heavyweights such as British Airways, Air France-KLM, 04/2009

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and Lufthansa. And emerging world companies including Jet Airways, Turkish Air, Singapore Airlines and Etihad are also in the fray for the market. So if a new airline from, say, Vietnam wishes to get into this sector, it must have a compelling message beyond the messages of passenger comfort, luxury and safety being rolled out by the incumbents.

3. Harness the bias of national perception: to repeat my earlier point, there will always be a positive, neutral or negative association with a business sector and the country of origin. If it is positive for you then you must maximise it. As an example, there is tremendous respect with most European companies for the

The best solution remains a sustained long term communications and marketing strategy. high quality and dependability of IT services and software from India, which helps our company to credibly position our key message – “We help clients experience certainty.” If it is neutral, go breathe a sigh of relief.

And if you are unfortunate enough to have a negative association, then you certainly have your work cut out. A good tactic is getting credibility points and references out in the press and participating in local award contests.

4. Look beyond the word Europe: notwithstanding the stellar efforts of the European Union to coalesce into a harmonious region with aligned foreign policy, economic and legal frameworks; when it comes to the world of communications, there is no single body called Europe. It is easy for foreign companies to overlook this and attempt a single strategy for the

STRATEGIC THINKER

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The seven steps Audit your position in the new market Differentiate your brand Work with your public image Europe is not one market Don’t get lost in translation Integrate your functions

Photo: Tata Consultancy Services Europe

Use known quantites to speak for you

region. However, each country has idiosyncrasies that must be catered to and which have messaging/positioning implications. Also when it comes to press relations, strategies have to be country oriented. Different national publications hold sway in each country – there are almost no major pan-European publications, with the rare exceptions of, say, a valiant New Europe weekly newspaper and a Euronews TV channel.

5. Mind your language: casebooks are replete with examples of companies making errors in translations and ending up with egg on their faces. It happens even at the highest levels: the famous case of the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton presenting a symbolic button to the Russian foreign minister with the intended message being “reset”, to mark the start of a new relationship. The translation ended up being the word “overloaded” in Russian. The common mistake made is that translations are considered administrative, rather than strategic. In media relations, it pays immensely to keep on side local spokespeople, who are native to the language and culture of the country.

6. Integrate communications and marketing functions:

emerging market companies that come into Europe have a long way to go in locally creating both their brand and their reputation. Yet it is often the case that they can and have invested only limited resources to achieve this. In this scenario, it is especially important that their marketing, advertising, branding and communications teams work together to bring an integrated approach to the market. In many cases, it actually makes sense to front load PR ahead of marketing, having it lead the development of that brand in Europe.

7. Embrace legitimacy: if your target audience is unfamiliar with you, then having some known entity vouch for you has immense benefits. It could be a client, a partner, an analyst, a ranking list, or even a local award. For us, the greatest credibility point in the 34 years we have been operating in Europe has undoubtedly been the clients who vouch for us. Companies such as ABN Amro, AXA, Belgacom, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ferrari – i.e. companies that are recognised leaders in their fields.

LONG LIST OF BRANDS In relation to this, let me con-

clude with a sample of eastern philosophical thought on communications – the great strategist Chanakya said, “A man who is praised by others as great is regarded as worthy, even though he may not deserve it. However, a man who sings his own praises lowers himself in the estimation of others, even if he possesses all the virtues in the world.”

Who is Chanakya? He is perhaps India’s foremost Abhinav Kumar strategic thinker, who lived Director of Marketing & Communications ,Tata Conover two thousand years ago, sultancy Services Europe in 350-283 BC: he was prime minister to an emperor and wrote a formidable book on the principles of statehood, politics and economics. He may be considered an equivalent of Machiavelli, Von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu. If Abhinav Kumar is responsibyou have not heard of him, le for building the reputation then he just joins the long and brand of India’s largest IT list of eastern brands that yet company in continental Europe. need to build a stronger repHe previously helped create a positive market position for the utation in Europe. And no, firm during its foray into Latin as far as I know, Chanakya America. He holds an MBA in never bought Japanese jeans marketing from Indian business school group IIM. – but I just might.

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GIVING EUROPE A VOICE Many citizens of the European Union have difficulties in understanding its complex mechanisms and feel alienated from its decision making processes. European Citizens’ Consultations tried to improve this situation.

by Christian Hänel

I

n 2005, voters in France and the Netherlands rejected, in two referenda, the treaty of Rome establishing a European Constitution. In 2008, Irish voters rebuffed the Lisbon treaty, Rome’s watered down successor. Amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth, Brussels struggled to figure out what went wrong. Indeed, the rebukes came despite support from national politicians and a flood of pro-EU campaigns. It was clear that voters’ mistrust of the EU had been underestimated, and that no amount of advertising could bridge the divide between Europe’s politicians and the citizens they are meant to serve.

Some shook their heads, resigned to the perceived inevitability of voter scepticism; others decided to address the root of the problem. In 2007, after a period of reflection, the European Commission launched Plan D for Democracy, Dialogue and Discussion, a sweeping programme

Some shook their heads, resigned to the perceived inevitability of voter scepticism; others decided to address the root of the problem.

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to increase and improve dialogue and discussion between the organs of the EU and its citizens. In 2008, the Commission developed, as part of Plan D, the Debate Europe programme. In its first year, Debate Europe concentrated primarily on bridging the chasm between Brussels and EU citizens, which had only widened in the aftermath of the failed referenda. In 2008/2009, Debate Europe took a substantive turn, concentrating on the role of the EU in maintaining Europe’s economic competitiveness, an issue of particular concern amid the global financial crisis.

With EU parliamentary elections looming, the EU made 04/2009

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citizen engagement a priority. The culmination of this effort came in March 2009, when all 27 EU member states held simultaneous European Citizens’ Consultations to consider the economic and social future of the European Union. Over 40 independent organisations – foundations, non-governmental organisations, universities and thinktanks in every member state – formed a consortium under the leadership of the Belgium-based King Baudouin Foundation to fund and conduct the simultaneous consultations, with financial support from the Commission. The Robert Bosch Foundation was the European level partner, sponsoring the German Citizens’ Consultations, among others. Conception and facilitation were managed with the support of German project partner IFOK.

EUROPEAN CITIZENS’ CONSULTATIONS – APATHY WAS YESTERDAY! The design of the

European Citizens’ Consultations had proven itself as a model for citizen participation in 2007/2008.

Through the conference format, citizens from across Europe are given a voice, directly participating in the political decision making process. The core of the project is a

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series of interlocking participatory and dialogue processes occurring both on and offline, activating and mobilising Europe’s citizens – even if they are not directly participating in person.

Apathy was yesterday! The consultations have their roots in a novel concept of political communication, tailored for use in Europe. Participants are given the opportunity to discuss their views of a European future with their fellow citizens – unhindered by national borders or language differences, and to develop concrete policy recommendations.

This not only gives citizens a voice, it actively incorporates their ideas, worries and views in tackling the most important issues facing Europe.

Photos: Frank Toussaint

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FUTURE OF EUROPE IN FOCUS The

first phase of the 2009 European Citizens’ Consultations comprised a pan-European online discussion.

Between December 2008 and March 2009, the general public was invited to log on to dedicated web sites to voice and develop their recommendations for Europe’s economic and social future. These recommendations formed the substantive basis for the citizens’ consultations themselves.

Among the participants in the German Citizens’ Consultations was Hans-Dieter Homeyer, a 47–year old from Lower Saxony. “It began with a phone call,” Homeyer recollected.

“Someone from the University of Bamberg asked me whether I would like to participate in the European Citizens’ Consultations in Berlin in March. At first I was sceptical, but I was certainly intrigued by the idea of developing recommendations for policy makers.” The German Citi-

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Impressions from the European Citizens’ Consultations.

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zens’ Consultations brought together 150 participants, selected at random from a representative pool. “How 150 average citizens were supposed to come up with recommendations pertaining to the economic and social future of Europe – and that within the course of two days – was a mystery to me,” said Homeyer. “Moderators led the discussions at round tables, and an editorial team recorded our ideas. Experts analysed our recommendations, and commented on feasibility. In this way, we were actually able to develop ten sensible recommendations, which we subsequently discussed with Members of the European Parliament.”

On each of three successive weekends, nine countries held simultaneous citizens’ consultations, allowing participants to exchange their ideas and concepts with others across Europe in real time via video conference, giving the project a truly European dimension. After the individual country conferences, the respective recommendations were submitted to a second online balloting phase, from which 15 common European recommendations emerged. These 15 common European recommendations formed the basis for a European Citizens’ Summit in Brussels.

CITIZENS SEND BRUSSELS A CLEAR SIGNAL In a hall in the Brussels Stock Exchange are ten densely arranged round tables. Miniature flags placed on each table symbolise the EU’s 27 member states. Interpreters have filled the remaining space around the tables with their small booths. A cacophony of 23 languages fills the room. At each table sit 10 people – young and old, male and female, representing 27 different nationalities. This is the European Citizens’ Summit in Brussels. At one table sits Hans-Dieter Homeyer. He is, along with nine other Germans, representing the 150 participants of the German Citizens’ Consultations, and is listening spellbound

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On each of three successive weekends, nine countries held simultaneous citizens’ consultations, allowing participants to exchange their ideas and concepts with others across Europe in real time via video conference. as an interpreter translates the arguments of the Greek participant sitting next to him. Representatives have come from every member state to the Citizens’ Summit, which represents the high point of the European Citizens’ Consultations project. At the summit, participants work on 04/2009

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Opening up dialogue Many European citizens feel alienated from the decision making processes of the European Union.

From 2007 to March 2009, the European Commission developed plans to engage citzens.

Consultations allow citizens direct interaction with the European Parliament and Commission.

Unlike static opinion polls, the consultations offer more detailed and goaloriented evolution of positions over an extended period of time.

They also capture interest of a media usually bored with EU stories.

detailing and crystallising the 15 recommendations from the previous phase. Among the recommendations are new environmental protection measures, enhanced regulation of financial markets, and the harmonisation of employment conditions and social safety nets across the EU. Participants debate and discuss these issues among themselves, and in closing with President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, Hans-Gert Pöttering, then President of the European Parliament, and the leaders of all European parliamentary groups.

Shortly after the summit, Homeyer takes stock of his experience: “We were enthralled to have politicians listening to us, debating with us the recommendations we ourselves had developed. That said, I felt our first round of discussions with representatives from the European parliamentary groups was disappointing: a political campaign show with little

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relation to our arguments. But in the following rounds, with EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso and Hans-Gert Pöttering, we were finally able to make ourselves heard.” Homeyer’s personal take: “It became clear to me how important it is to vote, to actively participate in democracy. I also resolved to better inform myself in the future. We need to show politicians all over Europe: ‘We’re here!’ I really hope that the policy makers in Brussels took our recommendations to heart.

They won’t have another opportunity soon to get such a detailed and comprehensive picture of their citizens’ political priorities – not even through the elections.”

Photo: Robert Bosch Foundation

“I BECAME INTERESTED IN POLITICS WHEN POLITICS BECAME INTERESTED IN ME” The

key aspect of the citizens’ consultations format lies in its singular ability to actively bring ordinary people into a political decision making process that is to many people at best remote, and at worst irrelevant.

The citizens’ consultations go a long way in reducing the psychological distance between ‘those up there’ – the politicians – and ‘those down here’ – the citizens. Participants are presented with a broad challenge, and are given the creative freedom to expand and refine their own ideas and concepts. Perhaps the most important aspect: they feel that they are being heard and taken seriously, a fact validated by the extent of the engagement of EU policy makers and institutions.

Policy makers, in turn, are given the chance to hear, directly and unadulterated, what is on their citizens’ minds. The response from participants – citizens, experts and policy makers alike – was overwhelmingly positive,

as was the extensive and upbeat media coverage of the event.

The participants were crucial in achieving this media attention, offering interviews and enthusiastically reporting on their activities. The idea of ordinary citizens creating policy, as well as the individual stories behind the participants, resonated with reporters – particularly at a regional level.

The citizens’ consultations go a long way in reducing the psychological distance between ‘those up there’ – the politicians – and ‘those down here’ – the citizens.

RELIABLE AND RESILIENT “With this new commu-

nication format, we have truly succeeded in mobilising citizens for Europe,” said Henning Banthien, managing partner of IFOK. “The citizens’ consultations created a new, direct path for interaction and exchange between the European Parliament and Commission on the one Christian Hänel hand, and European citizens Deputy Head of Department, International Relations on the other. It drew unheard Western Europe, America, of levels of interest from a Turkey, Japan, India, Robert Bosch Stiftung media usually bored with the European Union. And it offered policy makers an opportunity to hear what their citizens are really thinking, in a way far superior to ordinary polling.” As opposed to the static snapshot of public opinion offered by surveys Christian Hänel has been with and polls, the citizens’ conthe Robert Bosch Foundation sultations offer a detailed, since 2001. He joined the dynamic and goal-oriented as participant in the Robert evolution of positions over Bosch Foundation Leadership Development Programme and an extended period of time. became programme officer The results, which come afGerman-American relations in ter much reflection, are both 2003. From 2006 to 2007, he served as executive assistant reliable and resilient. It is a to the chairman of the board communication format that of management. Since 2008, produces results relevant not Hänel has been deputy head only for politics, but for any of department International Relations Western Europe, foundation or association America, Turkey, Japan, India. that wishes to better unBefore joining the Robert Bosch derstand the individuals it Foundation, he worked in meserves. dia distribution and sales.

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CREATIVITY IN A CRISIS At a time when economic cutbacks make the traditional means of coordinating large scale management meetings even more difďŹ cult, Atlas Copco has adopted a very modern approach to assembling its decision makers.

by Annika Berglund

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hat would you do if you had invited 450 managers from all around the world to a large conference in Stockholm and the world economy suddenly hit the wall? Cancellation was not an option. Managers’ expectations were high and boosting energy and reinforcing values more important than ever before. Yet it was impossible to have top business leaders leave normal business operations for a week to come to Sweden. We had 04/2009

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to completely rethink our communication and collaboration formats and channels to make the June 2009 group event a success.

Swedish-based Atlas Copco is a global industrial group with three business areas and operations in some 80 countries. Every three to four years the president and CEO gather top managers from all companies and countries to a group

Photo: Atlas Copco

Jeanette Livijn, vice president human resources, conducts a live interview with Carlos Frateschi, general manager in Brazil.

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event, a conference with the objective of strengthening and increasing the understanding of the vision and strategies, cementing the core values, and enhancing networking and

As it was so unusual for Atlas Copco, we knew that the most exciting part of the eight-hour programme would be the threehour broadcasted television show. benchmarking across geographical and business area borders.

The planning horizon for such a meeting is usually long, mainly due to the logistics. To find a good venue requires planning well in advance.

More than a year in advance, the hotels were booked, dinners were arranged and the content was more or less decided upon. That was before everything ground to a halt in the autumn of 2008. It was not until January 2009 that the group decided to go ahead and run the meeting and re-confirmed the theme. The Atlas Copco Group has a vision to become and remain First in Mind–First in Choice®, and this time the focus was on the second part; on how to surprise and delight customers and provide the best service at all times.

CHANGE OF FORMAT We start-

ed discussing a change in format – a radical departure from all previous group events. This year the event would involve a webinar from a TV studio that would act as the main hub, connecting a constellation of webinar hubs around the world. The managers would be able to stay on the ground, where they were most needed, yet participate in local workshops on the two focus topics of the Group Event. The workshop modules were on people manage-

ment and its role in helping the group tackle future challenges, and on how to develop business synergies between Atlas Copco units – between business areas and across geographical borders.

As it was so unusual for Atlas Copco, we knew that the most exciting part of the eight-hour programme would be the three-hour broadcasted television show. We wanted to use an attractive, fast-paced format, with a lot of interaction between people, but we also wanted to ensure that we could reuse material produced for the event. The starting point was simply to identify what people like to watch on television and use that as inspiration for how to convey our messages. We found that people typically liked to watch talk shows, news programmes and reality shows, so we decided to use these formats. This was a fantastic playground for us: no one had done what we wanted to achieve and we saw no limits. In the end we did not need to buy outside creativity regarding the content, only the production skills.

BUILD-UP TO THE EVENT To build excitement around the event and provide managers another way to interact, the group created Bluehub, an internal online community.

It was supposed to function like Facebook, with individual profiles and a common wall about the event. For some managers, this was their first insight into the possibilities offered by social media. In a follow-up survey, most said they would like to have an internal tool like Bluehub, if its functionality was improved.

HOW IT WORKED To plan and produce the webinar,

a small core team of communications specialists was assembled, including an IT network specialist and a project coordinator. These people were critical to the event going smoothly. One person from each business area was added to the team, making ten in total. Two months before the meeting an external consultant was contracted to provide expertise on broadcasting and television.

Had we known in advance how much work this event would involve, we would have added more of our own people to the team at an early stage. But we did not know and we had no one to learn from. Sometimes it is good not to know; that might have stopped us from doing it.

The conference itself involved 18 hubs, or locations, with a central hub in Stockholm, Sweden. The hub locations spanned from Dallas, United States, in the west to Sydney, Australia, in the east, and from Stockholm, Sweden, in the north to Johannesburg, South Africa, in the south. The event connected people gathered in cities 04/2009

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including Nanjing, China; Nasik, India; Moscow, Russia; and Sao Paolo, Brazil. Each hub had a host, a senior manager familiar with the region and the challenges they were facing as a result of the crisis. The host decided the local setup, such as the invitation, location, venue, and programme. The majority of them chose to run the programme over two days. They also made sure that resources were dedicated to testing Internet connections and other details prior to the event.

TIMING A GLOBAL EVENT Only one time was fixed: 13.00 – 16.00 CET, June 12, 2009. That is when everyone would participate in the common webinar. Otherwise, the group event structure was up to each hub host, who could run the workshop modules before and/or after the webinar depending on the time zone they were in. The local host could also add to the programme if there was something critical to discuss in the region. For example, the Bangkok hub added training on corporate responsibility.

The connections and the quality of the webinar were very good in all locations except for South Africa, which had a problem with the bandwidth. There was nothing we could do to improve it. The alternative, to broadcast via satellite, was extremely costly. Finding a time that suited all time zones was another challenge. For most locations the timing was fine, but for Sydney it was very late and for Dallas

very early. On the other hand, it was a one-off and it was important for all of us to be together at the same time.

HIGH LEVEL INVOLVEMENT All members of Atlas Copco’s group management, eight people, performed ‘on stage’, in the TV studio.

The president and CEO was the host.

He interviewed the three business

It was tough to cut in the programme during a live performance; we do not usually interrupt each other or cut people off when they are speaking. area presidents and the HR manager, and conveyed his own messages. The CFO, the legal counsel and the communications director (i.e. me) served as moderators. All eight conducted live interviews with colleagues out in the hubs, and event participants

The talk show host Ronnie Leten, president and CEO of the Atlas Copco Group, only 12 days into his position.

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Photo: Atlas Copco

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY All around the world The web conference involved 18 locations, with a central hub in Stockholm.

The event allowed participating managers around the world to remain on site.

Disparate locations also allowed participants to focus on issues relevant to their locality, although it did not facilitate interpersonal interraction with new employees.

The event also created its own communications tools, which continue to be of benefit after the event.

Photos: Atlas Copco

could see the interviewees on screen.

We were very strict on keeping the time of the webinar. As the show progressed we found that we spoke slower when we were on air than when we were rehearsing. It was tough to cut in the programme during a live performance; we do not usually interrupt each other or cut people off when they are speaking. But we had to do it, and perhaps this made the event even more like the live radio and TV shows with which we are all familiar.

PROS AND CONS There were both advantages and disadvantages to sitting in many different places. The workshops benefited from having members sitting in their region, focusing on their local issues and challenges. The participants in each hub came from different business areas, yet shared similar challenges. They could benchmark solutions and focus on finding synergies to be gained through collaboration. Regarding business synergy development in particular, implementation of solutions or projects following the event was probably faster and more efficient

than if the workshop team had included people from many different corners of the world. The disadvantages were more on the team building and relationship side. Atlas Copco had grown tremendously since the 2005 group event and many of the 450 managers were new in their positions. As the group had acquired many companies since the last group event, there were many managers who had not met group executives or even many managers outside their country.

In both cases, these managers would have benefited from a more international environment – interacting with colleagues from all over the world in the country where Atlas Copco has its home. Meeting old friends and making new has always been a highlight of the group event.

THE RESULTS Was the group event successful? Yes!

A follow-up survey showed that the messages were well communicated and understood. What is more, a main benefit of the remote event was that many communication tools were produced for it, and are being used today. The participants got a toolbox of commercials, speed presentations, a reality show called The Blue Box Experiment, and more. The innovative and interactive format strengthened participants’ views of the company as a leader even during tough times. Finally, the talk show host (the new president and CEO who Annika Berglund was just 12 days into his Senior Vice President Corporate Communications, new role) was a real hit; Atlas Copco he managed to create a positive atmosphere despite the business environment, and showed his modern, inspirational communication style.

The event opened many group leaders’ eyes to the potential of webinars and Annika Berglund began her remotely connected meetcareer with Atlas Copco in ings. We showed that it 1979. Since then, she has could be done, even on held a number of positions in the group related to mara global scale. However, keting, sales and business the participants’ general controlling in Europe. Prior to opinion is that a virtual, her current position as senior co-located meeting canvice president corporate communications, she acted as not replace the face-tomarketing manager for Atlas face interaction offered by Copco Controls. She has been a large physical meeting. a member of group manageNot yet, anyway. ment since 1999.

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How to improve personnel management and your career

LONG TERM PERSPECTIVES Today, people live longer than ever before. So why should experienced communications professionals stop working at the age of retirement?

by Chris Ball

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A

time comes when all of us have to face that “final curtain,” as Frank Sinatra put it. But why should communications leaders worry about this, if they are doing a good job? After all, there are innumerable examples of high profile people who have performed superbly, well beyond the age when others think of hanging up their boots. Winston Churchill was 66 when he took over as Britain’s prime minister in the Second World War. Fiftyseven-year-old captain Chesley Sullenberger landed a US Airways A320 Airbus in the Hudson River in January this year, saving 155 lives. (Had the incident 03/2009

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happened a few years ago, he could have already been compulsorily retired). Does anyone really need to be persuaded that older employees can perform superbly in moments of crisis?

Well, seemingly yes. Some communications leaders who do not want to run down their careers have expressed fears that if they fail to be competitive, they may be eased out.

They have good reasons for concern.

Presently, as the law stands in the UK and most of Europe, employers can compel employees over 65 to

retire. Theoretically, one can legally request to remain working beyond 65, but the law is one sided in this area. An employer can reject such a request out of hand – and some do so.

Other employers pick and choose, so anyone perceived as uncompetitive can be quietly sidelined with no real recourse. The idea of people having shelf lives is not helpful, as sell–by dates shuffle down to those in their early sixties and fifties too. In some sectors you even have capable people

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in their late forties being thought of as approaching their final lap. Until a recent legal challenge, air traffic controllers were seen as too old for recruitment at 36!

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER But talented and successful individuals ought to have no problem in working on if they wish, and increasingly do so. Nonetheless, so fixated are we with the idea of a set age of retirement, that even the most capable of people may contemplate a future of wooly cardies, afternoon TV and ek-

ing out the winter fuel allowance. A few years ago, the manager of Manchester United Football Club, Sir Alex Ferguson, was one of them. He announced his retirement, brooded on it for the best part of a year and then thought again. A European Champions League title and three premiership trophies later, will anyone say he was wrong?

Older workers can bring value as sage gurus, counsellors and repositories of knowledge and experience

in any organisation. Reasoning skills and emotional intelligence carry on developing well into one’s sixties and it is surely no coincidence that, despite many barriers to continued working, people of 50 plus now represent the single growth area in UK employment statistics. Knowledge transfer and mentoring across generations have suddenly been rediscovered. McDonald’s lately boasted research showing how their restaurants with older staff members achieved higher levels of customer satisfaction than those without.

THINKING ABOUT PERSPECTIVE What lessons should one draw from this? One is that if you dread the sun setting over the mountains of a thousand PR campaigns, take comfort – you may be welcome round the corporate campfire a good while yet. Riding into the sunset is not compulsory! So communications directors approaching retirement age should ask themselves: “Is this really what I want to do?” If it is – fine. If not, pause a moment, then stake your claim. What makes you want to stay? Is it fear of boredom and a life without purpose that scares you silly, or the attraction of carrying on doing what you love that stops you from letting go?

If your motive is the love of the milieux in which you operate, staying as long as possible in your current role could be an option. You may want to consider downsizing your responsibilities at some point but really, there is no one size fits all answer. If your aversion to quitting stems from more negative concerns, retirement could be considered as an opportunity to change your status. Becoming a consultant and drawing from your company pension could provide a cushion allowing you to take your career on an adventurous new course. Plenty of people launch themselves into self employed consultancy in this way, though the journey may need careful planning, determination and a bit of luck to get started. On the other hand, people with hobbies or long cherished ambitions can emerge from retirement reborn, transmogrified and realising goals they never thought they could attain. But you want to hang on in there? Why not – there is nothing to stop you. It may have taken a long time to get to where you are and you might be enjoying work more than ever. Perhaps you have financial reasons for carrying on longer than others; a child at university or a second family to support perhaps.

There are plenty of reasons for not buying the automaticity of the retirement ritual and there are many others in the same boat as you. However, you are going to need your game plan. Staying competitive is part of it, but having your own vision for work and retirement helps rather.

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GRADUAL APPROACH TO RETIREMENT It is helpful to get one thing clear in your mind from the start; entitlement to a pension at a certain age does not imply an obligation to actually take it, and it is perfectly normal to want to choose one’s retirement date. It can be financially beneficial to keep on working, for more than one reason.

For example, in the UK, if you delay taking the state pension, it increases in value by roughly 10 per cent for each year the pension is deferred. Delaying for five years, for example, could be a good deal if you are in good health and expect to live into your late eighties or nineties. It is hard to make calculations of this kind, but surveys by actuaries show that people often underestimate their own longevity by large margins.

You might be able to retire flexibly – the UK’s Finance Act 2004 allows this but pension schemes have to fall in line before it can happen in your organisation. Where an employer agrees, individuals may take a company pension and draw a salary from the same employer; but as stated, this is conditional on the employer first adopting pension rules that facilitate the flexible option. The underlying idea is to facilitate a more gradual approach to retirement. Carrying on for a few more years should not necessarily mean having your foot jammed down on the throttle with the engine screaming full revs until the last moment.

When more people understand the implications of huge pending changes in our population profiles, such arrangements will be more in demand. With increasing life expectancy on one hand and more precariousness about finances and savings on the other, early retirement to a life of Sundays makes no sense at all, though this was the trend in the 1980s and 1990s.

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SURVIVAL STRATEGIES So the idea of pacing one’s life and work is catching on. Many people feel that work has become too dominant and that more time is needed for a rounded, healthier existence. Younger people and those of prime age may need more time to study and raise children. Others would like to reduce their hours to relieve pressures of demanding jobs and other interests. In contrast, people are often pressed into retirement before they need to go and are perfectly capable of remaining in work longer. It is one of those odd ironies that there are time rich and time poor individuals and that many of us go through both stages in a lifetime. If we could save time as we save money, how different things could be. This is not so hard to imagine though. If time could be saved and reallocated more evenly across the life course, our energy 03/2009

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and zest for work and life could be enhanced. If this sounds utopian, take on board that the foregoing is a real description of the Time Credit and Leave Schemes currently operating in the Belgian state. National governments will not always offer imaginative solutions such as this for our time and life dilemmas. However, if we want to remain competitive and functional as we live longer, we should learn from such models and avoid burning

It is a harsh world and the destructive effects of overwork and burnout cannot be denied. ourselves out too quickly. As Willy Loman, the character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman puts it, “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.” It is a harsh world and the destructive effects of overwork and burnout cannot be denied. Organisations are increasingly recognising this (litigation has had an important impact here) but individuals too need to learn survival strategies.

LIFELONG LEARNING A healthy

lifestyle should be everyone’s aim, with the right amount of exercise and following sensible rules of diet.

Squeezing everything into to a busy schedule is notoriously difficult, but do not let the job consume you.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications, despite his well known mental health history and former alcohol addiction, coped with the pressures of one of the most demanding roles by vigorous physical exercise, run-

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY More maturity in the workplace As populations get progressively older, the world’s workforces will mature in age.

Self-employed consultancy work is one way to cushion when moving your career in a new direction.

A redistribution of time and the personal/work balance will help avoid early burnout.

Lifelong learning allows you to continually bring new qualities to your work.

Photo: private

A lengthy career can serve as an inspirational role model for the company as a whole.

ning to the office and training for marathons and triathlons.

The big picture is that experience really can be an unmatchable winning asset. Of course, this does not mean all experience per se is of value. Rather, it is one’s ability to continue learning from experience that matters. In our infancy, we do not see the passing years as ageing, we see them as development. When we cease to learn from our experience, development falls by the wayside, but we do not really need to let this happen. Applying oneself to serious learning throughout a working life means you can always bring something new to the party. We know that many people end their formal learning in their late twenties, but this does not need to be the end of valuable learning. State employment policies and organisational practices can have an enormous impact here, but ultimately, whether we continue to learn is a matter of choice and approach to life generally.

ADDING SOMETHING EXTRA TO ONE’S SKILLS The UK, in common with the rest of Europe, faces a turbulent future. In the first half of the present century, a negligible increase in the number of 20–64 year olds in the population is predicted, but a 78 per cent increase in the number aged 65 and over. It is hard to imagine – a little bit frightening maybe, but researchers have predicted up to half the children being born today will see their hundredth birthdays. So the issue that all organisations and individuals will have to face, is how to age successfully.

Successful ageing will demand individuals adopting personal strategies with organisations and the wider society intervening to lend a helping hand and prick our social consciences. A lifetime of unhealthy living may lead to an old age, kept alive with all the support that medical science can offer but surely no one could opt for this. Senior managers and directors who lead from the front and demonstrate by their own examples what can be done will be valuable assets. To succeed in this way, you need to consider adding something extra to your skill set; you will have to learn the best ways of managing your ageing employees. Research in Scandinavia, where these ideas have been well developed over the past decade, suggests the best age managers are those who have coped best with Chris Ball their own ageing procChief Executive, TAEN esses.

– The Age and Employment So, should you need to Network offer a further rationale for remaining in post as the years tick by, remind yourself that the inspiration of your own exemplary performance is a valuable contribution to the whole organisation. Your Chris Ball is a specialist in emcompany will need all its ployee relations and currently skilled and knowledge chief executive of TAEN – The workers to age successAge and Employment Netfully and contribute to its work. He is a member of the Central Arbitration Committee, development. In fact, you a chartered fellow of the CIPD, may conclude that your and he holds a doctorate in organisation needs to get industrial relations from the this idea across to all its London School of Economics.

Ball has worked as a freeemployees. An ideal camlance journalist, writing for the paign for an ageing comEvening Standard, the Guardmunications director, you ian and various other papers, mostly on work issues. could argue!

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AN INFERNAL SPIRAL At the time of going to press, France Télécom has experienced 25 suicides in the past 18 months, a tragic reminder of the psychological risks of organisational restructuring.

by Bertrand Cabedoche

W

ithin the past two years, 25 France Télécom employees apparently chose suicide as a way to escape “the hell” of their company’s human resources management. One could ask: “Why are the media focusing now?” The direct relation between suicide and the pathogenic environment of a firm does not seem to be a new phenomenon: cases of work-related suicides were already reported by company doctors at the end of 90s.

And the relevant literature reveals a lot of despairs in work from rural areas during the 19th century, mainly in the

Within the past two years, 25 France Télécom employees apparently chose suicide as a way to escape ‘the hell’ of their company’s human resources management.

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appears now as a world champion of the information industry.

HOMO ECONOMICUS Paradoxically, this success of France Télécom reveals a particular characteristic of France: a managerial culture perfectly aware of the slightest economic indicator, but at the same time apparently unable to identify the psychosocial risks of its restruc-

Photo: www.flickr.com

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west part of France. Actually, if we accept the figures from France Télécom, there has not been an increase compared to previous years.

So, how can we explain this sudden media attention?

“L’effet de captation” (catching effect), which constitutes one of the considerations for media coverage, can explain the projection into the limelight, bearing in mind the demonstrative violence of some of the deaths (hanging, jumping out of the window, harakiri), sometimes on company grounds. The brutality of the act corresponds to the violence of the economic takeoff for a company initially invested as a part of the civil service. As soon as it was privatised, the company dashed into the mercilessly competitive market of telecommunications, until it showed a balance of 15 billion Euros between 2002 and 2006, and

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turing and unable to avoid them, as Great Britain, Canada, and Scandinavia have done. The leaders of France Télécom company, Didier Lombard (CEO) and Louis-Pierre Wenes (chief executive in charge of operations in France), are totally dedicated to making a success of the cultural revolution which the convalescent structure requires. They are leading the business based on their own understanding of HR: job mobility at

man resource in its totality, impossible to execute efficiently without management and communication abilities having taken the measure of the human being, not only the homo

As France Télécom apparently offers up its 25th human sacrifice on the altar of its economic success, its situation characterises an internal crisis becoming an external one. economicus. Indeed, the suicides at France Télécom, after those at Renault three years ago, seem to confirm a cultural incapacity of French managers to consider the human being beyond the level of professional performance. The crisis requires communication skills, which France Télécom has painfully learnt to mobilise.

DISCOVERING THE CRISIS As France Télécom appar-

least every three years connected to the necessary restructurings; multispecialisation rather than retraining, the planning of voluntary retirements and departures among employees (20,000 over a period of three years, plus 20,000 more with the Nouvelle Expériences des Télécommunications plan), all connected to the obligation of every manager to be a costcutter.

These are measures involving the hu-

ently offers up its 25th human sacrifice on the altar of its economic success, its situation perfectly characterises an internal crisis becoming an external one. Chronologically, a crisis knows three stages. The first one is a melding of productivity and self-image: “I do not have a profession anymore. I no longer take pleasure in coming to work.” This shows nostalgia for the civil service, when pride was in doing work well. The second stage is permanent “discredibilisation”, when the stigmatisation precedes understanding: “Our leaders do not know what to do when the product to be managed is social; I no longer have any faith in them.” The third stage is a disintegration of social identity: “I am losing my motivation for life because of my lost motivation for work.”

How to explain this heightened level of the internal crisis, increasing in such a speedy four-year period? When they took up their positions in 2005, Didier Lombard and Louis-Pierre Wenes shared the same ambition: to change the company from “grandfather’s telephone to Internet livebox”. They had the same convictions: the human being is primarily a resource, connected to a knowhow which must become a “centre de profit”; the human resource is also a variable of adjustment which must be reduced, in the same way as the other costs, ideally on the basis of salaries. And they used the same methods: to stigmatise the “lazyness culture” inherited from the civil service, by establishing the individualised and systematic control of job performances, compulsory job mobility, and the stimulation of an absolute and ambitious project, and in doing so establishing a tense work atmosphere.

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NO JOKING MATTER The announcement of imminent change for France Télécom was made in the worst posible way in the eyes of some employees: “Now the mussel gathering is finished,” Didier Lombard announced, seemingly not understanding that he had just struck at the values of the civil service. The correction of the message was done in an even more offensive manner, with the chairman claiming to have made a joke with the allusion. People were not

So, paradoxically, some desperate people can assert their will to escape the ‘non-choice’ by an ultimate and definitive act. ready to joke when, after all, the CEO had promised dark days ahead, without offering anything more concrete: “We do not know well what is going to take place […], the company is going to need to adapt in a hurry.” For some, the message is decoded thus: “we are useless”. A conviction that the systematic job mobility seems to confirm, with its consequences in terms of multispecialisation to be integrated at once, in every transfer. “I am barred from a job I liked, the management and maintenance of the network, to a task as an agent in a call centre for which I have no skill or urge.”

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TO GIVE EVERYTHING Meeting the needs of multispecialisation can become a paradoxical order: “To give everything, to constantly be the best in every part of your mission, but not to burn out”. Breaking one of these two rules when the company provides training courses as a means of integration can look like a confession of weakness, a lack of professionalism. It can also be seen as an act of ingratitude, even if it is a warning against ‘communications gurus’, those consultants who infest companies with their pseudo-certainties, to ensuring a comfortable benefit, in terms of fees, domination of the trainees, or lobbying. Disputing the desocialised character of these teaching techniques of pseudo-knowledge can be seen as an imputation of the non-performance of the organisation responsibilities.

This difficulty in disagreeing about training proves that, in a company, communication must be considered as a partial sphere of debate reduced to a simply professional purpose. That French speciality, the ‘social compromise’ – the negotiations of the social partners, the political reflection of the top management – forbids discussion about the fundamental choices operated by the leaders, unlike in Germany or Scandinavian countries. A whole range of debates around 04/2009

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what the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls “the public sphere” is thus denied to the employee, even if the decision engages directly his own future.

DISLOCATIONS In France Télécom, some employees speak about a management of change reduced to indisputable orders. Contained in the sphere of working relations, the expression of the employees is finally forced outside the private life and individual feeling. To accelerate this loss of sense, the managerial coherence dissolves; exponentially adding orders every hierarchical manager considers they must give, in different temporalities; evaluating nothing more than the result, i.e. the prescribed time but not the real time needed to obtain the result. Soon, Wenes’s injunction, “time to move”, completes the dislocation: a space dislocation if we know that the psychic balance of a human being comes from his capacity to be comfortable in his physical environment; a financial dislocation if we consider the stagnation of the home buying market, the probability of unemployment after moving, the increasing cost of commuting (“I was transfered 300 kilometres away.”); a professional dislocation (“When I was automatically moved from HR to a technical service, I felt incompetent, useless.”); a relational dislocation (“Now I feel afraid of hierarchies, colleagues, neighbours, friends, relatives. I don’t dare to express myself any more.”).

So, paradoxically, some desperate people can assert their will to escape the “non-choice” by an ultimate and definitive act.

MANAGEMENT IN CRISIS An error of the management’s crisis communication in this case was to wait

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Not waving but drowning Dramatic organisational restructuring provokes psychological trauma, which can not be underestimated.

HR management must not reduce the individual to a mere resource.

Managers should be trained to recognise and evaluate stress.

Photo: private

for evidence of mental illness before acting. France Télécom showed itself at first hesitating, delaying before reacting. The refusal of any denial, even if, for example, the proofs of a social pathology are not established. The leaders of France Télécom did not possess this wisdom, at first maintaining silence since 2006, when the company’s doctors had already made an alert; blaming, without any evidence, other factors to explain away the suicides (“he had problems with his girlfriend”, “the media prompted the idea of death”, “labour unions manipulate the cases”) and disqualifying other readings of the hypotheses (“to believe in the existence of something that does not exist is what psychiatry calls a delirium”).

PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP Finally, Wenes, symbolic in the eyes of the labour unions of the “management by terror”, was sidelined, and Stéphane Richard, seen as open-minded to dialogue, was introduced as the future CEO. His first steps have been highly symbolic: a toll-free telephone number and a lookout observatory on work stress point in the right direction, even if the effects of such devices are limited. The opening of negotiations is a first corrective step.

And so is the suspension of systematic job mobility and the publicising of individual objectives and performances, as well as the recruitment of 380 employees with permanent contracts. But the internal communications and the measures of psychological help do not fundamentally solve the problem. This is a moment for the company to really consider the crisis as a constructive antagonism: the situation can stimulate tremendous creativity. Following the suicide of three of its employees in 2007-2008, Renault inaugurated a programme of listening to the employees, so that these people can share their problems without any censorship. A D-Day (“dialogue day”) was even established on this principle. It is the same device that France Télécom has chosen to establish. From this consultation, new attitudes will have to emerge, such as the rebalancing of the workloads and the training of managers to detect and manage stress.

CONCLUSION To bring visiblity to the illness constituates the first act of social healing. But it is necessary to re-engage with the hierarchical resistances. It will be necessary to lead the conquest of markets from a viewpoint which no longer reduces the human being to the homo economicus. In this way, France Télécom already speaks of “a new social contract”. The aims of Prof. Bertrand Cabedoche such a project must be also Gresec Université Stendhal expressed in terms of menGrenoble tal balance of the employees. It will be necessary to observe that they keep the promise and not re-embark on their “infernal spiral”.

Finally, even with all this attention, the balance is never guaranteed: consider once more Renault as an Bertrand Cabedoche is professor of information and commuexample of the treatment nication at the Gresec Univerof suicide as socially pathosity Stendhal Grenoble III, and logical. Three years after UNESCO chairholder in interbeginning their programme national communication. He has been writing for 30 years of relieving job stress, the about north-south relations company suffered a new as well as on the representasuicide. This proves that it tions of the European Union in is impossible to lock a man the main newspapers of the member states. Cabedoche into some managerial or is a member of the executive communicational deterboard of the European Comminism and avoid dominatmunication Research and Education Association, ECREA. ing relations at work.

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MAKING BETTER TALENT DECISIONS Wise talent decisions are fundamental in securing a company’s future success: it’s all about finding diamonds in the rough.

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O

ne of the many threats to an organisation’s ability to compete and grow in the future is the inability to place the right people in the right jobs at the right time. It is very true that missteps in strategic finance, marketing or operational decisions can place an organisation in far greater peril. But behind those decisions are people who have been selected, developed or promoted based on what often prove to be subjective and unreliable assessment practices. Indeed, any line manager who has experienced the business consequences of poor people decisions will testify to the value of creating a reliable and consistent way to measure or predict employee performance. Perhaps it was 04/2009

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the sales account executive promoted to regional sales manager based on positive reviews from bosses or peers, but who failed to effectively lead his or her culturally-diverse staff – largely because their promotion was tied to measures of past success in the previous role, but not readiness for a new and different leadership role.

Maybe it was a decision to retain or make redundant certain leaders during a corporate merger based solely on recommendations from politically motivated managers who knew them

Photo: www.dreamstime.com

by David Gudanowski

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best, rather than on accurate, objective data. Or likely it was a series of hiring decisions pegged only to assessments that measured candidates’ ability to do the work, but discounted or overlooked cultural or job fit.

These days, poor people decisions do not result from a lack of good intentions or a paucity of data. HR or line leaders intuitively grasp the economic value of making accurate

These days poor people decisions do not result from a lack of good intentions or a paucity of data. hiring, development or promotion decisions. Most HR organisations have invested considerable sums in data management systems that allow them to collect an enormous amount of information. HR databases swell with information about employee performance. In our work with organisations at PDI Ninth House, we have found that line managers often lack good measurement frameworks around the following:

- Determining which talent decisions are most pivotal (e.g. understanding the strategic or financial impact of the decision) - Determining what data is most appropriate for different kinds of decisions (e.g. differentiating among performance, potential, readiness and job/culture fit) By applying these simple frameworks, organisations can increase the quality of their talent decisions.

FOCUSING ON PIVOTAL TALENT A common misperception is that human resources and line managers need to dedicate the same amount of

time, energy and money to the hiring, promotion or development of all roles in an organisation. The reality is that not all talent decisions are created equal. Without diminishing the value of any employee role, it is clear that some talent decisions have far greater financial or strategic impact on the organisation than others. These decisions are typically made around ‘pivotal’ talent pools. Pivotal talent pools are those where the difference between a strong and weak performer has significant economic or strategic consequences for the business. For example, a company whose competitive differentiator is innovative products, pivotal roles may be within the research and development area, whereas in other companies, pivotal roles could be those who are country heads. While these roles vary across organisations, the thoroughness and accuracy of the assessment process should match how pivotal the job or role is.

The more strategically imperative the role, the more robust the measurement process must be. On the other hand, if the cost of a poor promotion decision is relatively small, using the most efficient process can be more important than using the most effective assessment. You may find that trading off some accuracy for a less costly and time consuming process is worth doing.

Effective HR leaders should become more proactive in these pivotal talent decisions, spending more time advising line leaders on the implications of choices they will make.

USING THE RIGHT ASSESSMENT APPROACH When making decisions, don’t be caught off guard. More easily said than done, the unfortunate situation is that many HR professionals and line managers find themselves having to make a very quick decision at the most inopportune times.

Managers are often making critical talent decisions in the areas such as selection, promotions, downsizing, identification of high potential talent, succession management, reward and compensation and development. These decisions are notoriously difficult in good situations, but without the right data and under time pressure, they can increase business risk. Some managers confuse performance with potential, promoting people to a new level based on their success in current roles. There is certainly no question that past performance predicts future performance. And in the absence of other data, this can certainly be an important data point. However, past performance is more likely to predict future performance when the job is similar, but what happens when the job is significantly different, such as when you move from one leadership level to the next? All too often, we find ourselves trying to assess talent without any clear objective in mind. It is often helpful to step back and 04/2009

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ask yourself: “What are we trying to understand about this individual?” Prior to assessing your talent, you need to know what you are assessing them for.

FOUR FUNDAMENTAL PILLARS Choosing the right assessment approach must begin with understanding the four fundamental pillars underlying talent management decisions: performance, readiness potential and job/culture fit.

Each of these will help you address and answer different questions about your talent. While the process for collecting this information will vary and can be done with a myriad of tools and approaches, the first step is understanding what each of these provide you. Performance refers to an individual’s ongoing results (business results, accomplishments achieved, goals met, key performance indicators) as well as the means used to accomplish those results (competencies and behaviours) in their current job. Organisations typically collect the business results on their employees (often referred to as the “what” of performance), but may not necessarily col-

lect data on the “how”, or how people are achieving their results. Organisations will typically collect and retain this information over the course of an employee’s career history with the company. Both the what and the how of performance are most commonly used in performance management systems (that is performance reviews) and are typically tied to compensation and bonus schemes. By way of example, you may evaluate the yearly performance of your regional sales director based on key performance metrics (for example turnover, gross margin, percent of new business), which then have an impact on their performance evaluation and bonus or merit increase.

Analysing the talents

Assessment Framework

Current Performance

Key talent questions answered

Data to gather

• How well are our leaders performing?

“What” of performance: business

• Who are my top, middle and bottom performers?

metrics met. “How” of perform-

• Where are gaps in our talent pool and where do we need to invest in development?

ance: competencies and behav-

• Who is meeting or exceeding expectations?

iours required in current role.

• How many of our high potentials are ‘ready now’ to move up into the next level of leadership – how soon, and what gaps need to be filled?

• Who is ready to be promoted into a corporate executive position (for example the Readiness

head of a region)?

Skills and competencies required for the next role or position.

• Does this individual have the competencies and behaviours needed to be successful in this new role?

• What are this person’s strengths and development needs relative to other successful individuals who are currently performing the job? How big are the gaps?

Potential

• How many of our high performers actually have the potential to advance beyond

Intellectual capacity, personality

their current level?

traits, motivation, career aspira-

• How far will this individual be able to move up the organisation?

• If my employee is not ready for this position, does he/she have the potential?

• If we invest in this person’s development, do they have the potential to be a manager

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tions, learning agility, critical experiences – all profiled against other high potentials.

longer term?

Job/Culture Fit

• Which of those individuals that are ready now are the best fit for available positions?

Alignment or match between

• How do we best deploy our people across various roles?

person characteristics (for ex-

• Is this external candidate a good fit for our company culture?

ample personality, competencies,

• Is this candidate a good fit for a startup position, managing a remote team, in an

experiences) and those required

emerging market?

• Would he/she be a better fit for the same position in Germany, Brazil or Malaysia?

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for a specific role or position.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Getting the most from your talent Placing the right people in the right jobs at the right time is difficult, but key.

It is crucial to assess employees in the right way to determine future potential.

Past and present performance may not effectively predict future performance.

Photo: Philippe Veldeman

READINESS Readiness is an in-

dividual’s ability to handle the requirements and challenges of a new or expanding role in the near future – usually within the next 12 months.

The focus here is on job-related competencies and experiences relevant to this future role (not the current role), and often within the context of succession management. Following from our example above, you may be interested in knowing whether or not any of your pool of regional sales directors are ready in the next year to be a country manager. A common mistake companies make is determining readiness for future roles solely on the basis of performance in current role.

While past and current performance can be a useful predictor of future performance, this is not always the case – particularly when the new role involves a big step change and new sets of skills (for example from individual contributor to first level leader). Decisions regarding readiness should certainly include track record of performance and functional expertise, but the most effective measures are those that evaluate the person’s actual ability to handle new challenges and responsibilities. Potential refers to an individual’s likelihood of long term growth and advancement several leadership levels up the

organisation (for example hierarchical movement). While readiness typically focuses on a span of one-two years or less, potential looks at one’s capacity several years down the road. The focus is not on job or functionally specific skills, competencies or behaviours, but on attributes such as intellectual ability, personality traits, ambitions, motivations, emotional maturity, the ability to learn (for example learning agility), and job experiences one has been exposed to.

Assessing the potential of your young talent (for example two leadership levels below your country manager) could be helpful early on in an employee’s career. It allows the organisation to start targeting those who may be more likely to develop into senior leadership positions if given the right development experiences.

JOB/CULTURE FIT Job/culture fit refers to the “degree of match” or alignment between the characteristics of an individual and a specific job or role. For example, many people may be “ready” for a country manager position. However, a country manager in an emerging market versus a mature market are very different. Our regional sales director may be ready for a country manager role, but would he/she be a better fit as a country manager for Germany, managing a 200 million Euro business, or country manager for Malaysia, managing a David Gudanowski Vice President and Leader40 million Euro business? ship Solutions Director, Aspects such as an emPDI Ninth House ployee’s specific skill profile, leadership style, job experiences and ability to work in a startup market rather than a stable market become critical in finding a match between the person and the specific job.

The lesson learnt is that David Gudanowski has with a little bit more disworked for PDI NH since cipline and making clearer 1998 and is responsible for decisions about what data the design and implementation of customised and inteis really relevant to a givgrated talent management en circumstance, you can programmes that are aligned reap the benefits in terms with organisational strategies.

His expertise is in executive of enhanced business perassessment and development, formance by making better which includes among others talent decisions and minidesign of competency models, mise lost yields from makselection and succession planning systems. ing poor ones.

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ANTHONY GOOCH Director of Public Affairs and Communications, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Interview: Marc-Oliver Voigt The OECD has its origins in 1948 as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, formed to help administer the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. How would you define its role in today’s world?

The origins of the OECD had a recipe that is unique in the international context. From the beginning, we have gotten people to sit around the table in all areas of public policy, to compare their experiences with a view to coming forward with best practice, and working to keep political compromise out of the process. In doing so, the OECD has been able to continuously address issues at the top of the global agenda during the last 50 years by evolving while seeing the need for what it does remain just as

Our results stand up to scrutiny because of evidence, because of experience and because things are tried and tested. And that is unique.

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necessary today as it was in the 1960s. Whereas in the 70s and 80s the OECD focused, for example, on industries such as steel or shipbuilding, it has in the meantime shifted to issues that are of major concern to us now, such as green growth and innovation strategies. The OECD is the global economic weatherman, measuring traditional economic indicators. But the OECD has always measured many other things, such as employment, education, health, innovation, environmental policies, etc. The OECD is the premier international organisation in terms of being able to compare, measure and produce data in different fields in a very authoritative and independent manner, with the purpose of translating this knowledge into policy recommendations. Our results stand up to scrutiny because of evidence, because of experience and because things are tried and tested. And that is unique.

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In many countries the OECD will mostly be known to the broader public for one aspect of its work: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. Why do the numerous other facets of your organisation’s work get less recognition than this project?

PISA is a prime example of what we aim at: at its essence, the OECD is about improving quality of life.

How do we go about this? We compare and we rank, and this has an extraordinary influence. It is an extremely efficient motivator for our members to improve themselves. The OECD champions higher standards in all areas of government activity, education being key among them as a prime determinant of quality of life. The PISA study is therefore certainly one of the best and most effective translations of what the OECD is all about. In Germany, it had one of the most significant impacts because it caused a stir – but it is surely not the only topic we are recognised for.

Given what you have just said, the perception of what the OECD does will be quite different from country to country. Can you explain the reason for that?

If we take the example of PISA, I would say that because of where Germany came out at a given point,

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was spent effectively. But it takes a certain mental agility to accept and understand that the same organisation also establishes the global standards on fighting bribery and on tax havens, can also tell you how to mitigate the effects of climate change in terms of energy subsidies, and is the international organisation par excellence that measures the effectiveness of your education system.

The quick answer is no. Unfortunately, we were in good company, as no other international organisations involved in economic governance saw the crisis coming either. the level of controversy and interest that this aroused was a particularly determining factor in the level of media interest over a period of time. So it depends on the circumstances that countries are in at given times.

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So the OECD will always be identified with a topic which is of empirical national interest?

People want to be able to focus around certain key things and key issues of importance to them. Our advantage – and in communications terms, our challenge – is that we cover many areas of public policy. For example, on development – the D in OECD – we are the organisation that will tell you, honestly and impartially, where countries are in terms of their Millennium Development Goal commitments. We can also tell you whether their aid money 04/2009

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The OECD assembles experts from all over the world, and has profound levels of expertise, particularly in the field of economics. Did your experts foresee the global financial and economic crisis?

The quick answer is no. Unfortunately, we were in good company, as no other international organisations involved in economic governance saw the crisis coming either.

In the organisation, concerns were expressed about troubling contexts and circumstances developing in the area of financial markets. Debate and discussion internally at the OECD did air a lot of these issues, and in certain cases we were able to speak publicly to that effect. But in important areas, there wasn’t an institutional consensus on the concerns held by quite a number of people. What we have warned about since the inception of the financial crisis, right at the start, and are now seeing the full effects of, is the transformation from a financial crisis to an increasingly social one with employment, migration, and social welfare areas suffering even while the markets begin to recover.

Even though the OECD was not able to foresee the crisis, does the fact that it already treated the existing

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concerns make it easier for you now to show measures that might help to solve the problems?

Yes, we sat around the table in October last year when the crisis took on very large proportions, and that was to rethink. One of the most successful things this organisation has ever done was to come up with the OECD Job Strategy in 1994, which has been globally credited with getting many people back to work after the recession of the early 90s. Now the rethinking applies to our recommendations in a broader range of areas to bring us out of this more complex crisis, as well as to ourselves as an organisation and our role alongside other important economic actors.

Do those recommendations still apply?

We’re looking at many of these things from the perspective of a ‘crisis test’. Are the recommendations we were making prior to the crisis still valid? For example, the OECD Corporate Governance Principles are the only instrument for corporate governance that exist on an international level. We also have the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises – again, the only such instrument that exists at an international level. One of the questions to be asked is if we had these instruments and guidelines, why did the crisis still happen? We are certainly looking at whether we need something more robust in order to address a problem of this type in the future. There is soul-searching going on within the OECD on the back of the crisis as well. In the current context, this isn’t an organisation sitting back and saying that it can feel comfortable and just focus on the work that it has been doing.

Has the deteriorating situation made the OECD more important to the corporate world?

I think so. Last week, the new head of the German industry association, the BDI, came to visit. In the course of that meeting, it was very evident that one of the principle business federations in the OECD was very attentive to the positive impact that the organisation had made in the past, makes, and could make in the future. He was very interested in the areas of work that we were going to be taking forward in the fields of green growth and innovation. He was very interested as well in participating on issues such as good corporate governance for the future.

Would you say that the economic disaster makes people pay more attention to messages from the OECD than they did in the past?

Our level of ambition there is linked to the extent to which we can impact public policy, rather than having the ambition to see whether the general public has a greater awareness of our role and influence. Given our resources and priorities, it would be too ambitious for us to have that as a stated objective. It is not that we don’t have that level of penetration in the public consciousness on a number of issues – the questions of tax evasion and tax havens, for example, have really put us on the map in the public mind.

For us as an international organisation, the public domain can be a unique leveraging tool, but by raising awareness around the issues and thus advancing the debate, not by publicity seeking for ourselves. So the OECD relies on the public domain in a unique way in order to have its influence and do its work.

The OECD’s structure is quite complex and consists of many different interests. Many multifaceted organisations struggle when they are asked to quickly react to current topics with a single, unified message. How does OECD manage this concern?

It’s an ambition that, working within many international organisations or federation environments, you have to aim for on a daily basis, in the knowledge that you will not be able to reach it every day. Sometimes we are successful, sometimes we’re lucky. Last year, it happened that we were coming to the end of a cycle of work, producing a joint report with the Food and Agricultural Organisation in the middle of the food crisis, so it couldn’t have been more relevant. But, to be honest, we didn’t know that this was going to be the case then. We knew the issue was important, and it was going to be of relevance, but we didn’t know the level of media interest it would have. But we do 04/2009

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governments in it. And that’s not always an easy thing to do.

look to marshal areas of work to have a maximum global communications impact by getting our timing right, by putting forward those that are of most relevance to the international agenda at given times. That’s a question of orchestration, a question of having a real finger on the pulse of the global agenda. The OECD is not driven by the media, but we have to be mindful of the public domain, and the importance of the issues that are playing on the minds of the politicians and decision makers, and to be responsive to that agenda. We cannot seek to ride every wave that may be rising in the media. You have to stay true to your own mission.

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The OECD has 30 member states, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful countries. How does the OECD make sure those more dominant states do not impose their political influence on its work and messages?

The OECD is one of the least political international organisations there is. There are political contexts within which the OECD works, and we are mindful of those, but the strength and the value of this organisation is that it tells it like it is. When you look at a lot of the media coverage generated around the OECD, we don’t look to ferment this. A lot of the coverage focuses on criticisms of government policies that people raise based on OECD work and analysis. Opposition parties will look just as closely at our reports as governments will. Trade unions will look at them, the business community will look at them, NGOs will look at them and academics will also look at them. They feel that the OECD is an organisation that is genuinely striving towards as high a degree of authoritativeness and independence as possible for an organisation which has 30 members represented by their 04/2009

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So would you say that there is no political influence on the OECD? No, I wouldn’t. Members of the OECD recognise its value, but it would be asking too much of them to remain silent when, for example, a government feels that perceived criticism emerging from the OECD is going to make its life politically uncomfortable. It’s our job to make sure that we get what we say right, no matter whether people like it or not. Our members are members because they know that what we say is valuable. It is not our ambition to make people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. It is our ambition to have them improve public policy.

Taking a look at your CV, it becomes clear that you have strong bonds to politics and its surrounding issues.

What fascinates you about public affairs?

Effective use of the public domain in order to advance your policy aims is something that is a common thread which has motivated me throughout my career. Working in an environment like this one is certainly a challenge. I came from an international organisation context – the European Commission – where I spent 13 very good years, during which I learned how important communication was in order to achieve public policy aims in negotiations. If you define public affairs as looking to influence public policy, then one of the major public affairs actors in the world is the OECD. And here I go back to the important role that communications plays for the OECD. We don’t lend money, like the International Monetary Fund. We don’t have a court of justice, like the EU. We don’t

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have this ‘hard power’. So we have to rely on other things. Our leverage in great part lies in using the public domain effectively, which puts communications front and centre.

Photos: OECD(3); private

As you just mentioned, you spent a long time working for the EU. For a Brit you seem to be something of a Europhile…

Perhaps you can’t avoid being a Europhile if you grow up within a context as I did: a context where different languages, nationalities and cultures coexist. My mother is Spanish and I grew up in an international city – London. It wasn’t as though I grew up in a purely British environment. International contexts are perhaps a natural habitat for someone like me. In that respect, moving from the European to the international, at the OECD, is an exciting progression. I have recognised and seen that I can add value in contexts such as these. Well, I hope so anyway! That’s the idea.

Did you always look out for this mix of politics and economics when you pursued a change in job?

I think you’re right, there is certainly a mix, but I don’t see the political and economic domains as two separate vessels. Life may be easier if you categorise in that way, but one then misses the complex reality. If you look at economic issues without taking on board the politics then you’re not going to get very far because economics and politics are about human beings, and so you need to be able to combine the human and the rational. I think in that respect you’ve put your finger on something, and I hadn’t thought of it in that way. I certainly wouldn’t imagine myself operating in a purely economic environment necessarily.

I’m not an economist by training. I’ve picked up a lot of knowledge along the way on trade and on economic and

Certainly, it is not our ambition to make people’s lives unnecessarily difficult. It is our ambition to have them improve public policy. other issues, and I’m picking up knowledge here at the OECD for example. But I’m fascinated by that intersection between those spheres.

Finally, you have always worked in large organisations. What are the advantages in that?

It’s a real privilege to be able to work in organisations that have a genuine impact on the global landscape. It’s not open to everybody, but if you have that privilege and that possibility to bring your small contribution to shaping a global landscape, to hopefully improving that global landscape, then that is a Anthony Gooch strong motivational force. I think it’s probably the sort Directorate of Public Affairs & Communications, OECD of motivational force that underpins the rationale for many people who work in such organisations. It outweighs the undoubtedly existing frustrations. I’ll give you a parallel. At the end of a period of years, if you have been able to contribute to moving the direction of an Anthony Gooch was appointed director of public affairs and oil tanker by a few degrees, communications at the OECD relative to changing the diin April 2008. Prior to this, he rection of a sailboat, what headed the European Commission’s media and public diplowould you look back on and macy operations in the UK, profeel is more rewarding? Inmoting the EU’s major global ternational organisations are policy initiatives on issues such oil tankers in many respects. as climate change. Between 2003 and 2006, he was based They’re big, they’re heavy, in Washington DC, heading the not easy to manoeuvre, but Commission’s media and pubif you can be part of an eflic diplomacy operations in the fort to manoeuvre them in US. From 2002 to 2003, he was the EU’s visiting fellow to the right direction in order the University of Southern Calito address new situations, fornia Los Angeles Annenberg then it’s a real privilege to School, teaching and researching on globalisation issues. be part of that.

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STORY TELLER Looking at the important questions of communication

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PAINT A PORTRAIT

The complex relationship between communications and top executives

“Just the two of us” by Dafydd Phillips and Richard Morgan page 54 - 57

“A diverse leadership” Interview with Christa Carone page 58 - 61 “Find the right fit” by Simon Sproule page 62 - 65

“The Prince and I” by Cynthia Wagner Weick page 66 - 69

“Strategic relationship” by Patricia O’Hayer page 70 - 73

“Ensuring credibility during turmoil” by Simone Niven page 74 - 77

“Refuelling faith in the motor city” Interview with J. Christopher Preuss page 78 - 83

“Informant to the CEO” by Rossella Gambetti and Stefania Romenti page 84 - 87

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JUST THE TWO OF US The interdependent relationship between a company’s CEO and the communications head covers a range of issues and permeates each organisational level, from media training to stakeholder relationships.

by Dafydd Phillips and Richard Morgan

T

he CEO is often the public face of an organisation, especially in difficult periods. Their every comment is analysed in minute detail, making the choice of words and phrases crucial. It is often the communication director’s job to put these words and phrases in the mouth of the CEO, to let him express the firm’s business decisions in a language that will appeal to all stakeholders. This requires a deep level of trust between the two – after all, the communication director is the person who, other than the CEO him/herself, is most responsible for the CEO’s internal and external reputation. Because of this, it demands a comprehensive and comfortable working relationship between the two. Without this level of trust and understanding, the CEO’s messages risk becoming contradictory and discredited. This can damage the company in the eyes of the media, shareholders, and the public, and can ultimately result in lower performance. It is therefore of the utmost importance that a CEO and their communication director can work together, as a team, to consistently deliver the company’s messages in the best possible manner.

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A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN Working with a CEO on their presence in the media is one of the more direct and visible avenues for a communication director to exercise their abilities. This is a chance to prove your value with immediate impact, with results that are plain to see and increasingly easy to monitor, thanks to CEO stockwatch, stock prices, press coverage and so on. Florian Martius, director of communications and public relations at Sanofi Pasteur MD, guesses that “about 20 per cent” of his work is devoted to improving his general manager’s personal standing with stakeholders and the media – a sizeable chunk of time. A CEO may not have much experience in dealing with communications – he or she may come from 04/2009

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an engineering background, or be a financial wizard; in other words, they may have not finessed their interpersonal or media skills. While it may be unrealistic to expect every CEO to have animal magnetism as part of his or her natural personality, this, says Martius, “has a great influence. It’s too often the soft skills that define if a meeting with media people is a success or not.” Media training and a clearly defined communications strategy are ways to help CEOs form the right approach to positioning themselves.

MODELLING FOR SUCCESS If a situation arises where a new CEO’s personality is clearly going to be problematic in future situations, there are certain things a communication director can do to help. Caroline Hempstead, vice president for corporate communications at AstraZeneca UK, believes that it is possible to model communications in this way. “I think that it is crucial to model the style and tone of any communications – external or internal – to suit the preferences and characteristics of the CEO,” she says. “The challenge is to find the environment and medium that suits your CEO and builds on their strengths.” However, attempting to completely rebuild a CEO’s person-

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ality is not a good idea, and the ruse will most likely be seen through straight away by most people.

Other than personally positioning the CEO and establishing him or her to a greater or lesser extent as a significant media presence, the relationship between the communication director and the CEO relationship covers a range of important functions. The communication director must analyse problems, evaluate risks and propose solutions to the CEO, who must then select the way forward and the timing; all this done in discussion.

Vladimir Budinsky, communication and strategy director at Severoceske Doly, the largest mining company in the Czech Republic, and part of the Cez Group, delineates the responsibilities of the two by saying: “The CEO’s guidance is the target and the timing; the communication director’s authority is the tactics, resources and operations.”

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AN ELEMENT OF TRUST In order to arrive at this balance of responsibilities, the CEO must trust the communication director. Budinsky explains: “The key factor for the relationship between CEO and communication director is joint understanding and trust. In this area, I must say that my CEO is the best I have ever had. My previous experience has shown that without such trust and joint opinion on issues, the long term collaboration is not possible.”

However, these so-called ‘soft skills’ are no substitute for a communication director’s thorough understanding of the company’s business in order to successfully position a CEO. If you want your communication department fully integrated as a strategically important function within the company, a firm grasp is vital. “A modern, state-of-theart communication approach needs the full understanding of the company’s profile, strategies and products,” Florian Martius says. “The level of detail might be defined by the topic. But to position their CEO, the communicator needs to know his/her agenda. How else can I give the right support or anticipate possible reactions or issues?”

TARGETING HIGH-LEVEL STAKEHOLDERS At Severoceske Doly, the strategy is to position the CEO to high level stakeholders in order to secure the difficult and lengthy process of investment – mining technology is very expensive and the investment period is usually 40 years. The communication director is responsible for the crucial work of winning public acceptance for its mining operations, which must be managed on a daily basis. The CEO, meanwhile, is most strategically employed focusing on other stakeholders, as Vladimir Budinsky explains: “We focus on the local and the regional relationships first, and then we focus on villages and cities located in the neighbourhood of our mines. Local press and media are important as well. All this is primarily the role of communication director; the CEO focuses on the high ranked key decision makers in the parliament and the central government as well as on the strategic communication within the group.”

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THE BALANCE OF POWER The balance of power in this complicated relationship is not clearly defined. On the basis of a mutually agreed set of strategies and priorities, the communication director operates with an autonomy that may be the envy of other departmental heads. That, at least, is the picture painted by Vladimir Budinsky: “I have lot of freedom as we have a mutual understanding of strategy and priorities with the CEO,” he says. “We most04/2009

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ly agree on all aspects of communication of the company policy. I act independently. However, before any important action I inform the CEO. In 95 per cent of cases, I receive the green light.”

Ultimately, any business decisions made by the company are the CEO’s to make, and the best laid plans of the communications team count for nothing if the CEO decides to override their carefully devised strategies. Like the majority of human beings, CEOs do not always do what they are told. In Florian Martius’ experience, this can be due to a number of factors. “It might be the need to react to a new situation without the chance to a prior discussion,” he says. “It might be the absence of inerrability of the communicator or the ‘I know better syndrome’, but when you hear the ‘I

Ultimately, any business decisions made by the company are the CEO’s to make. should have acted like you told me’ sentence, you realise that you are on the right track.”

Caroline Hempstead, on the other hand, disagrees with this point of view, saying that “a smart CEO will be as interested in how decisions will be perceived, as the decisions themselves.”

BRINGING IN A NEW CEO A

communication director should be responsible for communicating a leader’s identity, core business principles and relevant experience that will drive the company’s success.

In the case of a new CEO, it will not be until hard results can be reported, usually the first earnings

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period after the CEO’s arrival. A new CEO brings the possibility for change in the organisational structure, but it will take time for anticipated changes to become clear, and stakeholders to familiarise with this unknown quantity and attendant new strategies. However, it is also important to realise that the opposite is also true – a CEO needs time to get to grips with the complexities of their new company. The situation is exacerbated by the flurry of media interest that normally comes with a changeover at the top, and the constant requests to communicators for interviews with the CEO. And especially with a new CEO, there is a ticking, though intangible, deadline: the honeymoon period is soon over, and analysts are ever ready to see things go off the rails. This is human nature. The amount of time allowed for this, and rigorousness of the situation, will depend on the specific circumstances surrounding the new CEO’s introduction: are they replacing a long standing and beloved CEO, are they intimately familiar with the company already, is the company in robust health, or should it be handled with care? A communication director can and should be readily available to answer these questions when called upon, and can also be a fountain of knowledge for an incoming CEO.

OUT WITH THE OLD The situation is slightly different when the CEO is being promoted from a position within the same company.

Here, they will be familiar with the situation the company is in to a far greater extent, and will consequently be able to speak confidently for themselves sooner. Of course, the communication director is still a vital link in between the outgoing

and incoming executives, even if the new CEO has been groomed for the job by their predecessor.

DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS A highly efficient and

relatively new tool for communication directors in helping position CEOs comes in the form of social media. Web 2.0 is taking the world of consumers by storm, but it can also be a great way of promoting a company’s point of view – often directly to customers. CEOs at many top firms are now more directly connected to their consumer base than ever before, through blogs, web chats, and more.

Caroline Hempstead agrees that social media offers possibilities in this area: “Web 2.0 offers a world of possibilities for CEOs who understand and feel at home in the digital environment,” she says. “It can be a channel to engage directly with customers, employees and other stakeholders; a channel that thrives on authentic, personalised communications; and one that offers speed and flexibility.”

Social media can be an effective internal communications tool, providing employees with far greater access to their executives. Done well, employee blog spaces can have the effect of bringing the CEO closer to his or her workers. But, as Hempstead is quick to point out, the move to Web 2.0 must seem like a genuine one. “To be successful in this environment, the CEO needs to be personally credible in the digital space,” she says. “It is not for everyone in my view.” The communication director can be vital in implementing social media initiatives, but ultimately it must be the CEOs themselves who are participating. A communications team member answering questions put to the CEO will, at best, not go down well. Of course, finding enough time for a CEO to regularly sit down and write personal messages to workers can be tricky.

One other problem with social media is its rapid proliferation. There are now so many channels available that cutting through the mess to deliver a company’s message can be tricky. In this regard, communication directors must work together with CEOs to distinguish where their time and efforts are best placed, and, more importantly, what their message will be.

CONCLUSION There is only enough space here to

scratch the surface of a relationship fundamental to the performance of an organisation. As it is increasingly recognised that the place of the communications function is at the centre of the company, more and more attention will inevitably be paid to the complicated ties that bind together the CEO and the communication director.

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A DIVERSE LEADERSHIP Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy turned the company’s fortunes around; on July 1 this year, she handed over control to Ursula Burns, in the first ever woman to woman CEO transition. Xerox’s Christa Carone explains how her team positioned the first African American female CEO of a major US company.

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Ursula Burns (left) took over from Anne Mulcahy as CEO of Xerox in June 2009.

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Photos: Nik Rocklin; Jeff Weiner

Interview: Dafydd Phillips

Anne Mulcahy was head of HR before becoming CEO, and Ursula Burns comes from an engineering background – two very different career paths. They seem to offer very different approaches to leading a company; how do you communicate this shift in attitude?

I think we’re in a fortunate position, in that Ursula Burns had been working side by side with Anne Mulcahy for several years, so this leadership change was a well planned succession and therefore didn’t surprise anybody. I’d actually say their leadership styles are not terribly different, and certainly they both grew up in the company, if you will, and share the same amount of passion and commitment for the company and for the industry that we’re in.

It was an incredibly smooth transition because it had been mapped out pretty strategically and was therefore well accepted by Xerox people.

At what point do you start working on communicating the hand-over?

Was there a specific date when you got together and said, we’re going to start communicating this to media, internally...

Well, I would say that in the same way that the leadership transition was well planned, it was also well planned on the communication side. So it was April of 2007, Ursula Burns was named president of the company, reporting directly to Anne Mulcahy as CEO. And at that time Mulcahy had made it clear that 1) she wasn’t going anywhere any time soon, but 2) she felt that succession planning was a priority for the CEO and therefore was putting Ursula Burns in place to start nurturing the next generation of leadership for the company. So that also became an opportunity for the communications

team to say “we need to start giving Ursula Burns more visibility internally and externally because Anne Mulcahy has given this strong indication that Burns some day could be the company’s next CEO.” So it became a launch pad for us to be very strategic in our communications positioning for Ursula Burns, and at that time she started assuming some more responsibilities externally with the press, with industry analysts, with investors, and internally: now when she would do operations reviews, we would make sure that she was also doing telecom meetings, round table. Those type of things that prior to her being named president, she would have just been focusing on the workforce within the organisation she was leading.

Did you find it easy to work with her, to go to her and say: this is what we need you to do, these are the people you’re going to be speaking to?

It was very easy to work with her. Again, I think a benefit for us was that Anne Mulcahy was the type of leader who prioritised employee communications and employee

Ursula Burns had been working with Anne Mulcahy for several years, so this change was a well planned succession and therefore didn’t surprise anybody. engagement, and Ursula Burns was able to see from that how effective that was within the organisation so when we would come to her to say: “You have a visit to Mexico on your calendar, and while you have operations reviews we have also scheduled all of this other activity,” she would be very receptive to it. So we would work side by side with her office to look at her travel schedule, and build within the travel schedule internal and external engagements. So she never did a country visit without it also including press and employees and, when applicable, sometimes investor meetings or analyst meetings.

So there was a structure already set up…

There was a structure already set up and that is absolutely how we worked Anne Mulcahy’s communications engagements as well, so we knew it was successful and it was easy for us to transfer that same type of structure to Ursula Burns and she was incredibly receptive to it.

Anne Mulcahy had great success in turning Xerox around.

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other companies, and on the day the handover was announced, Xerox shares were down. Did it shake confidence in the new CEO? Because it was well planned and she has been part of developing all of the efforts we’ve taken to offset the economic pressures, there wasn’t a sense of surprise or any new positioning that we had to put in place. When she was named CEO we made a very concerted effort that focused her time on employee engagement and not a lot of other stakeholder engagement. So we sent her on a multi-country ‘tour’, if you will, and most of the time the first question employees would ask is: “What are you going to change?”, and her response was typically: “I’ve been part of developing this strategy of this company, I’ve been working side by side with Anne Mulcahy on how we’re dealing with the economy, so I’m personally not going to change a lot of what we’ve already mapped out. I know what’s working, I know what’s not, and I’m going to continue in the same path that this leadership team has been on, because I’ve participated in it, I helped to develop the agenda and now I’ve taken the role where I need to execute the agenda.” So there wasn’t anything new that we really had to do in that case, because she was becoming more of a known quantity there wasn’t a question about her credibility or about her ability to lead.

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Xerox has a long-standing commitment to diversity – has externally positioning the first Fortune 500 African American female CEO posed any unique challenges?

What surprised us more in the communications activity was the amount of attention on this particular situation because she is the first black female CEO. So I’d say business as usual: as communications leaders, we did what you do in a leadership transition, which is you focus on your employees, especially when it’s an internal transition – when you bring in an outsider you probably have to spend more time with other stakeholders. In our case, it was a well planned succession, she knew all our of key stakeholder groups, we had a very clear focussed communications strategy that prioritised employee engagement. So that’s business as usual. For us, what was unusual was that there was a novelty because she is the first black female CEO, and the first woman to woman transfer of power. I must say, for us, this is just Xerox; it’s not a novelty to us at all. We’re a very diverse company, this was a very well planned succession, and the fact that both our leaders are female, the fact that one is a black female was like, “Ok….”

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nal attention. And we were careful in our communications strategy to not let that unnatural amount of attention cloud the fact that she is the right leader for Xerox at the right time, and this is not about race or gender, it’s about the individual who has the right capabilities to lead the company forward. We didn’t let that consume us - it certainly drove the story externally but it wasn’t the way we were positioning the story.

Did you have a set response for this kind of attention? Was there a company line?

The company line was, we appreciate that this is a novelty to others, and while Ursula Burns is very respectful that she’s a role model as it relates to this particular milestone

While Ursula Burns is respectful of the fact that she’s a role model as it relates to this particular milestone in leadership, her focus is on being successful as CEO. in leadership, her focus is clearly on being successful as CEO of Xerox, and she does not confuse the two.

So in all her employee engagement, she’s said to people: “I know there’s an unnatural amount of attention on who I am, but I want to make it clear to you that my attention is focused more on leading this company and less than about being a highly visible leader externally because of my race and my gender.”

Anne Mulcahy frequently appears in lists of most powerful female leaders yet she’s expressed the hope that, soon, “female” won’t be part of her job description as it will be an unremarkable norm. Do you foresee the

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Photo: Xerox Cooperation

same thing happening with African American female CEOs? We would certainly hope so. There are a number of African American CEOs, Ursula Burns happens to be the first female African American CEO. So she’s always saying “I look forward to the day we stop counting”, because that means there’s so many, we no longer need to count, and the headline isn’t the fact that you’re breaking new ground because of your race or gender, you’re breaking new ground because of your effectiveness as a leader. So you have to strike this interesting balance of being very respectful to the fact that this is incredibly inspiring for a lot of people. It’s inspiring for Xerox women to be part of a company that is the first woman to woman transfer of power, and we, Anne and Ursula are very respectful of that. And we’re also then selective of those types of activities that speak to the fact that both Mulcahy and Burns are role models. So they will do a couple of speaking engagements a year – Ursula just did one at YWCA, a group focused on nurturing opportunities for underprivileged young women, and she did that because she understands she’s a role model for those women. So we’re respectful of it, we’re very discreet in selecting the right opportunities where Ursula can have some influence in driving some cultural change, but we don’t let it consume us.

Do you think that future positionings of high level African American female CEOs will look to your work as a template?

We get some calls from people who might be working with a high profile female executive on what we did. We reached out to colleagues who have been working with Af-

rican American male CEOs who we understood would be getting a lot of interest because of their race. I think everybody is along the same lines of thinking, of striking that right balance of the individual as a leader because of the experience and the expertise that he or she brings to the job, and it’s about the company first and the person

It’s really hard in some cases because you’re saying no to amazing opportunities that otherwise PR people would love to do...But they’re the right noes. second and striking that right balance is what you have to do in communications positioning. I will tell you, it’s really hard in some cases, because you’re saying no to amazing opportunities that otherwise PR people would love to do – general interest type of publications, who may call and say: “Boy, I’d love to follow your CEO around Christa Carone over a weekend and see how Vice President, Marketing and Communications, Xerox she balances work and family, and can I go to her son’s soccer game with her.” And that’s really exciting because it’s this really well known news person who wants to do the news story. But that has nothing to do with Xerox! So you have to say no so you’re aligning your Christa Carone is vice president, priorities in the right place. marketing and communications They can be tough noes but for Xerox Corporation, serving as the company’s chief marketthey’re the right noes, I must ing officer. She was named to say. We’ve been through this position in September 2008, this, we’ve had the benefit of and, among others, is responsible for global marketing strategy experience of working with and initiatives that include adAnne Mulcahy and now vertising, public relations, internal applying that towards our communications and integrated communications positioning campaigns. Prior to this role, Carone was vice president of with Ursula Bruns and we’ve global communications, leading learned very clearly that the Xerox’s public relations, internal role of CEO is about leadand corporate communications, ing the company, and that’s and community relations initiatives. Before joining Xerox, she what comes first. It’s quite a managed communications and privilege to be part of a compublic affairs for healthcare pany that has these things companies in Rochester and Baltimore. happening.

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FIND THE RIGHT FIT There is no one size fits all formula for success that tells communication directors how to position their CEOs – strategies must be tailor-made.

by Simon Sproule

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Photo: www.dreamstime.com

A

merican and British politicians like to talk of the ‘special relationship’ that exists between the two countries. A relationship forged through good times and bad, and of course united by (almost) the same language. Is the relationship between the CEO and the communications function more ‘special’ than with other functions in the organisation and how is that relationship changing during the current turbulence?

Chances are, if you are either responsible for the entire communications function or directly assigned to executive communications you are closer than most to the top of the company. Depending on how your leadership engages with stakeholders, you can be both behind the proverbial curtain or out in front, representing the views of the CEO. Although we all dread the “what they meant to say was…” conversation with the media, it is clear that a smart and informed communication function can have huge influence inside and outside the organisation.

So, is your CEO being blamed for the global crisis? Chances are, probably not. However, anyone it seems who fills a chair in the C-suite is now a viable target for attack. We

know that the public’s trust in corporations is at historically low levels, and the C-suite has become the lightning rod for anger at the failure and excesses of the ‘system’. The public mood has been one of rightful indignation pumped by hysterical reporting with equal doses of embellishment and conjecture thrown in for good measure. The result is a media environment that can sometimes feel more like the Salem witch trials. However seemingly unfair and reactionary the environment, business must accept some of the responsibility, or at the very least, be sensitive to the prevailing public sentiment. It is no coincidence that the sequel to Wall Street, the seminal ‘greed is good’ movie of the late 1980s, is coming out in 2010.

INTOXICATING RIDE The financial and economic crisis has also seen large amounts of schadenfreude enjoyed by the public and media against the private sector. Given that the media love to build people up and then knock them down again, this should come as no big surprise. It can be intoxicating ride being part of a company that is consistently reporting significant yearover-year growth, but even Warren Buffett has bad days in the market.

Preventing the media tearing apart your success story when you hit the first bump in the road is all about managing expectations. There can be no better way for a skilled communications function to provide real value to their CEO than by creating a messaging framework that is built on the assumption that things can and do go wrong.

COMMUNICATIONS STARTS AT HOME Start with the basics and

figure out how well the CEO is get-

ting through to your organisation. Visiting employees at one of your regional warehouses is less sexy than appearing live on television, but great communications starts at home.

Especially in these uncertain economic times, the organisation needs to see and hear from the boss more than ever.

Although we tend to think of the media and financial analysts as the toughest and most cynical critics, I believe it is employees who are the most difficult to convince: employees have the most to lose from poor management! Getting your CEO to understand the value and power of effective internal communications should come well before you start planning a sophisticated media engagement plan.

Every executive has their own style and some are better at the unscripted town hall meeting than others are. Moreover, if you see your CEO struggle to be convincing or ef-

Getting your CEO to understand the value and power of effective internal communications should come well before you start planning a sophisticated media engagement plan. fective with employees, it is your responsibility to address directly the issue, however uncomfortable that conversation might be. In fact, it is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for senior leaders to be effective communicators. Your task as the communications leader is to work with them to create the right messages told in the right way at the right time – and in a style that is credible and sustainable.

THE LURE OF CELEBRITY Over the past two decades,

we have seen business leaders elevated into the increasingly less rarefied atmosphere known as celebrity. In this new place, business leaders cannot just deliver ‘boring’ sustainable profit and growth, they need to amaze, and, more than anything, they need to sell. Sell the story, sell the stock, sell the company, and in many cases, sell themselves. Whether the latter is to the devil, depends on your view of certain CEOs. And if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it is that Andy Warhol could well have been right about his 15 minutes of fame theory. It used to be relatively simple understanding who was famous and why. The major Hollywood players, musicians, royalty, sports stars, etc. Now, everyone seemingly wants to be famous; and the business sector got hooked as well. Nothing wrong with building a good reputation earned through the delivery of results, but repeatedly having your CEO pictured in a celebrity magazine while the company slides into bankruptcy only hastens their own 04/2009

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exit process (and the pain of the accompanying media feeding frenzy). There is a reason why Richard Branson is famous but still in charge of his company – he consistently delivers results. In that race to the bottom of the fame pit, seeking to be the next Richard Branson is a road paved with hazards. Be realistic (and honest with your CEO) about what he/she can achieve in terms of coverage – and why you want it. They may be a godlike figure in your industry, but if your industry rarely makes it out of your own trade publications, then promising your CEO will be on CNN every night is a good way to hasten your own exit.

Finally, I disagree with many of my marketing colleagues when it comes to that other side of the fame game: celebrity endorsements. My cautionary note here is that ultimately (and cynically), most celebrities will do almost anything if the price is right. If you venture down the celebrity path, treat the relationship in exactly the same way you would with your CEO: be authentic, consistent and durable. Oh yes, and like the rest of us, celebrities have their faults and weaknesses. Just be sure you do the full risk analysis and due diligence before rushing into the waiting arms of a celebrity agent who cares more about his fees than the values of your brand.

TIME TO TALK? First, start with the performance of

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the company. Everyone has been affected by the financial crisis and economic recession. But take an honest look at your own organisation and leadership. If they are not delivering the goods, then your communication plan should reflect that. Your counsel to the C-suite needs to give them informed opinions and options. It might be obvious that when you are laying off thousands of employees, it is not the time to make any visible investments in anything that could not be considered critical to the recovery and future growth of the company. Maybe wait a while before planning that next executive offsite/golfing excursion.

In case you were wondering, I do count investing in your brand as business critical. An often made mistake is to cut back in a recession on telling your story. In fact, now is exactly the time to explain the values and value proposition of your brand. You have less competition or ‘noise’ in the market place and the ability to generate better results from earned, owned and paid media will be so much better than when the good times start rolling again. Remember, great brands communicate consistently, in good times and bad, and not in peaks and troughs.

CHIEF STORY TELLER So, we know that great organisations communicate consistently, but they also 04/2009

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Bringing the best out of your CEO Be honest with your CEO about the bad news and poor public opinion as much as the good news.

Ensure your CEO communicates in the most relevant way with your stakeholders.

Know every detail about the business so you can have informed debates.

When raising the profile of your CEO to the status of chief story teller, be honest and consisitent.

communicate with conviction, passion and simplicity. We are now in an era where delivering messages in the traditional sense (such as via a news release or similar corporate speak) is increasingly irrelevant.

The winners in the new communication environment simply tell better stories and do it in a way that is culturally sensitive and relevant.

There is no better opportunity than during tough times for your CEO to take on the additional executive role of chief story teller. And there are many CEOs who perform this role particularly well. The aforementioned Richard Branson, Steve

If your industry rarely makes it out of your own trade publications, then promising your CEO will be on CNN every night is a good way to hasten your own exit.

Jobs and James Dyson all come to mind as leaders who not only epitomise their brands but also perform the role of a chief story teller with impressive results. The dark side of the fame game is, of course, any

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leader who is more style than substance; in the end, the truth always comes out.

Not every CEO wants to be twittering from the board meeting, but do your research on the right tools and trends to ensure they are communicating in a relevant way to your stakeholders. The beauty of today’s communication environment is that we have more choices than ever before. This also brings into sharp focus the changing roles of communications and marketing. The million (probably billion) dollar question that is of particular focus to both PR and advertising agencies concerns ownership of so-called new media.

The simple answer is integration.

Not necessarily the integration of functions, but certainly the creation and management of the core narrative. Paid, earned and owed media needs to deliver the same basic message to stakeholders, and this applies equally to how your CEO is presenting themselves as it does to the launch of a new product.

BAD NEWS We have all sat in meetings and watched people avoid telling bad news to the boss. Although you may not be responsible for that bad sales month or product recall, it is important that your CEO understands how your stakeholders are reacting to events. This is not about making your colleagues look bad (they can do a much better job of that themselves) but it is about ensuring that the leader of the organisation gets the right kind of information she or he needs to run the business.

A word of caution on editorialising. CEOs tend to be well read and well informed. A sure way to isolate the communications function is either through editorialising or making ill-prepared comments

on issues that then get forwarded around the company.

I encourage all communicators to dive deep inside the business and be ready to have an informed debate with the C-suite, but never abuse your position by gossiping to the boss.

Finally, be as quick to deliver the bad news as you are the good. Staying connected to prevailing opinion is critical for any leader and even if that opinion is uncomfort-

Most CEOs only blame the communications function for bad press when they see evidence that there was no attempt to present a convincing story to counter a negative attack. able for them personally, it is your responsibility to share both the good and the bad news. Most CEOs only blame the communications function for bad press when they see evidence that there was no attempt to present a convincing story to counter a negative attack. I still believe that most CEOs have no desire to shoot the messenger…

CONCLUSION In conclusion, the relationship between communications and the CEO is special. There is no other function that can provide them with a 360-degree view of the organisation, both inside/out Simon Sproule and positive/negative. This Director, Head of Communications is a privilege, and one that Renault-Nissan Alliance is earned through trust, transparency and the delivery of results. Personal chemistry is important, but, most of all, it is your ability to do what is right based on both facts and intuition. It is often an inexact science, but when done well, can Simon Sproule has been Rebe critical to the success of nault-Nissan Alliance’s director, your organisation. head of communications since September 2009. Previously, Sometimes your CEO he was corporate vice presiwill do stuff for personal dent, global communications reasons and interests. Unless at Nissan Motor Company. it will damage them or the Sproule started his career as a researcher in the internal combrand, be smart and ensure munications of Ford of Europe the best possible outcomes. in the UK. He holds a bachelor Remember, they are only of science in geography from the University of London. human, and so are you.

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THE PRINCE AND I First published in 1532, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince has attracted and repelled generations of leaders looking for guidance.

by Cynthia Wagner Weick

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number of books in recent years have been dedicated to the wisdom offered to corporate leadership by the 15th century Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s The Prince, in particular, is considered by some as required reading for achieving success in modern companies. So what advice does he offer? And what are the implications for the roles and responsibilities of communication directors? Careful consideration of the behaviour advocated by Machiavelli – and the assumptions behind his philosophy – suggest that his approach is obsolete. We can surely still learn from The Prince; however, its lessons warn us of how placing self interest and lust for power above all else leads to dangerous consequences.

WHAT IS A MACHIAVELLIAN LEADER LIKE?

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Machiavelli’s prince offers several insights key to successful management. His motives and means, however, are filtered through one ultimate principle: power is an end in itself. The Prince rightly emphasises the importance of education and training for oneself and employees, alertness to the environment, preparation for events that cannot be predicted; and the challenges of introducing change in organisations. But the means needed to reach his ends include whatever it takes to secure and maintain power: intimidation, force, manipulation and deception. Fear should be instilled in others so they will be subordinated and do the prince’s will, but not so much so that they come to hate the leader and render him or her ineffective:

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perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”

When needed, force trumps the rule of law:

“You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.”

The prince has vices, but makes sure these are never uncovered, and that his or her reputation remains untarnished:

“Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them.”

Be practical, advises Machiavelli.

Goodness and trust are for the naïve, who are eventually defeated by others who are more astute at manipulation and deceit.

“Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft.

Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”

SERVING THE PRINCE: COMMUNICATION DIRECTORS AND MACHIAVELLI Communication di-

rectors operate at the interface between top leadership and the rest of the organisation, as well as various external communities. Assuming the CEO is a prince, the major roles and responsibilities of the director seem clear:

- Protect leadership by establishing a distance between corporate executives and others inside and outside of the company.

- Foster the belief in others that leadership alone is right, and needs little or no input from others.

- Cultivate a sense of fear and intimidation such that no one dares to question actions.

- Veil or obfuscate negative results as well as any confusion or indecision on the part of leadership.

- Create an image of leadership that suggests forthrightness and honesty, despite flaws or weakness in character.

If prince-like leaders existed only in theory these roles and responsibilities might be more palatable. Daily review of business news, however, suggests that a number of contemporary executives have come to mirror Machiavellian values and beliefs. Consider, for example, Bernie Madoff, whose extraordinary investment prowess was exposed as a massive Ponzi scheme. Or Klaus Zumwinkel, Deutsche Post’s former CEO, who was convicted in early 2009 of tax evasion. Or imagine being a communication director at Enron in early 2001, when the executive team was applauding their sixth straight award from Fortune magazine for being “America’s Most Innovative Company”. Within the year it was discovered the company’s successful financial innovation was predicated upon accounting fraud. In cases like these, knowingly or not, everyone in the executive suite becomes trapped in a web of deception and manipulation, and are ultimately victims of it. The prince trusts no one; and sees no value in keeping promises when, after all, no one else will.

Accepting this behaviour implies accepting its consequences. Is the prince-like CEO allowed to operate unfettered by the pressures of shareholders, regulators and employees? In fact their very self interest and lust for power often backfires. Many end up humiliated, fired and, in 04/2009

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some cases, incarcerated. Their companies – and even their business partners – often follow them into bankruptcy and disgrace. Along the way innocent people lose their jobs and retirement savings; and trusting shareholders see their investments decimated. The most recent round of Machiavellian behaviour has left the entire global economic system in shambles. Are manipulative, deceitful, power hungry corporate leaders the exceptions? If so, there have been too many exceptions.

WORKING ON ASSUMPTIONS Machiavelli’s approach is predicated upon faulty assumptions, and is not sustainable in the long term. The prince assumes that the organisation exists as a vehicle for his/her own power, ensured by centralised authority, an unquestioning and compliant public who, like all people, have no control over their evil and self-interested nature (see table below).

The business environment in the 21st century, however, is drastically different from the historical context in which Machiavelli’s approach emerged. Thanks to the egregious transgressions in the last several years, regaining the trust of customers, the community, shareholders, and governments is among the most formidable near term hurdles facing executives today. Surviving the recession related to these transgressions remains a pressing issue. Longer term, several irreversible challenges will also render the Machiavellian leader impotent: among others, industrial restructuring and redistribution; the need to harness the talents of an increasingly well educated, critically minded and globalised workforce; and limitations in the fundamental resources of energy, water and food.

THE ALTERNATIVE An alternative set of assumptions is more relevant to this new environment (see table below).

Companies, especially public institutions, exist to provide Machiavelli’s Prince (left column) and an alternative model (right column)

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Organisations exist as a vehicle for selfaggrandisement of leaders, who gain their position through political manoeuvering.

Running a company is about creating value, and is a vehicle for solving problems.

Hierarchy, where control and knowledge is concentrated in top leadership, is the best model for organisations.

Flat structures, in which people are empowered to share their knowledge and contribute to future directions, are best for a dynamic and sustainable organisation.

People are stupid: they can easily be manipulated, intimidated, and deceived.

People are insightful; they can see through deceitful behaviour and will react against it.

Man is inherently evil and acts mainly out of self interest.

Man is inherently good and, while not selfless, acts out of interest of collective good.

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a product or service to customers, a fair return to shareholders willing to accept the risk of investment, and a meaningful work environment to knowledgeable and insightful employees. In short, companies exist to create value for its internal and external communities, not to destroy it; and leaders are responsible for ensuring this.

A NEW REALITY The most fallacious and dangerous assumption behind The Prince’s approach – whether applied by Machiavelli or those who read his work – is that people cannot and do not change. If we accept that humanity is immutable, it is highly unlikely we will be prepared to manage a future in which we face among the most daunting threats in history.

The roles and responsibilities of communication directors within this new reality are markedly different from those associated with Machiavelli’s prince. These include: - Building bridges for communication between leadership and increasingly diverse employees, shareholders, and the community.

- Creating a sense of shared purpose and trust, to which others have input and therefore willingly commit.

- Cultivating an environment open to constructive criticism.

- Clarifying challenges facing the organisation, and representing performance in a truthful manner.

- Showing the leader authentically, even allowing for weaknesses and misjudgment.

- Setting expectations of honesty and mutual respect in internal and external relationships.

Fulfilling these roles and responsibilities implies that the director must gain a deep understanding of

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Prince and the paupers Machiavelli’s prince offers several insights key to successful management.

The Machivellian leader sees an organisation as a vehicle for self-aggrandisement, a position attained through political manoeuverings.

The most dangerous Machiavellian fallacy is that people cannot change.

We can still read Machiavelli, if only to ensure autocracy remains in the past.

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who the leader is, where the company is headed, what challenges lay ahead, and what input is needed and expected from others. Their role in receiving and conveying information – and maintaining the integrity of the message – becomes all the more important. In the absence of honesty, mutual respect and openness within the organisation, the director must be willing to sever ties or suffer the consequences.

Is the alternative described above naïve? Three companies – Virgin Group, Toyota and Southwest Airlines – are ahead of the curve, turning what appears to be idealism into a new reality of business leadership.

Virgin Group and Toyota are highlighted briefly below.

VIRGIN GROUP The highly diversified Virgin Group operates as 200 companies worldwide in mobile telephony to transportation, travel, financial services, media, music and fitness. CEO Sir Richard Branson actively encourages its 50,000 employees to communicate ideas for improving the company; and expects management to show their human

side, care deeply about people, and trust them. Despite its size, Virgin maintains a flat organisation, described as a family versus hierarchy. “We believe in making a difference,” says the company’s website. “Virgin stands for value for money, quality, innovation, fun and a sense of competitive challenge. We deliver a quality service by empowering our employees and we facilitate and monitor customer feedback to continually improve the customer’s experience through innovation.”

TOYOTA Japanese automotive giant Toyota has more than 300,000 employees worldwide. Since its founding in the early 1900s, it has been guided by an ethos of humility and what is known as the Toyota Way. The two major pillars of the Toyota Way are continuous improvement, which entails establishing and meeting challenges, courage and creativity; and respect for people, which involves trying to understand others, taking responsibility; and building teamwork and mutual trust. In a speech at the University of Denver in 2009, the President of Toyota Motor Sales USA, Jim Lentz, described the company’s vision as one that “calls Toyota people to a higher cause than just building cars and making money.” “Your job isn’t just a job,” he continued, “it’s a responsibility... it’s a commitment to others... it’s a pledge to create a better world.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE Is Machiavellian leadership the only way to succeed in the world of business? Are alternative models pipe dreams?

CEOs who behave as if their companies are their kingdoms are out. So is the spin, image creation, and isolation that surrounds them.

Authenticity, openness and recognition that everyone in an organisation needs to make a contribution are the new realities. Should The Prince be left to gather dust on a shelf? We can still read Machiavelli, if only to ensure that autocracy remains in the past. The challenge now is to promote and sustain leadership approaches that are consonant with our future.

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Prof. Cynthia Wagner Weick University of the Pacific in Stockton, California

Dr. Cynthia Wagner Weick is professor of management at the Eberhardt School of Business, and the School of Engineering and Computer Science, at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. She teaches and publishes in the areas of commercialising science and technology, and creative approaches to strategic management and leadership.

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STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIP If they want to play a decisive role within their company communication directors need to be part of the CEO’s inner circle and promote communications as a strategic imperative.

by Patricia O’Hayer

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ennis Jönsson, CEO of Tetra Pak, once confided to me that “strategy is easy, it’s the execution that’s difficult.” For CEOs today, this remains a universal challenge. Unless you can translate your vision into tangible actions and align your organisation so that each employee understands how they can contribute to the business, well then a good idea remains just that, a good idea.

If you run a multinational, how would you mobilise the organisation around your business objectives? How would you ensure that your markets, your customers, and your investors understand the value proposition of your company? Not to mention your employees. How would you make all your partners – customers, suppliers, subsidiaries – value you? Today and over time?

Enter strategic communications. One of its main objectives is to help position the company externally with analysts and customers while also providing context of the business for its employees. Strategic communications also mean engaging on important issues on behalf of the company. For Unilever, nutrition is one such issue – both malnutrition and over nutrition (obesity). In the developing world, the number of the world’s hungry has surpassed one billion for the first time in history, and the cost of meeting urgent humanitarian needs is also breaking records. Unilever recognises the potential to make a positive contribution towards a solution. We work together with the World Food Programme supporting school feeding in Africa, Asia and Latin America, while providing access to new food technologies for humanitarian experts.

Equally, in developed countries we actively participate and shape the policy debate on improving the nutritional profiles to ensure that our products are at the forefront of health and nutrition. This means working with key opinion formers and taking positions on issues from product 04/2009

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labelling to advertising aimed at children. Communications plays a key role in indentifying these thought leadership platforms for the company.

STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS IS ABOUT LEADERSHIP Used strategically, communications is a catalyst, and CEOs who understand this implement their business strategy more effectively. But here is the challenge: the chief communications officer (CCO) must position communications as a strategic imperative – it is unlikely that the CEO will take that step for you.

And the CCO must live and breathe strategic communications, in everything they do, including the way they interact with their CEO, demonstrating value time and again.

How is this orchestrated? For starters, the CCO needs to get into the CEO’s inner circle, not just float around the outer circle. The CCO must ensure that all the communications activities line up with the company’s business agenda. There is no question that the CCO has to earn their seat at the table, and then keep earning their right to stay there. And how is this accomplished? By, for example, consistently contributing to the business discussion, by demonstrating the strategic relevance of communica-

tions, by showing absolute business alignment and not merely chiming in whenever there is a communications-specific conversation at hand.

Summarising, strategic communications is about leadership. The CCO needs to take a proactive stance, be fluent in the business and see the wider context of issues.

IT’S ALL ABOUT ALIGNMENT How often do we hear a leader claim that he is only as good as the troops he can marshal? A realistic CEO knows that if he cannot align his troops, none of what he says, does or thinks will matter. Communicating strategically is the only way to convince employees that they can make a difference and have a real impact on the company’s success. Being able to accomplish this and more

will only be achieved when the CEO grants his CCO full authority, access and trust. CEOs who rely on strategic communications never underestimate the challenge of aligning employees so that all could see where they fit in and how they could contribute to the strategy.

COMMUNICATING STRATEGICALLY IS THE MAKE OR BREAK A CEO will typically start treating the key

communications person as an ally once the company has experienced a bottom line impacting crisis situation. I

A CEO will typically start treating the key communications person as an ally once the company has experienced a bottom line impacting crisis situation. was at Dow Corning during the silicon implant debacle; the CEO quickly understood that using communications strategically was essential for the company’s survival.

A few years later I found myself with a major medical supplies company and a mandate to resolve an unprece-

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dented business and human tragedy, namely the deaths of some 50 patients associated with the company’s products.

We needed to find a means to negotiate a settlement and satisfy authorities all while minimising the impact on the business and community. The CEO placed his trust in two people: the chief medical officer and strategic communications. I became spokesperson, issues manager, family liaison officer, public affairs delegate; I represented the company at meetings with the health minister; I was the negotiator interacting with the families of the deceased.

All in all, a situation where strategic communications became the make or break for the company’s reputation.

Companies that have experienced a clear case of getting it wrong or surviving a fiasco will have rewired to treat communications as business-critical. Ultimately, the CEOs of such companies will start seeing the communications function as much more than just communications, effectively filling the role of chief reputation officer.

CORPORATE REPUTATION VS CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS A company’s reputation is its most impor-

tant asset. The reputation of a company is its promise to its customers and shareholders. Years and millions invested in the making, even the most resilient reputation can be destroyed in moments. Today’s CCOs need to be involved in all aspects of corporate reputation. This is a broader appellation for what falls into the communications jurisdiction.

As long as the CEO does not understand or feel that communications counsel and insight in this extended realm is essential, the CCO will not have the proximity to the CEO that is required. And it is only once that proximity to the

CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS OFFICERS SEE THEIR STOCK RISE

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An annual survey published this year by Weber Shandwick in collaboration with global executive search firm Spencer Stuart reveals that CEOs are depending more and more on their CCOs for crisis and issues counsel, to steady both their company’s reputations and the minds of all stakeholders. It also transpires in this study that the skills owned by CCOs are in greater demand than ever: crisis and issues management and the management of complex portfolios of stakeholders. The survey also reveals that CCOs who work for companies with the “most admired” reputations are the most closely aligned with their CEOs. And most interestingly: 58 per cent of CCOs (within the 159 companies surveyed, of which 84 per cent are among the Fortune 500) report directly to the CEO versus 48 per cent only one year earlier.

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TOP 5 INDICATIONS THAT YOUR CEO IS TAKING YOU SERIOUSLY 1. Communications strategy is reviewed regularly on the leadership agenda.

2. Communications has open access to the CEO any time.

3. You are invited to participate at very early stages in discussions/decisions that could impact the reputation of the company.

4. Communications is recognised in the organisation.

5. Communications is seen as an investment and budgets reflect this investment.

office of the CEO is secured that the power of strategic communications can be fully harnessed.

Take mergers and acquisitions.

Countless studies demonstrate that over 50 per cent fail, even after millions and billions spent in boardroom discussions and elaborate planning. How is it that promises of such great things (the integration of two cultures, exciting business potential) fail so systematically to materialise? And how is it that, in many instances, customers of both companies actually do not even understand the benefits of the merger? Here again, strategic communications has a massive role to play. A savvy CEO knows he/she will need to rely on strategic communications to help investors, customers and employees understand why the company is doing what it is – acquiring, being acquired, or merging. The CCO’s job is to explain to all stakeholders how this operation will benefit them.

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strictly with investors, on how good the deal is, etc. The legal department will want to communicate as little as possible. Meanwhile, communications has the responsibility of ensuring that all audiences – employees, customers, investors – hear and see what they need during the transition, and certainly after. Articulating and communicating the full and most satisfying story for all these audiences can be a tightrope exercise at best, and yet the CCO is expected to hold that balance.

STRATEGIC VS TACTICAL One of the most commonplace beliefs, and possibly also one of the most anachronistic, is that communications is all about producing PR and marketing materials. Make no mistake, there will always be a need to create collateral material, media campaigns, and community events, but this is not the communication director’s raison d’être; it is only part of the job content and it is, while important, largely tactical. Communications becomes truly relevant to the business when it is strategic. And for that to happen the CCO must benefit from proximity to the CEO. If this is not the case then the CCO’s HOW SOLID IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR CEO – A LITMUS TEST 1. How often do you meet with your CEO (weekly, biweekly, monthly)?

2. Are you aware of his/her priorities and so you share some of his/her objectives in your work plan?

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3. Are you a member of his/her leadership team?

4. Do you feel you can disagree with him/ her without impunity?

tasks and relevance are doomed to remain purely tactical, rather than strategic.

Having worked for four multinationals over the past two decades, I can attest that if a CCO is not in at the strategic level – meaning if the CEO does not value the role of com-

Make no mistake, there will always be a need to create collateral material, media campaigns, and community events, but this is not the communication director’s raison d’être; it is only part of the job content and it is, while important, largely tactical. munications highly enough to include a communications professional in that inner circle – then the CCO’s job will be condemned to remaining short on contribution. And when someone occupies a position with a capped contribution potential, they do so at their own peril.

WANTED: DEEPER, RICHER RELATIONSHIP WITH LIKE-MINDED THINKER The 21st century communications director has come a long way. The function of the CCO is to show how strategic and business-critical communications is. The CCO has to keep demonstrating that strategic communications is more than just ‘nice to have’ and must keep contributing to strategic business conversations at all times. Delivering demonstrable added value through strategic communications will help include the CCO in the inner strategic circle. As the business-critical nature of strategic communications becomes apparent over time, CEOs will be convinced that communications is a hugely valuable tool for uniting the organisation and all its stakeholders around the business objectives and, ultimately, the instrument for converting vision into reality.

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Patricia O’Hayer Vice President Communications and Corporate Responsibility, Unilever

Amer ican-bor n Patr icia O’Hayer is experienced in dealing with all management levels in many countries Europe-wide. Since 2007, she has been Unilever’s vice president communications and corporate responsibility. Prior to this, she worked as vice president global corporate communications for packaging specialist Tetra Pak. O’Hayer has developed and implemented issues and crisis management systems in major companies such as Tetra Pak, Baxter and Dow Corning.

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ENSURING CREDIBILITY DURING TURMOIL In times of change and crisis, internal communicators must work alongside their chief executives to win the support of employees, which in turn will empower the leadership to drive the company forward.

by Simone Niven

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o, who said corporate communications is boring? The first six months of any new global corporate communications role is often tough – a global network to navigate and a new chief executive to build a relationship with. More so when you are joining the mining industry, a notoriously issues-based sector with inherent reputation-related risks. When the first six months also involves the second biggest rights issue in history, the fatigue associated with successfully defending against a hostile takeover bid, some senior board level changes, a significant global workforce reduction, and a change in strategy from growth to curtailment, you know it is not exactly going to be all smooth sailing.

Of course, communications related jobs have become a lot more interesting of late, with the global credit crisis and economic meltdown shifting the agenda. Relatively stable and solid industries are no longer solid and business decisions taken eighteen months ago seem strangely misguided given the swift and extreme collapse of the global economy.

Against this backdrop, how do you ensure your chief executive maintains his/her reputation with employees when they are under immense pressure from investors and external stakeholders? When this scrutiny is played out in the media every day? Especially when your chief executive ranks in the Top 20 CEOs worldwide in terms of volume of media coverage? Generally the response is to batten down the hatches, keep low and wait until the dust settles.

More so in an industry such as mining that for the last 20 years has had a relatively stable, albeit challenging, business environment. I would argue that the role of internal communications, taking its lead from media relations, of04/2009

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ten becomes defensive just when an offensive is required.

The challenge is convincing your chief executive and the leadership team that it is time to start talking to employees even more, and not less, especially so when the obvious priority is maximising shareholder returns and the associated related external stakeholder activities. Below are some of the lessons learned along the way in convincing chief executives of the need for offence rather than defence during times of change and challenge. Of course, there is not a one size approach that

How do you ensure your chief executive maintains their reputation with employees when under pressure from investors and external stakeholders? fits for all – as most chief executives are different and are at varying stages in their tenure. However, experience working with just a few suggests that there are some common characteristics, and therefore techniques, for developing a fruitful relationship. Being able to develop this relationship is extremely

75 important and the key determinant of success is understanding what drives the business and the individuals that work within it.

BUSINESS PERFORMANCE AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT Most importantly, internal communicators must be able to speak the language of their chief executive, understand the business strategy and be able to show the 04/2009

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demonstrable link between employee engagement and business performance during change. This is generally an easier sell in consumer businesses where employees are more often seen as valuable assets, given their direct interaction with customers. Most chief executives in these businesses are aware of Heskett’s service profit chain concept and understand the link between employee engagement and business performance. The tangible link is harder to prove in some business-to-business environments, especially when what you are doing has no direct customer interaction or involves selling to large corporations or governments.

Yet the link is there. Most chief executives, if nothing else, understand the importance of engaging their senior leadership teams. This is often a good place to start the discussion, as without the support and confidence of leadership team members most chief executives realise their tenure is likely to be short lived. More so, when external stakeholders are asking questions regarding business direction and leadership.

ASK THE BIG QUESTION I find it is always helpful to ask a chief executive, before you embark on any change initiative or major programme: what and how do you want to be perceived? What do you want your legacy to be? The earlier you do this in the relationship, the better. Having clarity around this key reputational issue allows for a positioning that reflects your chief executive’s aspirations.

That does not mean you should accept him/her blindly – it is a good communicator’s role to test and challenge. Ask questions, state the obvious risks and challenges. This discussion serves as a valuable bedrock to future communications strategies and takes on a significant purpose during times of challenge and change. Do I want to be seen as a maverick? I want to be seen as solid, efficient and respected! I want to survive!

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COLLECT THE DATA To prove the need for a proactive internal communications campaign, you need to collect the data. Most chief executives validate their business decisions by data – they need empirical evidence and measurable effect. The answer is to do what you can to get the numbers to support the need or prove there is one. In most organisations, the annual employee survey can be very helpful, and if it is progressive it will determine the key drivers for engagement within the business. If this is not available, a quick and dirty pulse check to test the attitude of leaders and employees is useful. Once you have the data, prepare to understand it fully and to defend it. Most leadership teams under pressure will spend a considerable amount of effort 04/2009

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Internally communicating your CEO Internal communicators must link between their work and business performance during change.

Find out early on what and how your CEO wants to be perceived.

Apparent inconsistency between earlier predictions and present reality can be reconciled by providing context of change.

Informal face-to-face meetings with employees are vital in promoting strategic direction.

testing the validity and accuracy of the information, especially if it paints them in an unfortunate light.

This can often be countered by using a third party consultancy or specialist research agency – whose independent non-company bias often adds more weight to the argument. Useful data can help shape solid communications strategies and plans while serving as a benchmark to measure success.

CREATE THE STORY – MAKE IT REAL Most chief executives under-

stand the value of investor relations, media relations and external affairs.

They are well versed in messaging that is aimed at these key stakehold-

Most chief executives validate their decisions by data – they need empirical evidence and measurable effect. ers and usually prioritise this stakeholder activity above all others. This is very much warranted in almost all situations. The important point is a consistent and aligned story across all

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media and all stakeholders. Consistency is an important element to build trust and confidence. This has become severely tested recently, with many chief executives making bold assertions six months ago that no longer seem valid. How do you counter this apparent inconsistency? By agreeing a story that explains the context; the rationale; what has changed and why.

This must be completely consistent in its application – with no deviation. It must be repeated proactively at every opportunity – it is time to go on the offensive, not the defensive. This is certainly true of internal employees – while the story you use with external stakeholders will be high level, your internal stakeholders will expect and want more, and they will need more face time. They will need the opportunity to ask the difficult questions; they will want to know more with real depth. Internal audiences are more discerning; they can spot inaccuracies, untruths and inconsistencies a long way off. They need to be addressed with simple, honest and direct dialogue – they can be a chief executive’s biggest allies or biggest detractors. It is best to be in the former, not the latter.

Photo: private

EXCEPTIONAL PR DOES NOT MAKE GOOD INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS Regurgitating a media release internally and placing it on your intranet is not good internal communications. The sooner your chief executive knows this, the better. During significant periods and under pressure, chief executives will need to spend more time with their internal audiences – especially their leadership teams. This will need to be agreed clearly upfront with your chief executive as time will become even more precious when business pressure mounts. A plan of scheduled activity

is key; an agreed, timetabled approach makes a difference.

A series of informal discussion sessions is also important: a view of the world at large from the mouth of the chief executive makes a big difference. Having a clearly articulated, visual strategic direction and priorities helps employees ap-

A series of informal discussion sessions is also important: a view of the world at large from the mouth of the chief executive makes a big difference. preciate, when the pressure is mounting, that the company has a future, as does the senior leadership team. Relentless and continuous reinforcement of these strategic goals helps restore confidence.

CREDIBILITY UPHELD While living by these guidelines serves the corporate communicator well in quieter times, they become increasingly vital when the environment gets more challenging. In stormy waters, anchor your approach to the solidity of your business’s strategy and your chief executive’s motivation. But embrace the change that has to happen as the external context shifts.

Simone Niven Know why and how that Global Head of Corporate Communications, Rio Tinto change will affect what you Group have said before; be able to explain it; and go to greater lengths to do so.

As new challenges emerge, and pressures on time and decision making intensify, keep the evidence to support your campaigns at your fingertips, so you can Simone Niven is global head of corporate communications for push them through to best the diversified and multinationeffect. Engaging your workal mining and resources group force must remain at the top RioTinto, a position she took of the list. Now more than up earlier this year. Prior to that, she was head of internal ever, employees need to hear communications at Vodafone their leaders’ voices, and see UK. She began her career in their faces. Employees’ supcommunications in 1993 as a port will provide the power communications officer at the Grains Research and Developthe leadership needs to steer ment Corporation. A graduate the business through the of the University of Canberra, maelstrom, with its reputaAustralia, she has lived and worked in Sydney and London. tion intact.

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REFUELLING FAITH IN THE MOTOR CITY J. Christopher Preuss recently became GM’s vice president communications. His new challenges include positioning a fresh CEO and dealing with the world’s biggest ever industrial bankruptcy.

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In the course of the global financial crisis, GM experienced a change of CEO, when Rick Wagoner was replaced by Fritz Henderson. What was the GM’s communications procedure to make the transition between the two as smooth as possible, and how was Henderson positioned?

That was just one of those things that you knew might happen, but you never knew if it really would happen. When we got news that Henderson was going to be CEO and that Wagoner was out, it was literally a minute’s notice. It 04/2009

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should be known that there was forethought given to this – you know, what would happen if… The good news is that he was positioned right away. We worked to make sure the terminology of how Henderson was positioned was strong. Words such as ‘Interim CEO’ could not be used. He had to be given a fair shake to go. We

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Interview: Richard Morgan

very aggressively moved to get him positioned, first with the internal audience, to keep as much equilibrium inside, and secondly, as was our strategy for most of the bankruptcy, we were extremely proactive to keep the microphone. We didn’t want commentators and pundits making the calls here. He needed to be out there on a message of accountability and transparency, and we immediately worked aggressively to get him out there. I would say he has put in more communicating time than any other CEO I’ve seen, because of this burden of transparency based on how the bailouts and assistance went.

Was this an unprecedented experience for you, dealing with such huge change at this speed?

I think it’s unprecedented for anybody. We tried to look at other case studies and other issues that had this much focus. The tough thing for GM was that we were the second wave of the government-sponsored assistance bailouts. It was very hard to pin blame or to really vent frustration at this amorphous bank situation where the personalities weren’t well known and there’s lots of complicated financial derivatives and nobody’s really sure what happened. But when GM and the three CEOs got there, well, those guys we all know, and so GM was a very identifiable place for the national angst to be laid. I would argue that, as much heat as we probably deserved, we took a disproportional amount of the negativity in the overall debate for the bailout on behalf of the banks and everything else just because people had such a familiarity with us. That certainly made our situation much tougher to manage. The hangover of that is going to be with us for a long time, and the fact is there is no clever communications scheme you’re going

to throw up that’s going to get you through this. The only thing that gets you through it is results, very careful calculating in terms of how and what you’re communicating, and intuitiveness – you just have to keep going at it. We will be overly transparent and aggressive on what we communicate, simply because we owe that to the public.

GM has also laid off thousands of workers. How have you worked with the CEOs to try and lessen the blow and keep up morale with the employees who were staying on?

The difficulty with all of this has been the emotional hole.

Many of us have parted with colleagues and friends that we’ve known for decades. The first set of cuts were basically a great opportunity to get people you probably wouldn’t want to move forward with anyway off the books. The second wave of cuts was cutting into people that have great skills, people you really like very much, but now you’re going to have to part with them. The third wave of cuts, you’re basically letting go people who you wouldn’t part with under any circumstances unless you were forced to – they were excellent professionals. Henderson had to manage that and keep the business on track. He needed to be mindful of the fact that the internal burden here was bigger than the external burden. The external message was that people saw us taking the tough medicine that was necessary to right the business. That was actually a positive message. People

There is no clever communications scheme you’re going to throw up that’s going to get you through this. wanted to see that the business was going to fundamentally change, and that there was accountability and cost reduction. Internally, it was devastating. We’ve had to have a very strong communications plan using internal tools, like the blogs, using web chats, doing town hall meetings, consistent update calls from Henderson, Henderson engaging one-on-one in these different forms we gave him. He’s got to do the work; we can’t have other people doing it for him.

It’s a big burden on him, a big time commitment. If you had 20 hours a day, it would be impossible to show everything he needs to do in a day just running the business, let alone the time he commits to the communications side.

How effective have the internal social media tools like the GM workers’ blog been? How can they affect the dynamic between the workforce and the top management?

We have a couple of different employee blogs and very 04/2009

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active dialogue going on with employees. It’s a great place for them to vent, a place where success can be shared, and a great place for Henderson to engage directly with employees. He does web chats at least a couple of times a month with employees, as well as with the outside world. He loves those because he can give immediate responses. One risk in a social media space with a CEO is their time burden. We cannot, and will not, fabricate answers. He’s got to answer his own stuff.

That’s a guiding rule we have here. If you start the conversation, you’re obligated to finish it and participate in it – the worst thing you can do is start a conversation and then walk away from it.

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Fritz Henderson, current General Motors CEO.

Rick Wagoner, former CEO of General Motors.

Carl-Peter Forster, General Motors Group Vice President and President, General Motors Europe.

Photos: General Motors Company

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How much CEO consultation is involved when planning and delivering communication through social media channels? Is everything regulated by the leadership, or does it give the communications team more of a free rein?

We have a tremendous amount of trust from our management here. I would say the one great thing about going through what we’ve had to go through, particularly on the intensity of the bankruptcy, is that there has been this release of energy on the proactive good news side. We’re finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The staffs are so energised to be doing proactive things versus completely being on our heels in defence mode, that there’s all kind of things we’re incubating right now.

It’s quite an energised environment. The good news for us will be that if success begins to develop underneath the business plan, our goal right now is to position our tools and our conservation so that when success does come we get the maximum benefit from that in terms of helping shape the culture inside the company as well as to help reshape the customer experience outside the company.

With social media, our ability to do that is huge. One part of the realignments of the new GM was to combine marketing, vehicle design and communications in the one unit under Bob Lutz [GM vice chairman, marketing and communications]. I have no less access to the CEO, and I talk to Henderson every single day, but by aligning strategically under one hat we have the ability to bridge the chasm between marketing and communications, and advertising and communications, especially in the social media space. It’s become infinitely easier, and we’re far more integrated than we ever were. We’re putting far more forethought into how we’re doing things. I have as much influence and say on what’s happening in advertising as I do in the communications space, which is something we’ve never had before.

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Do you think it could be Henderson’s individual personality that will make or break the current GM situation?

When you get into this situation in any company, when credibility is completely gone – and let’s face it, our credibility is gone – you have this catastrophic bulk of failure.

Credibility is in short supply. The only thing we have to trade on is the credibility and the personal respect of the CEO. It’s squarely on his shoulders, and Henderson knew that going in. That’s an enormous burden to wear, but that’s the only place credibility was left, and you have to work with what you have.

In times of crisis, CEOs are usually highly visible. They become the public face of the company. How do you deal with this high level of public scrutiny?

There are instances where you have companies that are very strong that don’t have a highly visible CEO, but I would still argue in most cases, particularly in the auto industry, this has traditionally been an industry dominated by big personalities. The difficulty in prepping someone like Henderson is to have not just what they’re saying thought out, but how they’re saying it. Because we’re in this very pluralistic society now. The fact for GM is that most of our future success will come by appealing to youth, the 18 to 30-year-olds now, understanding that we’ve lost so many people based on previous experience.

Using somebody like Henderson, who personifies on an outward level a middle-aged white male in a very diverse and pluralistic environment, is something you have to be mindful of. But the biggest lesson for anybody in this case has been that they need to be authentic. You can’t try to create a CEO into somebody he’s not. People will smell that out immediately.

Can a communication director impose any sort of image on a CEO even though that public image would not necessarily reflect the CEO’s real character and abilities?

I wouldn’t advise it! I can only imagine the PR guy over at Microsoft trying to tell Steve Ballmer how he needed to act at the employee meeting. He is who he is. He is what people like or dislike about him. When you have a CEO who is likeable, like Henderson, it’s a huge advantage. The other big personality here is Bob Lutz. He’s a bigger than life automotive fun time 77-year-old. Actually, he’s out racing his Cadillac today against a bunch of journalists in New York.

Guys like Lutz make it so easy because people love the personality. They’re drawn to it. We’ve been juxtaposing Lutz’s persona on one side to Henderson’s, and we actually manage them together. They each play a very distinct role for how

The difficulty with all of this has been the emotional hole. Many of us have parted with colleagues and friends that we’ve known for decades. we shape the image and the believability of the company. If you’re dealing with a CEO who’s not a strong personality or very likeable, you have to respond to that. But to try and take somebody who’s known as a killer and paint a smile on their face, put a flower on their lapel and stick them out there, I don’t think it’s going to pass muster.

You’ve recently moved from VP communications for GM Europe (GME) to VP global communications for GM. How long did it take you to get acquainted with the working style of a new CEO? It’s taken some time. I’ve been back about three months now, and I would say now I feel like I’ve got the confidence of Henderson and it’s comfortable. I did not have the advantage of having worked around him in other assignments at GM, but his style and my style are very similar: both a little impatient, very direct, tend to want to act quickly. So on that count, we got along very well on a personal level. It’s taken some time to understand his exact style, though: what he’s willing to do, what he’s good at, what he needs to develop.

Any CEO has to have confidence in the persons advising them, and there’s no tighter advisor than someone who is handling his reputation internally and externally. That trust is developing quickly, but it’s still a work in progress.

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I don’t think you can put a formula to that. I think it’s a very personal thing. It’s not about time, it’s a fit – and it’s either going to be there, or it’s not. The trust in the relationship develops over time, and the more time, the more trust. But you have to have a rapport with the CEO. If you don’t, that trust cannot develop – there’s always suspicion or second-guessing. Then it’s doomed to fail.

So there has to be some element of a personal relationship as well as a professional one?

Absolutely. There has to be a trust and respect for the intuitive side of the business, for the gut call. Communications is not like engineering, where you can write a formula to it. The reality is that you might have three or four very different ways to get an equally satisfying result, and how you choose to go down a path is somewhat subjective. The CEO has to trust that the person making those calls knows what they’re doing. Even if the calls are right, though, if that trust is not there, I would submit that it’s going to be a difficult relationship to develop.

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While in Europe, you worked under Carl-Peter Forster, GME’s president and chairman of the Opel Supervisory Board. How did you handle the situation of positioning Forster when the interests of GM’s headquarters might have been different, for example regarding levels of positivity about the proposed sale of Opel?

In the German situation, I had to learn very quickly, although I had good help, good advisors and some great staff members there. The situation for Forster was very tenuous; he wasn’t just having to navigate this personally as to where he might end up, based on how the disposition of Opel was executed. He also had to bridge this chasm that was being developed politically between the works councils of Germany and their head of Detroit management. So here’s Forster, who answers to Detroit management, but needs to keep the workforce in Germany engaged in working through a very turbulent period. It was really a no win situation for him.

He was basically sitting in the middle of a triangle. At one point, he had the entire German political system and his stature as a known business leader, and therefore by default a political influencer in Germany. The second point was the works council labour unions, the German working relationships and him running a German company. And on the other point was the Detroit leadership, who were expecting results and loyalty through a very difficult political battle. It didn’t matter whether he was trying to work it through with labour councils – that would make the people in Detroit suspicious. If he was working with the political system, it 04/2009

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made the works council suspicious.

So there was this dynamic constant going on, a very difficult situation to manage.

How did you work to communicate him through that situation successfully?

I had to defer very much to what his personal leanings were, because it was ultimately his personal reputation that was going to suffer the most. GM and Opel would go on, but Forster the individual was going to have to find a place after all of this. My approach was to defer to his comfort levels on what he would and would not engage in, and in this case the decision was: let’s lay low.

The more he inserted himself visibly, the more dangerous it got. So we

My approach was to defer to his comfort levels on what he would and would not engage in. deferred to using blogs, and we used the chief negotiator, John Smith out of Detroit, who could come into the political setting in Germany and take the heat. They expected to have a Detroit guy, but it took the heat off Forster. Meanwhile, we let Forster speak almost exclusively to the product launches, very much in industry forums, very much focusing on him as the guy running the business, and the guy in the turmoil of trying to negotiate a complex international business deal. That was fairly effective, but I can’t say it was a total victory. In hindsight I might have pushed harder to have him do some things differently, but again, I couldn’t push him out of what was his personal comfort level – in this case, there was so much personally on the line.

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Photo: General Motors

Having worked extensively in Europe and the US, what would you say are the differences in the relationship between CEOs and communication directors on the two continents? Which place provided the sterner challenge?

It was difficult for me in Europe because the cultural differences made that trust factor harder to develop.

That’s not to say Forster and I didn’t have great trust – I think we did on a professional level – but he obviously knows that I’m not going to think and react like a typical German would. And so I would rely on a colleague, Frank Klass, who was very close to Forster, to help manage that part of his repertoire. In the US, with a lot of things, I wouldn’t even think about it, I would just make calls. These became very much question marks to me when I was in the European environment, where what my intuition was telling me might not play out the way it would here. And so I needed to be much more cautious, and I think effective communications, by and large, for as much theory as you out behind it, becomes something of an intuitive business. It’s something you either understand and know how to do well, or you don’t.

What did you do to encourage the bosses at GME to develop their online presence?

We launched a GME branding conversations blog, which was basically Forster and the leadership’s blogs base. We had the employee blogs, and we started introducing more in the way of web chats and that type of thing, but the big problem here is language. That’s the inhibitor. You can do this by country culture, but even in the case of Opel, you have a German dominated organisation which is where the hub of all the ac-

tivity was, and yet some of our biggest employee populations were Spain, Italy, Belgium and the UK. You couldn’t just put out a web chat or a blog and expect to get broad participation. Worse yet, we have blogs that we translate,

GM is in a unique situation... We owe a measure of accountability that’s not present for most other companies, and everything we say and do gets scrutinised. and you get people in the conversation using three or four different languages. I think the cultural and language issues are as big a challenge as any for European social media activities.

Finally, what influence, if any, does a communication director have over the business decisions made by his/her CEO? Well, like I said, this has been the great change here. We do have a full seat at the table with the marketing advertising mix, so many of the consumer facing, marketing based decisions we get to directly participate in. Secondly, GM is in a unique situation because of our obligation to the taxpayers in the US and Canada. We owe a measure of accountability that’s not present for most other companies, and therefore everything we say and do gets scrutinised, from how we do entertainment programmes for dealers and media, to how we’re going to make finanJ. Christopher Preuss cial statements. So we have Vice President Communications, General Motors a very keen sense of how something we do here might play on the outside, relative to the taxpayers. We’re basically in almost all the decisions right now. I can’t say we influence by saying ‘take this business decision because you’ll get better press than if you make that busiJ. Christopher Preuss has been vice president, communications ness decision’. That’s not a for General Motors since Auway to run a company. But in gust 2009. In this position, he terms of being at the table to directs all external and internal understand, anticipate and communications activities for the global carmaker. Preuss plan for how business decipreviously served as VP comsions are going to impact the munications for GM Europe, image of the company, we’re a position he had held since February 2008. right there.

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INFORMANT TO THE CEO The increasingly important relationship between the communications function and the company’s CEO underpins stakeholder engagement strategies.

by Rossella Gambetti and Stefania Romenti

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rom recent research conducted on Italian firms, it emerges that the function of communication, and particularly the role of its director, are acquiring more and more importance in the organisational structure of the firms. In particular, two indicators show the importance that communication officers are gaining in the strategic management of 04/2009

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Italian organisations. First, in 78 per cent of Italian companies, the communication manager is a corporate communication officer (CCO), thus reporting to the CEO in most cases. Second, 61 per cent of Italian communication managers see their proposals taken seriously or very seriously into account by their top management and their CEO .

In the context of this evolution, we can argue that the CCO covers a more strategic role in the decisional processes of the executive committee of the company than in the past. In particular, the capacity to analyse and to interpret the social environment represents the crucial component of the strategic role of the CCO that may enhance the corporate decision making processes of the top management.

More specifically, the ability of the CCO to engage the company’s stakeholders through coordination of message exchanges within the company and ongoing, interactive and transparent management and communication of social performances, rooted in the core values of the company and aimed at fostering relationships with key constituencies as a proactive response to the social environment expectations, leverages and enhances the function of the CCO and his relationship with the CEO. In particular, the application

of a stakeholder engagement process causes the CCO to act as:

- a key informant of the CEO, who has a deep knowledge of both the social context and the needs of the company’s stakeholders and is able to report them to the CEO and have them included in the corporate decision making processes to boost the company’s alignment with the society’s requirements; - a strategic advisor to the CEO, as well as to other directors of business functions where communication plays a key role (for example HR, marketing and finance) in order to guarantee systematic, synergic and consistent messages inside the company and toward its external environment; - a specialised manager, capable of both coordinating the communication planning and control process and integrating all communication activities and tools so as to obtain maximum consistency in corporate image and to enhance corporate reputation, acting thus as the reputation manager of the company on behalf of the CEO.

THE STRATEGIC DECISION MAKING PROCESSES Analysis

and interpretation of the context in which the organisation moves have become crucial due to the enlargement of the social profile of the company, in terms of both the increase of its stakeholders and the urgency and pressure of their requests.

Research on the context enables the CCO to contribute to strategic corporate decision making by nurturing it through the collection of information and then by supporting the shaping of the choice options.

Through these activities, the communication director supports the CEO in the formulation of strategies and processes that can cope with

the dynamics of the social context and with stakeholders’ expectations, rather than simply taking into account the company’s unique interests. This facilitates the legitimisation of the company in its environment, enabling it to maintain its license to operate over the long term.

ENGAGEMENT OF KEY STAKEHOLDERS The main strategic contribution of the CCO is to support corporate decision making processes that are aligned with the evolution of the social context. This contribution is deeply

The main strategic contribution of the CCO is to support corporate decision making processes that are aligned with the evolution of the social context. strengthened by the activation of stakeholder engagement processes. Indeed, if the communication officer adopts a stakeholder engagement approach, rather than focusing on stakeholder relationship management, he/she can support the company in seizing a greater number of opportunities and therefore increase the effectiveness of its governance model.

Stakeholder relationship management conceives the relationships with stakeholders as a goal of the company rather than as a means to reach common ends. In this way the company considers the management of relationships according to a buffering perspective, in order to defend its own license to operate and to guarantee a constant flow of resources crucial to its survival. The adoption of this perspective results in a limit to the ability of the company to build authentic bridges with its key stakeholders to reach common ends.

For these reasons, the company should shift from a logic of stakeholder relationship management to one of stakeholder engagement, in order to develop relationships based on deep collaboration and sharing of responsibilities with key stakeholders in the daily running of the business.

Through stakeholder engagement, the company widens its strategic abilities, such as listening as well as meeting constituents’ expectations, which support competitive advantage and create sustainable value for the community.

We can conclude by saying that stakeholder engagement emphasises the strategic contribution that communication gives to the management of organisations. In other words, this means that by activating and supporting processes of stakeholder engagement, the CCO demonstrates what kind of value has been created for the organisation and so 04/2009

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contributes to the enforcement of a trustful relationship with the CEO.

CO-DECISIONS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ADVOCATES

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To be functional to the attainment of business goals, stakeholder engagement should activate co-decisional processes, build partnerships and stimulate supporting behaviours by stakeholders. The results consist of shared choices that satisfy stakeholders’ expectations. The most appropriate tools of co-decision are ad hoc stakeholder meetings and multi-stakeholder workshops where participants discuss strategic corporate social responsibility topics such as the measures to be adopted for environment protection, the definition of codes of conduct and policies of human resources management, and philanthropic actions to be developed.

Building partnerships means working together with stakeholders to think up and plan new business solutions.

Some examples include: the development of partnerships with suppliers for joint research projects, the development of joint solutions to reduce the consumption of energy resources in the production process, the limited use of fuels for the distribution of products, or the increase in the use of recyclable materials for packaging. Further examples encompass educational projects made in partnership with suppliers to teach consumers how to make a proper use of product packaging. Finally, stimulating supporting behaviours consists of transforming stakeholders into real advocates for the projects of the organisation and mobilising them in a favourable direction. For instance, in some Italian firms employees have been activated as supporters who spread the new core values in the whole organisation and stimulate their concrete application in their daily activities.

The following case of the French Air Liquide Group offers a significant example of a company whose governance model is based on a stakeholder engagement approach in which communication plays a strategic role and the communication officer takes part in the basic decision making processes, supporting the CEO by coordinating the management and the communication of all the main corporate social behaviours of the company, considered as primary communication tools of corporate citizenship.

CORPORATE SOCIAL PERFORMANCE The European Air Liquide Group, operating in the public utilities sector, is the world leader in gasses for industry, health and the environmental. Its leadership, beyond factors like constant innovation and superior financial performance 04/2009

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in the long run, is especially due to its stakeholder engagement strategy based on respect for social, societal and environmental responsibilities as well as on talent development in many countries.

The effort towards engagement of key stakeholders starts with a strategic communication tool, the mission statement of Air Liquide, whose main goal is to “anticipate the challenges facing current and future markets worldwide and deliver sustainable progress for customers, employees and shareholders, thanks to innovation, know-how and performance over the long term”.

Beyond general goals, stakeholder engagement is evident in the group’s overall conduct, which is a primary communication dimension.

In 2006, the group formalised its principles of action in a code of conduct, a strategic document available in 16 languages, communicating its approach to all key stakeholders (customers, personnel, suppliers,

We can conclude by saying that stakeholder engagement emphasises the strategic contribution that communication gives to the management of organisations. partners and local communities).

Moreover, the group’s subsidiaries are encouraged to implement local codes of conduct. This decentralised approach combines respect for local customs and regulations, the ethical commitment of the group to respecting the regulations concerning its economic activity, as well as the application of moral principles such as social rights and the fight against discrimination and harassment. In addition, in 2007, a group’s

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY CCOs and stakeholder engagement The function of the communications director is taking on increased importance in complex organisations.

The CCO’s ability to engage stakeholders enhances the function of the CCO and the relationship with the CEO. The CCO informs the CEO of stakeholders’ needs and expectations.

Reporting to the CEO, the CCO oversees integration of comms tools and activites, thus acting as the company’s reputation manager.

ethics officer was appointed. He is responsible for providing advice and assistance to the entities in applying their codes of conduct and he handles all the questions submitted by employees on implementing these codes of conduct, thus acting as a fundamental reputation ambassador of the group with a strategic communication function.

Photos: private

SOCIAL AND HUMAN COMMITMENT Social and human com-

mitment is another ongoing concern in Air Liquide’s stakeholder engagement strategy. In this regard, the Air Liquide Foundation, created in April 2008, is aimed at encouraging and developing projects in the 75 countries in which the group operates in the following fields: the environmental field; the health and respiration field; and the area of micro initiatives. Moreover, the Air Liquide Group has increasingly demonstrated its commitment in the human, social and societal areas, including specific performance indicators related to those aspects in the group annual

report. This commitment, translated into an ongoing stakeholder engagement approach, is based on different company actions that benefit its key stakeholders. In particular, as regards employees, there are four basic pillars featuring the group’s human resources policy: diversity, training, remuneration and participation.

CONCLUSION Therefore, corporate communication plays a strategic role in the Air Liquide Group’s stakeholder engagement strategy both by regularly transferring the value created by the company on multiple markets and by creating value itself through building and fostering relationships with key stakeholders that consolidate corporate reputation. Accordingly, the communication officer takes part in strategic decision making processes, by: - developing and coordinating the relationships with key stakeholders and reporting their needs and expectations to the board of directors, acting as a key informant of the CEO; - taking part in the management process of corporate social responsibility performance; - taking full responsibility for the corporate communication process and managing communication tools consistent with the corporate values so as to enhance corporate reputation.

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Prof. Rossella Gambetti Assistant Professor of Corporate Communications, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan

Dr. Rossella Gambetti is assistant professor of corporate communication at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy, where she teaches corporate communication economics and techniques and international communication.

Gambetti is Editor-in-Chief of Communicative Business, the first Italian scholarly peerreviewed journal focused on current research topics related to corporate communication theory and practice.

Prof. Stefania Romenti Assistant Professor of Corporate Communication, IULM University, Milan

Dr. Stefania Romenti is assistant professor of corporate communication at IULM University, Milan, Italy, where she teaches public relations at the Feltre branch.

She is a delegate for public relations and communication measurement of FERPI, the Italian Association of PR Professionals. Her fields of interest inlcude, among others, public relations measurement and corporate reputation management.

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BOOKS Communications Reader

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s the old saying – a favourite of wise old relatives – goes, “you should never judge a book by its cover”. Luckily, this reviewer learned that lesson at an early age and was not immediately discouraged by this book’s very uninspiring, textbook-style cover, took a deep breath, and waded into the deep and often murky waters of discourse analysis.

This tome sets out to gather together some of the latest studies in discourse and business communication and other fields, as well as to present a variety of multidisciplinary approaches and a number of representative pers-

88 NEW APPROACHES TO DISCOURSE AND BUSINESS COMMUNICATION EDITED BY FERNANDO RAMALLO, ANXO M. LORENZO, XOÁN PAULO RODRIGUEZ-YÁÑEZ AND PIOTR CAP PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, AUGUST 2009 04/2009

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pectives to the different traditions, both theoretical and methodological, that characterise this subject. On reading the introduction, it seemed certain this aim would be achieved, although the use of complex insider language made it a constant battle to decipher exactly what was under discussion, and why that would be relevant, unless the reader happened to have spent a large chunk of his or her academic life investigating these issues already.

The book itself is set out in an accessible manner, grouping all of the essays on the same subject, which creates a sense of natural progression. After Piotr Cap’s introduction, there are eight chapters dealing with general representation, and the book ends with five chapters focusing on various kinds of representation within organisations. These are bridged by two chapters which offer more insight into how interactional strategies are important within the context of an organisation’s global image, using examples from Asia (Japan and Thailand) and South America (Brazil).

CLOUDED IN TECHNICAL JARGON Although the

messages are often clouded in technical jargon, almost as if to obscure the true meaning of the chapters from those who are seen as outsiders to the field of discourse studies, there are several standout chapters which are just about accessible enough for anyone to understand and even enjoy. Paul Bick writes an impressive chapter on how Adbusters, the anti-consumerist magazine, has attempted to subvert the corporate image of McDonald’s, analysing in great depth one of their satirical images, and how it turns traditional McDonald’s slogans and images against them to create an advert that seems, on first glance, as if it came straight from the McDonald’s marketing team. Contributor U-maporn Kardkarnklai also grabs the attention with an interesting analysis of how Thai and Japanese business professionals manage to avoid professional conflict in the workplace, using a mixture of ‘non-task talk’ – to soften potential disagreement and create an easygoing atmosphere – and repeated use of the ‘soft no’. There are several other moderately interesting chapters in this collection, but Bick and Kardkarnklai’s efforts are the most accessible and interesting.

This book is most likely perfectly pitched at its target audience, but it is very hard to judge fairly unless you are an academic in that field. If you are not backed up by years of study in this area, or have an intense passion for the subjects covered, it will prove quite demanding to mine the potentially valuable lessons that are hidden beneath the surface of the almost unintelligible language used in many parts of this collection. Neil Cranswick

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broadcasters provide a profoundly distorted picture of our world. We are convinced that the increasingly centralised, corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests.” So it goes on.

It is worth mentioning here that the convictions of the two Davids probably contrast completely with the beliefs of at least 95 per cent of Communication Director’s readers. In fact, if you communicate for a large company or PR agency, chances are that these two men hate you, your firm, and everything you both stand for. For while the bile in this book is directed at the media’s biased reporting of events, much of the content derives from the authors’ opposition to the increasingly corporate nature of the press.

NEWSPEAK IN THE 21ST CENTURY DAVID EDWARDS AND DAVID CROMWELL PLUTO PRESS, AUGUST 2009

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hese days, most of us take the idea of freedom of the press for granted.

We also generally assume that our journalists are honest, hard-working folk who are relaying us the news without being under any sort of influence from higher powers. According to writers David Edwards and David Cromwell, though, nothing could be further from the truth. In that regard, Newspeak in the 21st Century proves a real eye-opener.

The book’s two authors are veteran media commentators, and are co-editors of the Media Lens project, which they describe as “a response based on our conviction that mainstream newspapers and

JUSTIFIED ANGER These are two angry men, that much is certain. But do they have a point? Are household names such as the BBC really sacrificing objectivity by putting out messages tainted by the self-serving elite? On this evidence, the answer would appear to be a resounding yes. This is a frank and damaging exposé of mass media.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to criticising coverage of the Iraq war and, of course, the war itself. The authors make a number of thought provoking points, particularly on how we readily take as fact statements made by western leaders and governments, while at the same time naturally assuming that declarations made by the likes of Iran must be devious and false. Other sections deal with the media’s approach to climate change and eastern powers, and there is a particularly fiery chapter devoted to the BBC’s lack of objectivity that will certainly raise a few eyebrows.

But the book is not without its problems. For starters, the authors frequently slate lines taken by the mass media while automatically taking as fact the points made by people they happen to agree with. Secondly, they criticise newspapers like the Independent – which devotes a lot of time to discussing issues like climate change – for running certain corporate adverts. Is it hypocritical for the Independent to wax lyrical about the climate when it is frequently carrying adverts for various car and travel groups? Probably, but how else would the paper survive if it wasn’t selling advertising? Ultimately, though, this is a highly original, and at times darkly humorous, account that everyone with an interest in the media should read.

Most will take its message with a hefty pinch of salt, but a few might just learn that the press may not be as free as they previously thought it was. Richard Morgan 04/2009

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European Association of Communication Directors

EACD EVENT OVERVIEW The EACD has had a very busy end to the year, providing numerous events to its members and other communication professionals across the continent.

EACD Anniversary: Regaining Trust Conference Brussels

EACD Anniversary Reception & Discussion Brussels

November 12 – 13

November 12

About the event

The EACD hosted a two-day conference on the biggest challenge facing communications professionals today: regaining trust. It featured a mix of best case presentations, workshops, keynote speeches and several working group meetings.

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second semester of regional debates over November and the beginning of December, giving members a chance to experience interesting and thought provoking discussions in their own countries, as well as exciting networking opportunities. Below is an overview of some of the events the EACD has organised to end the year.

About the event

The EACD hosted its traditional anniversary reception and panel discussion at BNP Paribas Fortis. This year’s discussion centred around the subject of the Internet as a reputation trap, and how organisations can use social media to their benefit.

Maximising Communications in the Era of Distracted Media Zürich

Social Media: Changing Communications One Blog at a Time Lisbon

Communication Directors & Headhunters Madrid

October 14 at ABB

November 10 at Portugal Telecom

November 11 at Dircom

About the event

About the event

About the event

The presentations in Zürich focused on how to spread your message to a media largely preoccupied with the financial crisis.

The presentations were aimed at helping the audience to understand and use social media to their benefit.

There were presentations from:

Held in cooperation with Dircom, this event showed communication professionals how best to interact with headhunters. The speakers included:

Sara Batalha, MTW Portugal Luis Rasquilha, Ayr Consulting, Nuno Veiga, Webdote Digital Communication Nuno Costa, Identidade Digital

Julio Moreno, Korn Ferry International Luis Murillo, Odgers Berndtson Sara Bieger, Leaders Trust International Juan Manuel Cendoya, Banco Santander Xabier Olazábal, Publicis Dialog Spain

Médard Schoenmaeckers, Syngenta

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Wolfram Eberhardt, ABB

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Photos: Albrecht Noack; Holger Werth; Syngenda; ABB

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he EACD is ending 2009 on a high, with a host of events taking place across Europe. As well as the EACD anniversary conference and reception in Brussels, the association is also hosting its

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Communications: The Great Border Crosser Copenhagen

Social Media: Yesterday,Today, & Tomorrow Belgrade November 17 at Erste Bank and US Philippe Borremans, Steel Serbia Van Marcke Group

About the event The event examined how to maximise the use of social media, both in the present and in the future.

Dragan Varagic,

November 19 at Lundbeck

About the event The event discussed how organisations communicate across international borders, both from a company and a governmental perspective.

Michael Vedsø, DG Communication

P2 Internet

Today’s Challenges,Tomorrow’s Rewards Tallinn

Social Media: Streamlining Internal Communications Paris

November 19 at Taevas Ogilvy

November 24 at Alcatel-Lucent

Upgrading your Communication Tools Bucharest

About the event This regional debate looks at the challenges of building and maintaining relationships with journalists. The speakers will include:

About the event The presentations in Paris will look at how social media impacts upon internal communications.

Communicating Environmental Issues Helsinki

Rasmus Kagge, ETV and Radio KUKU Kair Käsperi, Taevas Ogilvy Rein Iida, Taevas Ogilvy

Photos: private (2); Mattel; private; Alcatel-Lucent; private (3); ING; private

Christian Schultz, Mattel

Caroline Guillaumin, Abhinav Kumar, Alcatel-Lucent Tata Consultancy Services

Branding: For Better or For Worse Houten

OTHER DATES

November 26 at Holcim

December 2 at Kemira

Communicating Russia Across the Globe Moscow December 4 at SUN InBev

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November 26 at ASPA

About the event The event in Houten will feature several presentations, followed by a panel discussion, on the subject of branding and rebranding, with a specific focus on the experiences of Dutch organisations.

Fiona Atighi, Ministry of General Affairs

Marc Cloosterman, VIM Group

Monique Opdam, ING

Koenraad van Hasselt, Reputation Matters

For more details about the events on these pages, as well as for new events (which are being added regularly), please check the EACD website.

EACD Members can download presentations from the regional debates from the Knowledge Pool section of the website.

The site also contains up to date event listings, as well as event and association information and registration details: www.eacd-online.eu

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LIVING WITH WEB 2.0, PREPARING FOR WEB 3.0 The Evaluation Working Group held a meeting in St. Emilion in early October which revealed one truth in particular: professional communicators must understand that the world is constantly changing and that everyone’s a communicator now… it’s the era of citizen communicators!

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ife as we know it is a lot different than a few years ago, when the first Web 2.0 conferences were held. The term Web 1.0 is often used to describe the Internet of the nineties and the early part of the 20th century – one where you fired up your browser to look for information that was put out for general consumption. Then along came Web 2.0, with its huge babble of opinion and counter opinion – and therein lies 04/2009

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READY TO LISTEN The message coming from the St. Emilion workshop is that all communicators must be ready to listen and learn if they are to harness the power and avoid the pitfalls of today’s Internet. For example, B2B forums have been known to influence government policy, but such forums often contain contributions from jobseekers or students, so not all voices carry an equal weight. Furthermore, you can not monitor the whole Internet (even Google only watches three to five per cent of the total). During the workshop, Jens Schuemann, director of marketing, sales and corporate development at Meta Communication International, commented on the problems encountered by companies trying to monitor what was being said about them. He bemoaned the fact that a simple search for information about a major organisation could produce tens of millions of results

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the problem. How can communicators measure effectively? The old certainties of print media such as circulation, page size, the writer’s reputation, etc., are of limited relevance. Not that all opinions carry equal weight – investigative blogs like the Huffington Post may be regarded by some observers as being of equal importance as the New York Times, while others can be safely consigned to your recycle bin. Jeff Archambault, vice president of communications at Euro Disney Associés and EACD regional coordiantor for France, sees communication activity increasingly becoming a two-way dialogue between companies and stakeholders. He says: “We need to prepare ourselves and our companies for this fundamental change in our communication.” The first question to be answered is, therefore, how do we get a grip of Web 2.0 before Web 3.0 comes along?

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TOP TIPS • Be open, encourage your staff to express themselves via blogs and forums.

• For Web 2.0 type communication, use the right tone of voice and be transparent… there are no secrets any more.

• When web watching, achieve a balance between autonomy and abiding by rules.

and did not include major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Schuemann added that products like Google take time to “crawl” the web and are never going to be delivering breaking news. Despite all this, prominent blogs need to be surveyed, and that takes time and a certain amount of experience. The actual process needs to be a balance between automation, using search strings, and human evaluation. Then again, specialist crawlers

KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER • You can not monitor all aspects of the Internet.

• You don’t have to focus only on the most prominent bloggers.

• When it comes to finding content, it is not only speed that counts.

may be required as well as conventional search engines.

As well as watching external activity, the power within an organisation has to be harnessed. As Louis de Schorlemer, the evaluation working group coordinator, says, with Web 2.0, all employees become active spokespersons; there is a need for perfect synchronisation and alignment of all communication vehicles within an organisation.

GROWTH IN TRUST The good news is that there are benefits to be gained by companies that are prepared to make an effort. For example, some companies have experienced a growth in trust and the amount of confidence being placed in them by running open blogs and forums as part of their online presence (e.g. SNCF). That shows that the opportunity to express frustration can lead – paradoxi-

cally – to positive employee emotional engagement.

But it is not just a matter of letting employees blog and monitoring the Internet to see who is saying what about whom; there are certain rules to be followed. For example, an authentic tone of voice is important, and transparency is key, as there are no secrets any more.

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE? Nigel Middlemiss, knowledge director for Echo Research, feels that: “Web 2.0 offers a flexible space for the building and shaping of reputations, where the organisations who win the greatest rewards will be those who understand the importance of what is being said about them, listen carefully and engage appropriately in conversations that matter. Professional research is a key enabling tool for this whole process.” Lucian Sarb, director of Euronews’ news and programmes room, says: “It is essential to integrate audiovisual production and online content.” To put it another way, companies have to learn how to communicate using all of the possible techniques – text, graphics, audio, video and animation. You may not do it, but everyone else will.

FUTURE WEB But what about Web 3.0, now that Web 2.0 has been around for five years or more? Interestingly, Microsoft has just used the 2009 Web 2.0 Summit to announce a deal with Facebook and Twitter to integrate social networking data in its Bing search results. Google responded by announcing a new product, Google Social Search. These are the first tentative steps by the main players. However, based on the views of some industry experts, the only certainty is that no one really knows what the future will bring. Our advice is to capitalise on Web 2.0 – before it goes away.

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WORKING GROUP EVALUATION

The EACD’s evaluation working group explores the use of evaluation, research and measurement in the communications field. It regularly holds calls and meetings, such as the one hosted by group member Yves Robins of Dassault Aviation in St. Emilion, France, on October 1-2.

To join the discussion please contact evaluation@eacdonline.eu

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FUTURE TRENDS IN SCHOOL COMMUNICATION Communication in schools is of vital importance, as it affects our most precious asset: children. But as the methods of communication have evolved a huge amount in the last decade, it is important to rethink how we communicate with the new tools we have.

by David Willows

our stakeholders, however, the more we will feel the pressure to conform to their views. We will be forced to reassess our fundamental values and mission statements – either ditching them or finding new ways to ensure that they ‘envision’ the conversations out there. If we do not, we will become susceptible to the winds of common opinion and potentially lose the pedagogical plot completely.

1. LOSING CONTROL VS LOSING THE PLOT: As social media relentlessly pushes us to become better listeners, to have better conversations and become more flexible, we have had to give up the myth that we can control what people are saying about us. The more airtime we give to 04/2009

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3. FINDING THE NEW IN OLD MEDIA: It is all about new media now – shiny new tools that promise an online, limitless future. And to think, only a few years ago, most of us were content with a brochure and a website that worked! Propelled towards this future, we will do well to reflect on whether traditional print media can still play a role. Today it is irresponsible to think that we will continue to use paper where there

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There may be outlines on the horizon, but the future is still quite vague. Looking back, however, it is easy to see the past. Ten years ago, many of us read The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, and it quickly revolutionised our thinking, forever changing the way we understand communications: stop using jargon, tell it as it is; listen; have conversations and, once and for all, stop seeing customers as the enemy. This now seems to be common sense, and the thesis has become the new business as usual. So, where next? Here are ten initial thoughts to get the conversation going.

2. TELLING THE STORY TO UNDERSTAND THE STORY: This is a simple point really – we can not understand human experience until we tie it to a story.

Without a story, our lives are nothing more than a dislocated, meaningless set of sensory experiences.

The same is true of organisations. They do not have a vision until they have a story, so when it comes to narrating the future of our educational organisations, we can not afford to leave the storyteller outside the boardroom. It will be his or her job to find simplicity in complexity, bring coherence, offer perspective and a common language. All obvious, perhaps, but take a look at the senior management organisational charts of many schools and colleges. The communications director is nowhere to be seen.

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is a credible alternative, but perhaps we should not move too quickly away from print production. A positive future will be one in which we use paper wisely, creatively and with clear focused objectives.

4. DRIVEN BY DATA VS DRIVEN MAD BY IT: We will need to be more target driven and focus our evaluative efforts on more than coverage and content. Measuring inputs, outputs and impact upon the organisation will be required at all levels. As most of us will not have the luxury of a data officer, we are all going to have to learn to improve our analytical skills; asking better, more insightful questions of the work we do; and learning how to tell stories through numbers.

5. THE OLD INTERNAL VS EXTERNAL CHESTNUT: We will find that internal communications will become far more important to us than marketing. This is a bold statement, but think about it: many of us work in organisations where our market appeal is dominated by word of mouth.

So it stands to reason that we should focus on keeping our current customers happy.

6. COMMUNICATIONS AS EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE: The ‘experience architect’ is said to be one of the ten faces of innovation. Starbucks does not simply want to serve you coffee; it wants you to pay for and receive an experience that just happens to include coffee. In the future, our customers are going to be far more demanding in this area. They will be easily bored and distracted, preferring those who communicate something more than just information from a page. So how do you communicate great learning?

7. ADDED VALUE: It seems a simple thing, but I believe that it is not for most of us. Most of us are creative enough to enjoy new challenges and to adopt new ideas, but where does this all stop? Is new always better? In the future, I believe we will have to ask far more often those difficult questions about the value of many of our traditional, taken for granted activities. We are also going to have to be prepared to act upon the answers we bring to these questions.

8. CAPTURE THE STUDENT VOICE: I believe that schools and colleges have not yet begun to tap into their own student resources. Working with our own students will become commonplace. We will look more and more to our students to bring us closer to the experience of

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NOTE

Ideas are always borne of conversations, so I am extremely happy to acknowledge those members of the workshop at Case Europe Annual Conference on August 27 2009 (sponsored by Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the European Association of Commuication Directors) who so readily engaged with this subject and provided some helpful direction and critical thinking to my own.

learning, to new ways of telling the story, as well as closer to new communications technologies.

9. WHERE DID ALL THE VOCATION GO? One of the repercussions of a more professionalised industry seems to be the death of vocation. In the future, I believe that one of two things will happen.

We will either have to get used to young professionals joining our teams and then being lured by more lucrative positions; or we are going to have to think of ways to reintroduce the concept of vocation – that sense that we actually make a difference in our work.

10. AND IN THE END: I suspect that over time our jobs will become more demanding, more rigorous and more accountable. We will have to be increasingly creative with our limited budgets, take risks sometimes and learn quickly from our mistakes. If I can look back and say that I have told the story of my school and helped others find their place in that story, then I’d dare to say it was a job well done.

So there you go. Ten briefly stated ideas. Who knows whether they will last the test of time or whether other lines will appear on the horizon? Time will tell, I guess.

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DAVID WILLOWS

David Willows is director of external relations at the International School of Brussels. He has authored a number of books and articles, particularly on education, narrative and knowledge management. He is the founder and editor of the Journal of Innovative Teaching: Imagining the School of the Future.

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WELCOME! The following communicators have joined the EACD

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Elisabet Altin, Global Manager Internal Communication, Volvo Construction Equipment Rob Bagchus, Chief Public Affairs & Public Relations Officer, ECT Delta Terminal Alexandra Bennett, Communications Director, WWF European Policy Office Robin Boon, Group Director Communications, TNT N.V. Astrid Brunini, Press Relations, Société Générale AnaBulgar, Petrom Online Manager, Petrom Ross Butler, Communications Director, European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association Cecilia Carlsdotter, PR & Communications Manager, Panda Security Sweden AB Edel Clancy, Communications Director, Musgrave Group plc Ute Dehn, Communications & PR Leader, GE Money Bank AG Michael Dickstein, Manager Communication & Public Affairs, Heineken Nederland Goran Djordjevic, Marketing & Communications Director, METAL Sistemi d.o.o.

EelcoDubbeling, Executive Director Communications and Public Affairs, Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken Nadica Dujovic, Communications Associate, United Nations Development Programme Irina Dumitrescu, Communications Manager, European Copper Institute Tali Eisenberg-Nissim, Media Director, Kenes Group Kirsten Eskildsen, Chief Communication Officer, Metropolitan University College/Professionshojskolen Metropol Ana Isabel Esteban, Head of Communications and Events, European Vending Association Mario Fetz, Director External Relations, International Diabetes Federation – European Region Roger Frost, Communication Manager, International Organization for Standardization Cecile Garache, Assistant Director / Communications, Ernst & Young Ulrike Julia Gehmacher, Group Public Affairs & Communications Manager, Coca-Cola Hellenic Marianne Grundsøe, Director Communications, Confederation of Danish Industry Christine Hahn, Senior Manager Corporate Branding & Communications, ESK Ceramics Kristin Hetle, Director of Communications, Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion Jane Hogan, Regional Communications Manager, EMEA, ExxonMobil Belgium Julia Kalcheva, Deputy Head of Public Relations, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation PLC David King, Group Marketing & Communications Director, Radley Yeldar Martin de Koning, Corporate Communications Director, Draka Holding Stefan Kumarage Schou, Communications Adviser, Confederation of Danish Industry Hannu-Pekka Laiho, Director for Communications and Resource Development, Finnish Red Cross Bruno Lambin, Head of Section of Communication Project Management, European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation Mark Lammerts, Director Marketing & Communications, TU Delft Marleen Laschet, Communication Manager, VNG Norge AS Sandrine Laurent, Public Affairs and Communications Co-ordinator, Unité de Gestion Pro€Invest Leena Lie, Vice President of Communications, Kemira Oyj Patricia Marques, PR Coordinator, Sonae Sierra Bruno Martins, Spokesman, CP - Comboios de Portugal Maria Antonella Massari, Head of Group Identity & Communications, UniCredit Group Laetitia Maurel, Head of Communications and Social and Environmental Responsibility, Tour Société Générale Valeria Montesoro, Head of Media Relations, BSI SA Ingrid Nienaber, Senior Manager Corporate Media Relations, BASF SE Sean O´Neill, Head of Communications, National Roads Authority Milan Obradovic, Communications Sector Manager, Erste Bank a.d. Novi Sad Ronald Oman, Head of External Relations, Lyxor Asset Management Baptiste van Outryve, Corporate Communication Manager, Thomas Cook Belgium S.A. Gilliane Palmer, Director Corporate Communications, Ideal Standard International Sebastian Petre, Head of CSR Office, Petrom Thomas Portz, Director, Head of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs, Daiichi Sankyo Europe GmbH Corina Ramers, Communications Manager, Lilly Nederland Olivier Remels, Communications Director, Pharma.be Ole Johann Sagafos, Head of Online and internal Communications, Norsk Hydro ASA Thomas Scott, Communications Diretcor EMEA, GE Transportation Simon Sproule, Director Communications, Renault-Nissan Alliance Milica Stefanovic, Corporate Identity, Public Affairs and Communications Manager The Coca-Cola Company Veronika Studer, Communication Manager, Medela AG Gillian Tachibana de Llull, Director E-Media, Merck Sereno International Vladimir Todorovic, External Communication specialist, Erste Bank a.d. Novi Sad Martine Van Driessche, Strategic Communication Manager, Global, CYTEC Kamelia Velichkova, Head of Communication and Coordinations Department, DSK Bank Rienk van Velzen, Regional Communications Director, World Vision Geert Verellen, Vice President Investor Relations & External Communications, Delhaize Group Jörn Wagenbach, Corporate Head of Communications, Panalpina Welttransport Karin Waltner, Internal communication, Sanofi-Aventis Cynthia Wee, Communications Manager, PostEurop A.I.S.B.L. Stephen Weller, Director of Communications, International Fragrance Association Klaus Wustrack, Vice President Communications, Thales Security Solutions Thales

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COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

Celebrating Excellence in PR and Communication across Europe

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QUESTIONS TO...

The personal side of communication directors

CARMEN LÓPEZ-LAVID Communication Director, Merck Sharp & Dohme Spain How do you explain your job to your friends?

It’s like an ongoing chess game that requires strategy, intelligence, finesse, the right moves….

What personal object decorates your desk?

Pictures of my three children from since they were babies until now. The oldest is at university. I can see in a second and every minute what is most important in my life.

Who is your favourite character in history?

Isabella I of Castile, born in Madrigal de las Altas Torres in the fifteenth century: sweet princess, suffering woman, strong queen, capable of completing the reconquest of an ancient kingdom, Spain, and of promoting the discovery of a new world, America.

Who are your present day heroes/heroines?

My heroes are all those people living on a dollar a day and moving on with dignity. Working mothers who sacrifice themselves so their children can have better lives. I find all those unknown to be heroes.

What book do you have on your bedside table?

There isn’t a book on my bedside table because it keeps me awake, but I love the magical realism of Isabel Allende. In fact, a book and a walk on the beach are the perfect combination.

What has been the most emotional moment of your career?

My first publication. I was a medical microbiologist

working in a hospital and was the first in my laboratory to be published in English.

What is your greatest weakness?

I am too impulsive and I have not over the years learned to not let emotions overwhelm me; on the contrary, every time I let myself be guided more and more by the beating of my heart.

Which natural talent would you like to possess?

Without a doubt the extraordinary sense of humour that some people have who are able to make you smile any time.

What do you detest most?

Arrogance, vulgarity, daring ignorance, lack of humanity, lack of respect towards other people and maltreatment above all.

Carmen López-Lavid Communication Director, Merck Sharp & Dohme Spain

Dr. Carmen López-Lavid is currently in charge of corporate communication, internal communication, product support communication, corporate social responsibility and patient support unit at Merck Sharp & Dohme Spain. Having graduated in medicine and surgery from the Autonomous University of Madrid, she joined the medical department of Glaxo where she spent two years. She joined MSD Spain in 1994, and was in charge of the anti-infectives unit for five years. In 1999, she was promoted to executive manager of outcomes research. Dr. López-Lavid holds master’s degrees in health management, marketing direction and in strategic communication.

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Editor-in-Chief: Marc-Oliver Voigt Editors: Dafydd Phillips, Richard Morgan, Neil Cranswick, Grit Fiedler Graphical Concept: Steffi Butter, Franziska Söhner Layout: Steffi Butter Illustrations: Burkhard Piller Photo Editors: Moritz Vennemann, Jesse Benjamin Advertising: Norman Wittig (norman.wittig@helios-media.com)

04/2009

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

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