Contents

J Edgar Hoover was famous and feared throughout his reign at the FBI for his rigorous attention to detail.  There is a story that revolves around him taking a holiday. He was going through his papers on the eve of  departure when he came across a report from a junior agent which caught his eye.  The layout failed to match his exacting requirements and sure enough when he took a ruler and measured the columns his wrote in disgust “watch the borders” down the side of the offending page, threw it in his outbox and headed off for a fortnight’s break.

On his return he was alarmed to find FBI HQ on red alert.  All leave had been cancelled and staff were running around in a state of near panic.  Hoover called his senior managers into his office and demanded to know why the entire FBI had been mobilised during the dog days of a hot August.

“Well sir,” replied a minion, “you didn’t stipulate which borders. So we had to deploy men to cover both Canada and Mexico.”

The story may be apocryphal but a Chairman of BT (British Telecom) once confided to me that he had to be very careful about making any casual remarks in large meetings.  “I’d say something in passing and the next fortnight a two inch thick report would thump onto my desk.  Hundreds of man hours had been wasted on analysing a problem that was of no interest or use to our business.”

That’s the trouble with communication in large organisations.  Leaders are treated like medieval monarchs – their every utterance considered to be a jewel of wisdom of the highest order.  Yet most CEOs did not get to the top of the organisation because their wit surpassed that of Oscar Wilde nor did their insights put Galileo in the shade.  Most got to where they are through hard work, native cunning and keeping their mouths shut.  Yet once they achieve top dog status we ordain them with the wisdom of Solomon and hang on their every word.  Indeed internal and corporate communication during the latter half of the twentieth century became the last bastion of feudalism in the developed world.  In some cultures it still is.

The dilemma is that top down communication only works when the leaders know something that the followers want to hear.  In the '50s and '60s there was enough growth to keep them in this such a Delphic position.  In the'70s the cracks began to appear as a new generation of managers appeared who were not conditioned by the Second World War  In the '80s and '90s senior managers moved from telling instructions to selling them - much to the benefit of the nascent video and event production companies who were employed to sugar the pill of top-down information with lashings of razzmatazz entertainment.  But none of us knew back then how many of our colleagues ignored the internal newsletter, trashed the company magazine, avoided our team briefings and washed away the memory of the CEOs keynote speech in the conference bar.  Sure we had people who could interview and measure, but it was a brave Head of Corporate Comms who admitted to the Board that employees were ignoring them. The message would go out to whoever was in charge of the corporate towers of Babel:  SOS – “Send Out Stuff” and more trees would be pulped and more TV presenters autocued to cascade the company view.  We conformed because deep down we knew that it didn’t really matter if staff could not recite the company’s Vision, Mission and Values when the senior management couldn’t either.

And then this meteorite hit the communication world called the internet.  Rather inconveniently its internal manifestation, the intranet, does not lie – or rather the analytical data behind it cannot be ignored.  Only when the facts revealed that less than 5% of our colleagues were reading anything coming through our internal channels were our worst fears confirmed.  The audience are in control. In fact they always have been; they just didn’t let us in on the secret. 

So where does that leave the communications executive or manager who picks up this book looking for advice, tips and techniques for making communication more effective in their organisation?  If top-down messages no longer work from California to Cardiff is there any useful role for the message carrier?  This book sets out to answer that question.

Of course there are times in any organisation’s life when your colleagues will crave instruction.  During a merger or takeover, down-sizing or office move people will be knocking on your door for information. Your intranet hits will go through the roof and your newsstands will be plucked empty the instant the information you hold has an effect on the lives of others.  But these periods are few and far between.  Most professional communicators experience them once a decade unless they are very unlucky.  For at times of crisis and real change senior management stop talking just when staff start listening and you are left exposed, a sole player standing on an empty stage with no lines.

You’ll find plenty of advice in here on how to communicate the basics – what Roger Duprix calls the what, why and how of change communication.  But the world has moved on and if you want to raise your influence in the organisation then it is probably the rest of this handbook that you’ll find more useful.  Here you will learn how to facilitate rather then lecture, inspire conversation rather than kill it, help managers to communicate rather than manage communication. The rulebook was ripped up the day that everyone inherited the means of publishing through the internet. 

This handbook is for communicators working in the connected world. It does not contain all the answers, but it is a response to the biggest questions.  Each week we track the articles and advice that are most downloaded from our site www.simply-communicate.com.  At the time of writing there are more than a thousand articles online attracting some 15,000 visitors each month.  This book is a response to the top 5-10% of questions we have been asked over the past couple of years.  In that respect the content has been selected by people like you rather than an editor like me.   I am only too aware that each day the questions will shift, change and mature.  So use this handbook as an anchor, a tick list to ensure that you are up-to-date, but to stay truly current please interrogate the site.  If we haven’t answered your question, then tell us and we’ll respond.

After all, the biggest message contained in these pages is that in the world of communication the audience calls the shots.

Marc Wright

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