Red Dawn seems to have all the ingredients of a surefire Hollywood success.  It’s a remake of a successful 1984 film featuring Charlie Sheen and  Patrick Swayze about a group of teenagers banding together to save their small U.S. town from a Soviet invasion.  The new cast of up and coming stars have already been featured in blockbusters like Thor and Transformers and seem tailor made to appeal to the tween and teen audiences that have fueled recent hits like Twilight and Harry Potter.  So why is MGM spending more than a million dollars to digitally edit the finished film and delay its release until November 2012?  Because in the new version the invading force is a Chinese army, and in Hollywood today, you do not want to upset the Chinese, who sanction only 20 foreign movie releases per year.  (The “digitally re-mastered” enemy moviegoers will see is led by a much less commercially important North Korean force).

It’s another example of a new reality for Hollywood where screens abroad now account for nearly 70% (and growing) of box office revenue, according to the L.A. Times, and studios cater all elements of production to international audiences particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China whose growth has helped studios survive a massive drop in DVD sales.  So, how’s Hollywood changing and can Communicators learn from their efforts? Read More »

Anyone ever tried one of those seven day cleansing diets?  They usually start when you get back from a decedent vacation, stuff yourself over the holidays, or realize you’ve subsisted for a month on Chicago polishes and deep dish.   You’re allowed only concoctions of stuff like lemon juice, vinegar, salt water, and mashed beets and ginger; and the expectation is that after a week, you’re miraculously cleansed, fit, and trim.  Of course, any benefits don’t last, and by day eight you’re back in line with the rest of us at Big Al’s Italian Beef.

Bear with me a second, but that whole process kind of reminds me of a desperate Corporate Communications team retreat.  We know we’ve gotten fat on low-value requests, we haven’t had time to work out our skills, and the direction of our function is starting to feel a bit aimless.  So, the thinking goes, if we just lock ourselves in a conference room for three days to plan, train, and strategize, we’ll be good to go for another twelve months.

But we all know the benefits of many retreats don’t last longer than those cleansing diets, and our needy business partners can throw us off track like a Bears Mug Beer Sunday Beer Special (a Chicago football tradition).  So as a solution, let me introduce CEC’s 100 day plan for lasting improvement to your communications function.   It’s not an instant cure, but we think the benefits are far greater and more lasting. 

Day 1-25: Setting Strategic Priorities
The first step in the diet is figuring out what we actually should be working on.  Now, a cleansing diet will have you a brainstorm a big list, narrow it down, refine some language and send you packing with nothing tied to business value to keep you on track.  The CEC plan requires a bit more upfront research with business partners, but if you complete our Anatomy of a Business Value Focused Communications Function, you will come away with a data-driven set of priorities that maximize value to the business based on urgency and current state.  You can even use the data push back on business partners and revisit your work to ensure ongoing alignment.    Read More »

Each November, the parent entity of the CEC, the Corporate Executive Board, releases to our members a widely read Executive Guidance briefing outlining management imperatives for the coming year. This year’s document addresses one of the most common challenges raised by Communicators – the promise and perils of globalization. The opportunity is clear: between 2010 and 2030 the percentage of global GDP from emerging markets is expected to grow from 37% to 59%; however, most organizations focus on market-level investments and fail to address how corporate center functions such as Finance, IT, Legal, and of course, Communications need to adapt. The Corporate Executive Board has outlined six management disciplines critical for long-term success in emerging markets (and members will have upcoming opportunities to digest them all); however, one in particular struck me as a place for immediate impact from a high-functioning global Communications department: Accelerated Collaboration and Innovation.

While access to new markets and talent should offer opportunities for market shaping innovation, less than 40% of employees perceive effective collaboration – even in just one location. The results are troubling: innovation vitality (the percentage of sales from new products) is troublingly low to keep up with the necessary pace of growth in these new markets and less than a third of R&D staff in developed or emerging markets report high levels of trust with their global counterparts.

So how is this all a Communications problem (other than the fact that everything is a communications problem!)? Corporate Executive Board research shows that most organizations wrongly attribute these deficiencies to the innovation skills of geographically dispersed R&D centers; however, leading companies instead focus on increasing 1) the willingness of global employees to share and receive information and 2) the strength of connections to actually identify and apply new ideas – in other words, the effectiveness of the communications environment. Two lessons from our research into global intranet platforms suggest some immediate solutions. Read More »

In my experience communicators tend to be fairly strong planners.  If you ask for a crisis plan, you’ll see binders full of material checking almost every conceivable box.  If you want to see the plan for the Quarterly Town Hall, you can wade into pages of key message maps and logistical details.  But when you ask about a social media plan, suddenly the documentation (and the strategy) seem a lot thinner.  Yes, we’re on Facebook and Linked-in; we tweet and we’ve given our CEO a blog; but how many of us have a cogent social media plan tied to corporate goals, endowed with credible metrics, and benchmarked against competitor activity?

If you do (and you’re willing to share a scrubbed version of what you put together with the membership), e-mail me at griebj@executiveboard.com because we would love to collect more examples for people to view.  (The #1 search term on the CEC website is “template”).  If not – but you’d like to get there – read on for a virtual tour of the CEC’s Social Media Strategy Builder.

At this point, it might be helpful for me to refer you to the CEC Social Media Strategy Builder on the CEB Website.  We offer dozens of other tools and templates but if you are looking for a  single roadmap for yourself or a social media working group to organize your discussions around, this would be the place to start.

Phase 1: Company Strategic Priorities and Business Goals: The key to unlocking all our hopes and dreams for social media is to ground our plan in our ongoing corporate objectives.  This keeps us from getting distracted by the newness of the space and makes it easier to sell the plan internally to non-communicators.

Examples from the Membership: Read More »

August is here.  Students head back to class, NFL players return to training camps, EPL rivalries are renewed, and professionals begin confronting a fresh array of business challenges.  Yes, the end of summer always brings a mandate to learn new skills, and the CEC is proud to announce our own such development opportunity to the membership.

After spending the summer refining the 16 attributes of the Modern Communicator’s Skill Set, we have now posted a series of development resources against each element.  These resources combine the best of CEC case studies, practical templates, and interactive workshops to arm communications professionals with the skills required to meet the growing demands of the role.  After the jump, I’ll explore a few of the best opportunities to ignite your professional development.

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Live Blogging CEC’s Annual Retreat

7:59AM:  I have made it to the AON Conference Room here at CEB Chicago to live blog this year’s Annual Executive Retreat in Washington D.C.  The biggest impediment to this experiment – the variable functionality of our video conferencing equipment – seems to be taken care of, my laptop is fired up, and Rick Delisi, our headliner extraordinaire, is already at the podium.  In the words of the immortal Bart Scott: “Can’t Wait”.

8:28: THE STAKES FOR TODAY:  More than 60% of employees today are experiencing high to severe “change fatigue” and the resulting stress is negatively impacting workforce performance to the tune of US$30million for every $1Billion in revenue.  Now, having been to a few executive retreats in my day, I have a sneaking suspicion that our efforts to mitigate the pain of change may be misplaced…

9:05: Okay, so all is not lost.  The efforts we are making to increase transparency and credibility are not wrong, it’s just that they mainly get us buy-in and only when change is a discreet event.  The problem, as I listen to comments from around the room, is that the volume and pace of change are accelerating and these efforts are therefore having diminishing returns.

9:45:  BIG QUESTION #1:  WHAT DRIVES PERFORMANCE IN A HIGH-CHANGE ENVIRONMENT?  We tested factors associated with 1) effort, 2) responsiveness, and 3) agility and the answer is… AGILITY!  (which we’re describing as proactively adapting, seeking feedback, and supporting peers).  This is great: next time I am asked to work longer or follow direction more closely, I will explain that instead I will just be more agile… I hope my manager gets to see this content at some point. Read More »

One unique element of the Communication Executive Council is our close relationship with sister programs serving heads of Sales, Marketing, and Market Research. Leading executives in these spaces are rapidly adopting new strategies in response to changes in customer behavior brought on by both new technologies and economic realities. In aggregate, these changes acknowledge a significantly more empowered and circumspect buyer who is ever less reliant on brands themselves in the purchase decision process. To respond, the best companies are improving the quality of information they have and provide to the customer while trying to influence the broader information landscape that influences purchase decisions. For those of you in the high-tech, computer software, and electronics industries, this trend is even more important as your consumers are some of the most tech-savvy and early adopters out there.

Communications ability to impact the flow of this information both internally and across earned media channels will be critical to success in these initiatives, so after the jump, let’s review some early findings from our systems program’s latest research and the implications for our function. Read More »

It’s baseball season in Chicago and hope springs eternal on the North Side.  But as the Cubs chase the impossible dream of a World Series, communicators confront their own impossible dream – how do we measure the un-measureable: the value we create from all the stories that didn’t get written about us this year.

So it wasn’t until opening day that I realized the goal is similar to the efforts of advanced baseball statistics, which try to more completely capture a player’s value by comparing his contribution to a replacement. The only difference is that in baseball a replacement still generates some value whereas in communications the replacement actually reduces a company’s value by allowing negative coverage.  But while baseball statisticians can’t add up the hits of a replacement that doesn’t actually play any more that communicators can count the articles that were never written, they know they get pretty close by merely calculating the average or expected value of the replacement. So if communicators can focus on just an expected number of mentions, we can similarly develop a more accurate representation of our value.

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When crises like the events in Japan strike, corporations play a number of vital roles in helping society to respond effectively.  We, as large organizations, are an important social network that helps authorities account for those most affected. We are a communications channel to provide critical emergency instructions to affected areas. We are a trusted source of information in a cluttered environment. Our resources provide the technology, supplies, and expertise to support immediate relief. Our employees and foundations donate significant aid funds. Our early statements shape policy discussions to minimize future disasters. And, lastly, our collective response efforts ensure global economic continuity and minimize collateral damage.

Strong communication is at the center of all this. While specific responses will vary by organization, it’s vital that we share ideas and best practices to serve societal (and business) interests. I’ve started to collect a few of these priorities and ideas – please help others by sharing what you’re doing.  And let us know what questions you have for your peers.  Read More »

It’s NCAA Tournament time. Ten years ago you’d see stacks of brackets from the USA Today littered around the photocopier. A guy you’re pretty sure works in IT would walk around collecting $5 per draw.  And to catch the early games, employees would linger over a long lunch at Chili’s or hover around someone’s woefully inadequate portable television – completed bracket in hand, of course!

Today, most pools are entered, scored, and paid for through sites like ESPN and PayPal, and the afternoon games are easily accessed through online video sites and even on your iPhone or iPad. But just as surely as the inevitable winner bases their picks on a preference for Blue Devils over Bulldogs are you confronted with an annual set of statistics estimating $1 – $4 billion in lost productivity during March Madness and dire warnings of federal gambling statutes. As communicators, often charged with promoting awareness of and compliance with corporate policies, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of policing our communication tools to prevent  these legal or productivity risks. A compelling case could be made that those efforts would be misplaced – in fact, let’s go out and encourage participation in the office pool. Read More »