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 »

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

As the world’s most populous country, fastest growing economy, and stereotypically hard working culture, it’s no wonder that so many companies are focused on expanding their footprint within China. That said, it can be a great challenge for multinational companies to effectively recruit top Chinese talent and build engagement with their current employees.  This is due to paradoxes in the Chinese culture including values of traditionalist versus advanced practices, material success versus relationship-driven business exchanges, and socialism versus capitalism.

This environment leads communicators to ask questions like “will our internal social media investments be effective with our Chinese employees?” “How should we prepare leaders and managers to drive dialogue in an environment where employees may naturally be inclined to let their boss do the talking?” “What values matter most to potential employees in this market?”

We would love to hear your experience with employee communications in China and thoughts on these questions (comment below.)

In the meantime, based on conversations with numerous MNCs and working closely with our peers in the HR space, we’re tracking some of the key trends in employee communication specific to working in China, including:

3 Trends about Employee Communications in China:

1. Chinese Employees Increasingly Choose Chinese Firms over MNCs:
While a higher number of Chinese work for multi-national corporations, in the past 4 years there has been a 19% increase in employees’ preferences to work for Chinese firms. For many, this stems from a fear that recession-hit Western companies lack growth opportunities and have a glass ceiling. Read More »

For many of our members (and for CEC as well), January is the month when the annual performance review process kicks off. The review process is a great way to evaluate what you did well in the last year, but also to focus on your key areas of development. For most of us, the review process ends at the individual level, but it is equally important for the Communications function as whole (and for the team members who together constitute “the function”) to take thorough stock of its achievements and future objectives.

Based on our research and partnership with hundreds of companies over many years, we have identified the 20 key attributes of business value-focused communications function and compiled them into a compact Anatomy Game board . The Anatomy showcases the best practice for each attribute to help our members achieve functional excellence in each of the functional responsibilities. We found that a truly business value-focused communications functions focus their efforts in 4 key areas:

1. Sense Opportunities for Creating Value

Truly valued communicators don’t just fulfill clients’ requests, but proactively identify opportunities to meet stakeholder needs, address areas of potential reputation exposure and surface internal business partners’ communications needs and priorities.

2. Optimize Resources to Highest-Value Work

Many communications’ teams reported stagnating budgets in 2011, with only slightly more optimistic forecast for 2012. Scarce resources place lots of pressure on allocating them in the most efficient and impactful manner. Most successful members create a strategic high-value activities focused plan, and optimize their most important resource – their staff.

3. Extend “Reach” by Enabling Others to Communicate on Your Behalf

Most of our members have 1 to 5 communicators per 1,000 employees. This ratio makes it virtually impossible for the communications team to really connect and touch every employee and stakeholder out there. Top communications teams successfully leverage their stakeholders by getting managers, leaders, employees and external stakeholders to advocate on their behalf.

4. Create Value by Crafting and Disseminating Messages

Almost every communications team out there is focused on creating and disseminating message. However, what distinguishes the truly best communications teams from all the rest is their ability to not only have their message heard, but to actually motivate their audience to take action and to actually change stakeholders’ behavior in way that has a concrete and measurable impact on company’s business objectives.

Why don’t you take a look at our newly updated Anatomy and let us know how your function stacks up?

Recommended Resources

The Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communications Function

Managing the Function Topic Center

Skills and Roles of Modern Communicator

3?  Just a measly 3?  C’mon, already. I mean, when you think of every foot that’s been unceremoniously shoved into its corresponding mouth during this entire year, how could you possibly limit the list to just 3?

But, as a communications professional, I will attempt to fulfill the mission as assigned by the stern taskmistress who runs the show here at the Insider…starting with:

#3: The Governor of Texas Can’t Count to 3
Gaffe: During a November GOP debate in Washington, DC, Rick Perry (the ever-so-momentarily leading contender to challenge President Obama) stated in no uncertain terms that when HE becomes president, his first order of business will be to eradicate three federal agencies: Commerce, Education, and…uhhhhhhh…the, uhhhh….

Lesson: (eesh, where to start?) If you’re gonna be specific, you’d better be…well…specific. If you’re gonna make inflammatory, controversial statements, you’d better be able to back them up. If you’re gonna prove that you’re smart enough to be the next President of the United States, you’d better be able to count past two. Read More »

Deciding how to prioritize our efforts in a way that best supports our business partners has always been challenging. Expectations have evolved and it’s time to break perceptions of communications as merely a service provider. Through our research into the communications skills set needed by the ‘modern communicator’, it’s clear that you and your team must not only excel at the classic communication skills but also non-traditional competencies such as business acumen and building consultative partnerships.

Over the past few months, hundreds of communicators have been reevaluating the critical skills they consider essential to effective performance in this environment. And many teams have improved planning templates, invested in development workshops, and hopefully dug into the CEC resources to identify skills gaps and improve their effectiveness in these areas.

We know only too well how difficult it is for central communications teams to carve out time for their own personal development. So think how hard it must be for colleagues in local offices or dispersed business units, who are ‘out there on their own’ and are often forced to wear a number of different hats. With this in mind, better visibility into the skills of local communicators and improved collaboration between corporate and affiliate Communications has never been so important, and it really is in our best interest to invest in our local affiliates’ development.

When the CEC was putting together its work around Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations, a notable approach we came across in improving this central-local partnership comes from fellow CEC member Novo Nordisk, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Novo Nordisk has implemented a simple yet highly effective 3 step process, leveraging what they refer to as a Communications Effectiveness Reviews (CER). They use this as a dialogue-provoking and development tool, which identifies skills gaps of local communicators so they can better align their activities with business needs.

To summarize these 3 steps:

Read More »

As a former journalist, ohhhhhh how I HATE media hyperbole. Don’t you? Every bad weather system that’s described as (this year’s) Storm of the Century…every one-day drop in the stock market that has investors reeling…every tragedy that forces local residents to rebuild the shattered pieces of their broken lives. Uhhhhhhgggh.

When I think about what’s become of the news business, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or go out on the front lawn and start eating grass (isn’t that what animals do when they think they’re about to barf?).

But I gotta say — although you may already be getting a little queased-out from the relentless coverage of this Joe Paterno/Penn State story — for once, this ain’t hype.  This really is the biggest scandal in sports history. More than just another ringing bell for the Pavlov’s Dogs of Media to salivate over, this is a cautionary tale for EVERYONE in a position of authority at any big organization in the world.

Here’s a strong recommendation from your friends and colleagues at CEC: Use this moment as an opportunity to have an important discussion with your CEO.  Particularly if he (90+% chance it’s a he) is a football fan (gut guess on my part = there’s a 75+% chance he at least likes football).

All you have to do is ask him, “So, uhhhh, whadda ya think about the whole Paterno mess?”, then sit back and let him spew. Whatever he says next will enlighten both of you about his understanding of “the way things work” in today’s media environment.

Chances are you’ll get one of three responses: Read More »

It was with extreme irritation that I discovered this weekend that London’s department stores have already begun to stock their shelves with Christmas goods! It seems that the countdown to 2012 has begun already, and although in my personal life I have no intention of thinking as far ahead as the presents I’ll be buying my family, in our professional lives it’s definitely the time of year where we’re obliged to start making our plans for the year ahead.

We at the CEC are no different, and in our never-ending quest to stay at the cutting edge of the Communications space, it’s vital to us that our agenda be set by our members most pressing needs. With this in mind, we recently polled our clients to identify where we should be focusing our energies with our upcoming work.

Check out 4 trends that we’ve observed from the data:

Observation #1: Engaging employees with corporate goals and supporting change remain the top priorities for communicators

CEC research indicates that the average employee experiences 3.5 major changes every two years, ensuring that the need to navigate these turbulent times, and maintain employee engagement at the same time, remains high on every communicator’s agenda.

• Thoughts from CEC: check our studies, Mobilizing the Workforce for work on engaging employees around organizational objectives, and Building a Change-Ready Organization for work on supporting organizational change management. Read More »

They may be experts at setting strategy and managing a leading organization, but unfortunately not all of our CEOs can walk up to a podium with confidence and truly engage their employees, investors, or stakeholder audience.  How about your CFO? CIO? Are they able to lead a presentation that captures and keeps the audiences’ attention and teaches them something?

Coaching the leaders of the organization to be better communicators with their respective stakeholders is a critical skill of today’s communicators—and one that our skills maturity assessment highlights as a common development area for today’s communicators. Our goal here at the CEC is to help you be a better coach, and thus enable better communication across your organization.

Recently, the oh-so-talented team of executive advisors at the Corporate Executive Board gathered for a few days of training (yep–we’re trying to make our presentations more engaging and effective for our members as well!). Below are 10 of the top tips from CEB’s masters of effective presentations. Share them with your leaders in your next coaching session! Read More »

Every year, corporate crises hit the news, and remind us of their potentially devastating impact on the reputations of those organizations involved. The UBS tax scandal of 2008, Toyota’s three product recalls from 2009-2010, and BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 all had two things in common:

• They could all have been prevented
• They did significant damage each company’s reputation, and to their financial performance

With the stakes higher than ever before, CEC is updating its existing work on crisis management. And, with the above in mind, we’re looking at two different angles.

1. Building a Preventative Culture

In spite of the best efforts of companies to apply processes, rules, and expectations, this isn’t always enough to drive behavior change – we’ve all seen rules bent or broken to “get the job done”. And yet, we are reliant upon employees maintaining standards to maintain product quality, information security, legal and ethical compliance, and personal or public safety – if they fail to do so, the consequences for the organization can be disastrous.

Communications Challenges

CEC is looking at some of the reasons that employees don’t always act in accordance with the standards required by their organization, its regulators, and other crucial stakeholder groups. Our conversations indicate that many communicators spend a disproportionate amount of time building employee awareness without addressing the personal and systemic barriers to desired behavior. Indeed, research shows that only 6% of employee-observed misconduct is escalated to business leadership, preventing the business from responding to rectify the problem. We’ve thought about what prevents employees from acting in a way that prevents crises. Here’s our first shot, below: Read More »

Find yourself in any social situation where you are meeting new people, and the question that will inevitable come up is: “What do you do?”  Unless you hold a really unique job position (my internet search for “weird occupations” provided me with ostrich sitter, dog food tester, and snake milker among many others) chances are that you will respond with your job title and maybe an additional sentence or two to clarify.

However, in the last couple years the communications landscape changed substantially, as did many of the positions and responsibilities under the communications umbrella.  Communicators across our membership are moving away from being task takers and content creators to being communications enablers and valuable business partners. In order to make the transition, many communicators are adding new, non-traditional roles to their team’s repertoire and evolving some of the more traditional roles in order to adjust to the new environment.

CEC is currently creating “role profiles” of some of these new and evolved positions in order to give our members a peak into how these roles and responsibilities are changing among their peers.  Currently, we are focusing on covering these 5 main aspects of each role:

• Purpose: what is the key objective of the role in the overall communications strategy
• Reporting lines: where in the orgnaization does the position report and what are the advantages/disadvantages of different reporting lines
• Main responsibilities: what does the person with this job title ultimately do on every day basis and how do they allocate their time among these activities
• Key skills: what are the key skills that a person needs to be successful in this role
• Business partnerships: what communications and business parters do the communicatior in this role need to work with to be successful

I would love to hear your ideas on why (or why not) you would find these role profiles useful and/or what other aspects of the role description you would like to see us include in order to make these as valuable to YOU as possible. Shoot me an email at mkrausova@executiveboard.com or leave a comment and let me know!

Relevant CEC Resources

Modern Communicator’s Skill Set

Skills Set Webinar