What's New? Everything.

From Communication 101 to Communication 2001

Today's U.S. labor force is awash in productivity to an extent unprecedented in the post-World War II years. And as the economy continues its unparalleled growth, the productivity statistics keep getting better -- up another 4 percent in the first quarter of 1999, following a remarkable 4.3 percent increase in the last quarter of '98. Economists tell us that U.S. workers have not suddenly become more skilled over all. Instead, a combination of investment in key capital equipment and information technology (IT) is the reason for the unprecedented productivity growth of late.

"Firms are coping with price competition by squeezing more productivity out of their workers and machines," says George Huang, a Harvard-educated economic analyst for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. "IT has helped increase the efficiency of the use of these resources. Firms also see higher productivity gains coming from capital and IT investments (than from labor), and they have allocated their dough accordingly. The combination makes a healthy economic environment of low inflation, low wage pressure, higher productivity and low unemployment."

There are, I think, hidden communication ramifications to this economic outlook, which for the most part is a footnote to the larger force of a third industrial revolution shaping all of us, our jobs and our organizations. Like it or not, the Internet and all its derivatives are not only reshaping our commerce, they also are reconstituting our organizations, and that ultimately has to affect organizational communication.

If companies, industries and whole nations are in the process of reinventing themselves, then it would seem logical that corporate communication as we have known it in the 20th century is not likely to survive the first hectic years of the new century. This is not a conclusion I come to easily or lightly. It took shape this past spring when over the span of two months I listened to some leading business, economic and communication thinkers look ahead at the millennium and beyond, they painted a still fuzzy picture that I can understand intellectually, but must pause to ponder emotionally and practically.

Like the productivity spikes, the continued added investment in ever-improving IT fundamentally "changes the way everybody does business," according to author/academician Lester Thurow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of management and economics, citing from his latest book "Building Wealth: New Rules for Individuals, Companies and Nations in a Knowledge-Based Economy."

If, in fact, by 2010, as Thurow predicts, half of today's retail outlets are replaced by Internet commerce and most companies have had to "cannibalize themselves to save themselves," then communicators had best rush to beat organizational senior management to the punch they must start figuring Out if there is, indeed, a future for professional communicators in a functional sense, and if not, what they can do to reinvent the function. Looking at the challenge in Thurow's macro-economic terms: "Technological breakthroughs occur, the economic environment changes, and [many large companies] are unable to adjust."

The New Communicator

One of a series of IBM advertisements gracing upscale magazines recently featured an employee so young that it was obviously designed to put a Generation-X face on the work force of what at one time was the dominant marketing organization in the world and one known for its white-shirt-only conformance and rock-solid conservatism. The full-color ad featured a "Digital Designer," and the quotes used as part of the copy were revealing about what is thought of as "internal communication" these days.

The "job description" for the digital designer -- a sophomore-looking, casually dressed woman -- is described as being to "maximize a company's internal communication by custom designing intranets based on their specific needs." As a counterpoint, the ad lists the young designer's "pet peeve" as being: "people who think the 'intranet' and 'Internet' are interchangeable."

Staring into the shiny blue eyes and the fresh young face, I noticed the ad was "signed" by IBM Global Services, which bills itself as being for "people who think (knowledge workers), people who do (results-orientation) and people who get it (understand the third industrial revolution)." Whatever the ill-defined new corporate communicator looks like, this describes pretty much the audience(s) with whom he/she will be trying to connect.

This past spring, a professional communicator painted a picture of her international consumer products company's internal communication as one in which the individual employee is now "the publisher," using the worldwide intranet established by this European-based corporation. It reminded me that IT professionals keep pushing more and more distributed computing; no more monolithic mainframes in the computing world. The model is easily transferable to corporate communication.

This woman -- one of eight distinguished academic and industry communication professionals gathered at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication -- carried the title Manager, Internet Technology Group, in her multinational company. She noted that her company was still traditionally managed in functional departments, but all of them were being quickly broken down via the Internet, and by the ability and empowerment of average employees to cut through and across departments in communication.

Use Technology Effectively

New software is now available for helping employees share information more easily. The employees tend to group by relationships and areas of interest, as opposed to the old functional departments that worked and played together.

"Because of the tremendous advances in communication and computing technology and growing ease with supersonic air travel, in the 1990s mass communication began to give way to more informal communication that could keep up with the growing dependency for speed," says Jeff Zakaryan. He is a former corporate communicator and advertising executive who has transformed himself into an executive coach based in Southern California after 15 years of helping an international engineering firm radically change its marketing communication/training approach. "The flip side of the transformation to more speed was the need for more time preparing to communicate effectively in the new world with a much more varied group of communicators who often sacrificed understanding for expediency."

When Zakaryan joined Fluor Corp. (now Fluor Daniel) in 1981 as a marketing communication manager, communication internationally was done by telex. It was slow and sporadic. When he left to start his own business in 1997, he had redefined marketing communication and established a global mentoring program among the multibillion-dollar international engineering firm's best and brightest. Internal communication had become instantaneous on a worldwide basis. No longer were communication, training and leadership development separate functions on parallel tracks. Communication was merged with training, leadership development and cultural transformation to develop a cadre of global sales leaders.

"Despite the numbers-driven nature of business, when all is said and done, the critical factor to success is the people who make things happen," Zakaryan says.

The leadership scholar and well-known business lecturer and author Warren Bennis, from the University of Southern California and the University of Exeter in the U.K., agrees with Thurow's assessment about our being in the midst of the third great industrial revolution since the first one (steam engines and railroads) in the 1830-'50s, noting that "people have supplanted capital as the critical success factor in our economy."

What Makes a Leader

Bennis, who once was president of the University of Cincinnati, but admits he didn't have the right passion for university administration work, has studied and practiced leadership for more than four decades. He was one of the youngest American infantry commanders in World War II, fighting in Germany at age 20. As founder of the Leadership Institute and visiting professor on leadership in the U.K., Bennis has written more than 25 books exploring essential leadership skills, developing and fostering team leaders, and creating great groups within the corporate environment. His first book, "Leaders," was hailed by the Financial Times as one of the top 50 business books of all time.

Bennis breaks down leadership attributes into groups that basically depend on what gets done, not what is said, but the telling, communicating, is important in a highly personalized way. "Spreading ideas with the speed of light," as General Electric CEO Jack Welch often says, cannot be done with centralized, layered communication organizations; an organization needs a decentralized communication structure for that.

So part of the job of fostering the so-called "learning organization," which Bennis and Welch would both have a strong preference for, is developing organizational training and coaching. It can't be done with slick communication messages. Further, it will not be done by old organizational designs and old ideas.

Lester Thurow's assessment of the third industrial revolution is that it has created a global economy in which national economies are becoming irrelevant. He predicts that national governments will shrink in importance while international corporations expand in size and stature. If this all means that individuals, companies and nations must radically adjust, the traditional internal "interpreters" of organizations and their cultures must be re-thought.

"The biggest unknown for the individual in a knowledge-based economy is how to have a career in a system where there are no careers," Thurow wrote earlier this year in Atlantic Monthly, paraphrasing from his "Building Wealth" book. "As for employees, without career ladders, they cannot intelligently acquire the right skills on their own, Since they will be switching employers frequently, they don't know what skills they will need or how long those skills will be relevant to their earning opportunities.

As a result -- rationally -- they don't invest in skills."

Perhaps part of the opportunity for traditional corporate communication specialists lies in the fact that along with the acquisition of new skill sets, knowledge workers will require more coaching and training in the cultural and psychological changes inherent in a world that prefers electronic commerce. Sociological developments can tame and shape technology or prevent it from fully flowering. Even Thurow, Drucker and Bennis would agree with that.

Traditionally corporate communication, the function, has helped bring the social sciences to bear on cold, bottom-line statistical games involved in running an organization. Training, human development and a sense of place and purpose can be delivered in a decentralized manner that allows different folks to use different menus. The days of top-down "official communication" are as numbered as our old Royal typewriters were a generation ago, but we did not know it back then. Now, we should know better.

Changing Topics of Seminars

The flyers for the numerous organizational communication seminars offered throughout the world have changed a lot these days. A recent one passing through my office was entitled "Restructuring Internal Communication to Drive Radical Change." It included breakout sessions on such topics as "The eCommunication Revolution," "Restructuring Corporate Communication: Leveraging Functional Value-Added Through Strategic Communication Consulting," "Communication in the Information Age," and my favorite, "A Good Day to Die: The Risks and Rewards of Truly Radical Communication."

That last session urges the attenders to challenge their own organizations -- "confront the leaders, champion the employees, and live to tell about it." Such radical new mind sets in what only a few years ago was the staid center of the corporate hierarchies is a reflection of the psychological "distance" we have traveled over today's Information Superhighway.

Peter Drucker thinks e-commerce is no longer a "revolution." It is a fact of life that affects all of us.

"It is now the establishment," says Drucker, noting in his raspy European-accented English that electronic commerce's effects are just beginning and can only be compared in his resilient mind to the effects of the real industrial revolution with the coming of the railroads. "The railroad altered human geography -- mankind for the first time could master distance. E-commerce has altered psychological distance and means every business is into the global economy.

"Every company is in the global economy and everyone has to be globally competitive."

Organizations recognize Drucker's insights, but mostly in their operations, their commerce or their missions -- not their formal communication. They see the changing psychological changes of consumers, clients, students, but no one is thinking through what this means to our traditional approaches to organizational communication.

The reinvention of organizational communicators should start with the client/customers. Their varied definitions of "communication" now really matter. If providing e-mails with web-site links to business information and skills is what some of these knowledge workers consider as "organizational communication," then that is one set of products and services to provide. If being free to humorously comment on the organization (a new-type Dilbert) is what employees want, give them the opportunity to share insights, jokes and historic references that have relevance to the organization's broad mission and strategic goals.

So I think there is a new role, like the one Zakaryan and others are assuming at large, well-established organizations, but it will not be easily defined and it will not come complete with a universal set of titles and guidelines. Nevertheless, someone in the corporate center or administrative headquarters needs to manage the psychological and sociological transformation of employees working in increasingly flattened, nonfunctionalized organizations.

It can be called education, training or leadership development. Someone needs to be addressing these areas comprehensively, with a broad view of the overall organization's direction and strategies. Why not a new form of corporate communicator, schooled in the liberal arts and business disciplines, flexible and open to continuous learning, and with a nose for news and a stomach for risk.

Richard Nemec is a Los Angeles-based writer and communication consultant.