Communication Strategies for Corporate Leaders

Implications for the Global Market

Pragyan Rath, Apoorva Bharadwaj

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351341493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Communication is key to success in every aspect of life and ever so in a competitive business environment. This book examines managerial communication from seminal theoretical and demonstrative vantage points through interdisciplinary amalgamation of sciences and the liberal arts. It presents new paradigms of managerial communication in the form of manoeuvres that can act as game changers in tug-of-war business situations, including difficult negotiations, conflicts and interpersonal dissonance that characterise the day-to-day corporate workplace tenor.

This volume:

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• Develops persuasion strategies based on argumentation tactics derived, for example, from legal cross-examination.

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• Introduces 'problematisation' and 'deconstruction' as effective communication tools into mainstream managerial discourse.

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• Employs Harvard Business School cases to demonstrate problem-solving skills, which will further serve as guide to writing business reports, plans and proposals.

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• Positions business writing methods as taxonomical tenets that can help tackle complex business scenarios.

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• Draws business diagnostic procedures from diverse fields such as Sherlock Holmes from popular culture, and Jared M. Diamond from ecology.

This book will be a significant resource for business communication practitioners, especially corporate managers and leaders, sales and marketing professionals, and policymakers. It will be of interest to teachers and students alike, in business communication, organization behaviour, human resource management and marketing communications. It will act as a useful aid for classroom efficacy for teachers and academics.

Chapter 1

Prelude to communication strategies for global corporate leaders

In today’s volatile business world with its multitudes of vicissitudes, the leaders all the more need persuasion skills to bind their workforces and lead them by their high-minded missions. Communication is the most pivotal tool of persuasion which can mobilise the immovable, inspire the mundane and galvanise the inertia that cripple the proficiency of progressive ambitions. The art and skill of communication have inspired the process of metamorphosis through centuries and have helped leaders worldwide from different walks of life – politicians, sportsmen, artists, corporate heads, scientists and many others – to stimulate new thought processes, to initiate new ways of life and to impart new meanings to human philosophy. Communication is a human need and a human deed that can lead the people indeed! Here is your manual of communication that can help you operationalise your visions and missions through transmissions that can provide a new visionary lens to the myopic world.

The aim of this volume is to develop content that can fill the void in communication literature available in the managerial domain. Most communication literature currently used by academic/industry practitioners in management has its thrust on presentation skills and authoring business messages primarily in conventional formats. Most do not cover detailed studies of case analysis, an integral part of contemporary managerial training in decision-making processes. In our work, we have evolved new strategic frameworks of communication and applied them to diverse corporate situations through numerous cases and examples, both domestic and international. The work covers a wide gamut of solved hypothetical Indian episodes, as well as Harvard business cases which act as its major differentiating factor in global communication discourse.

Readership

We have developed the book that intends to reach out to diverse audiences by offering them multiple takeaways:

• Students can benefit from intensively worked out case studies from various managerial domains that relate to their career building endeavours.
• Communication instructors in management academia can benefit from the conceptual frameworks built and their detailed applications which can be used to make the process of teaching-learning more efficacious.
• Corporate professionals can use the communication manuals developed in the work for their daily transactions.
• Researchers can apply the theoretical contexts used in the work to develop new communication projects. As a majority of communication books (both Indian and international) have their content focus on formats and terminologies, this work intends to demonstrate how concepts have been evolved which rationally culminate into format designs, frameworks and terminologies that further add to the quintessential basis of managerial communications.
• Interdisciplinary scholars will find the work interesting since they would be able to comprehend how to use and apply their niche expertise in developing mainstream corporate communication literature.
• International students pursuing global careers can use this work to understand Indian markets and the application of interdisciplinary techniques of communication in the Indian as well as global contexts.

Methodology

We have sought to apply theories from variegated disciplines like humanities, social sciences and theoretical sciences to develop novel strategies and principles which can be used for communication practices. Contributions from landmark thinkers like Samuel Coleridge and Roland Barthes from Literary Studies, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Francois Lyotard from Sociology, J. Freedman and S. Fraser from Psychology, Einstein from Physics and even the Sophist rhetorician Protagoras, among others, have informed the conceptualisation of new communication frameworks that the authors have developed. The existing scholarship in the area of managerial communication, including the works of authors like Mary Munter, Peter Cardon, Robyn Walker, Michael Gamble, Jane Thomas and Courtland L. Bovee (to name a few), have also been used as reference material to build up this research work. Hence, the rationale behind our project has been to offer new perspectives and frameworks as considerable departures from conventional literature available for managerial communication.

Highlights

The unique profile of this book is characterised by the following features:

• It is positioned as the only book of its kind which delineates powerful communication strategies and their applications unlike many mainstream books on communication which either do not cover communication strategies at all, or just theorise on these strategies without presenting their applicability in corporate scenarios.
• This book presents new paradigms of persuasion in the form of manoeuvres that can act as game changers in tug-of-war business situations comprising difficult conversations like negotiations, conflicts and interpersonal dissonance that characterise day-to-day corporate workplace tenor. It equips communicators with argumentation skills that can retrieve a lost argument. For the first time, persuasion strategies have been “insourced” from argumentation tactics
  • (a) used by lawyers to frame and position their wit to win a point (for instance, cross-examination);
  • (b) used by Critical Discourse theorists to frame and position their new theoretical inputs (for instance, Judith Butler positioning Body Theory in feminist discourse and Derrida positioning Deconstruction in Poststructural discourse).
• The book breaks the stereotypical taxonomy of business messages which routinely use four categories – routine, good news, bad news and persuasive. The book brings a comprehensive string of business situations that call for strategic responses rather than staying with formatting protocols. We have elevated the process of writing messages from a formal routine etiquette or duty to a strategic tool for tackling critically intricate business scenarios. We have identified certain business situations not in regular circulation and used them to show how writing strategically becomes a powerful tool in the hands of the manager.
• It is the only book in the global market to take up case studies as one of its major learnings. Harvard business cases which are used worldwide in management institutes have been employed for the first time in a book on communications (both in India and outside) to demonstrate problem solving skills which also act as precursors to writing business reports, plans and proposals. As an addendum to this toolkit of solved Harvard cases, we also add some hypothetical but familiar domestic situations that call for critical thinking skills that contribute to intelligent configuration of business reports, plans and proposals. We deploy diagnostic procedures from medical sciences as well as taxonomical tenets from zoology and botany as guiding principles for scrutinising situations of corporate investigations. Sherlock Holmes and the evolutionary ecologist Jared M. Diamond have been invoked to give a new perspective to the investigative function of scrutinising not-so-obvious or camouflaged managerial problems to derive insightful problem statements and use them to present targeted solutions.

Preview: chapter snapshots

• Chapter 1: Prelude to communication strategies for global corporate leaders

The on-going chapter is a kind of orientation for readers as an initiating exercise into the content of the book. It provides a preview of the contents of the book, along with its highlights. It also informs the readers

1. (a) how diverse audiences – students, teachers, researchers and corporate professionals, both Indian and international – can benefit from the book;
2. (b) how the book is uniquely positioned as the only work of its kind imparting innovative concepts and frameworks with their pragmatic applications delivered.

• Chapter 2: Walk the talk: application of communication strategy

The chapter presents a toolkit of communication strategies based on theoretical inputs from diverse disciplines to enable managers to handle business situations. It is also rich in examples drawn from bureaucracy, media, business, entertainment, history and culture to bring alive these abstract concepts.

• Chapter 3: Checkmate: persuade to win

The chapter describes persuasion as an act of game changing manoeuvre deploying a “selling apparatus” for attaining desired targets in Catch-22 as well as dead-end situations. It equips readers with skills that can enable them to win lost battles. This chapter also introduces new terminologies not prevalent in managerial discourse, like problematisation and deconstruction, to redefine and reposition persuasion as warfare to be won through the subtle demolition of audience defence and resistance. In addition, it offers new insights to career builders for handling their recruitment communications for clinching a deal with their dream companies.

• Chapter 4: You’ve got mail: strategy in style

The chapter looks at the act of writing messages not just as exchange of information but as strategic responses to challenging business problems. It introduces a new taxonomy of messaging situations along with new strategic frameworks, concepts and terminologies. For each situation, email write-ups have been presented as tutorials in strategic writing skills. As the contemporary corporate scenario is beset with numerous raging controversies, which call for immediate tactful redressal, the chapter presents hypothetical controversial situations akin to real ones, for presenting a writing drill that entails application of new strategies not discussed hitherto in popular communication books.

• Chapter 5: Sherlock Holmes in action: managerial investigations (cases, reports, proposals, plans)

The chapter showcases Harvard business cases as well as hypothetical domestic cases as “texts” for launching investigations using new diagnostic tools to unearth latent intricate business problems and solve them. New innovative concepts have been deployed for case analysis, like

1. (a) domestication of problem through Anna Karenina Principle (evolutionary ecologist, Jared M. Diamond);
2. (b) verification and falsification through medical patterns of diagnosis (medical practitioner and novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle);
3. (c) historicisation (New Historicism).

The chapter also covers writing analytical reports and business proposals along with authoring business plans as entrepreneurial tools for attracting venture capitalists.

The salient attractions of the chapter include:

1. (a) two Harvard Business cases analysed and presented in the form of corporate reports;
2. (b) two indigenous business cases analysed and presented in the format of submission ready corporate reports; and
3. (c) one business plan and one business proposal completely drafted based on a hypothetical new business offering pitched in for funding.

In sum, the book offers a whole lot of new and exciting experiences and perspectives that are significant in a career builder’s life in a contemporary business scenario.

Strategies for global corporate leaders
Stimulating the curious minds of diverse readers
Steeped in the dense theories of the erudite past
For contemporary managers in the world, furious and fast.

Chapter 2

Walk the talk

Application of communication strategy

Communication strategy is the cornerstone of all communication episodes in managerial scenarios. Imagine that you are a Vice President in a multinational giant. You have recently won a bid on a very coveted overseas assignment. Now you have to accomplish a competitive delivery in a short stint of time. But the flip side of the bid is there are no immediate incentives you can offer to your team. Now the challenge is to steer a team of these employees towards your big ticket goals without rewarding them with anything. You know that you are on a sticky wicket. Then what are your options? See Figure 2.1 for the sticky wicket options.

Figure 2.1 Sticky wicket options

Source: All figures, boxes and tables are by authors, unless otherwise mentioned.

When you elect and exercise Option C, you are acting as a Communication Strategist. How do we define a Communication Strategist? A Communication Strategist is a communicator who is persuasive for being productive. In other words, s/he knows how to talk in a way that makes others walk the talk. The architect of this walk-the-talk model is a noted researcher and teacher in the Tuck School of Business in Dartmouth College. Prof. Mary Munter¹ has made walk-the-talk easier for all management practitioners by building a universal grammar for productive managerial conversations.

In an Indian context, the application of Communication Strategy is all the more relevant as managers have to grapple with multiple issues of resource deficits, both financial and human. The inherent problem for the Indian workplace has been to mobilise people from heterogeneous sub cultures, which is a stupendous task. Indians work when they are forced, owing to fear of punitive action, or even if they work of their own volition, their sub cultural pluralities make the workplace narratives more rhizomatic and, hence, chaotic. As managing people in Indian organisations is a supremely challenging task for any manager, Munter’s grammar can give them a structured paradigm to formulate their own prof...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of scripts
• Commentaries and explanations
• Case studies and caselets
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prelude to communication strategies for global corporate leaders
• 2 Walk the talk: application of communication strategy
• 3 Checkmate: persuade to win
• 4 You’ve got mail: strategy in style
• 5 Sherlock Holmes in action: managerial investigations (cases, reports, proposals, plans)
• Appendix case 1: taking the cake
• Appendix case 2: the CEO’s private investigation
• Index