If you are worried about the risk to your reputation, you don't launch a telecoms firm in an aggressive way.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.
Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line.
Executives are rarely comfortable speaking on the record, particularly in secretive Silicon Valley companies.
Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.
Corporations have free speech, but they can't speak like you and me. They don't have mouths or hands.
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
Motto of the U.S. airline industry - "We're Hoping to Have a Motto Announcement in About an Hour."
Most smart companies should make themselves media companies. That means they put out their own information.
A press statement may be given with a very good intention, but it says nothing beyond it. If it comes from corporations they run, then it is corporate social responsibility (CSR). That's different from philanthropy. CSR is a lot of shareholders, including me.
I don't understand why people whose entire lives or their corporate success depends on communication, and yet they are led on occasion by CEOs who cannot talk their way out of a paper bag and don't care to.
If you work at a 10,000-person company, and you're using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack, you might have access to 10 or 20 percent.
Inside a company, you can mandate that everyone use the same technology, which means you can go a little bit, I don't know, higher-fidelity than the lowest-common-denominator technology. There are a lot of things that Slack gives you that email doesn't when you think about internal use.
It's urgent that companies tell their own stories on digital platforms.
Calling the new company Live Nation Entertainment is a big statement. Let's make sure we send a strong message from the first investor call.
I'm out talking about this company (General Electric) seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with nothing to hide. We're a 130-year-old company that has a great record of high-quality leadership and a culture of integrity.
Pulling the plug on the BlackBerry could cost corporate America millions of dollars. The BlackBerry is more than e-mail but a handheld office, and if you shut down the BlackBerry, you shut off the data that powers American business.
Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.
So often corporate America, business America, are the worst communicators, because all they understand are facts, and they cannot tell a story. They know how to explain their quarterly results, but they don't know how to explain what they mean.
Social lets consumers talk about the products. You may pay your way onto the Facebook feed, but after that, it's conversations by the users. That's not sufficient because it leaves out what is possible for employees to talk, for R&D to talk, or the CEO to talk.
Hold at least one all-hands meeting every quarter and, to underscore the startup's team concept, make sure at least one additional executive joins you in leading the meeting.
I actually do think you're seeing this trend towards organizations just caring more about their brand and engaging. And so I think Home Depot will want to humanize itself. I think that's a lot of why companies are starting blogs, are just giving more insight into what's going on with them.
In the corporate world, there is no ground more fertile for appearing smart than the rich earth that is electronic communication. Your email writing, sending and ignoring skills are just as important as your nodding skills, and even more important than your copying and pasting skills.
Communication is the key for any global business.
