Businesses of every imaginable kind must communicate, explain what they do, internally and externally, or die. Reaching out to customers, suppliers, employees, prospects and shareholders is not an option. In the case of publicly-held companies, quarterly and annual financial reporting is the law. To reach prospects and customers they need advertising and public-relations agencies, and competent writers in many areas of business activity.

‘Grow or die’ means what it says. Organizations, people, vegetables. Let’s stick to corporations. New and self-renewing enterprises investigate and exploit inventions, new ways to do things, in an accelerating technological world. They kill their own established products with new ones, e.g. in high technology. Corporate graveyards are filled with the tombstones of companies who rested on their laurels, stood pat and (often) tried to save money by not investing in communications: advertising, PR, shows—the media list is long and costly.

Successful companies know that if they don’t innovate first their competitors will. Then they must tell the world, or fail. Global competition is lean and mean, tough and aggressive, well heeled and determined. Failing to respect competition is, frankly, suicidal. Continue reading A failure to communicate (Part 2—the ‘abominable no man’)

How often have you seen businessmen—in business or trying to build one—fail to include communications as a specific budget item in their cost projections? Brilliant inventors and entrepreneurs who don’t see the need for business plans are legion, too. So are marketing geniuses who rely on personal contacts alone. Financial supporters don’t discover new companies by accident. Prospects and customers don’t acquire information about new products and services by reading tealeaves, from intuition, using osmosis or via psychic phenomena. Forgive me if I seem self-serving.

Communications count. Yes, really. For everyone. They manage how we are perceived, like it or not. You, I and everyone, including political parties, corporations, cities and organizations of every type and size, acquire a reputation by decision or by default.

Unless sloughed off as irrelevant, communicating is a decision, an act of will that must be budgeted and executed properly and professionally, to include ‘the abominable no man’ (we’ll discuss him tomorrow) as audiences you must address or risk failure. A metaphor for the ‘abominable no man’ is that memorable Washington, DC political caveat: you can be killed by a knife thrown across town and you may never find out whose hand it left. Continue reading A failure to communicate (Part 1—it’s an act of will)