Thoughts on Assignment B for Executive Communication

Hello. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and are now ready for the sprint to the Christmas/Hannukah holidays. I also hope that my comments on Assignment A were helpful (sometimes in small, picky ways) to help you polish your executive writing skills.

Just as our work with "tipping point communication" was somewhat cutting edge (you noticed that you can't look it up in many places, even though the idea of tipping points is well-established), similarly our Assignment B will take you into the relatively new territory of Communication Architecture.

I've talked with many of you about your papers. Here are four points that emerged in each of those conversations:

1. Communication channels and protocols ("rules") seem to spring up like weeds in organization, without plan or forethought. Your assigment B will give you the chance to describe a real or hypothetical communication system that is PLANNED. I, for example, would LOVE to plan a better communication system for our School.

2. If you're having trouble getting started, think of a past or present work experience (which may be disguised) where communication patterns and protocols (not personalities) lay at the heart of the organization's problems. A description of that bad situation becomes the first page of your paper. The remainder of the paper presents your analysis of how a better, planned approach to communication could have avoided the problems you described and, in addition, brought the organization many advantages.

3. In your analysis, consider "thinking time" or "executive time" as an endangered species, if many channels of communication are allowed to break into our day at will. In your plan, you may want to think through how you PROTECT your most creative people from communication overload.

4. Organizations have suffered (expensively) from the social dimension of communication. Frankly, it's fun (at times) to write or text funny stuff to your colleagues; it can be equally amusing just to chat by phone with friends within the company. Even admitting the need for good morale, such freedom to entertain oneself and one's colleagues during the workday can be enormously distracting in terms of productivity and mission. You may want to give some thought to the possible abuses of the social dimensions of various communication channels.

I hope these comments are useful. Feel free to give me a ring (415-422-6170) or email (bell@usfca.edu). Usually an email will bring a faster response because I check my email hourly and, at times, remotely when in meetings when I can't check my voicemail.

I learned volumes by reading your perspectives on tipping points in Assigment A. I look forward to the same kind of learning experience in Assignment B, and of course I hope the consideration of these topics are helpful to your executive development.

Art