A field guide for stoking your company's reputation.
8/12/2002
Who at your company delivers the firm's message to employees, the public, the media, investors? Ultimately it's a job for the CEO, say Paul A. Argenti and Janis Forman—he a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and she a director at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. The communication piece is central to corporate well-being and strategy, they believe; companies that delegate it to death or treat it as an afterthought may not live to regret its loss. This clearly written how-to describes internal and external communications, including advertising, community and investor relations, and crisis management. Like those of business, the strategies and techniques of corporate communications are "morally neutral," say the authors. On the other hand, "a corporate reputation that is built by honest, open corporate communications can be better than cash in the bank."