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I recently joined thirty colleagues from the academic, agency and corporate worlds for a symposium co-sponsored by the Arthur W. Page Society and the Institute for Public Relations, organizations I currently serve as a trustee. The symposium was hosted for the third year at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
This year the symposium focused almost entirely on the white paper recently published by the Page Society entitled “The Authentic Enterprise.” The paper considers major seismic shifts affecting business—globalization, stakeholder empowerment and the rise of new media—and the specific implications of these forces on corporate communicators.
While much of the discussion centered, as one would expect, on the notion of authenticity, a great deal of the dialogue also focused on the concept of the “enterprise.”What makes this symposium unique is that it mixes those who teach communication in a business school environment—at places like Harvard, Notre Dame, the University of Virginia and Dartmouth—with those who teach the discipline in more traditional schools of journalism and communication.
From the discussions over two and a half days, it was clear that among business school students—both undergraduate and graduate—there is a growing appreciation that to succeed they need a better understanding of the communication discipline. By the same token, more and more communication students are being advised that to succeed in the corporate communications profession, they need to study business fundamentals as an integral part of their college experience.
Despite this recognition, our academic institutions are struggling to keep pace with the rapid changes in the world of corporate communications. While silos exist in all organizations, in the academy they are particularly rigid and the pace of change can be glacial. For example, in many institutions communication students are effectively prevented from enrolling in business school courses because seats are prioritized for business majors and minors. In many cases prerequisite requirements make it difficult for a communication major to select many classes that teach marketing, economics or accounting principles.
At the symposium, several attendees pointed to strategies they are using to counter these realities. One communication school is offering its own business fundamentals classes to communication majors by hiring adjunct professors from other institutions, thus circumventing the business school blockade.
At many universities students are now being strongly advised to minor in business, making it easier to enroll in needed classes that will better prepare them for corporate positions.
Whatever the strategies used, the sooner our students learn to appreciate the complexity of business enterprises, the more authentic they will become as counselors. Those enlightened academic institutions that are finding news ways to facilitate this learning deserve our thanks.
Tom Martin is a Senior Counselor at Feldman & Partners, a communications management consulting firm, and the Executive-in-Residence at the College of Charleston. He can be reached at tom@feldmanandpartners.com.
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