Sean Williams – CommAMMO at BGSU

I have spent most of my professional life in matters of internal/employee communication. One of the academic angles for that is organizational comm — the different ways we can explore, interpret and conduct communication activities that are intrinsic to building, maintaining and enhancing organizations.

In the BGSU StratComm online MA program, it’s one of the deeper courses, very strategic and challenging. There’s a strong emphasis on how management and non-managers interact, the reasons underpinning those interactions, and practical and theoretical implications of those impacts.

For example, early on in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, people researching the organizational world tended to see a rather scientific view – organization as a machine with interconnecting parts, each of which could be made to function more efficiently. Communication was mainly viewed as a one-way thing, with the manager telling the workers what to do and how to do it. There would be “one best way” to do the work, documented and enforced.

They wanted workers to have specializations, and communication within those disciplines was seen as important. But across functions? Bottom up? Not so much.

In the second third of the century, we start to see criticism of that approach, and an impulse to let employees have more input into HOW the work gets done. That leads to some pretty radical concepts – that employees could participate more equally in the work, that power could be shared across hierarchies, and by the last third of the century, that treating employees like children was a bad way to make them loyal, hardworking and otherwise valuable.

Organizations are still fighting these fights, and knowing the history of these communication approaches, makes for a better communicator, a better PR person, and a better marketer. I like to say that communicators are business people whose superpower is communication.

In this class, we expand your foundation of knowledge about business, management, leadership and organizational life. All you need after this is your cape!

Ready to make communication YOUR business superpower? Investigate the BGSU MA in Strategic Communication, Sean Williams, Coordinator, and associate teaching professor.

Maybe it’s because I’m in the process of wrapping up my fourth year as a full-time professor, but I’m more convinced than ever that higher education is a public good.

Some politicians are making a massive market in outright hatred of university educations. They grasp at red herrings, use exceptions to prove their rules, seize on extreme examples to castigate the entire enterprise. There are bills before state legislatures that demand control over vast reaches of the academic mission and operations.

It sure is ironic that nearly all politicos are lawyers, people who themselves have deep educations that have enabled them to be handsomely paid in luchre and power. Most lawyers study history, or political science, or even philosophy prior to law school (Grey, 2022). These liberal arts and social sciences are part of what these folks are attacking.

There’s no doubt that the huge rise in the number of attendees in college has led to some unintended consequences. As of 2021, more than 37% of Americans 25 years and older have a Bachelor’s degree; many more have an Associate’s or at least some college. This is up more than 7 points just since 2011. In 1970, the former figure was less than 20%.

What’s the impact of nearly doubling the number of college graduates? Add in an ever-broader menu of coursework and majors, and there certainly are jobs that require a Bachelor’s that don’t need one. That does not mean that a college degree is useless, even in the liberal arts.

For me it all comes down to Objectives. My old website’s headline was “Objectives are everything.” It is still the case that getting a degree makes one more employable and that college grads earn more over time than those without one (save for skilled trades, which is a topic for another post.) A Georgetown study from just a couple of years ago says Bachelor’s degree holders average about 75% more in lifetime earnings of someone with just a high school diploma, and those with a master’s degree double that of high school grads.

A college education is more, however, than a pathway to higher income. It’s a means of learning how to think critically, how to learn, to be inquisitive and curious. College is a safe place to explore different ideas, to meet people different from yourselves, to figure out how to work with people you don’t know.

University is a means of learning to lead, to follow, to criticize, to write, speak and otherwise express yourself in a supportive environment. This is not a particularly quantifiable set of goals, but it nonetheless is crucial to becoming a functioning, contributing member of society.

The experience will be different for everyone, and that is totally OK. Some people won’t like it, will find it difficult, will have poor experiences. But most will remember it as a time of critical transition in their own lives.

Come back to college, or come for the first time. My own journey took a rather long time – 16 years for the Bachelor’s and 5 for the master’s. Both changed my life immeasurably for the better.

References:

Grey, S. (2022). The Top 13 Pre-Law Majors: What’s The Best Major For Law School Admission? Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/advisor/education/pre-law-majors.

Nietzel, M. (2021). New Study: College Degree Carries Big Earnings Premium, But Other Factors Matter Too. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/10/11/new-study-college-degree-carries-big-earnings-premium-but-other-factors-matter-too/

Schaeffer, K. (2022). Key facts about today’s U.S. college graduates. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from https://pewrsr.ch/3uATci3.

Any longtime reader knows that I’m a fan in the most inclusive sense of the phrase, “public relations” to describe the work I’ve done for more than 30 years in professional communicaiton.

As a board member of the International PR Research Conference, and my activities with the Institute for PR Measurement Commission, plus years with PRSA’s Employee Communication section, and now leading the NW Ohio Chapter of PRSA, PR is in my blood. And yet, there periodically are spasms of discussion about what we call ourselves, particularly as Content Marketing creeps into our sandbox, Native Advertising and Sponsored Content tries to pass themselves off as news content, and the “media” changes practically by the moment.

I’ve held for a long time that there is more to PR than media relations — employee communication, reputation management, issues management, crisis, and much more — but that has meant some people hear me say PR and misunderstand. So the effort to find another term for what we all do is understandable to me.

I like “Strategic Communication” quite a lot. I also like “professional communication,” which may be a bit inaccurate because we don’t need professional licensure the way accountants, doctors and lawyers do. We are, however, the only people in most organizations who are business people for whom communication is our superpower. So why not embrace the more general “communication” in some fashion that differentiates it from telecommunications — the technology to carry our messages?

A lot of people like “Integrated Marketing Communications,” but I believe (as others have quoted me) that all marketing is communication, but not all communication is marketing. So that’s not going to work. A ton of smart people like to say that everything is about marketing anyway, so why not just used that term?

J’ Rèfuse! See comment above!

Gini Dietrich uses PESO === Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned == and I bring that to my students all the time to show how different tactics help us communicate to our many stakeholders and constituents. In my AMMO model (audience, message, method, objective) PESO covers the methods. The remaining components are the ultimate in strategy, and thus lift up our discipline to the highest levels.

So StratComm is it, at least for me. It’s the only term that lets me fully blend the various elements of the communication mix. What are your thoughts?

Sean Williams is an Asst. Teaching Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University, in NW Ohio. He coordinates the School’s online master’s program in StratComm.

A pal texted me this morning asking, “How could we have two Cy Young award winners and not with the whole thing?” Ah, yes, the pain, the pain.

Here’s what I believe.

Number one: Underperforming hitting. So many teams with terrific pitching have their offenses suddenly play snooze tag during the playoffs. In the MLB’s list ranking the last 25 World Series Champs, there’s ample evidence that the old adage “good pitching beats good hitting” is true.

But, even anemic attacks can come alive on any given day. Just ask St. Louis’s David Eckstein, who won the WS MVP in 2006, or (ack!) Edgar Renteria for the Marlins in (darn it) 1997. Or Steve Pearce for the Red Sox in 2018, David Freese for the Cards in 2011, or Pablo Sandoval for the G’nts in what, 2012?

Without the element of luck on the offensive side, it doesn’t matter how great your pitching is. The Indians have had the best staff in something like five out of six years, and yet they’ve made the Series once and been booted in the first round twice because there was no offense. Even from star offensive players!

That’s the proof to my thesis. You need pitching good enough to hold down the best of the opposition, but without someone standing up to hit, you will lose a lot of low scoring games. How we typically talk about this conundrum – offense vs pitching and defense — is a throwback to the days of Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax. Dominant starters supported by a variety of hitters who were flexible in their attack.

Let’s put it another way: No one cares if you win 11-10 or 2-1, as long as it’s a W.