I’m teaching Media and Communication 6550 this summer, Organizational Communication. Having spent nearly my whole career in that field, I anticipated that it would be a walk in the park.

This is the third time I’ve taught the course; the first two were last fall, one online and one conventionally. The 15-week semester of then, however, is NOT the six-week sprint we are in now!

In a whole regular semester, we use a textbook. For summer, it’s a selection of journal articles. There’s a team project for the former and a final paper for the latter. There are DEEP details we can get into and discuss in the longer version. For summer, we leave aside a fair amount of theory beyond a few critical items, and try to get to applying those key theories as quickly as possible.

I’m a pretty good online lecturer; I break longish stuff into many parts, am an “animated” speaker who’s very well aware of the need to perform online, and try always to impart a passion and excitement for the material.

Whew.

This one is tough!

So far, the students are hanging in there. The reading is demanding, the online discussion assignments are challenging, and the lack of synchronous communication means you have to save up your questions and formally ask me via email. Can’t be easy! We have nearly 30 in class, and it’s a mad dash.

Short version: We contrast classical management theories from Fayol, Weber and Taylor with more modern paradigms, focusing on the communication impacts and issues of those managerial ideas. And this week, we look at a few important 21st century developments (like the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) theory).

I wish I had known this material at Goodyear and KeyCorp!

A quick overview of the graphic above… One of the central concepts of OrgComm is the idea that an organization isn’t a “container” full of communication activity. The communication is actually helping to structure, support and change the organization itself. Anne Nicotera wrote that it was an O1, O2, O3 arrangement – organizING, OrganiZED and OrganiZATION. That is, the communication actions are creating the needed structures for the firm in real time, leading to a state of being organized and thus supporting the entity of an organization.

That self-structuring activity is how teams and sub-teams get built and discarded, how the rules for discourse get made and abandoned. Institutional positioning among various stakeholders is also a reflection of that structuring, as are the processes by which people join, stay and leave the firm. Without the communication activity, these processes don’t happen, or don’t happen as well.

Stay tuned. I’ll share some more on this class as we go along.

Sean is also marketing the BGSU Online Master’s in Strategic Communication program for the balance of summer semester. Find the details here. Want to do some visual learning? Here’s a webinar that outlines the program in more detail.

I’m not naming names, but certain politicians rely on hyperbole, exaggeration and drama that frequently seems to have little relationship to facts. That’s not a political statement, it’s an observation. So is that merely a rhetorical distinction, or is it important.

I once wrote in response to Bob Batchelor that public relations/communication isn’t evil, but that political PR probably is. Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove, George Stephanopoulos, and now Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders… Technically NONE of these people are public relations. They are creatures of the political, not dedicated representatives of principled, ethical advocacy.

It’s really unfortunate, because those of us who do see ourselves as the latter are often observed to be the former. Certainly the strategic thrust of our job is to represent our client/boss and the interest of our organization in finding and supporting competitive advantage.

The question is, how far should we go?

In advertising law there’s a phrase that applies: Puffery. When a potato chip says, “no one can eat just one,” the reasonable person doesn’t think that is a literal claim. When a roofing company says in an ad that it’s a “world champion,” we know that there’s no objective competition under way that might support that contention. It’s puffery – it’s rhetorical and used to raise awareness and prompt interest, and the law says that’s ok.

In politics, however, there’s a whole industry dedicated to convince you that you didn’t hear what you just heard, that “she meant” something different. That we should “take him seriously but not literally.”

Danger, Will Robinson.

As a near 30-year pro in professional communication of varying stripes, I believe words and images matter. To quote the Christian bible, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” (Luke, 16:10, KJV) If we can’t trust you with the small stuff, how can we do so for the big stuff?

The political realm is one of the only places where the “official” text of a speech is different than what the speaker actually said. Congress allows Members to “revise and extend” their remarks. So you cannot believe what you hear, right?

The rules on puffery shouldn’t apply in politics. We should expect our representatives in both the legislative and executive branches to speak the truth. Not a partisan version of it, but the actual truth. If they are engaging in speculation, or interpreting something, they should say so and NOT claim they are telling the truth or exposing lies when they are doing nothing of the sort.

Part of my job is coordinating BGSU’s online master’s in strategic communication, and as a result, I get to teach grad students in that program. Likely in the future, I’ll teach some in person as well, as I did at Kent State.

Amid my peregrinations among these students I’ve picked up some interesting tidbits of information, and I thought I would share them with you.

1. Grad school isn’t easy. In my grad program (I was on the five-year plan) I went part time while teaching a class and serving clients in Communication AMMO. Three of those were retainers of significant commitment, so for a time, Saturdays and Sundays were full of reading, writing, and thinking. That’s fine, and I enjoyed it. But it’s worthwhile to know that I worked for myself, and could fudge my schedule around to make time for all this stuff. These students inevitably work for other people, and at varying degrees of seniority. Making the time is hard when balancing work and family responsibilities, and professors should know that it’s a different gig than when they were in school, mostly going straight through and not attempting to strike that balance.
2. Academic writing is, well, not the way people normally write or speak. We all know style (AP, APA, Chicago, MLA) is just meant to provide some rules that make it easier to read and to write. But our insistence on following the arcane formality that’s commonplace in academic writing makes it much harder to learn the material. I use a YouTube video from a Brit Ph.D. student to give suggestions on how to read scholarly material. It involves OneNote or something similar and helps demystify how you pick out important stuff from the morass that often results. It would be awesome if the plain language movement from finance could find an auxiliary footing in the academy!
3. The applied, for people who will not go on to Ph.D. and an academic life, is more important than the mechanics and the theory. I qualify that statement, though, by claiming that theory is every bit as relevant and important as the applied, but we have to bring it to life! Learning how to do structural equation modeling would be a mind-expander, but in reality, most of us in the comms profession will never have the need to do that. We do need to know what it is, how to recognize a good research design, what to do with the data and how to apply it to strategy!

There’s more, but this post already has a tl;dr pall gradually creeping over it.

Suffice to say, I get SO much from the time I spend reading and listening to students! Love this job.

So here at BGSU we’ve acted proactively and announced we’re going to be online-only after our spring break next week, for two weeks.

For me, it’s not a big deal. We can do quite a lot of our stuff online, and I’ve been teaching in that space for awhile, most recently last Fall.

But for some of my colleagues who NEVER teach online, or whose subject matter is dependent on tools and equipment that’s real world, not virtual, it’s going to be a Big Hairy Deal.

All of that pales in comparison to people’s health, and ideally, we’ll be so far out in front of this that it will prove to be a non event here on campus.

That’s why I am not at all upset about the switch a roo, even though the Coronavirus so far isn’t here in NW Ohio. Better to put the CDC recommendations in practice now than wish we had.

In the meantime, WASH YOUR HANDS. Stop touching your face. Practice the Demolition Man handshake protocol.