The Communication Manifesto, Revisited
April 06, 2022
What have corporate communicators achieved, in a generation?
Youโd yawn, if you started reading here about the trouble with corporate life these days, and corporate communication and I was saying stuff like: โEmployee levels of distrust have probably never been higher in North America and โฆ many of our communications fall far short of building understanding, or improving quality performance, or meeting employee needs or management objectives, let alone changing behaviors โฆโ
Tell us something we donโt know, Murray.
Okay, what if I told you those were some of the operative words of a โCommunicator Manifesto,โ delivered in a speech in the mid-1990s, and published in a Journal of Employee Communication Management that I helped foundโthat itself is now 15 years extinct. Good God almighty, how am I even still alive?
The Manifesto was written not by me but by a frustrated vice president of corporate affairs at Whirlpool Corporation, Bruce Berger, who was departing for what would become a happy quarter-century second act, teaching advertising and public relations at the University of Alabama.
I donโt want to reduce Bergerโs Manifesto to Sisyphusโ annual contractโand I donโt want to discourage todayโs communicators by sighing, โIt was ever thus.โ
Rereading this piece after Berger and I reconnected recently, I was also struck by some of what was different, back in the mid-1990s:
American employees at that time were freshly shocked by a huge raft of layoffsโthen called โrightsizingsโโthat had just WillSmithed many of them out of the assumption that they might work at a single company their whole career, as their fathers had done. Globalism still seemed new, brutal concepts like โzero-defectโ and โreengineeringโ were scaring the shit out of people. Dagwood gave way to Dilbert, and the business press lionized asshole CEOs like Jack Welche, and โbelieve it or not, kidsโa guy named โChainsawโ Al Dunlap.
Cold institutional corporate-speak was a bigger problem then than it is now, at least judging by Bergerโs enraged exhortations that communicators fight it โby posting and highlighting atrocious examples on bulletin boards. By sending dozens of photocopies of the offending language to the President and the CEO. By daring to leave such words out of announcements. By embedding the word Companyspeak into your organizationโs vocabulary. By making this dangerous and empty language as transparent and visible as we possibly can.โ
Alas, much of this 26-year-old piece is painfully and drainingly familiar, including Bergerโs call for a communicatorโs revolution:
We blow up the old mental model.
We make visible the trust issue.
We give CompanySpeak a dirty name and fight hard to eradicate it.
We challenge all who inhibit the flow of information, ideas, opinions โฆ
We strengthen our own skills and add new ones to the mix.
We develop and own a communication process โฆ
We understand the politics of strategic planning.
We learn how to win.
We fight like hell.
And we never, never, never, never give up.
Nineteen ninety fucking six.
Rather than berate ourselves or our lesser God for failing to solve these stubborn problems in corporate life, communicators might do well to imagine how bad things would have become had stubborn communication humanists like Bruce Berger and his proteges not been on that wall through the next 25 years: The dot com collapse, and 9/11. The advent of social media in corporate communication. The economic meltdown of 2008. The Trump election. COVID, the George Floyd Summer and January 6. How alienated would corporate workers be if some culturally literate humanists in corporate communication departments (and elsewhere throughout the corporation, wherever they found themselves working) werenโt fighting beancounters and propeller-headed bureaucrats with all the guile and courage and energy they could bring to bear?
I will run this piece by Berger and hope he responds. But my feeling is that corporate management does listen more and bullshit less than it did back in Bergerโs day. That corporations are somewhat less Kafka-esque, Heller-esque and Orwellian places to work and more responsive to employeesโ demands. And that more managers, all the way up to the CEO in some cases, would embrace Bruce Bergerโs definition of the meaning of corporate work:
We would like to find the most effective โฆ most productive โฆ most rewarding way of working together. We would like a work process and a set of relationships that meet our personal needs, too โฆ our personal needs for belonging โฆ for contributing โฆ for doing meaningful work โฆ for the opportunity to make a commitment โฆ for the opportunity to grow and to be at least reasonably in control of our own destinies. And then, from time to time, weโd like someone to say, โTHANK YOU.โ
Well, as the comic Stephen Wright used to say right around that same time: โYou canโt have everything. Where would you put it?โ
Bruce Bergerโand everyone else who remembers what it was like to work and communicate in corporations all those years agoโare you satisfied with the progress weโve made in the last generation?
More importantly: Whatโs the Communicator Manifesto you would deliver for the next?
***
Postscript: A letter from Bruce Berger, the writer of the original Communicator Manifesto:
The Communicator Manifesto ainโt dead, David, but itโs evolved in a world that appears ever more frantic and dangerous. Some days thereโs sunrise in our work, and other days dense fog hides our progress, or stormy clouds and thunder dominate. Such is life, right? But we always need a manifesto in our fieldโa call to arms to address issues and concerns that arise in our profession in what today is a different world than that of 1995. And by 2050 there will be yet another dramatically different world. If we are still around. If the dramatized and dangerous politicians and world leaders havenโt imploded our planet. If we havenโt all asphyxiated from gassy oxygen-less air.
I agree, David: some things have changed in the last quarter century. Though working in academia, Iโve continued to consult and work on communication projects, and Iโve been involved with more than 35 research studies regarding leadership in our field, self-reflection, team building, listening, ethics, and so forth. Leadership has improved. For one thing, more leaders are women and people of color. More leaders today focus more on their employees and team members. They listen better. They are more sincere. They are more open to others and different ideas. They realize that diversity, inclusion, empowerment, engagement, and other popular words and phrases are MORE than just words. And more say โthank youโ today.
Other changes also are underway. The workplace, highlighted or boosted by pandemic-related issues and changes, has given greater control to workers. There are more jobs out there, the strict 9-5 day is disappearing, more people work from home, salaries rise to fight competition, and more and more people at all levels appear to be more sensitive to the vital issues of trust, inclusion, diversity, equal opportunity, work recognition, and leadership that practices what it preaches in the real language of the heart, mind, and decision-making.
So, Iโm more optimistic, David. I believe more of us across professions are embracing that โoldโ definition of the meaning of corporate work I shared in 1995:
We would like to find the most effective โฆ most productive โฆ most rewarding way of working together. We would like a work process and a set of relationships that meet our personal needs, too โฆ our personal needs for belonging โฆ for contributing โฆ for doing meaningful work โฆ for the opportunity to make a commitment โฆ for the opportunity to grow and to be at least reasonably in control of our own destinies. And then, from time to time, weโd like someone to say, โTHANK YOU.โ
A new manifesto today might highlight trust, truth, information content, multiple channel presentations, and fake news issues. Or emphasize the desperate need for a new, third party in politicsโฆ
Thank you, David, for your thought-rich, wry, and witty contributions in this field.
Thanks, Bruceโfor weighing in here and for writing the Manifesto in the first place. It was serious, idealistic, borderline subversive communicators like you, when I was in my mid-twenties, who convinced me corporate communication might be a field worthy of a lifeโs study. It has been! โDM