Time, Tide and the Net Wait for No One
Leadership in the New Media Environment Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead (ret) at the 2nd National Summit on Strategic Communications It’s a pleasure for me to be here to spend a little bit of time with you and talk a bit about the Navy’s view toward communication. [Acknowledged introduction by Mr. Bob Grupp, President, Strategic Communications Leadership Initiative]. What I’d really like to do and I’m very pleased to be able to do is spend some time talking about how the Navy – a global organization that has been in business for over 230 years, an organization of...
read moreConfessions of a Strategic Communicator
Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks weighs in on Assistant Secretary of. of Defense for Public Affairs George Little’s recent memo re-defining Strategic Communications. Brooks refers to SC as the thoughtful integration of issues of stakeholder perception and response into policymaking, planning, and operations at every level. Public affairs, IO, and traditional public diplomacy are tools that can support and enhance strategic communication, but they aren’t the same as strategic communication, she says. Strategic communication, in this view, is less about what we have to say than it...
read more“Strategic Communication” Defined
It has been said that the term “strategic communications” is used with such ubiquity that it becomes almost meaningless. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (OASD-PA) announced recently that it will “avoid using the term ‘strategic communications’ to avoid causing confusion.” I’m of the opinion that reports of the demise of the term “strategic communications” are greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, this still begs the question of definition. What strategic communication is, what it involves, and what it...
read morePracticing “Narrative Leadership”
Smart leaders today engage with employees in ordinary person-to-person conversation more than communicating a series of commands from on high. Practicing “narrative leadership” Increasingly, “leadership” is being defined as a conversation. A June 2012 article in the Harvard Business Review rightly focused on how the “command-and-control approach to management in recent years has become less and less viable” because “globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive,...
read moreCareers with an incredible view
Strategic Communication in an Era of Radical Transparency Remarks by Letitia A. Long, Director National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency To the National Summit on Strategic Communications June 7, 2011 Arlington, VA Letitia Long: Thank you very much, Bob (Grupp, President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations) for that kind introduction. Some may wonder; intelligence, strategic communication, radical transparency, secrets. What do they have in common? I was delighted to receive this invitation to come speak with you today, because we don’t often get the opportunity to speak in...
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