Abstract
Journalism and media communication majors often lack education and experience in business. Ragas and Culp, DePaul University professors, assembled an impressive group of industry leaders offering war stories and guidance from the trenches of strategic communication. As every instructor using guest lecturers knows, however, professionals bring a pedagogical opportunity and challenge: frequently, it is difficult to bring continuity to their advice.
I tried to imagine my students being assigned to read this book as a supplement in the Media Entrepreneurship course because it is one of our main business offerings within the School of Communication. I have never read or reviewed a book that opens with 18 endorsement blurbs from top professionals and academics. This is both impressive and off-putting—feeling a bit like the reader is being hammered with brand marketing messages about the book. Then, the reader must turn 17 pages (title, dedication, contents, contributors, acknowledgments, preface, and forward) before reaching the first chapter.
In it, Ragas and Culp carefully make the historic public relations (PR) argument of the need for communication professionals to contribute in executive decision making. They suggest that the hit musical Hamilton’s song, “The Room Where it Happens,” applies to PR research about a “seat at the table” (p. 3). Essentially, each of the book’s contributors offers examples of how their input to CEO’s and other top executives made a difference.
I was a doctoral student more than three decades ago when Turk (1989) began the conversation amid a very real concern that as more women entered the PR field, pay and career advancement could be issues:
Preparing students for entry-level positions is no longer sufficient; professional programs now see it as their mission to prepare students for lifetime careers that almost certainly will offer the likelihood or opportunity of managerial involvement in addition to the practice of technical skills. (p. 38)
Ragas and Culp do not directly address compensation, but it is obvious that White males continue to dominate top positions at many large organizations and in the board room. This is why for many years investor Warren Buffett required business schools bringing students to meet him in Omaha to have at least one-third of each group populated with women. Buffett has said that American business needs to be more inclusive to be competitive on a global stage. Ragas and Culp stay more focused on communication pros as “strategic assets to their organizations in advancing corporate character, purpose, goals, objectives and strategies” (p. 4).
The book is organized into nine parts: introduction, business acumen, finance, human resources and employee engagement, legal, marketing, social responsibility, corporate transformation, and a conclusion. Contributors come from a broad spectrum of PR areas of practice—pharmaceuticals, airlines, automotive, insurance, and so on.
Ragas and Culp align with the Arthur W. Page Society principles that argue for the value of the Chief Communication Officer (CCO) as a reputation “steward,” collaborative “integrator,” and “digital engagement” developer (p. 6). In doing so, they suggest that data should be harnessed, as PR people seek to “influence behavior” (p. 6). A CCO is viewed as a leader in guiding an organization to “tell the truth” and “prove it with action” (p. 11). The authors mention two other popular corporate titles, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO), but did not mention the emerging work about Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data Officer (CDO).
I was drawn to three of the book’s case studies about Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Conagra—two relatable brand stories and a company that abruptly moved its corporate headquarters after decades in Omaha to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. Conagra Brands CCO Jon Harris offered this: “Even when the message to be delivered is a challenging one, it is my nature and instinct to accentuate the positive” (p. 185). Try telling that to the hundreds of loyal Omaha employees left without work.
As an instructor of our Communication Law and Policy course, I also found the chapter about the role of legal counsel as valuable.
A major weakness of the essays was in Part IV: Marketing, Brand, and Data Analytics. The three chapters included some discussion of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), but no examples showing data as driver of decision making. Given what had been said earlier in the book about getting over a fear of math, I was hoping to find a chart or two.
I appreciated the effort by Ragas and Culp to synthesize the essays in an important concluding chapter. They suggest that “communicators must be increasingly well versed in the ‘business of business’” (p. 201). However, to do so, many PR people will need to pursue the MBA along with PRSA APR certification. The authors’ key conclusions center upon the CCO as “courageous counsel” with a “heightened focus on employee engagement and corporate culture” (p. 202). This could be overly optimistic.
The book may be useful as a supplementary reading, if instructors assign it when bringing guest speakers into the strategic communication or other course. I applaud the work of Ragas and Culp for taking on a challenging and changing industry area that impacts communication professionals. Our classrooms are important spaces for taking students beyond their first job and planning for a full career filled with technological change, global business, and unlimited opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. At the same time, we must carefully address PR from a critical perspective informed by the positives and negatives of corporate behavior.