Chapter 10 summary

Leadership Communication
Summary Chapter 10
Leading through effective external relations

Chapter 10 deals with how to establish leadership through effective external relations. A roadmap to achieve this goal includes;

* Developing an external relations strategy
* Building and maintaining a positive corporate image
* Working with the news media
* Handling crisis communication

A communication strategy framework can be used to develop an external relations strategy and includes clarity of purpose, identifying the major audience and stakeholders, and selecting a spokesperson(s).

Building a positive corporate image should include the following dimensions; media relations, corporate public relations, corporate identity, government relations, and investor relations.

Working with the news media involves media interviews requiring great preparation and good performance during the interview.

Handling crisis communications requires responsiveness, speed, crisis message consistency, and more to mitigate whatever negative effects the crisis has brought.

From a personal perspective, I believe the BP response to the media and Congress has been extremely poor. This loss of image was compounded by an out-of-touch CEO who seemed to know very little about many things related to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, BP’s internal communication staff were unprepared to handle that crisis and, therefore, were unable to protect BP from what has turned out to be an environmental and public relations disaster.
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