Giant leap for PR with HR remit at HSBC… Is PR ready for more opportunities?
A
recent global corporate appointment indicates the growing importance of corporate
communications, and the far-reaching management structural changes the said development
could perhaps herald across the world.
Goad
has made a transition to corporation communications in 2001 post his long
journalism career with media houses like The Asian Wall Street Journal, The
Wall Street Journal and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
"It
demonstrates how far communications has come at HSBC specifically, but more
widely as well," said Goad. "The skills and experience you gain
managing an integrated communications function are applicable and relevant in
other functions. Communications has moved past the press office era…. This is
an unusual move but I don't think it will be the last — it's the new modern,
integrated version of communications... Employees are our most important
resource and our most important ambassadors."
Juxtaposed with the assessment and recommendations of global experts, one begins to feel the HSBC appointment would not perhaps remain an isolated corporate development.
Juxtaposed with the assessment and recommendations of global experts, one begins to feel the HSBC appointment would not perhaps remain an isolated corporate development.
Ram Charan, other
experts’ prescription
Consider
the views of Ram Charan, eminent business advisor to CEOs and
corporate boards, on the Chief Human Resource Officer’s function, for instance.
In
his article, It’s Time to
Split HR in Harvard Business Review (July 2014), Ram Charan focuses
on why global CEOs are disappointed with their Chief Human Resources Officers.
“What they (the Chief Human Resources Officers) can’t do very well is relate HR to real-world business needs,” said Ram
Charan. “They don’t know how key decisions are made, and they have great
difficulty analysing why people -- or whole parts of the organization -- aren’t meeting the
business’ performance goals.”
HR heads like Misra (the other two
exceptions named by Ram Charan being GE’s
Bill Conaty and Marsh’s
Mary Anne Elliott – working in line operations is the distinguishing quality of
such rare HR heads) have inspired Ram
Charan’s prescription of splitting the Chief Human Resource Officer function
into two strands: 1. HR-A (for administration) would primarily manage
compensation and benefits; 2. HR-LO (for leadership and organization) would
focus on improving the people capabilities of the business.
Ram Charan is the author or co-author
of 18 books, including the best-seller Execution.
He is the co-author of the new book Boards That Lead with Dennis Carey and Michael Useem.
In
his article,
Why HR Still Isn’t a Strategic Partner,
in Harvard Business Review (July 5, 2012), J. Craig Mundy, Vice
President, Human Resources and Communications, Climate Solutions Sector,
Ingersoll Rand (his present designation is Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Talent
Management, Ingersoll Rand), wrote, “For two decades we have been hearing that
HR must become a strategic partner to the business. And the fact that we’re
still hearing it suggests that in many organizations it hasn’t happened. The
need to align HR with the business has become more urgent than ever…. Yet, all
too often, business leaders still wonder aloud why their organizations even
have HR departments. For their part, many HR leaders are willing to partner
with the business, but given the unique situation of each individual company,
they have little in the way of concrete guidance about how to fulfil that
role.”
Mundy continues, “To
truly be partners to the business we must identify those critical points of the
business where the strategy succeeds or fails, and provide relevant talent
solutions. In other words, we must think in terms of what Brian E. Becker, Mark
A. Huselid, and Richard W. Beatty call ‘the
differentiated workforce’, in their book of the
same name.”
The
Differentiated Workforce states that “many companies fall into the trap of
spending too much time and money on low performers in non-strategic
roles, while high performers in strategic roles aren't getting the necessary
resources, development opportunities, or rewards”. The book recommends that the
workforce should be managed like a portfolio – with disproportionate
investments in the jobs that create the most wealth.
Marketing opportunities
An
analysis of global experts’ assessment and recommendations on the marketing
function too reveals that the corporate communication function could perhaps
look forward to playing a much larger role in marketing, provided corporate communications
professionals are willing to rise to the challenge and retool themselves.
Stressing
the importance of marketing function overhaul is the article, The Ultimate
Marketing Machine by Marc de Swaan
Arons, Frank van den Driest and Keith Weed in Harvard Business Review (July 2014).
Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank van den Driest are the founders of the global
marketing strategy consultancy EffectiveBrands (now Millward Brown Vermeer) and the authors of The Global
Brand CEO (Airstream New York, 2010).
Keith Weed is the Chief Marketing and Communication Officer of Unilever and the
Chairman of the Marketing2020 Advisory Board.
“Marketers
understand that their organizations need an overhaul, and many chief marketing
officers are tearing up their org charts,” the three experts write in their HBR article. “But in our research and our
work with hundreds of global marketing organizations, we’ve found that those
CMOs are struggling with how to draw the new chart. What does the ideal
structure look like? Our answer is that this is the wrong question. A simple
blueprint does not exist.”
Echoing similar views on the marketing function is Bill
Lee, President of the Customer Reference Forum, Executive Director of the
Summit on Customer Engagement, and author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your
Most Important Asset (HBR Press, June 2012).
In his article, Marketing Is Dead in Harvard Business Review (August 9, 2012),
Lee writes, “Traditional marketing -- including advertising, public relations,
branding and corporate communications -- is dead. Many people in traditional
marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a
dead paradigm. But they are.”
The
way forward is clear. In their article, The
Ultimate Marketing Machine, the three experts recommend, “Marketing
organizations traditionally have been populated by generalists, but
particularly with the rise of social and digital marketing, a profusion of new
specialist roles -- such as digital privacy analysts and native-content editors
-- are emerging. We have found it useful to categorize marketing roles not by
title (as the variety seems infinite) but as belonging to one of three broad
types: ‘think’ marketers, who apply analytic capabilities to tasks like data
mining, media-mix modelling, and ROI optimization; ‘do’ marketers, who develop
content and design and lead production; and ‘feel’ marketers, who focus on
consumer interaction and engagement in roles from customer service to social
media and online communities.”
Lee’s prescription focuses on the “new model of
marketing: that is already in place in a number of organizations”. The key
elements of the new model are: community marketing; cultivating customer
influencers; rethinking the customer value proposition of the Most Valuable
Professional (MVP) customers; and involving customer advocates in the solution provided by the company.
PR and corporate
communications professionals, does all this ring a bell?
posted by J S Sai at 4:09 AM
15 comments
