Manage Communication to Add Value
Management guru Tom Peters says white collar workers and
managers in functional departments need to protect their futures.
They have to learn "the difference between doing totally
acceptable work and creating very new value...." he notes, in an
Industry Week article. In other words, people in departments
like Human Resources and Finance need to become entrepreneurial.
With that in mind, let's look at three ways you can use
communication to add new value, whether you work in a functional
department or not.
First, every department of every organization generates unique
information. That comes from being astride several communication
flows that come together in one office or area.
Information flows in from suppliers, from staff, and from other
stakeholders. For example, people in your department read trade
magazines, they attend seminars, they're in touch with people in
other departments, and they may belong to trade associations.
If your department consciously gathers, sifts, analyzes, and
organizes that information - formally or informally - then it's
creating new value. It's now more than just information: it's
business intelligence, information with added value. That's what
we refer to as generating new information.
Moving to the idea of condensing information, one striking
characteristic of modern communication is the amount of it
moving around. No doubt you've heard references to information
overload, an all too real problem for those whose work life
revolves around information.
You can add value by monitoring the information that comes into
your office and selecting just the critical parts. Movie
director Alfred Hitchcock put it this way, "Drama is life with
the dull bits cut out." That's probably not a bad way of
thinking about the condensing of information.
You can also summarize. Rather than distributing selected bits
of information, you can write an abstract that captures the key
data or ideas and reduces the load to manageable size for
others. That's great added-value for senior managers who need
overviews, rather than details. Many internal newsletters earn
their keep by providing regular summaries of useful information.
That information can come from outside the organization or from
within.
Third, there's other side of the same coin, which involves
expanding, rather than condensing, information.
One way to do this is by providing context. Consider, for
example, any current issue that gets high profile treatment. Can
you take the information you have, and then provide background
that helps others make sense of it? You might bring in
additional information that provides a brief history, the
current opportunities and threats, and some possible directions
for the future, along with their implications.
You might also expand information by making connections to
issues that don't seem to affect your organization. For example,
suppose your factory serves only the domestic market, so
globalization seems irrelevant for at least the near future.
But, what if you could explain how changes to tariffs would
allow you to buy your raw materials at lower prices?
In summary, you can add value to existing information by turning
it into business intelligence, condensing it, or expanding it.
All approaches may use the same material, but manage it
differently, to satisfy different needs.