Each period of business history has its own representative corporate type. The 1960s were the age of the conglomerate. In more recent decades, the startup has achieved iconic status. But the kind of organization that marks our own historical moment is, arguably, the turnaround company. In almost every sector, there are once-dominant enterprises that find themselves on the wrong side of a shift in customer demand or the emergence of a disruptive technology.

So what does it take for a leader to pull a company out of the doldrums, or indeed out of real or potential bankruptcy? It starts, no doubt, with a sense of urgency. In that respect, a turnaround effort differs from a standard organizational change initiative. Change happens slowly—whereas, in a turnaround situation, time is of the essence. A company that’s going in the wrong direction needs to change, and change fast, or soon it will be past the point of no return. Decide, act, decide, act: That must be the order of the day.

Or so it might seem, anyway. In fact, while the need for speed is undeniable, effective turnaround leaders also keenly appreciate the need to stop—to stop and talk with the people in their company who must do the day-to-day work of moving the organization in a new direction. Such leaders understand that a push to undertake a new strategy or to redirect operational performance depends pivotally on how well they communicate with employees. Equally important, it depends on how well they manage communication throughout their organization.

Consider the example of Starbucks. In 2008, the coffee chain was struggling to maintain its market position and to ward off a growing set of competitive threats. So Howard Schultz, the company’s founder, retook the reins as its CEO and launched a drive to revitalize its operations from the ground up. As reports on that effort demonstrate, Schultz placed communication at the center of his turnaround strategy.

“Schultz’[s] capacity for hands-on communication is impressive,” one writer observes. “He blitzed each core constituency—senior managers, store managers, customers, media, analysts, shareholders, and employees—with various communications concisely presenting the case for change or a particular decision.” Another commenter, drawing upon a published interview with Schultz (subscription required), highlights several principles and practices that Schultz has sought to pursue: “Share the Vision.” “Clearly Lay Out the Plan.” “Let Employees Know How They Can Help.” “Foster Two-Way Communication.”

Yet a focus on enhancing communication isn’t enough. It has to be communication of the right sort. In normal times, leaders can allow ideas and information to move across their organization in a deliberate, structured, layer-by-layer fashion. In a turnaround scenario, however, leaders must do whatever they can to make that process nimbler and smoother—more dynamic and more immediate. “Corporate communication,” as businesspeople have traditionally understood and practiced it, must give way to organizational conversation.

That’s our term for an approach to managing communication that draws upon the immediacy of personal conversation. Our model of organizational conversation features four distinct elements: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. Here, in the spirit of that model, we present four steps toward powering a turnaround project through conversation. For each step, we’ll cite an example from the case history of notable turnaround efforts.

Talk straight. Conversational intimacy involves efforts by leaders to create and maintain a close connection with employees at every level of their company. And it requires leaders to be honest and authentic, especially when it comes to sharing bad news or addressing difficult topics.

In 2000, when Anne Mulcahy took charge of operations at Xerox, there were plenty of difficult topics to confront. Xerox was deeply in debt, its stock was plummeting, and its core business model showed every sign of being unsustainable. In that role and at that moment, Mulcahy focused on getting out into the field and talking with people. A study of her tenure during this period quotes a colleague of hers as follows: “Anne appealed to employees with missionary zeal, in person and through videos.” According to the study, Mulcahy herself said, “I’m never happier than when I’m milling around with a group of Xerox people, in a town hall meeting, or a Q&A. I don’t like giving speeches, but I love dialogue.”  

It wasn’t all happy talk—far from it. In talking to fellow top executives, in particular, Mulcahy was blunt about reckoning with points of potential conflict. “I knew there would be people who certainly wouldn’t be supportive of me,” she recalled. “So I confronted a couple of them and said, ‘Hey, no games. Let’s just talk.’” She also put forth a more general rule: “When there are tough messages to deliver, it’s important to communicate the good and the bad. Respect people by delivering the truth.”

Make talk happen. When a company enters a turnaround crisis, it’s often in part because people in the organization have lost the ability to interact with each other. So conversationally adept leaders find ways to promote interactivity. They deploy communication channels that allow for back-and-forth discussion, and they build a culture that fosters that kind of discussion.

That’s what Carlos Ghosn did after he became president and CEO of Nissan in 1999. The Japanese automaker had seen its performance deteriorate over the preceding decade, and a shake-up was clearly in order. Among the first items that Ghosn changed was a protocol that had been in place for meetings of top executives. In a study of Ghosn’s turnaround leadership, a fellow executive offered this observation: “In old Nissan, there was hardly any discussion in most senior management meetings. … Today our meetings are different. We actually debate issues. We openly disagree with one another. It took some time for all of us to get used to it, but our meetings are much more productive.”

Ghosn also initiated practices that enabled greater interactivity throughout Nissan. Instead of relying on memos—or on middle managers—to convey his message, he used a companywide video hookup to present his transformation plan to employees. “This was the first time in the company’s history that the president spoke directly to everyone in the organization,” one Nissan executive explained.

Let everyone talk. Conversation inclusion exists where leaders adopt measures that enable employees to participate fully in the communication process. By including people at all levels of a company in the organizational conversation, leaders can achieve a more intense quality of engagement among those who must carry out a turnaround project.

HCL Technologies wasn’t at a point of crisis in 2005, when Vineet Nayar took on the role of president, but right away Nayar saw the need to initiate a major transformation effort. The company needed to move up the value chain in the technology services industry, and making that shift would require HCL employees to change how they related to each other—and to the company. Toward that end, Nayar and his team launched a internal communication initiative that featured the tagline “Employees First, Customers Second” (EFCS). Nayar, in a study of his early push to transform HCL, explained the EFCS theme: “The idea behind Employee First was that as a services business, the employee interface with the customer was critical. … I wanted value-focused employees who were willing and able to drive an innovative, sophisticated experience for customers.”

Elements of the EFCS project included the launch of a new, “employee-friendly” intranet portal and the creation of an intranet-based service called U&I, which empowered employees to engage directly with Nayar. “Communications at HCL used to be handed down from up high,” a senior manager at HCL noted. “Vineet replaced that with lots of direct contact through video conferencing, online tools, and face-to-face talks.”

Talk strategy—and talk strategically. Only when leaders approach communication with intentionality can they ensure that smart talk will result in sustained action. By carefully building communication efforts around a clear organizational vision, and by taking care to follow an overarching strategy for those efforts, a leader can pursue a turnaround conversation that will keep a company on message and on track.

Consider the turnaround push that Jan Carlzon undertook at Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS) in the early and mid-1980s. To improve the company’s ability to attract business customers, Carlzon aimed to improve the level of service that frontline employees could offer. The best way to do so, he concluded, was to empower those employees—to give them greater autonomy and flexibility in how they did their job. Yet they could exercise that autonomy fruitfully only if SAS leaders also gave them a big-picture sense of what the company was aiming to achieve. Carlzon, in a study of his early work as CEO, put it this way: “Anyone who is not given information cannot assume responsibility. But anyone who is given information cannot avoid assuming [responsibility].”

According to that study, Carlzon and his team went so far as to create a booklet for employees that used cartoon imagery—a smiling airplane, for example—and “simple, direct language” to tell “the story of the company to date.” Employees came to call it “the little red book,” and it exemplified Carlzon’s theory of turnaround communication: “Rather than merely issuing your message, you have to be certain that every employee has truly understood and absorbed it.”

[Cross-posted, in a slightly different form, at the Harvard Business Review Web site.]

The Web site 800-CEO-READ, a retailer and information clearinghouse that has become a key player in the fast-changing business-book market, put our book on its shortlist of titles in the “Leadership” category.

Strategy + Business, a magazine published by the consulting firm Booz & Company, placed Talk, Inc., on its “Best Business Books 2012″ list. (Free registration required. Visitors can also download a PDF of the magazine’s entire package of articles on the best books of the year.)

The editors of Strategy + Business cite our book under the rubric of “Organizational Culture.”In a piece that covers books in that category, writer Sally Helgesen offers this summary comment:

Talk, Inc. makes a powerful case that effective talk is the primary means of motivating and inspiring loyalty among today’s increasingly social and connected workforce. . . . Talk in all its manifestations—intimate, interactive, inclusive, and intentional—is the cultural instrument required to get people engaged.

Meanwhile, consultant Karina Butera recently posted a review of Talk, Inc., at her Web site. Here, in brief, is her verdict:

Overall, the authors give a compelling case for broadening the function of Corporate Communication from a one-way, top-down approach, to a two-way exchange. Talk, Inc. is well suited to executives wanting to gain better employee and stakeholder engagement and is a must-read for anyone specialising in Corporate Communications.

As strong business relationships are built from productive conversations, I see this book as an excellent guide to assist you in your business relationship building.

Bob served up a host of great questions, and we did our best to provide thoughtful answers that didn’t merely repeat material that’s in the book. The result is a wide-ranging discussion that touches on our personal backgrounds, our speculations about the future of leadership, and our musings on how the likes of Lao-Tzu and Voltaire might provide insight into the meaning of organizational conversation.

[The full interview appears in the extended entry.]

Before discussing Talk, Inc., a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?

[Boris] Since my childhood, my parents made sure I received a well-rounded education in everything from music to math. Education always came first. They also entrusted me with lots of responsibilities, such as helping out at home. They taught me the value of hard work and that anything was achievable. I learned that there is always more than one solution to any problem, so it’s important to think creatively. My parents also showed me the importance of treating people fairly and nicely.

To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?

[Mike] Before I found my way toward becoming a writer, editor, and communication professional, I studied history at the graduate level. (I have a master’s degree in that field from Cornell University; the focus of my studies was on U.S. history.) Although I decided against pursuing an academic career, I retain a deep commitment to what you might call the historical mind-set. In using that term, I mean a couple of things. First, the study of history taught me the value of analyzing any human endeavor in narrative terms. Whether you’re trying to understand the rise or fall of a nation, or the success or failure of a company, you’ll invariably benefit from viewing that phenomenon as a story—as a series of events that pivot around the problems that people face and the decisions that they make. My work as a journalist, and then as a writer of case studies at Harvard Business School, has only reinforced that lesson.

A second aspect of the historical mind-set is that it instills a keen sense of context. Historians insist on looking at every event in the light of the conditions that surround it. They try to see the big picture. In thinking and writing about the world of business, I’ve tried to apply that same kind of contextual awareness to the study of, say, a company and its competitive challenges. What’s more, I’ve come to believe that the best business leaders are those who view their company in a broad strategic context—who, for example, see how the company fits within a larger industrial ecosystem.

What do you know now about business world that you wish you knew when you when to work full-time for the first time? Why?

[Boris] I grew up recognizing the importance of numbers. I valued hard skills—math, accounting, finance. Once I was working full-time, my biggest “ah-ha” was that the business world is very social. I came to understand the importance of soft skills like communication and networking. Hard skills are not the only skills you need to succeed. You also have to be able to navigate the social side of business.

To what extent (if any) do business executives have significantly different problems—and significantly more difficult problems than they had, let’s say, five years ago?

[Boris] Maybe not in the last five years, but over last decade, being an executive has become increasingly complicated. I and my colleagues did a project in which we examined the skills required to succeed in seven different C-level jobs. We evaluated the skills that had been needed in the past, the skills that were currently needed, and the skills that would be needed in the future (HBR Blog Network: “It’s Harder than Ever to Be a Senior Executive”). We found that the required skillset has been changing, it will continue to change, and it’s change at an ever-faster pace. Social skills are indeed becoming more important, but hard skills are not becoming any less important. It’s not that the portion of the pie dedicated to social skills is growing while other portions shrink—it’s that the pie itself has gotten bigger. This change in the required skillset is driven by speed, globalization, and the expansion of a knowledge-based economy in which people skills—the ability to motivate and engage others—are becoming increasingly important. Communication skills are also becoming more important. It is critical to understand how executives can communicate with their employees to get the best outcomes. That’s why we wrote Talk, Inc.

In your opinion, what will be the greatest challenge that CEOs face during (let’s say) the next 3-5 years? Advice?

[Boris] All C-level jobs are becoming more complicated, and the CEO position is no exception. There are many contributing trends, but let me mention five.

First, the tenure of the CEO is a fraction of what it was 40 years ago. Shareholders have CEOs on a short leash and give them little time to get things done. As a result, CEOs are trying to manage next-quarter earnings in lieu of building a sustainable enterprise. Short-term perspective and short-term decision-making do not allow businesses to reach their full potential.

Second, the stakeholder universe is much wider and more diverse than before. In addition to answering to the demands of customers and shareholders, businesses also must contend with the expectations of employees, communities, activists, the government—the list goes on. Therefore, being able to manage diverse stakeholders’ interests is becoming more important.

Third, current and future CEOs must manage with a more global mindset, and they must be able to manage diversity. Notably, managing diversity isn’t just about demographic categories like race and gender, but also about managing diverse skills and perspectives. CEOs must leverage diversity to build merit-based, inclusive cultures that fully leverage talent in the organization.

Fourth, CEOs are trying to stay closer to frontline employees and customers in order to get more accurate information and make better decisions in a world that is changing by the nanosecond. This requires excellent communication and a flattening of the organization.

Lastly, it is important for CEOs to build a high-performing, high-functioning management team that functions well, provides different perspectives, fosters open expression of ideas, and leverages diverse skills and creative solutions, all while ensuring that the core of the business remains healthy.

Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond.

[Mike] As it happens, several of your favorite quotations align quite well with the four elements—intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality—that make up the model of organizational conversation that we present in Talk, Inc. So let me respond to those quotes by using them as launch points for describing each element.

First, from Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:
“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

[Mike] Inclusion is our term for the practice of engaging employees at all levels of a company in the work of telling the company’s story, and I’m hard put to think of a phrase that better captures the spirit of inclusion than “We have done it ourselves.” This bit of wisdom from the Tao Te Ching nicely conveys the way that the best leaders work to inspire a sense of ownership in their people by including them in a given project, or indeed in the life of their organization.

Next, from Voltaire: “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”

[Mike] An essential idea behind the practice of interactivity within an organization is that useful knowledge and valuable insight are most likely to emerge when employees can engage in open, back-and-forth discussion with each other, and with their leaders. This quote by Voltaire highlights the value of allowing people to pursue an open-ended conversation about a given topic—to explore that topic in a way that makes room for multiple voices, and in a way that doesn’t prejudge what “the truth” might be.

And then, from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

[Mike] A hallmark of what we call conversational intimacy is a recognition that leaders should strive to communicate with employees in ways that are direct, personal, and authentic. This pithy aphorism makes that same point. Too many leaders hide behind a corporate “self” (so to speak); they fail to see that “being themselves” can enhance their authority, instead of undermining it. That doesn’t mean that they need to be chummy when they interact with their people. But they need to give up the habit of communicating “from on high.”

Finally, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

[Mike] Implicit in this quote by Drucker is an emphasis on the primacy of strategic awareness—on the need for leaders to develop, and then to maintain, a clear sense of what “should be done.” Our term for that kind of awareness is intentionality. Even as they make communication in their company more open, leaders also need to make sure that all such communication ultimately supports the company’s overall strategic intent. Similarly, leaders need to keep in mind that there’s no point in communicating well if you don’t know why you’re communicating.

Now please shift your attention to Talk, Inc. When and why did you decide to write it and do so in collaboration?

[Boris] Mike and I had worked on a few cases together. Then, several years ago, we realized that we had a joint interest in communication, albeit for different reasons. Mike was interested in the function of communication. I, on the other hand, was intrigued by the challenges associated with strategy implementation and employee engagement. Again and again, for example, I’ve found that many executives are able to clearly articulate their company’s strategy to me—yet few other people in their organization seem to be aware of that strategy. It was a perplexing puzzle, and it was obviously a puzzle that involved communication. So Mike and I decided to collaborate on a project that would look at what works and what doesn’t work in in this area.

Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.

[Boris] I had five interesting insights while writing this book. First, I was astonished to see the significant amount of time executives were spending on communication. Second, I realized that great leaders used a conversational model of communication. Third, I came to understand the importance of engaging middle managers in communication processes, as that’s often where communication breaks down within an organization. Fourth, it is important to create an organizational culture in which conversational communication is fostered and allowed to thrive. Fifth, great leaders don’t necessarily spend more time on communication; they communicate more effectively, and therefore spend less time on communication while achieving great results.

To what extent (if any) does the book in its final form differ significantly from what you originally envisioned?

[Mike] We began with a research project whose focus was on organizational communication. We ended up with a book that’s essentially about organizational leadership.

Our goal was to discover innovative ideas and practices that related to how people conduct and manage communication within their companies. And we did just that. Talk, Inc., presents an overview of how organizational communication has changed over the past decade or so. But, more fundamentally, the book offers a broad vision of how conversationally adept leaders are building a two-way, trust-based relationship with people at every level of their organization. If all that we had to offer was a review of trends in the field of corporate communication, I’m not sure that we’d have gone to the trouble of writing a book. Instead, we realized at a certain point that these developments were coming together to form a new leadership model—a model that transcends the bounds of what people traditionally mean by “communication.” That was the key turning point in our work together, and it’s what kept us going with this project.

What are the defining characteristics of an “organizational conversation”?

[Mike] For us, the word “conversation” means something very important; it isn’t just a buzzword that you can use interchangeably with the word “communication.” Our core insight is that more and more leaders today are, in effect, applying the principles of personal conversation to the way that they conduct and manage communication within their companies. So the chief defining characteristic of organizational conversation is that it’s truly conversational. It’s bottom-up and face-to-face, rather than top-down; it’s two way, rather than one-way; and so forth. And, in that respect, it’s notably different from the “corporation communication” model that has long held sway in business life.

What do I mean here by “principles of personal conversation”? As we see it, ordinary person-to-person conversation has four basic attributes that distinguish it from other forms of communication: It’s intimate, it’s interactive, it’s inclusive, and it’s intentional. (I’ve said a bit about each of those qualities in my earlier comments in response to a few of your favorite quotations.)

What are the most significant differences between an organizational conversation and an organizational communication?
[Boris] We spend our lives engaged in conversation. Think about two friends talking with each other. What are the key properties that define that interaction? We’ve identified four such properties: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. But when you move into an organization environment, those four “I” properties are often destroyed by organizational politics, corporate structures, formal reporting relationships, differences in status, and so on. Our book is about creating flatter, more nimble organizations in which these “I’s” can survive and flourish. Creating opportunities for conversation, we argue, enables people and their leaders to create value.

Are organizational conversations both internal and external? Please explain.

[Mike] To an important degree, the emergence of organizational conversation coincides with another key trend—namely, the disappearance of the line that used to separate internal communication from external communication. Once upon a time, leaders could develop one message framework for their employees, another for their customers, another for their investors, and so forth. Today, thanks largely to the emergence of the Internet, that approach is becoming less and less tenable. (To cite one common example: If you talk with your investors about the benefits of planned layoffs, you should assume that your employees will hear that message, too. And they’ll hear it instantaneously.) Ultimately, we believe, there is one conversation that people have about a company.

Although our book (with its emphasis on how leaders communicate with employees) focuses mainly on internal dynamics, we view organizational conversation as a process that extends beyond the boundaries of a company proper. What people outside a company say about that company matters to employees; it affects morale and performance. And what employees say about the company matters externally as well. In the book, we write about leaders who are not only encouraging employees to act as “brand ambassadors” or as company-sponsored thought leaders, but also training them how to do it—how to carry the content of an internal conversation to an outside audience.

I am intrigued by your clever use of what you identify as “Talk, Inc., Points” (TIPs) at the conclusion of each of the four Parts. For those who have not as yet read your brilliant book, please explain these “TIPs” chapter titles.

[Mike] Thanks for highlighting those TIPs chapters. In talking about the book with reporters and readers, we’ve tended to neglect the “Talk, Inc., Points” material, and that’s unfortunate, since it’s in those brief chapters that we offer the most readily usable ideas that we have on how leaders can promote organizational conversation. Those chapters are full of bite-size, news-you-can-use items—nuggets of advice that we gleaned from our conversations with scores of business leaders.  But back to your specific question about the chapter titles: Each of these TIPs chapters corresponds to one of the four elements that make up our model of organizational conversation. Our goal in choosing titles for those chapters was to capture, directly and succinctly, what each element means in practice.

First, “Close Encounters”

[Mike] This chapter presents advice on furthering conversational intimacy—a quality that is, in our view, a function of leadership. It’s about enabling leaders to get closer to their people. It’s about narrowing the institutional distances (and, in some cases, the physical distances) that separate leaders from employees. It’s about, well, encountering people in a context that allows a leader to be less aloof and more personal.

Next, “One Way, Two Way, New Way”

[Mike] The essence of interactivity—the focus of this chapter—is ensuring that ideas and information move back and forth between people within a company. To achieve that goal, leaders are changing the way that they select and use communication channels. They’re moving away from one-way channels (such as print and broadcast media) and toward two-way channels, including those that involve new social-media platforms.

Also, “Amateur Hour”

[Mike] Inclusion is the theme of this chapter, and aim here is to present ideas on how to involve employees in the work of creating organizational content. In the traditional model, senior leaders and professional communicators retain exclusive control over telling the company story. In the organizational-conversation model, other people within a company—amateurs, that is—are able to help tell that story.

Finally, “A Sense of Direction”

[Mike] Here, we offer tips (or TIPs!) on how to pursue conversational intentionality. And intentionality, in our model, is all about strategy. It’s about using organizational conversation to further the goals of corporate strategy, and it’s about forging a strategy for building that conversation. In short, it’s about maintaining a sense of direction—a sense of where you want your company (and your company conversation) to go.

I also commend you on the brilliant use of mini-case studies that focus on four quite different organizations: Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Ltd, Cisco Systems, EMC Corporation, and Kingfisher PLC.

Here’s my question: However different the four may be in most respects, what do they share in common in terms of how they “walk the talk”?

[Mike] You’re right. We set out to feature extended case studies of four disparate organizations (two are high-tech companies and two are in decidedly different industries, for example), but in the end these companies share a couple of essential attributes. Or, more to the point, their leaders do. First, the top executives at all four organizations impressed us with their extraordinarily high commitment to improving the practice of communication within their companies. In each instance, these leaders conveyed and exemplified a keen understanding that they—and not some set of designated professional communicators—had primary responsibility for promoting what we call “organizational conversation.” John Chambers (Cisco) takes time to speak directly to employees every month or so by means of his video blog. Ian Cheshire (Kingfisher PLC) is spearheading a conversation-driven transformation effort. And so on.

Second, these top leaders are willing to take big risks when it comes to changing the way that ideas and information flow within their companies. The leaders at Hindustan Petroleum, for example, invited thousands of employees to take part in a series of organizational vision-setting workshops. At EMC, leaders created an internal social-media platform and then let employees run with it. That’s what conversation-powered leadership is all about: You can’t enable organizational conversation if you don’t relinquish a measure of the control that leaders have traditionally had over the communication process. And when you let employees become full-fledged participants in that process, there’s no telling what they might say.

What are the unique leadership challenges when attempting to establish a culture within which organizational conversations thrive?

[Boris] There are numerous challenges, so allow me to focus on just a few. It starts with leadership. Leaders who are engaging and who know how to motivate people are able to foster interactive, inclusive, intimate conversations. They lead by example, and they set the tone for what types of conversations are allowed and for how those conversations should unfold. They work to develop a clear strategy, a relatively flat structure, a set of robust systems that are transparent and easy to navigate, and a merit-based, inclusive culture that is open to dialog and debate. They create an environment that is easy on people, but hard on ideas—in others words, an environment that engages and supports people, yet also subjects them to the rigorous demands of serious conversation.

Let’s say that a CEO has read and then (hopefully) re-read Talk, Inc., and is eager to transform his company’s culture into one within which organizational conversations thrive. Where to begin?

[Mike] My first thought is that a CEO should start at the end—with intentionality. An effort to open up a conversation, or a series of conversations, within your organization will be most successful (and most sustainable) if you establish a clear, cohesive sense of the strategic goals that such conversations are meant to support. A good conversation is open, but it’s not aimless, as we like to say. Start by asking yourself (and, eventually, people throughout your company) a few basic questions. What do people talk about when they talk about this company? What do I want them to talk about? Where do I want this conversation to go?

Here’s another idea. Consider hiring a chief conversation officer—an individual who will take ownership of all aspects of the organizational-conversation process. This “CCO” figure would open up opportunities for employees to talk with their leaders and with each other, while also taking care to set an agenda for the larger conversation that unfolds inside and outside a company. Day in and day out, he or she would work to push you and everyone else in your organization to abandon the traditional “communication” mind-set, and to embrace practices that are intimate, interactive, inclusive, and intentional.

Now, actually creating such a position might or might not be a sensible idea. My point here isn’t to push something that could seem like a mere gimmick. But just thinking about this option will help a CEO to appreciate how vitally important it is to foster rich, dynamic communication within his or her organization. Indeed, the CEO might conclude that this role is one that he or she needs to claim—that he or she needs to act, in effect, as a chief conversation officer.

Which question had you hoped to be asked during this interview—but weren’t—and what is your response to it?

[Boris] “Who should read this book and why?” Talk, Inc., is not about the internal communication function, it’s about leadership. Any leader in an organization, therefore, will benefit from the ideas presented in this book. Furthermore, if you implement these ideas correctly, you will be able to communicate far more effectively and far more efficiently. Again, it is all about maximizing organizational performance.

Several weeks ago, we surveyed HBR.org readers to gauge their sense of each candidate’s ability to conduct and manage communication with voters. Both candidates, according to respondents, displayed an ability to communicate well. Yet the survey results indicate that Obama and Romney showed their respective strengths as communicators in very distinct ways.

We based our survey in part on a model that we call organizational conversation. In that model, leaders strive to practice and promote a form of communication that resembles personal conversation. Building upon our research on how leaders communicate today, we have identified four elements that make up this model: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality.

In the survey, which was open to HBR.org readers from September 21 to October 14, we asked respondents to rate how well each candidate performed along each of those four dimensions. Then we asked them to rate how well each candidate performed “overall” with respect to “conducting and managing communication with key constituencies.” In addition, we asked respondents to indicate whether they planned to vote for President Obama or Governor Romney.

Not surprisingly, respondents tended to answer our questions about each candidate’s performance in a way that reflected their candidate preference: Pretty much across the board, those who intended to vote for Obama gave their candidate higher marks as a communicator than they gave to Romney, and vice versa.

Nonetheless, we also observed an intriguing pattern that cuts across the line of candidate preference. Both Romney supporters and Obama supporters gave Romney higher scores on his overall communication performance than they did on any of the four areas of performance that we associate with the practice of organizational conversation. What’s more, on that question about “overall” performance, Obama supporters gave Romney essentially the same score that Romney supporters gave to Obama.

Those results, in our view, suggest that both sets of respondents attributed to Romney a talent for communication that differs substantially from the talent that Obama displayed. Obama excelled at pursuing a conversational form of political communication. So we argued previously in this space, and the results of our survey tend to support that conclusion. Romney, meanwhile, excelled at communicating with voters in what we might call a more traditional manner.

To understand what we mean by “traditional” in this context, consider Romney’s performance in the first presidential debate, held in Denver on October 2. In that venue, Romney was clear, cogent, and forceful. He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it systematically, using a tone and a rhetorical approach that he knew would appeal to his target audience. For decades, communicating in this model—communicating in a top-down and tactically efficient way—has been a central part of organizational leadership.

Thus, when respondents awarded Romney a relatively high score as an “overall” communicator, they were effectively recognizing his ability to convey messages in that traditional manner.

In business, as in politics, both of these forms of communication have their place. Leaders today, we believe, do benefit from the pursuit of organizational conversation. Nonetheless, we also appreciate the virtues of the more traditional model. Our model of organizational conversation, in fact, includes the element of intentionality precisely because that element addresses the need for clear, direct messaging. And, notably, both Romney supporters and Obama supporters gave Romney higher scores for that element than for each of the other three elements in our model.

In that first debate, Romney demonstrated an impressive ability to communicate intentionally with voters, and that performance gave his campaign a major boost during the final weeks of the race. (After the debate, interestingly enough, we noted a sharp rise in the number of Romney voters who responded to our survey—and a sharp rise, too, in the scores that Romney received from respondents as a whole.)

Obama, by most accounts, performed quite poorly in the Denver debate. In that setting, he seemed to many observers to be neither intimate nor interactive nor inclusive nor intentional. Over the course of the campaign as a whole, though, he seemed to draw effectively upon all four elements of organizational conversation—much as he and his team did in 2008. The results of our survey bear out that conclusion. Respondents scored Obama particularly high on the questions that pertained to intimacy and inclusion; even Romney supporters gave Obama relatively high scores in those areas.

Again, Obama’s prowess in this area—in conducting and managing communication to, from, and among voters—does not fully account for his victory. Even so, the success of his campaign this year highlights the power of the conversation-based model. Leaders in any kind of organization, we’d argue, are apt to benefit from adopting that model to communicate with key constituencies.

[Cross-posted, in a different version, at the Harvard Business Review Web site.]

For the piece—it’s titled “Part of an Ongoing Conversation”—I spoke with the interviewer about the value of trust, the importance of telling an inclusive story, and the elements of organizational conversation.

An energy-trading company rises high—and then suddenly implodes.

A luxury cruise ship takes a wrong turn—and the parent cruise-line company finds itself on troubled waters.

A mighty oil company presides over an environmental disaster—one that spills over to become a PR disaster as well.

The board of an airline hires a CEO—and then cancels his contract after just three years.

Five big companies. Five big problems. One of these companies is a high-tech manufacturer, two of them are in the energy sector, and two of them are in the consumer transport business. Otherwise, they have almost nothing in common. The problems that each company has faced vary widely, too.

Or so it might seem. In fact, each of these cases of organizational failure involves—right at the crux of the matter—a grievous lapse in communication. Let’s look further at these five companies and their problems.

• Nokia: For more than a decade, Nokia was the world’s largest mobile-phone manufacturer. But when the smartphone became the next big thing within the mobility market, the company lost its competitive edge. According to an in-depth account of why Nokia has “struggle[d] to turn its good ideas into products,” much of the problem stems from habits of communication that favor unfocused discussions about strategy over clear plans to bring new phone models to market.
• Enron: A scholarly investigation into the problems that led to Enron’s collapse pinpointed several “communication-based leader responsibilities” that senior managers failed to meet—responsibilities such as “communicating appropriate values” and “maintaining openness to signs of problems.”
• Star Princess Cruise Lines: In April 2012, passengers on the cruise ship Star Princess told members of the ship’s crew that they had spotted a fishing boat that showed signs of being in distress. Yet the ship didn’t stop to provide aid, and two people on the fishing boat later died of dehydration. Later, the cruise-line company issued a statement that cited a “breakdown in communication in relaying the passengers’ concern.”
• British Petroleum: The blowout of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, in April 2010, resulted in a massive crisis for BP and its partners. Among the key factors that contributed to the disaster were “poor communications” and a failure “to share important information,” according to a report on the White House commission that studied the incident.
• Thai Airways: When Piyasvasti Amranand lost his job as CEO of Thai Air, in May 2012, the reason for his dismissal was somewhat elusive. After all, he had held the post for a mere three years, and the company’s board had recently given him a positive annual review. According to one media account, however, the chairman of the airline said that “communication problems between Piyasvasti and the board were hampering the company’s effort to meet [its] profit target.”

We didn’t select these examples entirely at random. But neither did we work very hard to find them. Even a cursory survey of high-profile organizational failures will turn up numerous stories that fit the same pattern. Thumb through the business pages of your daily newspaper. Or browse the virtual pages of a business news Web site. Very often, if you didn’t know better, it would be easy to conclude that you were reading case notes from the field of communication studies.

Every leader keenly understands the consequences of taking a lax approach to financial management. And most leaders today recognize how dangerous it can be to take a lax approach to people management. But how many leaders appreciate the risks that come with taking a lax approach to communication management—with failing to manage the way that ideas and information flows within their organization?

Those leaders who do effectively manage the flow of information within their company tend to share a certain outlook—and a certain set of practices. They adopt communication methods that enable them to get closer to employees. They put in place communication systems that promote dialogue, as opposed to monologue. They engage employees by allowing them to become active participants in the communication process. They rigorously pursue an agenda that aligns their communication efforts with organizational strategy.

In sum, they put a premium on ensuring that people in their organization talk with each other, and not just to each other.

[Cross-posted, in a slightly different form, at the Harvard Business Review site.]

In our book, Talk, Inc., we describe how more and more leaders today manage communication within their organizations in a way that calls to mind ordinary, person-to-person talk. Indeed, a new model based on organizational conversation (as we call it) has come to the fore at many companies. Where organizational conversation has taken hold, leaders build engagement and drive strategic alignment by enabling ideas and information to move efficiently across their company. The task of a conversationally adept leader, according to this model, is to ensure that the right messages reach the right people at the right time.

It’s a task, in other words, that resembles the one that a successful presidential candidate must undertake.

In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama developed and led a campaign for the presidency that not only achieved its main goal—sending Obama to the White House—but also set a new standard for innovation and execution. He did so, we believe, by mounting a campaign that fully leveraged the principles of conversation-based leadership.

Earlier candidates, of course, had excelled at communicating with voters in a conversational manner. (Think of Franklin Roosevelt, who became famous for his radio-based “fireside chats,” or Ronald Reagan, whose easy-going style earned him a reputation as “the Great Communicator.”) Yet the Obama campaign signaled the emergence of a novel framework for managing electoral communication at a national level. From the way that it deployed advanced digital media to the way that it incorporated rank-and-file supporters into its messaging apparatus, the Obama for America operation in 2008 demonstrated the power of conducting a campaign as though it were a conversation.

Effective organization conversation, we argue in Talk, Inc., depends on how well leaders are able to promote four key qualities. Four years ago, each of those qualities was very much in evidence in the campaign that culminated in Obama’s victory on Election Night.

Intimacy: Effective leaders treat an opportunity to communicate as an opportunity to close the gap that might otherwise separate them from their followers—whether those followers happen to be employees or voters. From his fabled keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to his high-pressure speech on race in 2008, Obama proved able to talk about sensitive issues in a way that promised to bring people together.

Interactivity: Taking steps to promote dialogue—real, back-and-forth interaction among people from all parts of an organization—is another hallmark of conversation-based leadership. In 2008, Obama built an operation that used social-media tools (such as Facebook and its own “mybarackobama” platform) to enable two-way communication between campaign operatives and grassroots supporters.

Inclusion: A truly conversational leader engages people by empowering them to become full-fledged conversational participants. A highlight of the Obama campaign in 2008 was its ability, and its willingness, to leverage unsolicited pro-Obama messaging efforts. Notable examples of supporter-generated content included the “Hope” poster created by Shepard Fairey and the “Yes We Can” video produced by the music artist will.i.am.

Intentionality: Enabling open conversation isn’t enough. Leaders also need to pursue a focused agenda that ties together the various strands of conversation—an agenda that clearly ties organizational conversation to organizational strategy. The 2008 Obama campaign, through its “Change We Can Believe In” messaging strategy, aligned diverse constituencies around a vision that differentiated Obama from his opponents.

There’s more to a successful presidential campaign than building a great communication operation. Other factors, many of them external to the campaign itself—the state of the economy, the demographics of the electorate, the salience of certain policy issues—each play a critical role in rallying voters to one candidate rather than another.

Even so, Barack Obama’s extraordinary rise to the presidency illustrates the value of adopting a conversational approach to engaging with key constituencies. These days, whether you’re leading a private-sector company or a campaign for high political office, it pays to communicate with people in ways that are intimate, interactive, inclusive, and intentional.

[Cross-posted, in a slightly different form, at the Harvard Business Review site.]

• The Globe and Mail, a leading Toronto-based daily newspaper, published a thorough (and thoroughly friendly) review of Talk, Inc., earlier this month.
• At the Web site of the Australian Institute of Management (Victoria & Tasmania), blogger Leon Gettler cited our Harvard Business Review article in a round-up post titled “How to Be a Better Communicator.”

This week, for example, a Canadian business writer named Wayne Hurlburt posted a notice about the book at his site, Blog Business World. Here’s a sample of his commentary:

For me, the power of the book is how Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind combine the theory and principles of organizational conversation, with the practical techniques for nurturing and developing the concept within any company. The authors present a very compelling argument in support of organizational conversation as essential for companies seeking more engaged and empowered employees.

And here two more notable items that we’ve spotted in our “review mirror.”

• Bob Morris, at his Blogging About Business site, published a lengthy post about Talk, Inc.. A highlight of his review is a detailed list of “the passages, themes, and concepts that caught my eye throughout the narrative.”
• Dan Erwin has put up a piece about the book at his blog, which focuses on “career development, career and neuroscience research, current affairs,” and much else. “Groysberg and Slind’s new work,” Erwin writes, “is a welcome addition to every manager’s bookshelf.”

• A writer for Investor’s Business Daily, Steve Watkins, quotes both of us (Boris and Mike) in a recent article titled “Walk the Talk to Get Others to Follow Your Lead.” That piece appeared in print as well as online.
• At Forbes.com, marketing columnist Dorie Clark draws upon her interview with Boris in a piece titled “Why CMOs Should Get Used to Less Control.”
• The magazine Canadian Business has published a brief review of the book. It’s available not only online, but also in the magazine’s print edition.
• Here, addition, is a short notice about Talk, Inc., on the company blog of Continuum Design, a company that we featured in the book.