Multiple Roles in Responding to Strategic Communications

Abstract

Teaching communication to MBAs often involves focusing on corporate strategic discourse when student projects are intended to help companies move to a more advanced stage of development. This focus on corporate strategy—the language and concepts that concern the mission and direction that an organization should adopt—requires, in turn, that faculty enact several roles to assist students in developing their final assignments, strategic presentations, and reports. Faculty play the role of specialists in corporate strategy, communication specialists, and stand-ins for the primary audience(s) for these assignments. Working with students on these assignments underscores two important values in MBA education: providing students with the means to engage in discussion at the CEO level where decisions about the company’s strategic direction are made, and demonstrating to students that the strategic assignments they produce belong to a larger communication campaign for getting buy-in for corporate strategy. These teaching practices foster research projects as well.

Keywords

management communication faculty role play strategic discourse

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