Communication skills are critical to MBA's

Michael Sands wishes there had been a course on corporate reputation and communication strategy when he was a student at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management a decade ago. Instead, he says, he had to hone many of his communication skills on the job 'sort of like an apprenticeship'.

Now as president of Orbitz.com, he frequently faces communication, reputation and brand image issues. Recently with the Indian Ocean tsunami, for example, Orbitz needed to communicate with customers travelling to the affected regions, and it also wanted to establish an online link to the Red Cross. 'Crisis communication is critical for business students,' says Mr. Sands, 'as is understanding how corporate communications gets integrated into the marketing plan. Too often in business school, the discussion focuses on paid advertising even though I would argue that public relations and word-of-mouth messages are more important than ever.'

It is indeed the rare business school that provides master of business administration graduates with a thorough grounding in corporate communications. While some b-schools offer classes in 'management communication', the emphasis typically is on public speaking and written reports, not on managing a company's reputation.

I lecture frequently at business schools about corporate reputation and always find a receptive audience. Some schools have responded to the rash of scandals and plunge in corporate America's reputation with more classes on ethics, social responsibility and corporate governance. Yet I see few teaching students about the critical role of strategic communications in managing corporate image. Most M.B.A. programs haven't recognized the fact that senior communication managers at companies like FedEx Corp. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC are functioning as chief reputation officers these days to try to protect their companies' good names.

At many b-schools, corporate communications still suffers from perceptions that it's simply about writing press releases and flackery. 'A lot of deans don't realize the level of sophistication communications has reached and how it is being managed at a very high level within the corporation,' says James Rubin, an assistant professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia who teaches corporate communications. His courses include case studies of such companies as Dow Corning, Lego Group and Walt Disney, as well as readings on corporate identity, branding, reputation and crisis management.

Prof. Rubin's class isn't aimed just at future communications managers. It's part of Darden's general-management curriculum for CEOs in training who will likely devote a significant amount of time to communicating with employees, customers, investors, the media, analysts and other stakeholders. Nearly 70% of chief executive officers said they spent more time on external communications last year than in 2003, while 60% said they did more internal communications, according to a survey by PRWeek magazine and the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.

The Public Relations Society of America recently launched a campaign to address what it considers a serious shortcoming of M.B.A. programs. For starters, it sent letters to deans of leading schools, proposing that they incorporate communications into the curriculum through new courses, seminars and visiting lecturers. PRSA officials also are promoting more interaction between business schools and schools of communication and journalism.

'M.B.A. students are being well prepared to sell products in their many marketing courses, but are very under-prepared to manage the reputations of their companies-reputations that have a profound impact on sales,' says Kathleen Lewton, who is heading up the PRSA campaign.

Even so, many deans and professors simply don't view communications as a key functional area like marketing, operations and accounting. Part of the problem is the lack of enough hard data. 'M.B.A. programs are very obsessed with numbers, and because you can't tie numbers easily to communications, it isn't seen as real and as something that can make a significant difference,' says McCall Butler, a managing supervisor at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations agency in New York and a graduate of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, where she studied corporate communications.

What will likely change deans' attitudes most quickly is seeing more companies hire M.B.A.s for top communications jobs. Already, Paul Argenti, who teaches communication at Tuck, believes demand for MBA's in such positions is growing. 'More CEO's want to give their communication executives a seat at the table,' he says, 'but to have that seat, they need to speak the same language and have a deep understanding of all areas of the business. That means having an M.B.A.'

Business schools that do offer corporate communications classes find that student demand rises and falls based on what's in the headlines. Irv Schenkler began a crisis communications course at the Stern School of Business at New York University back in the 1980s when insider trading, the deadly Union Carbide gas leak in India, and the Tylenol poisonings dominated the news. With so many accounting fraud cases and Wall Street scandals the past three years and so many finance majors at Stern, Prof. Schenkler says, 'crisis communication and reputation are definitely back on the front burner.'

Reputation is also gaining more attention in Europe, which has seen its share of scandals at such companies as Parmalat and Royal Dutch/Shell. Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands and Copenhagen Business School in Denmark are leaders among European graduate programs in devoting more attention to corporate communications and reputation.

At Copenhagen, for example, M.B.A. students take the 'Managing Communication and Political Processes' course, which deals with crisis management and corporate image building. In addition, the school this year introduced a part-time master of corporate communication program that includes courses on corporate image, social and environmental responsibility and reputation management.

As for Mr. Sands at Orbitz, he will be pleased to know that his alma mater has added a one-half credit course called Values and Crisis Decision Making that will be required for all M.B.A.s starting next fall. It doesn't cover the full scope of corporate reputation but does deal with communications, including a 24-hour crisis management simulation. Kellogg is also considering creating a 'communications camp' where PR practitioners would offer workshops to M.B.A.s.

'After September 11 and Enron, I realized students needed to learn more about how to communicate with many different stakeholders when there's a problem,' says Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain. As a director and chairman of the public responsibility committee at UAL, the parent company of financially struggling United Airlines, he says, 'I see firsthand how important communication is to employees and other constituencies.'