The Role of Chief Communication Officer

The Role of Chief Communication Officer as explained by Roger Bolton at the International PR Summit – November 2018, Bali.

Being here at the International Public Relations Summit for the last two days and we have another day to go, I’ve met some incredibly interesting dynamic people who are clearly leaders within the profession here and are doing really good work. My other colleagues the professors who are here tell me that in the sessions that they’ve been doing the quality of the questions of the understanding and of the practice is really advanced. Which is very encouraging because I think that for an economy to mature and for people to reach their full potential, having a strong public relations community is really critical. I see very strong evidence that really good work is being done here.

We believe really really strongly in the role of the Chief Communication Officer, being central to the ability of business to act responsibly and to create not just customer and shareholder value but also social value. When we say that we mean every chief communication officer of every important organization around the world. And the work that the IPRS is doing is very similar to the work that we’re doing at Page only focused on Indonesia. Our ambition is to be the global organization but we want really really strong public relations organizations and conferences to be held in every part of the world as a part of this effort to raise the effectiveness of the Chief Communication Officer.

Corporate character as we think about it is the unique differentiating identity of the enterprise. Every enterprise has it. The question is, is it well intentionally defined or does it just happen by accident? So what it is in corporate character: mission, purpose, values, culture, business model, strategy, brand, there’s a lot of things, but if you think about all those things and define them in a way that they make a coherent integrated whole and get everyone in the organization to understand that definition and to actually live it, in everything they do every day. Then and only then, can you have the enterprise that you choose to have with the character that you want to imbue it with and the ability to earn trust. Ao internal and external both because everyone in the organization needs to understand, help define it and help activate it, and become it in essence, and so communication is essential to that internally and externally yes because having that corporate character as essential to earning the trust of external stakeholders. The role of communications is to help everyone inside and outside the enterprise understand its true character so that it can be what it aspires to be.

When I first went to private sector communications at a very high level because I’ve been in government for many years, so I went to IBM as the head of global media relations. When I got there everybody was talking about the IBM culture and I said what companies have culture I have no idea but they do. And the way people work and act that IBM is very different from the way that people work and act at HP or Microsoft or any of their competitors. And building the character that you want to have in order to achieve your business objectives takes a huge amount of work. At the Page Society we have 800 members I have a staff of 14. And even in my staff of 14 it’s constant work to get everybody to understand who are we, why do we do, what we do, how do we act, how do we greet our members. All those things are part of who we are.