Getting Started

The purpose of this blog site is to establish a space for sharing insights and resources pertaining to professional communication with the MBA students in the Summer 09 Executive and Management Communication course (MGT 650, section 03).

We will be using the term "professional communication" in its broadest sense as any kind of communicative behavior used in professional contexts. While academic courses in communication often focus on the traditional rhetorical skills of writing and speaking, we have already talked in the first class about the importance of listening in professional contexts as well as "reading" the culture. We also are unanimous in our appreciation of the value of collaborative learning , and, since we have such a nice variety of professional experience among the group, that collaboration should be an interesting and productive one!

My own experience as a professional communicator has encompassed a variety of career paths that led me, eventually, to my current position as a professor at Alverno College. I earned my undergraduate degree in English literature over a span of fourteen years that encompassed six colleges and universities, four children, eight moves, and enough credits for two degrees. Since most of those credits were earned studying dead white poets, my degree offered little preparation for the succession of professional communication positions I held following graduation. So I learned professional communication on the job(s) -- watching, reading and listening carefully; imitating, adapting, and editing shamelessly -- bluffing my way through as so many of us do, and gradually figuring out the communication strategies that (more or less) successfully integrated my own voice with the demands of the audience, situation, genres and culture of the organization or field in which I was working.

Thus I built my colorful resume: health care research in behavioral medicine, quality assurance,
health care communication and coordination, public relations and marketing, public policy communication, political strategy, marketing communications for non profits and small business, and finally, my real vocation, teaching. Between and along with these jobs, I kept going back to school, habituated, I guess, from my long undergraduate sojourn. It was such kick to name and explore the theories I had been naively applying in my working life as a professional communicator. It was so interesting to learn that when I taught myself early versions of computerized graphics and layout, I was using (intuitively) visual design principles, or that when I spoke at a fund raising event I was using ancient rhetorical principles of persuasion. When I chose how much of my advertising budget to assign to television ads and how much to reserve for print, who knew I was analyzing the most effective channels of communication to reach a target public?

While most people assume practice follows theory, my own reversal of that process has made me a tireless proponent of experiential learning. That's one of the reasons Alverno is such a good fit for me. Learning by doing, and learning by making sense of what we're doing means there's no solid line between theory and application. I hope this course -- with the wealth of experiences we all bring, the resources we all contribute, and the collaboration we all have promised -- will provide us with an opportunity to increase and refine both our understanding and our skills as professional communicators.