Prelims

Half Title Page

Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators

Title Page

Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators

The Workbook

by

Matthew W. Ragas

DePaul University, USA

And

Ron Culp

DePaul University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL

First edition 2024

Copyright © 2024 Matthew W. Ragas and Ron Culp.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Contact: www.copyright.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83797-085-8 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-082-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83797-084-1 (Epub)

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the educators, professionals, and students who recognize the role of business acumen in developing the next generation of leaders in strategic communication.

List of Figures

About the Authors

Matthew W. Ragas, PhD, and Ron Culp, Fellow PRSA, are on the public relations faculty in the College of Communication at DePaul University in Chicago, USA, where they help develop the next generation of communication leaders. They are the coauthors of Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators: A Primer and Business Essentials for Strategic Communicators: Creating Shared Value for the Organization and Its Stakeholders and the coeditors of Mastering Business for Strategic Communicators: Insights and Advice from the C-suite of Leading Brands. These books are in use in many college and university classrooms and in the professional development programs of top communication agencies and in-house communication teams.

Matthew W. Ragas, PhD, is a tenured Professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University. He was the Founding Director of the DePaul Master's in Professional Communication program and served as the academic director of the Master's in Public Relations and Advertising program during which it was named the PRWeek Awards PR Education Program of the Year. An award-winning Teacher and Researcher, Matthew W. Ragas is the author of more than 60 publications and six books. His business acumen books with colleague Ron Culp are in use at more than 30 colleges and universities around the world, as well as in professional learning and development programs. Matthew W. Ragas serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Public Interest Communication, Journal of Public Relations Education, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Public Relations Journal. He has been a Fellow of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, the Op-Ed Project, the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, and the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism. Matthew W. Ragas has been a recipient of the Dorothy Bowles Public Service Award and the Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He holds a doctorate with a focus on corporate communication from the University of Florida and Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Business Administration from the University of Central Florida. A member of the board of trustees of the Page Society, he has served as the Faculty Adviser on three student case studies that have won the Jack Koten Page Principles Case Study Award.

Ron Culp is a Public Relations Consultant and a professional in residence in the College of Communication at DePaul University. Before joining DePaul, he served as a Managing Director and partner at global public relations firms Sard Verbinnen (now FGS Global) and Ketchum. Earlier in his career, Ron was a Corporate Officer and Senior Vice President, Public Relations and Government Affairs at Sears. Previously, he held senior communications positions at Sara Lee Corporation, Pitney Bowes, and Eli Lilly. He graduated from Indiana State University with a prelaw degree. He is a founding board member of the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, which he chaired for five years. He also serves on the board of the Public Relations Museum and Library and the advisory board of Felix Global, a nationally recognized executive coaching and consulting firm. He was the first person to receive both the Distinguished Service Award and the Hall of Fame Award from the Arthur W. Page Society. A recipient of the John W. Hill Award from the New York Chapter of Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), Ron also was named PR Professional of the Year by the Chicago chapter of PRSA. In addition to being inducted into the PR News Hall of Fame, he received the David Ferguson Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Relations Education by a Practitioner. He received PRSA's Gold Anvil, the national organization's lifetime achievement award, and PRSA Chicago's Distinguished Leader Award.

Stacey Tank is a Fortune 500 veteran and the Chief Executive Officer for Bespoke Beauty Brands, parent to affordable luxury brands Jason Wu Beauty and Kim Chi Chic, which can be found at retailers like Target, Macy's and CVS, as well as on TikTok and Amazon. Prior to this role, Stacey was based in Amsterdam as the Chief Transformation Officer for HEINEKEN (AMS: HEIA) with €29 billion in annual revenues and over 100,000 global employees. Stacey formerly led the multibillion dollar Home Depot Installation Services and Home Depot Measurement Services businesses for the Home Depot (NYSE: HD). Dedicated to the intersection of business and positive impact on society, Stacey has repeatedly authored large-scale movements across enterprises like General Electric, the Home Depot, and HEINEKEN including launching a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar commitment to veteran housing, a $50 million shop class program that infused 20,000 tradespeople into the US economy and HEINEKEN's net zero carbon ambition. She is the founder of Our Happy Place (OurHappy.org), a 501(c)3 nonprofit serving children, educators, and families navigating childhood mental wellness. She also sits on the board, audit, and ESG committees for Interior Logic Group, the leading US installer of interior finishes for new home construction. Stacey is a 2020 World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a 2019 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and a 2014 Academy for Systems Change Fellow. She graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in Communications from the Newhouse School and a business degree from the School of Management at Syracuse University.

Pat Ford is a professional-in-residence at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications, where he teaches courses in Corporate Reputation, Crisis Communications, and Corporate Communication Essentials. He joined UF in 2017 from Burson, where he was most recently worldwide Vice Chair and Chief Client Officer. During his 28 years at the firm, he also served as US CEO, Asia-Pacific chair, global Corporate Practice chair, and US Corporate Practice chair. Before joining Burson, he served as the Vice President for external affairs at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, one of America's leading public policy think tanks, in Washington, DC. This followed a brief career as a Journalist, including four years at The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, NJ. Pat served as the Founding Chair of the Diversity Action Alliance, a coalition of leading organizations in the public relations profession, whose mission is to accelerate action on recruitment, retention, and representation of diverse talent at all levels in the profession. He also serves on the boards of the Institute for Public Relations (IPR), the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, and the Museum of Public Relations. Pat has been honored with several prestigious industry awards over the years, including the President's Award from the Hispanic Public Relations Association, the IPR Lifetime Achievement Medal, the Diversity Champion of the Year Award from PRWeek and the PR Council, and the Plank Center's Milestones in Mentoring Legacy Award.

Foreword for Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators Stacey Tank

In my early 20s, I worked for the company that FORTUNE magazine called its “Most Admired” – General Electric – with its complex global footprint across businesses that ranged from healthcare equipment to plastics to nuclear power to commercial real estate and television studios.

Regardless of the business segment, I noticed a pattern that seemed to repeat itself no matter the team or subject. We would have a great idea that we felt would change the game and catapult our work to the next level. The idea would be oozing with creativity and impact, creating just enough “squirming in our chairs” to tell us we were onto something.

We would toil in our office cubicles late into the night hyped up on free coffee making fancy PowerPoints with wiz-bang animations to help us pitch the idea to our boss (because there were no laptops or cell phones in those days). When the idea's debut moment finally arrived, our boss would listen and often, he seemed to like what he heard. He would perk up and start to brainstorm to round out the edges along with us.

It would feel like everything was going in exactly the right direction. Then like clockwork, in the last 10 minutes of the discussion, a shoe would drop. The boss's former enthusiasm would fade into a furrowed brow. There was probably no budget to put behind the idea, he feared. He wasn't sure how much was really left to go this year and finance said the budgets were terribly tight.

It probably wasn't going to work out this time. “Let's save this one for next year.”

Inevitably, we would retreat with our tails between our legs, unsure if our idea wasn't really that great or if our leader had somehow succumbed to his fear of the finance department with their blank stares, intimidating lingo, and love for scored earth “zero-based” budgeting. (This is a dramatic and sometimes unfair characterization, I realize. I do love my finance friends, as a reformed finance leader myself.)

My mother would confirm that I am a stubborn gal, and this “fear of finance syndrome” was part of the reason I pushed myself to join GE's Corporate Audit Staff in the mid-2000s. Marketing and communications employees rarely pursued this career path. When I started to express interest, I experienced a string of encouraging yet bemused stares as I underwent the gauntlet of requisite interviews.

I remember wandering up to the executive floor of GE's global headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut, which was sterile but beautiful. You could hear a pin drop. I tiptoed so my high heels didn't make too much of a ruckus as I wandered, slightly lost, down the corridors. When I was waved into one of the cavernous offices by the executive's assistant, I would settle myself into a Herman Miller chair and embrace the inquisition: Net-net, did I understand what I was getting myself into?

Of course, the truth was … I had no idea. But I never wanted to feel like one department was pulling the wool over my eyes. What really happened over there in the finance department? For better or for worse, I was about to find out.

I have great appreciation for the audit staffers who worked with me during my first few audits because I had no idea what I was doing. They were mostly generous in teaching me, penciling out the T-accounting and explaining each Generally Accepted Accounting Principle (GAAP) as I was assigned new audit areas like inventory or revenue recognition. Spending time on multiple continents in industrial businesses like GE Healthcare, GE Aviation and GE Energy, plus GE's consumer and commercial finance businesses – with movie and televisions studios throw in for a dose of glamour – was the most incredible training ground despite the incredibly long days and frequent moments feeling consumed by inadequacy.

Little by little, I started to become fluent in the language of business – the income statement, the balance sheet, and the statement of cash flows. I also made a promise to myself along the way: When my team came to me in the future, I might not be able to say “yes” to every idea, but I would know exactly how much was left in my annual budget, and I would never shy away from having a tough conversation with finance when it was needed.

Today, as a CEO, I only appreciate my audit and finance background more deeply. Being a CEO is about resource allocation, whether that's setting a clear vision for the organization, ensuring the right people are in the right seats on the bus or placing financial bets in the places that are most likely to nurture the business over time. It's also about sensing risk and seeing around corners. My audit and finance experience has given me the confidence and knowledge to bob and weave as we invest in our brands and deliver the next great product for consumers – all while continuously improving our financial performance. I would simply not be as effective a CEO without doing those hard yards in finance early in my career.

If joining your internal audit or finance department feels like a step too far, this workbook offers a great alternative – a vehicle for hands-on learning to upskill communication professionals on the sometimes intimidating and incredibly relevant world of financial topics – from annual reports to financial statements and beyond. Take a big breath and jump into the deep end of the business acumen pool. Your leadership impact will blossom because of it. And may you forever have visions of Excel files dancing through your mind!

Stacey Tank

Chief Executive Officer, Bespoke Beauty Brands

Former Chief Transformation and Corporate Affairs Officer The HEINEKEN Company

Preface

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says: “if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach a person to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.”

This timeless wisdom sums up the need for this workbook. Learning core business acumen concepts is valuable, but learning how to apply them through hands-on practice is priceless.

Over the past decade, we have coauthored or coedited three prior books on business acumen for strategic communicators. These books are now used in college classrooms around the world, plus in the professional development programs of top public relations and strategic communication agencies and in-house departments. We greatly appreciate the continued favorable reception to our work and the invaluable feedback from our readers. We have heard and now hopefully responded to requests from instructors and learners: to give us innovative ways to embrace active learning when teaching and learning about the world of business.

Message received and (work)book delivered.

Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators can be used in conjunction with our book Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators: A Primer (or our earlier title, Business Essentials for Strategic Communicators), or it can be used as a stand-alone text in courses and workshop programs. This workbook respects the busy schedules of students and professionals. Time spent on professional development is precious. Our work embraces a “less is often more” approach to learning. The chapters are purposely short and concise, written in the same accessible and conversational style that you will find in our other business literacy books.

The workbook is divided up into seven sections:

• 1. An introduction, which defines the term business acumen through the lens of senior communication leaders, followed by recommendations from senior communication leaders on practical ways to develop greater business literacy.

• 2. A review of how to read financial statements and conduct essential valuation analysis.

• 3. A review of the CEO and executive director letter and the annual report.

• 4. A review of the quarterly earnings report, including the earnings release and the earnings call.

• 5. An overview of the evolving expectations of ESG, DEI and EEO-1 reports.

• 6. A look at key corporate and organizational governance information, including the annual proxy statement at public companies.

• 7. The book concludes with a final section on business acumen and professional development, filled with actionable advice to put into practice across career stages.

For sections two through five, each chapter starts with the brief – a concise, quick moving overview of the core concepts in the chapter, including key definitions and the data sources related to the chapter content, plus how and where to access the sources. The chapter then moves on to the exercise, which allows the learner to analyze the specific business materials of organizations. For example, for the earnings release chapter, the exercise is a guided analysis of the quarterly earnings release through the lens of the strategic communication professional. The chapter then wraps with a set of discussion questions and a group activity, also through the lens of the strategic communicator. A list of key terms to review are included at the end of the chapter. The discussion questions and activity may be completed in conjunction with the exercise or used separately with the brief serving as the “cliff notes” that help “level set” the learners.

We intentionally wrote a more inclusive book with exercises and content that apply to a range of organizational settings. This means not just public companies but also private companies and nonprofit organizations (NPOs). In the back of the book, answer keys are included to go along with each of the chapters that feature exercises. Each answer key denotes the specific organizational document that was analyzed. For the public company chapter exercises, we selected Apple Inc., one of the world's most influential technology and media companies, as the case study to analyze. The private company we selected is Cargill, the largest US-based private corporation with operations spanning the world. The NPOs we chose are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the producer of the Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, and Feeding America, the largest US charity based on private donations. While we are based in the United States and the focus of the book is on American rules, regulations, and disclosures, we also purposely include international examples throughout.

Last, but certainly not least, this workbook includes an updated and expanded glossary of business terminology written specifically for communicators. We think the glossary alone is worth the price of admission. To become (and stay) fluent in the language of business means learning the ever-evolving vocabulary of business and management. Whether you've been working in the business world for just a few years or for many decades, there are always new terms to know and old ones to brush up on. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

In conclusion, to revisit the fishing themed metaphor we shared at the start of this preface, we believe the waters are choppy but promising for the future of the strategic communication profession. Never have organizations, their stakeholders, or society had a greater need for ethically sound, business-savvy strategic communication counsel and advice. May this book help you accelerate your career journey as you navigate the sea of possibilities ahead.

Matt Ragas, PhD

Ron Culp, Fellow PRSA

DePaul University

Chicago, IL

Acknowledgments

Real-world experience along with feedback are, indeed, the best teachers. This fourth book project together has benefited from the dozens of educators and professionals who have shared their insights and advice with us since the publication of our first book, Business Essentials for Strategic Communicators, a decade ago.

Feedback and encouragement from around the world led to this latest effort to provide a hands-on tool for understanding and developing better business communication skills.

Special thanks to the more than 200 educators and professionals who have supported our efforts to increase the business acumen of current and future strategic communicators. Beginning with a sage suggestion from Pat Ford, who we invited to write the Afterword for this workbook, we quickly saw the need for a hands-on workbook for use in classrooms and in the workplace.

Our proposal for such a workbook was well received and swiftly approved, thanks to Charlotte Maiorana, head of the books program at Emerald Publishing, which published our previous two books, Business Acumen for Strategic Communicators: A Primer and Mastering Business for Strategic Communicators. Charlotte, content development editors Lydia Cutmore and David Jak Mulvaney, book sales manager Kimberly Wiley, and the entire Emerald team once again made the challenge of book publishing a pleasure. Special shout-outs to rockstar DePaul grad alum and talented creative strategist Kevin Spitta for the author headshot images and to trusty graduate assistant Ella Tobias for her work on the tables in the appendix.

We also are grateful for the ongoing support from our DePaul University colleagues, who fully embrace the importance of equipping the next generation of communication professionals with business knowledge and skills. Special thanks to Dean Lexa Murphy and our colleagues in the College of Communication. We received similar encouragement and support from professional and academic organizations that understand and promote the importance of elevating the business acumen of rising industry talent – the Page Society, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Communication Leaders of Chicago, Institute for Public Relations, International Association of Business Communicators, Museum of Public Relations, Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations, and the Public Relations Society of America.

The hundreds of hours required for such a project would not have been possible without the patience and understanding of our partners, Traci Ragas and Sandra Culp. Over the past 15 or so years, we have grown as colleagues, friends, and “family” with Matt and Ron often being able to finish each other's thoughts and sentences. This mutual respect for each other is a secret ingredient to the successful coauthorship of this book and our past and future collaborations.

And, of course, thanks to you – our readers. The very fact you are using this workbook demonstrates your commitment to becoming a more strategic communicator.