Podcast: 101 Things We Think a Corporate Affairs Professional Should Know

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Today we release our summer special episode of Little Questions, featuring a lively discussion between Jenny Scott, Andrew Brown, and Matt Young on the 101 Things Every Corporate Affairs Professional Should Know.

We’ve assembled a list of what we believe to be the most important things effective Corporate Affairs practitioners need to know – blending practical lessons, shared wisdom from talented colleagues, and insights that only time and experience can bring.

Some of the points are practical, others are more philosophical, but whether you’re at the beginning of your career or leading a global function, there’s something here for everyone.

We’d love to hear your thoughts – which resonated with you… and what have we missed?

1. If you don’t have a corporate narrative stop everything and create one. If you don’t know what one is, stop reading this and go and find out. I know a podcast that has some helpful tips!
2. Make sure you know how your business works and that you do so from first principles. A good place to start might be the Chief Operating Officer or someone in the Strategy team.
3. Make sure you know how your business makes money and how it flows through the organisation. Make friends with someone smart in the finance team.
4. Never apologise for asking a dumb question. Your job is to be the smartest idiot in the room.  Whoever told me that I owe you a debt of service.
5. Sometimes your job is just to stop stupid things from happening.
6. Your greatest skills should be to explain the complex, simply. So that your mother would understand it. If you don’t have that skill, develop it. Urgently. Get help. Check out that podcast!
7. The first version of the strategy is usually therapy. Embrace it.
8. No-one gets it right first time. All hail the terrible first draft. And its creator.
9. ‘Let’s tell our story’ is not a strategy. It’s a hunch with a verb.
10. Internal comms is 70% logistics, 20% diplomacy and 10% creativity. It’s often gruelling. Respect it and the people that do it. 
11. Everyone in your business is an internal comms ‘expert’. Yes, it’s annoying. Be robust with armchair generals.
12. The default in-house can sometimes be to prioritise external over internal comms. Challenge yourself on the balance. Thank you, Patrick Keegan, for that.
13. Get close to where the centre of action is for your business. That’s where the story lives. And where most crises will originate from.
14. You probably don’t need more content. You probably need more meaning. 
15. If your CEO won’t read it, rewrite it. If they still won’t, rethink the format.
16. Most crisis plans go unread until five minutes after they were needed.
17. Read and review your crisis plan regularly. When crises happen to others, see if your plan would have survived the same in your organisation.
18. There’s no such thing as ‘keeping it internal’. It always leaks. Immediately.
19. Legal will always want to delete the most important sentence.  Rage against it.
20. If the company you work for doesn’t stand for something, it stands for nothing. And nothing is neither memorable nor motivating. Thank you, @CharlesWigley for that one.
21. Public Affairs is not lobbying. Stop letting people say it is.
22. Read. Walk. Think. Talk. Meet people. Be curious. Get away from the screen and out into the world.
23. Briefings should be short. Your thinking should not be.
24. Don’t mistake media volume for public interest.
25. If people are saying “Comms will draft something”, you are in a bad place. It is not a compliment.
26. People trust faces, not functions. Find and use the best faces in your team.
27. If it makes the HR director nervous, it’s probably worth exploring. If it makes legal nervous it’s definitely worth exploring.
28. Don’t waste your time ‘aligning messages’ no one cares about.
29. It’s not enough to have the facts. You need the framing.
30. Most policy papers end up being written by policy people for policy people. Try to write yours for outsiders.
31. The first five slides in most PPT decks can usually be deleted without losing anything. Sometimes the first ten.
32. Don’t confuse internal consensus with external clarity.
33. Most narratives should work in a paragraph. The best in a sentence. The exceptional in three words.
34. Be wary of anything that is summarised in three words
35. Saying ‘we take it seriously’ just makes people think you don’t.
36. If you need to apologise, do it properly, and quickly. Don’t allow legal to talk you out of it. A slow non-apology will not do you or your firm any favours.
37. Your CEO is incredibly busy. Plan accordingly.
38. In fact, everyone is incredibly busy. Get to the point.
39. No one ever thanked a comms person for restraint. Do it anyway.
40. In a media interview, everything is on the record. Even the silence.
41. You are not the conscience of the company. You are its mirror.
42. It’s never ‘just a line for the website’.
43. Don’t let branding people near Tone of Voice guidelines without adult supervision.
44. Work out how to get the best from your agencies and advisors. A good place to start is to ask them. You may pay the bills, but they are not your slave.
45. You don’t need to win the argument. You need to shift the terms.
46. Always assume your regulator is watching.
47. Influence is slow and cumulative to build. Like rust. Or trust.  Be wary of anyone who promises overnight success.
48. Put anyone who says ‘we’re going to make you go viral’ in the bin.
49. Ditto anyone who says you need to ‘start a movement’. Thank you again Chaz.
50. The right journalist is more valuable and useful than 100 LinkedIn posts.
51. Don’t confuse employee engagement with motivation or happiness.
52. If the data doesn’t change the decision, it probably wasn’t insight.
53. When a stakeholder says ‘interesting’ repeatedly, trust me, you’ve lost them.
54. Writing well is not an optional skill.
55. 90% of corporate videos should never be made.
56. ‘We’ve always done it this way’ is not an argument. It’s an obituary.
57. Always be kind to the EA. You can’t succeed without them.
58. Your job is not to make the Exec team look good. It’s to help them be better communicators.
59. If you ever find yourself saying, ‘we need to land this message’, you’re already off course.
60. Never confuse a holding line with strategy.
61. ‘Just get it out’ is how reputational crises begin.
62. It’s easier to defend a decision you shaped than one you discovered in a press release or even worse, in the press.
63. Embrace the Friday 4pm call from Mark Kleinmann. It’s what the job is all about.
64. The longer the statement, the less confident the company.
65. Too many executives think they’re good in media interviews. Too few are.
66. Churchill and JFK couldn’t and didn’t give speeches without thorough preparation. Your CEO probably can’t either. 
67. An employee survey is not the same as listening.
68. It’s a rare stakeholder map that survives contact with real stakeholders.
69. The comms team will always know the mood of the business before the board does. Find ways to turn that to your advantage.
70. Most ESG plans and output are a form of reputational cosplay. Be serious and do it properly or don’t bother (see greenwashing).
71. There is no such thing as a ‘quiet launch’.
72. This is PR, people, there should be no such thing as a quiet lunch either!
73. Always read the comments. Then decide what to ignore. Encourage your executive not to read the comments.
74. You will be judged on the quality of people you hire. ‘Fine’ just isn’t good enough. Thank you, Ed Petter, for that.
75. Make sure you demonstrate why comms is a commercial driver for the business every single week. Your CFO is watching.
76. If everyone loves the comms, it probably said nothing.
77. If anyone – particularly third-party agencies – proposes AVE to judge the success of your work, walk out of the room immediately. Or put them in the bin. Preferably both.
78. Know what hill you’re prepared to die on. There should only be one or two.
79. The biggest risk often hides in the most boring compliance update. Make compliance your friend.
80. Silence can buy you time. But not forever.
81. Don’t overestimate how much people know. Don’t underestimate how much they care (but don’t assume they care about the same things as you).
82. What you say is only half the story. Who says it is the other half.
83. Real impact lives in repetition, not reinvention.
84. Real impact lives in repetition, not reinvention.
85. You can’t communicate your way out of a situation your organisation has behaved its way into.
86. The job is to build trust. Not win arguments. Thank you, Basil Towers.
87. The best comms work should look effortless. Making that happen requires superhuman levels of effort. Make sure your team know you recognise this.
88. Most awards entries are post-rationalised fiction. Tell the truth anyway. Good judges know this and can usually tell the difference.
89. Treat the Annual Report like the piece of marketing material it is. Treat financial results like a campaign.
90. You and IR own the narrative for the Annual Report. Not Finance. And certainly not Legal.
91. Sometime the most powerful thing you can write is a killer Q&A.
92. Most of your best ideas and writing will never see the light of day. Make peace with that.
93. No amount of strategy can make a boring company exciting. Look to make it useful instead.
94. An LLM is just another tool. It’s only as good as the person that wields it. Until they take over the world, that is.
95. If the CEO is nervous, you’re probably onto something.
96. You need fewer spokespeople. You will never need more. 
97. Measurement is political. Be ready to defend what you’re measuring.
98. Every channel you create becomes your responsibility forever.
99. Transparency shows up in your organisation’s actions, not its words.
100. Like a lawyer at a newspaper, your job is help the business do things, not stop it. Thank you, Mark Henderson.
101. If you get the quote right, you’re most of the way there. Trust me. It’s all most people will ever read.

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