Over the past decade, the understanding of goal-oriented management in companies has fundamentally changed: Disruptive digital technologies, most recently generative artificial intelligence, increased value creation expectations among diverse stakeholders beyond economic success and intensified national and international distributional conflicts have created a completely new environment. Today, corporate added value arises in the tension between fundamental material and identity-related “experiences of loss” in society, which sociologist Andreas Reckwitz describes in his latest book as the “fundamental problem of modernity,” and the surplus reality that arises from innovation-intensive competition in a volatile geopolitical environment.
The question of how to adapt to this environment of acceleration, contradiction, and uncertainty in corporate management is a topic of much discussion in management literature. A recent trend has been observed, moving away from threat defense through skill expansion—condensed into new requirements such as resilience, ambidexterity, and anticipation—toward identifying opportunities in volatility. Rebecca Homkes of the London Business School, for example, describes these opportunities as an opportunity to generate new growth under the heading “Survive, Reset, Thrive.” The HR consultancy Russell Reynolds even sees companies today in a permanent state of “endless transformation.”
In a challenging environment, new success factors are also coming to the fore in corporate communications, as a look at the “European Communication Monitor 2024/25” shows. Dealing with the new geopolitical environment plays a key role, which around 80 percent of respondents perceive as a risk. Around 50 percent see the active positioning of the company and its top management on geopolitical issues as a particular challenge. At the same time, the “FTI Communications Heatmap 2024” shows that, according to respondents, the greatest challenge in political communication (around 70 percent) lies in the structure of the public affairs function itself, and in particular “the insufficient integration between the individual communications disciplines.”
A key characteristic of strategic communication is that it integrates approaches and instruments geared toward specific target and stakeholder groups. This applies regardless of whether this is achieved through horizontally cooperative, vertically hierarchical, or planning-dialogical mechanisms. This inward-looking dimension of communication integration is also essential – but not sufficient – for the performance contribution of communication management in a phase of fundamentally new demands on corporate management.
Equally important is the integration of communication into overall management, whose understanding of the company is generally – as Thomas Beschorner and Blagoy Blagoev of the University of St. Gallen recently explained in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the state of business administration – “monorationally focused on what appears to be the only alternative from an economic perspective,” while social and ecological interdependencies are deliberately overlooked. The US historian and strategy expert Zachary Shore, also referring to economic history, cites such “mental traps” as the reason “why smart people make bad decisions.”
The art of integrating communications management into corporate management lies in striking a balance between proximity and distance. If the relationship is too close to the value creation logic of traditional management, corporate communications loses its seismographic and consultative competence in a phase of radical uncertainty. If the distance is too great, it easily falls into the role of a risk-averse outsider in the decision-making process, one who is only heard once all decisions have already been made.
In psychology, proxemics addresses human spatial behavior in relation to distance, eye level, attention, and touch. Expressed in its logic, corporate communication integrates itself into management methods: approachable but distant in attitude; at eye level in its entrepreneurial promise of value creation but reserved in its hierarchical claim; approachable in interaction but not opportunistic.
