• describe the theoretical foundations of reputation and communication management
• apply communication management knowledge to the strategic decision making for corporations
• evaluate the impact of a communication management plan on the value of a business and its impact on society
• recommend a communication management plan with strategic value for a corporation

Reputation is one of the most valuable assets of a company, but also one of the hardest to manage. This makes it an eminent task of corporate leadership. Managed superficially, a corporation’s communication is just the sum of its media messages. Managed responsibly, it drives a corporation’s value. That requires corporate leadership to face numerous communication challenges, e.g.: there are always more people talking about you than with you; the call for corporations to be transparent has never been louder; different stakeholders hold you responsible at the same time, but for conflicting things; a global media structure makes this a 24/7 leadership task. Things can easily go wrong: Poor communication management is often at the core of corporate crises. Surprisingly, not many leading business schools include communication management in their leadership development. This course is intended to help fill that gap.

This course is taught entirely online. It will run for twelve weeks with seven topic clusters plus two in-term compulsory activities (approved / not approved) and a final exam assignment. It comprises online lectures, guided individual activities, moderated online discussions and group case work. All elements require a high level of self-leadership and participation from all participants. Feedback will be given on the in-term compulsory activities.

We will start by jointly discovering principles of communication and then applying them in a business context. We proceed by studying the management of communication as part of the competition for attention with other businesses. This is followed by a methodology to strategically plan the content and channels of external, especially digital communication. We proceed by looking at the main communicative duties of business leaders: simultaneously communicating with conflicting stakeholders and representing change. The course ends by looking at what happens when all the above fails and principles of crisis communication need to be applied.