The apostle Paul, corporate musicals, early use of internal
radio networks and the renowned US corporate communicator Arthur W. Page all
featured in a BBC radio history of internal communication (IC) broadcast on
December 31.
Billed as ‘Bathrooms Are Coming: An Internal History of
Corporate Comms’, the programme took its title from an American Standard
corporate musical of the late 1950s that promoted new ranges of bathroom and
sanitary ware to employees and distributors.
My role in the programme, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, was to introduce
the history of internal or employee communication and provide producer Emma
Kingsley with background information on the field.
The start point was to set IC in the context of persuasive
communication. The Apostle Paul could be considered an practitioner through his
letters to early Christian communities and visits to them, as suggested by US
scholar Robert E. Brown. The first employee newspaper seems to be the Lowell Offering prepared by women
operatives for staff of the Lowell Cotton Mills in New England between 1840 and
1845. In the US, UK and Germany, there were many examples of newspapers and
even film units in the latter part of the 19th century.
By the 1920s US corporations such as Western Electric Company,
Heinz, Pennsylvania Railroad and Metropolitan Life were using radio, telephone
link-ups, film and newspapers to communicate with widely-spread staff. Heinz,
of baked beans renown, held a ‘radio banquet’ in the 1930s so that all
employees across the US could be “brought into a family circle” at the same
time.
It was at this time that Arthur W. Page joined AT&T and
introduced his strategic approach to employee communication. His view was that
every AT&T employee held equal responsibility for the company’s fate,
because anyone meeting employees, called “the original walkie-talkies”, was
effectively in contact with AT&T. Nearly 90 years later, my view is that
Page’s research-led views on IC are is well worth considering.
As for corporate musicals, their hey-day was the late 1950s
and early 1960s. In addition to American Standard, they were used by big
corporations such as Ford, GM, Milliken and Shell. With the popular and
critical success of the movie La La Land,
could it be time for the corporate musical’s return?
