New edition of Roland Berger's book series "re:think CEO": Managers in the media trap" – Why communications is a matter for top management

Managers and journalists have never got on well; and, precisely because of the financial crisis, some media are letting themselves be led astray into prejudging things too quickly. Managers, as the often-repeated cliché goes, are mostly incompetent, anti-social and greedy. And people generally are only too ready to believe this: surveys show 85% have lost faith in management. So it is precisely now that businesses need, increasingly, to think about how they come across to the public. The new edition of Roland Berger's book series, "re:think CEO", entitled "Managers in the media trap", shows PR work is no longer just something for the specialists, but a strategic management task. But many managers are still delegating their PR work to professionals, they don't understand how the media work and they get it wrong. With this book Torsten Oltmanns, Roland Berger Partner and Global Marketing Director, and business journalist and publisher Ralf-Dieter Brunowsky aim to help managers understand the media better and help them present their case effectively in the media and to the general public in the "great recession".

In France, managers are being taken hostage, in the US, politicians decide which businesses are granted loans. In Germany, people are demanding that politicians should control the banks. And Schaeffler, Opel and Hypo Real Estate are just the first examples of how badly the public debate is restricting businesses' room to maneuver. And company bosses and entrepreneurs will be dependent on public consent as never before, by when the government has to decide on financial support for individual companies in the summer at latest. By then, at the latest, communicating professionally must become a matter for top management. This is something managers and bosses need to get ready for now. And this situation, being obliged to curry favor with the public, will be the norm in future: because the crisis has made people even more alert and critical than before.

Managers and the media – nothing but misunderstandings

"Strategic communication means including what impact your decisions will have on the media and general public right from the decision-making stage," says Torsten Oltmanns, Partner and Global Marketing Director at Roland Berger. "This means managers need to learn to understand journalists better as the main communicators to the general public." But while directors seem to have no trouble managing large companies with thousands of staff, many managers come across as helpless when they try to tell the public where they stand or look to politicians to help them implement their projects.
"The problem is, the two professions don't know enough about one another. Each has a prejudiced view of the other," says publicist, PR consultant and publisher Ralf-Dieter Brunowsky. Managers and journalists need to start really talking to one another. "This is something managers need to do themselves, not delegate it to PR people or outside agencies".

"Managers in the media trap" explains, with many practical examples, what challenges managers face today and what matters in communicating strategically with the media, banks and the public in future. "We're trying to explain what managers can do to stop themselves from being made scapegoats, and how they can get out of this trap," Oltmanns says. The book also shows what communications tasks they can leave to media spokespersons and agencies, and which they need to do themselves.