Industry great says profession in a crisis

Roger D’Aprix’s latest book aims to reset the course of organizational communications that, he says, is misguided by the lure of technology

Roger D’Aprix has been called “the father of strategic communication.”

Each of D’Aprix’s books has made sense of the current state of the communications profession and taken it to its next level. In his breakthrough work Communicating for Productivity (1982), he led organizational communicators from the reactive model of journalism and recast the profession in the mold of “proactive” strategists: Our job is to help the organization meet its goals in ways that can be researched, planned and measured. In so doing, he established the modern practice.

Drawing on his corporate experience at GE, Bell & Howell and Xerox, he also challenged communicators to equip front-line supervisors for their prominent role in face-to-face communications by helping them answer six key questions all employees need answered, in this order: