Business & Organizational Communication Portfolio

  Who: companies and organizations everywhere in the world, as well as branding companies must understand how branding works and how it has changed over the years with the addition of social media platforms being a new way to brand a product or company.   What: Branding a company/organization to promote their product or the company itself.   When: Everyday, especially when a new product rolls out or a new company is trying to become known.   Where: Everywhere, both the real world and on the internet.   Why: Want to promote the product or company for it to become successful in some way.   How: By using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Aristotle’s seven causes of human emotions, and any platform they can get their hands on. This being websites, radio, billboards, social media, apps and television.  

Crisis in a business is something that occurs almost every day. I recently watched the series Dopesick which was about Purdue Pharma during the roll of OxyContin and working on resolving the conflicts arising from lawsuits and the FBI. The shows depiction of how the company works on resolving the rising crises and conflicts coming towards them. From the very beginning, Purdue Pharma was shown to not care too much about the issues that their drug is causing. By the time this show takes place, the organization has paid out at least three lawsuits against them. Under the representation given, we can see from the beginning that they were bound to fail in the near future.  The company's action/risk plan was to pay out those who were suing the company, continue to bribe the FDA to approve their drug, and explain that OxyContin was not as addictive as it actually is. The show never shows the company start an investigation as to why people are misusing the drug and why there are soo many...

 Who: The company is involved and is facing the crisis. This includes the communication and legal teams along with the CEO and other board members. This also involves the people having the issues or side-effects with the product. What: There is an issue with a product that a company is releasing. Specifics vary from company to company and what the product is. When: Can occur either in the formation of the product or after it is released. This can be long or short term depending on the issue.  Where: Within the company and the public. Why: Because something went wrong or has caused side-effects or other health issues.  How: Someone has given a complaint about the product not working or has caused them health issues.

What: This chapter from HBR:10 Must-Reads on Communication discusses how we can work on making a stressful conversation easier to have. These conversations range “from firing a subordinate to, … receiving praise.” (HBR, 165) This chapter discusses how one can prepare for stressful conversations. The techniques given are identify , know how to react, and rehearse.   Who: The people involved in these conversations are often people of higher positions in a company or organization that must have a hard or stressful conversation with one or more of their employees. People, however, don’t necessarily need to be in power to have these conversations. It can occur between two employees where one of them either isn’t doing something properly or if they conflict with each other and do not want to bring it to their supervisor or manager yet, as they may want to try to resolve the issues themselves. These techniques are meant for those who are giving stressful conversation rather than the pe...

       In my four years at CMU, I have learned a decent amount of information about diversity in work and schooling environments. This has consisted mainly of the ways in which cultures differ in how they communicate and work in any environment. Last semester I had an assignment on how different cultures communicate where I observed three meetings of CMU's International Student Association, as almost everyone in the group came from a different country and culture.            Although that was a student led group, each meeting was ran in the same way a business would run a meeting as they had a person in charge and everyone had their own specific tasks and because of their diversity, they were able to think of diverse ways things could be done or alternative ways to improve something that they have already done.        Having a diverse group like this is beneficial in a work/schooling environment as ...

  Gender at work is something that has been discussed more recently throughout the year due to women wanting equal pay and no longer being the primary caretaker in their homes anymore. Women are constantly being discriminated and treated unequally at work. This comes in the form of pay differences among genders or women being overlooked for a position because they are seen as the primary caregiver in their family, no matter how much experience or hard work they do at their job. This free creation shows a man supporting his female coworker get equal rights in their company which many men should do. Although this stigma has been changing in the past few years, it still occurs and needs to be changed.  

    I was really glad that I said that James could show my pitch, as I learned a lot from the feedback. I learned that I am the only person in the class that was comfortable showing their video. Many people don't like watching what they make, or watching or listening to themselves, but thanks to my four years of being a communications student, I fine with it.      Some of the feedback that I received was that I used a lot of repetition. This allowed for the more important points to be emphasized. I did feel like I needed to emphasize the fact that it took me years to get to where I am and I am still learning.       I also learned that I would be presenting this pitch to photographers that are looking into getting into the sports side of photography rather than someone who is not a photographer as I discuss the technical side of photography by stating that you need to pay attention to the camera settings.      I really appreciat...