The Big Idea

Citation

Jones, R. (2001), "The Big Idea", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 107-109. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccij.2001.6.2.107.3

This is not strictly a specialist corporate communication book yet it speaks to the creative element in any theorist or practitioner in the field. It addresses issues of culture described in the earlier review of the Handbook of Public Relations and also picks up on the concept of the expressive organisation described there, by suggesting that “unless you stand for something, you won’t stand out”.

In a global village, Robert Jones says, every organisation – public or private, commercial or non‐profit – is open to scrutiny (p. 176) and “completely new ways of measuring emerge”. What will count he believes will not be shareholder value but member value: the emotional value of a community to all its members. Jones demonstrates this by including a catalogue of what he suggests are 50 of the biggest ideas around at the moment, assuming you accept the author’s interpretation that the big idea “isn’t always, or even usually, the organisation’s own words”. He offers a measurement score of a maximum of five stars based on his judgement of how big an idea is. The criteria for “big” are that it has to be radical, social and tangible. Included in these three variables is the degree to which members are able to communicate with each other, forming their own networks of people with shared interests among other things (p. 178). “It’s a different world of measurement”, Jones says “from earnings per share to inspiration per member”. It could be tempting to think that because Jones works at Wolff Olins, the London and New York consulting firm, this is just another way of hyping market brands. Indeed Wolff Olins himself has a chapter in the expressive organisation book (above) in which he recognises brands as “the company’s unique asset” and even suggests that brands are taking over the corporation (chapter 4). In the 1970s he, like this reviewer, would have been unable to articulate the growing sense that artificially created brands might challenge the public’s perception of corporate image and the organisation’s sense of identity of itself as they are beginning to do now.

Robert Jones helps us to feel our way along this tricky managerial path by suggesting that benchmarking one company against another to find the best way of doing things will “give way to the much more exciting art of inspiration … The organisations that succeed in the new way of business … will be those that don’t do the rational thing, those who don’t emulate but invent”. Most big ideas emerge over time but just occasionally organisations begin life “with an explicit big idea”. It is the kind of book that would create triggers for an exciting student brainstorming session during a tedious residential workshop or developmental skills weekend. To say it is an airport lounge reader would be derogatory and yet there is something light and cheerful about this book that allows it to cross boundaries between fiction and non‐fiction. It is not a book to make an essential reading list for postgraduate students and yet there is a component of strategic corporate communication that is a value. At double the price of a normal paperback, it is not something to pick up with the weekend shopping but whether teaching, learning or practising corporate communication, corporate affairs, public relations, it is a fun read without being shallow.