C-Suite Stack

What does a CEO actually need from communications? Prash sits down with his former colleague Oscar Suris, who has worked the question from every angle: as a business journalist, as Chief Communications Officer at Wells Fargo, as head of Edelman’s New York office, and in communications leadership roles at Ford, Duke Energy, and most recently TelevisaUnivision.

Oscar explains why every engagement starts with getting the brief right, why one of the most important jobs a communicator has is to bring the outside world in, and how the lines between internal and external, and between PR and public affairs, have disappeared. He shares the three capabilities he’d hire for first on an in-house team, why companies look to comms for leadership rather than services, and why every hire is a leap of faith that someone, eventually, will take on you. It all builds to his central point: the best data a communicator can bring a CEO isn’t proof of a job well done, but perspective.

Anne McSilver works in thought leadership at LinkedIn, where she spent the past year building LinkedIn Learning's Talent Velocity Report, a framework for keeping an organization's skills ahead of AI transformation. In this episode, she walks through how that work actually got made and what it takes to make ideas stick once they're in the world.

The conversation covers how to measure thought leadership against brand and revenue goals, why quality beats volume for resource-strapped teams, how a year of interviews and market research became one framework, the case for pairing data with human stories, turning a 40-page report into quizzes, workshops, and live events, why you have to sell your own sellers before you sell anyone else, and how to write in an executive's voice without losing them.

More on LinkedIn's Talent Velocity Report at learning.linkedin.com/resources/talent-velocity-report.

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