Essay On Answers To Questions

Communication

The Goldman Sachs Response
Introduction
When the article about Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman Sachs reached the New York Times, the company was placed in a dilemma on how to respond to the article considering the reputational crisis at hand caused by the publication of the article. As a remedy, the company issued a response, but it was through e-mail. The discussion examines what the company is hoping to achieve based on the response, the effectiveness of the response, and identifying other more effective strategies. Based on the company’s response, it appears that the top management is aiming to minimize the effect of the public toward the company’s reputation. However, the responses and the manner of delivering it possess weak areas that require strength in order to achieve a greater impact on the audience.

What the Management is hoping to Achieve

What the company hopes to achieve as expressed on the article is to make clarifications on the damaging assertions made by the former employee in the article published in the New York Times. As observed on the first two paragraphs of the response, the company asserts that the fact that the opinion of one employee does not represent the entire employee population of 30,000. Furthermore, the company made a point in emphasizing the fact that the assertions made by the former employee is rather the opposite of what the majority of the employees implied in their satisfaction survey responses. Therefore, by stating the facts about the singularity of the opinion asserted by Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs aims to contradict his argument using generalization of collective responses from a majority population within the organization.

Effectiveness of the Response

The effectiveness of the response lies upon the method of its delivery, the number of target audience, and emphasis on facts and numbers. In terms of the context of the message, it was effective in the sense that the author exercises argumentation in which the negative implications of Smith’s assertion was challenged by facts and figures. Meaning, the response was effective because it had verifiable basis. On the other hand, the response was weak in terms of format. It is apparent that the response was channeled through email. Subsequently, if the email was not cascaded to the media, the response would only circulate internally, which also encompasses the problem of limitations on the reach of audience. It appears that Goldman Sachs response intends to contradict the assertions made by Greg Smith on the New York Times, but to compare the reach of audience between the mainstream print media and electronic, the former is more effective, unless the latter was also disseminated externally.

Other more effective Strategy

The other more effective strategy to employ in a similar situation is to make a press release instead emailing response. A press release provides an avenue for delivering the message to create a hub of information relay by putting together the mainstream media in one place to cover the statements of the company pertaining to that of Greg Smith’s article. In addition, a press release can reach more audience at one time, which could also address the limitation in audience reach encompassed by using email response. Smith’s article was addressed to the public and the response to such should be also addressed similarly.

Conclusion

What can be taken from this evaluation is that effective communication can be realized by considering the manner of delivery. Most importantly, responding to a publicly delivered statement should be addressed similarly in order to achieve greater impact.