Live from Your Office! It's ...

It's 11 am on a Wednesday, and Dan Hunt, 42, president of Caribbean and Latin American operations for Nortel Networks, is live and on the air! Seated behind a stage-prop desk in the company's South Florida TV studio, the slender, articulate executive stares into a camera as he fields questions from Nortel employees -- an audience every bit as tough as any that shows up for a taping of Oprah or The Tonight Show. A caller from Mexico wants to know the implications of a joint venture between Nortel rivals Motorola and Cisco. Hunt delivers a detailed answer. Someone asks about the new competitive threat posed by Lucent Technologies. After taking a breath, Hunt answers. Next comes a query about Nortel's new branding strategy. Hunt smiles and defers to the host of this corporate talk show, Emma Carrasco, 39, vice president of marketing and communications, whom Hunt laughingly introduces as "the mistress of all branding."

Hunt isn't your standard talk-show guest. And this isn't your standard TV talk show. But it is an important corporate conversation. Once a month, Hunt and Carrasco broadcast the "Virtual Leadership Academy," an hour-long program that presents company spin and in-depth, highly usable information in an interactive, talk-show format. This morning's audience, consisting of 2,000 employees in 46 countries, has been treated to a conversational stew featuring industry news, a surprisingly interesting discussion of international-tax strategy, and a chance to pepper Hunt and other Nortel executives with direct questions about the company and its competitors -- all from the comfort of their regional offices. "We're always looking for ways to break down barriers in the company, and people are comfortable with the talk-show format," says Carrasco, a self-confessed "talk-show junkie" who designed the program to tap into what she calls the "talk-show culture" of her audience. "People watch talk shows in every country in the region, and they've learned that it's okay to say what's on their mind. In fact, it's expected."

Nortel isn't the only company that is borrowing from talk-show culture to improve internal communication. Breaking the centuries-old convention of one-way, top-down, rigidly formulaic corporate monologues, smart organizations are experimenting with new, more interactive, less formal modes of talking to -- and listening to -- employees and customers. Not every company takes the talk-show model as literally as Nortel does -- with its set, its TelePrompTers, and its commercial breaks. But at a time when all kinds of other boundaries in business are being bent, blended, and broken, the new metaphor for corporate communication is best described as "edutainment": the company as talk show.

Think about it. In the Information Age, organizations that succeed are those that can quickly and effectively communicate critical knowledge to their people. And the best way to do that? Traditional top-down communication techniques -- from shotgun memos to routinized meetings to heavily touted "knowledge management" systems -- seem either heavily bureaucratic or unnecessarily technocentric. In the new workplace, rigid hierarchies are giving way to informality and networks -- which is another way of saying that the most important elements of any organization are personal relationships: between management and workers, between colleagues, and, of course, between a company and its customers. And how do you build deep, valuable, personal relationships? Not through formal memos and structured meetings but through repeated personal contact. Through informal contact. Through talk.

"Humans create, reinforce, and disseminate knowledge through -- guess what? -- conversations," says Bill Isaacs, founder of Dialogos, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that practices the art of organizational problem solving by fostering careful, in-depth conversation. "It's something we forgot, and it turns out to be at the very center of the new economy. Companies that perform better in the marketplace are the ones that do a better job of conducting these conversations," adds Isaacs, who is also the author of "Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together: A Pioneering Approach to Communicating in Business and in Life" (Doubleday, 1999).

In other words, successful companies, like successful talk shows, are those that talk about the right things, to the right people, in the right way. Just as Oprah, Larry King, and Jay Leno know instinctively how to draw out their guests -- encouraging a flow of ideas, keeping the conversation focused, interesting, and fresh -- so "talk show" companies keep their own conversations flowing, not only among employees but also between employees and customers.