Microsoft’s Frank X. Shaw on Trust and Transparency in Tech

Frank X. Shaw: What are the core pieces of our brand, the things that are the most important to us as a technology company? And it’s trust and it’s innovation. Those are the two absolutely key parts of our brand. And they have to go together, right? Because if you’re not doing interesting things in the world, you’re not going to be in business very long as a technology company. And if you’re not trusted, people won’t use the interesting things that you’re creating. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Welcome to Always On, the podcast about brand reputation and data-driven communications. We are back from a long break to start season two. We’re very excited about that, and I’m your host, as usual in Copenhagen, Shahar Silbershatz. I’m also very excited to have with us today Frank Shaw, Chief Communications Officer at Microsoft, somewhat of a celebrity in the world of comms. Thanks so much for joining us today, Frank. 

Frank X. Shaw: It is great to be here. I mean, I guess maybe I’m situationally a celebrity.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Exactly, but one nonetheless. So it’s great to have you here. These are interesting times. We want to ask you a lot of questions. But let’s start from the very beginning. So how do you typically introduce yourself to somebody who doesn’t know you? If you meet somebody at a cocktail party, who is Frank Shaw?  

Frank X. Shaw: So I’m a little bit of an introvert. So what I say to people at parties is very situational. And usually what I do is start with as little information as possible. So, you know, people will say, Hey, who are you? I’ll say my name and then what do you do? And then I’ll say I’m in marketing as my first go around because that’s a generic enough term that you can sort of get away with it. And if people are like, oh, well, marketing, like, and then you go on to something else and that’s good. If they’re curious, they’ll say, oh, what, like, what part of marketing? And then I’ll say, well, I’m in communications. And then the question after that is like, what is communications? And this is the thing you want to avoid at a party, especially a loud party because it sort of defies an easy description.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yep, I know what you mean. 

Frank X. Shaw: If somebody’s really interested, at that point, you gotta find a small corner somewhere and talk about the work itself.   

Shahar Silbershatz: Well the first thing I have to react to is the fact that you are an introverted communicator, which sounds like an oxymoron. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, if I ever write a book, I think I would call it The Accidental Extrovert because, you know, the job requires a certain degree of, you know, being out there. But at the same time, I fall on the more introverted side.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah. I call it a learned extrovert. That’s how I describe myself. But tell us then, how did you get into, as an introvert, how did you get into communications at the very beginning? I mean, what got you into it? 

Frank X. Shaw: I was a journalism major at the University of Oregon. And then I spent time in the Marine Corps and in the Marines I was a public affairs officer, which is essentially doing communications on behalf of the Marines. So this was in the 1980s. I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina and a couple of other places, and I ran a base newspaper and a radio station. Did media relations and community relations, and I really enjoyed it. I liked finding interesting stories to tell and then figuring out how to tell them in a variety of formats. And so when I came off active duty, I decided that I’d love to work at an agency, so I worked at a number of agencies in the Pacific Northwest, ending up at an agency that was doing technology PR for Microsoft. And that’s how I sort of jumped into the Microsoft ecosystem.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Interesting. Okay. So starting in journalism, but in a military context and then ending up on the corporate side, and how would you describe that transition from journalism to being a communicator on the corporate side? 

Frank X. Shaw: To be fair, I was never really in journalism even though I was a journalism major. I think the ability to see and understand what makes an interesting story is a key part of being a communicator of any kind. That’s something that I think about a lot in my day job is, what did I learn at the University of Oregon in terms of what makes a great story and then how do I apply that? And a lot of times people think about a great story as something that’s like, Hey, I had a great idea. I implemented it flawlessly and everybody loves it. Right? That is a view of a story, but it’s completely uninteresting. And so our job as communicators is to find great, interesting stories, but be willing to see, you know, the challenges that are inherent to those. Where did somebody fall down? Where was there a near disaster? You know, what was learned? And then when you start pulling those threads, then you start getting much more interesting stories that say something about the company or the product or the service that you’re offering.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Telling a good story in a sense has always remained at the core of the profession, but how do you see otherwise the discipline changing over the last 20, 30 years that you’ve been in it? 

Frank X. Shaw: The challenge for communicators is really to always be thinking about the evolution of influence and how people receive information. And it’s changed, you know, dramatically, you know, over the last half-century. You know, you can go back and you can say, you know, there were newspapers and then there was radio, and then there was television and then that was sort of static for a while. Magazines, you know, print, radio, television. That was how people received their news. And then as the internet came along, you really started to see a fragmentation of influence. And it started slowly, but it’s really accelerated over the last set of years. And it’s accelerated because audiences are sort of self-selecting at this point. In a mass-media world, it was very difficult to reach a niche audience or, if you were in that audience, to find other people like you. And now you can find organizing principles against almost anything. You know, whether it’s sports, whether it’s pieces of technology, music, entertainment, you know, books, you know, whatever the case may be, there is a community for you. So now you have to think about how do you reach these communities effectively? So for communicators, I think it always starts by really being super clear early on about the audience you’re trying to reach. If you don’t have that really clearly in your head, then you’re gonna spend a lot of time and energy reaching people who are not your audience. So we’ve seen that, you know, like you look back and you say, oh, you know, blogs came out and then online news outlets. And now we have newsletters and influencers on TikTok and Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Reddit, who are reaching audiences that we care about. And we have to know who these people are and what they care about and how to make sure that we have contact and relations with the people that are talking to our audiences. So it’s gotten a lot more complicated, to put it mildly. 

Shahar Silbershatz: For sure. It’s an interesting label you put on it, the evolution of influence. It’s not so much the media fragmentation because that’s just one aspect of it. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, I’ve always said that like we should think about influence as anybody who publishes at scale. So an influencer is anybody who publishes a scale. And ‘publish’ is a malleable term. Publish might be like whatever asset that is, short-form video, long-form video, podcast, newsletter, newspaper, like, whatever it is somebody is publishing. And scale is sort of determined by budget, right? You know, you can define scale, based on how many resources you have to throw at a throw at a particular audience. And so you’re always thinking about that nature of influence. I remember years ago, back in one of my first jobs, when I was doing some financial communications with a bank, and one of the things that I always worried about was that there was somebody publishing a print newsletter somewhere that was deeply influential against the audience that I cared about, and I didn’t know who that person was. So you’re just always on the search for, you know, influence and influencers and new outlets. And our job is to find them as early as possible so that we can, you know, be part of that conversation, as it’s coming together. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, that makes sense. So let’s talk a little bit about how you do it in today’s world, because this evolution of influence, and obviously the multiplication of channels and influencers, also means that things are moving a lot faster. And this is partly why we call this podcast Always On because we find that communicators, companies, need to be always on in order to address the challenges that keep coming up and the opportunities that keep coming up. How do you find that you and the company you work for, Microsoft, are ‘always on’ in that context? 

Frank X. Shaw: It is a great observation and it gets back to what we were talking about earlier, that life is more complicated now. So I think there’s a couple things we do. We have good measurement systems. We work with Meltwater to help us with the measurement of news, you know, especially around some of our key moments and key events. We can set up alerts so that on a regular basis on a dashboard, you can see what’s happening. Like, you know, we’re having a news event, we know what our key messages are. You can look at the dashboard, you can see who’s talking about it, you can see the news coverage that’s coming in, who’s commenting on those things. You can see that in something close to real time, which is useful in addition. You know, there’s a bunch of things that we do that are still more, personal, right? So, you know, you have to look at where you know the news is. So if you’re making news that’s appealing to gamers, right, you have to be on X, right? They’re gonna be talking about it on X. If you’re talking to developers, you know, you’re probably gonna be looking at Hacker News. If you’re talking to a CEO-level audience, you know, you’re probably gonna be looking at, you know, the more traditional outlets and then the commentary that’s happening across social media as well. So you’re taking all that in, in something close to real time, and you’re using it to decide what do you do next or what do you not do next? And so one of the things that is true is that the world’s moving so fast. Sometimes when something’s happening, the decision to do nothing is the right one. But it can be hard to argue to do nothing. But sometimes it’s like, look, this news cycle is happening. It will be over in less than four hours because that’s the nature of the world. Us jumping into it now, we’ll extend that news cycle. Do we want to do that or not? If we don’t, then we just be quiet. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Do you have, by the way, a process around that identifying or categorizing these kind of emerging risks as something that you do or don’t want to react to? 

Frank X. Shaw: This is where it’s the art and the science. This gets to the storytelling piece because you can take a weak signal, somebody with like a low social presence, or a less at-scale influencer publishes something. And let’s just say it’s something bad that we don’t like. And you can look at it and you can say, okay, this one is probably not going to get picked up because the person doesn’t have much social signal or doesn’t have a strong reputational weight in this area. So we can let it go. Then you have to balance that with, like, how interesting is the story? Does it have that kind of charismatic element that will cause it to jump somebody with more signal. And so you can look at it, it’s a boringly bad story with low signal. You’re like, okay, we can let that pass. If it’s a super-interesting charismatic story with low signal, then you have to keep an eye on it because it has the potential to really blow up. And as you’re keeping an eye on it, you think about like, what would the reaction be if needed? And if you can’t really knock the stuffing out of an argument first go, and you don’t think that it’s gonna go too far, then you’re probably better off not saying anything.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, and it’s nice to hear that, it sounds like this is also where the human element comes in because today we’re automating everything in our profession. 

Frank X. Shaw: Well, I think that is right. And I think about it’s the art and the science. It has to be both. We have more data than we’ve ever had, but the data doesn’t necessarily tell you what to do. And it doesn’t necessarily predict effectively. That’s why we have to look at it and say, wow, like, is that super-interesting and play out. If I say this, what will happen? And, you know, we can get help with AI and sort of playing out those arguments, you know, we can use AI as a sparring partner. And like, if I say this, how would this respond if they say this and I say that, how might somebody respond? But it’s still, it’s like you thinking about it and saying like, okay, it’s my judgment that like we should or should not weigh in.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Tell us a bit more about the tools and the data that you and your team use in order to stay always on, in order to, to be, as you said, real time or almost real time with what’s happening. You mentioned Meltwater on the media monitoring side. What else do you use? 

Frank X. Shaw: We use Teams a lot. I hear at Microsoft to keep ourselves coordinated. We have a lot of data that sits on our various SharePoint sites that we use. We have a very robust calendar. You know, as you can imagine, we’re a big, complicated company. One of the things that’s true in you’re big, complicated company is you don’t want to compete with yourself all the time from a news delivery standpoint. That means that we have to have a very clear sense of what’s happening at any given time or what will be happening in the future so that we can keep at that. That’s one of the things that we do there, the calendaring system. And then we drive a process across the company, every six months, which feels like a lifetime, but like is not where we look at, Hey, what are the big bets that we’re gonna make over the next set of months so that we can just make sure that that is ready to go.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Okay. What would you say from a risk perspective are the biggest reputational risks for Microsoft? Because a lot of companies as part of using different tools to understand what’s going on also try to focus on potential risks. Do you have areas that you highlight as potential risk areas reputationally? 

Frank X. Shaw: Yes. So let me say that, like, one of the things that we think about is what are the core pieces of our brand, the things that are the most important to us as a technology company, and it’s trust and it’s innovation. Those are the two absolutely key parts of our brand. And they have to go together, right? Because if you’re not doing interesting things in the world, you’re not going to be in business very long as a technology company. And if you’re not trusted, people won’t use the interesting things that you’re creating. So we’re really grounded in those two things. So then from a risk standpoint, anything that touches those in a negative way is something we really have to pay attention to. So from a trust standpoint, there’s a whole bunch of things that are embedded in that concept. Are we a good partner? Do we treat our employees well? Are our products secure and private? You know, do we follow the laws in all the countries that we operate? You know, do we compete responsibly? You know, these are things that are like super important. And anytime you see something that is like touching one of those in a negative sense, you know, we’ve had an outage of some kind and employee’s behaved badly. You know, what was the outcome of that? And so we take a look at those. We’ve got an issues management team that is like hyper-focused on rapid response to bad things happening, that touch us from a trust standpoint. In the world today, it’s really complicated. We’re a global company. You know, the geopolitical climate is more difficult than it has been in a very long time. And, you know, so we have to really reinforce the sense that we can be trusted and and should be trusted in all the markets that we operate in, even in this complicated environment. And then on the innovation side of things, you know, you have to find this balance. You have to talk about the interesting things that you’re doing, but you also have to ship things that are interesting and the customers use and love. And you can’t get too far ahead of those. So you can’t show stuff that is way out in the future and then not deliver it because that gap is just really dangerous. You can do it sometimes on that, especially some of the really big long-term research investments that we make. You have permission to do that, but the rest of it is you have to have a quick switch. You announce something and then you ship it, and then hopefully, people love it. And things that hurt the innovation category or are like product issues, fit issues, customer experience things not going well. And so, you know, those are the places where you have to focus there.  

Shahar Silbershatz: What have you seen were the main areas in the past that affected negatively your reputation from the ones that you’ve just mentioned? I mean, of course, we’re all exposed in the media to things like antitrust and competitiveness and so on, but what did you find actually mattered when it comes to reputational risk in the past? 

Frank X. Shaw: I mean, obviously, Microsoft, as a company, learned a, you know, pretty painful lesson, in the nineties, getting sued by the US government, and I think we learned a lot from that. And one of the things that we learned is that you have to have a clear sense of the perception of the company and the internal perception of the company. And those things have to stay together. Because when they drift apart, then you behave in ways that surprise people, government entities, in a really negative sense. One of the jobs of the communicator, as a communicator is to have that real sense of what is the perception, what is the perception of the world, of the company or an aspect of the company, and then how are we thinking about it internally and making sure those things stay somewhat close together. Like, that’s what caused us reputational damage in the past, we thought we were a small scrappy startup that could be put out of business at a moment’s notice by somebody working out of a garage in Silicon Valley. And that was how we behaved. And the world saw us as one of the biggest technology companies in the world with massive power. And so when we then act like a scrappy startup the world’s like, no, no, you’re an industry leader, that dissonance is deadly. It’s just very difficult. So like, keeping those things together is important, you know, not understanding, the impact we have in the world is risk for us. So we have to think about like, hey, we’re creating these products and tools and platforms that will be used. How will they be used? You know, and then making sure we’re communicating both the benefits and the risks associated with those, and that we’re talking about what we’re doing to mitigate those risks. So as you do that, then you have permission to continue to move forward. And if you don’t do that, then you just sort of get reputationally hit very hard. We certainly saw that, you know, in 2015, 2016, 2017, with, Facebook, now Meta, you know, whether it was fair or not, right? You know, they made some decisions that that really drove a significant trust deficit for them that has been difficult to recover from. 

Shahar Silbershatz: It’s a very interesting angle what you’re saying, because in a sense you’re saying managing reputation is about achieving congruence between how the world sees you and how you see yourself. That, of course, requires that you at all times understand how the world is seeing you, but also that you are heard in the company, the role that you’re sitting in, heard in the company to be able to affect how the company sees itself. And do you feel that you have that ability? 

Frank X. Shaw: Well, I think it’s not just incumbent on the communications leaders and communications team to do that. It is a leadership responsibility. You know, again, at Microsoft, I think we’re incredibly fortunate. We have people like Brad Smith, who’s our president and vice chair who really deeply understands this and thinks about it all the time. You know, Satya Nadella, our CEO, was really focused on this as well. When he became CEO, one of the things he said is, the first job of the CEO is to understand the soul of the company. And you know, when you spend time thinking about that, that makes life a lot easier for everybody to say, okay, like, what are we doing? Who are we in the world? And then how do we express that? And it will change over time because that’s the nature of things. But just making sure that you’re staying in touch with that is just incredibly important. 

Shahar Silbershatz: That sounds great. I wish every CEO would say that upon taking up the role. I want to ask you about, you mentioned the issues management team and the complexity of the world today. How are you managing the situations that we’re in, that we live in a permacrisis world. There’s a lot of geopolitical developments, there’s a lot of societal issues, macro events that are impacting us. What do you have in place as part of that issues management team and process that helps you address that?   

Frank X. Shaw: First it is a global team. So we have people around the world, so we have something close to 24/7 coverage, which is, you know, required. We have a good process for being able to identify things that are big deals, and then rally the right people against them very rapidly, so that we can have a tight loop, a tight decision loop on what we’re going to do. You know, the CrowdStrike outage from a bit ago, right? Where CrowdStrike shipped an update that brought down a bunch of computers. You know, I think it started in Australia. So very inconvenient from a timezone standpoint for us. But the people in Europe caught it, and were working it and so as the West Coast of the United States starts to, get up, you know, we’ve already got visibility into what’s happening, the engineering teams have been notified, we’re starting to think about all the different communications aspects of that. And then there is a leadership team that then gets pulled together depending on the scope of the problem. Obviously, that was a big problem, involves very senior sales engineering and we make decisions around what are we going to say? And it’s always like, what are we doing? You have to keep those things together. You have to understand what are we doing? And then you have to decide what we’re going to say. But that was an example of where, like, you knew right away that this was going to be a big deal and that it wasn’t our problem. You know, we didn’t cause this, you know, it wasn’t our fault necessarily, but it was our problem because people saw this as like, Hey, there’s this very clear Windows thing that’s happening, and that meant that we had to be out there everywhere as aggressively as possible. And so like, you know, that was what we did. I said, you know, we need to have spokespeople out on every TV station covering this, every radio, every article we have to have somebody what we’re saying. We have to get out on social media. We need to explain it because we have one chance to sort of drive the right coverage.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah and I guess that’s another example of the always-on nature of it that, that you do need to be able to do that, and you also need to be able to balance a very rapid response with consistency, I guess, with your values, with your voice. And I can imagine that’s a challenge in its own right. 

Frank X. Shaw: Well, I think, you know, if I look back again, it was, I guess like 2015, 2016 where you started to see this sense that companies and CEOs should have a point of view on everything, and you know, the pendulum always swings back and forth and so it really swung hard towards like, Hey, you know, everybody should have a point of view on everything that’s happening in the world, all the time. And that people are looking to, you know, technology CEOs in particular to have a point of view or companies to have a point of view. And one of the things that like we’ve always, you know, tried to be principled in is that if we’re gonna say something about a topic, we have to have standing, and the question that I always ask myself is, is the world waiting on Microsoft to have a point of view on this? And a lot of times when you ask that question, then the answer is no. It’s like, on this topic, whatever the topic might be, do we have employees involved? Are products related? Is it technology-related? And if you keep answering no to those things, then the answer is maybe you just don’t say anything at all. And then if you’re gonna say something about a topic, you have to commit to doing something. And if you’re not willing to do something, then maybe don’t say very much because, like, as you said earlier, you have to have symmetry between the voice of the company and the actions of the company. If those things get pulled too far apart too consistently, then when you say things, people don’t believe you, ’cause they’re like, yeah, it’s just like, I’ve heard it all before, like, show me the money.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, I heard one of our guests, the CCO of Chobani, said that maybe the good side of the ESG backlash or the DEI backlash is that those companies that were just talking the talk, very quickly pulled back, whereas those were serious about it, you know, they stayed on. Do you also have discussions on that, for example, okay, where is it an issue where we feel, you know, it might be to in vogue to say something, but it’s actually not in line with our values. Whereas if it is, we should keep saying it, even if it’s becoming less favorable. 

Frank X. Shaw: No, that’s exactly right. For us, you know, our culture is incredibly important. We have a mission that is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. That’s our mission. And so if your mission is to empower every person on the planet, you really have to aspire to have a company and a culture that reflects every person, and that you want to, you know, do work to hire the best people, who reflect an incredibly broad range of perspectives and backgrounds, and then you want to make sure that they feel welcome and that they stay at the company, ’cause that’s good business. It is just flat-out good business. We do better when we have different perspectives. We do better when we have different experiences, where, you know, people who are building products, you know, have a deep understanding of an audience or a subset of that audience. And so that’s what you want, and that’s what we’ve been doing. And we’ll continue to do it.  

Shahar Silbershatz: And let’s talk a little bit about this, the stakeholder universe. How would you describe the stakeholder universe of Microsoft? Who are the main stakeholder groups that you consider?  

Frank X. Shaw: Let’s start with externally. And we have a huge set of stakeholders because we’re in a broad set of businesses. You think about our investors as stakeholders. You think about customers of all kinds as stakeholders. You think about governments globally and regulatory bodies, as stakeholders. And then you can get subsets of each of those. We have an advertising business, so we think about advertisers. We have a gaming business, so we think about, you know, gamers around the world. We sell developer tools. So we think about developers as a first-class set of stakeholders. One of the advantages that we have, I think, is that that breadth of stakeholders and our awareness of all those stakeholders keeps us from making decisions that optimize for one stakeholder in an odd way. So if you only have an advertising business, then everything looks like an opportunity to sell ads. And then, you know, sometimes you get into trouble because you’ve got a consumer who’s using your product and it’s like, I just don’t know what’s going on here. If you’re just in the gaming business, then, you know, you would do things that, like, if you have other aspects of your business, people go like, well, I don’t quite understand what’s happening. And so there’s multiplicity of external audiences and stakeholders that sort of keeps us on a, a little bit, on the straight and narrow. We have to balance these things very carefully so that we don’t inadvertently, you know, do things that will irritate or alarm our stakeholders.  

Shahar Silbershatz: In a sense you’re saying it’s a positive thing because it actually helps you balance across different considerations, different messages. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yes, exactly. It’s exactly right. And it can be complicated because, you know, sometimes you would want to do something, like let’s use advertising as an example. You could say, oh gosh, you know, like, it would be so much better if, you know, we could more effectively target these ads, so we’re gonna take, and we’re gonna do something with our browser or Windows or some of our applications and make those, you know, more identifiable. That’d be great for the advertising business. It runs right into this challenge of like, we’re committed to privacy and so we’re selling things to companies and their expectation is that that data is their data. And we’re gonna optimize for that. And so these things that are in conflict, and, you know, you have to carefully look at them and see if there is any kind of middle path. And if there’s not, then you’re gonna do what’s best, you know, for the audience that you’re focused on.  

Shahar Silbershatz: But from a communication perspective, do you find that it’s getting harder to have brand consistency, as your stakeholder universe becomes more complex? 

Frank X. Shaw: I would probably say, gently say yes, but it’s a gentle yes, because, you know, we’re still all part of, like, we think about the Microsoft brand as part of that, and that doesn’t change. You know, we, the same promise that we’re making is the same promise the company is making regardless of who the stakeholders are.  

Shahar Silbershatz: So you don’t feel a change in the complexity behind the scenes in keeping the consistency as your audiences multiply and fragment. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, I think it is, it can be more challenging. But again, the better you understand like that soul of the company, the easier it gets to express to all different audiences.  

Shahar Silbershatz: For sure. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization of your team? How are you organized and how does that support some of the challenges that we’ve been talking about? 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, like if anybody has come up with a perfect organization for a global communication structure, I would love to know.  

Shahar Silbershatz: I’ll make sure to let you know. 

Frank X. Shaw: And, you know, we’re in a constant state of evolution, just because the world continues to change around us and our priorities change. So we’re always in a little bit of a flux. But we are a mostly centralized communications. We have what I think about as sort of engineering and sales-aligned teams. So we have teams of people that are focused on our core products and our core services. So they’re the ones that think about, okay, we have new Windows offerings coming out. We have a new set of AI tools coming out. We have new developer features coming out. So they’re thinking about that piece of business. Their job is to work closely with the engineers and the sales team to understand what we’re doing and to think about how we’re gonna reach those audiences at scale. Then we have a set of what I think about as sort of enabling teams, that support them. We have a global team with people sitting in many markets around the world. You know, their job is to do sort of two things. One is you make sure that they’re acting as a local company in that market, and they’re driving trust and innovation in that market in the way that makes the most sense. You know, that’ll be different in Korea than it is in Germany, but like your sense of like, okay, what are we doing in those countries, and then catching the stuff that’s coming from the United States, from a technology standpoint and playing it out locally. They’re a platform for us and an enabling function for us. Then we have a team that is focused on brand, brand social employee engagement, that is a centralized team. We have a team focused on the core aspects of what does it mean to have a communications function, measurement, reporting, influencer engagement, agency management, community, you know, how do we manage this community of communicators, and then where are these things going, right? You know, what do we think is happening from an influence standpoint, from an AI standpoint? So there’s a team that is focused on that. And then we have a team that is broadly focused on innovation, and what’s happening across Microsoft research. What are the things that are like a little farther out that we want to be talking about? Then there’s our public affairs team that reports into Brad Smith, but is a core part of my team as well. And, you know, they’re the ones that, you know, deal with, you know, some of the issues around government relations, legal issues, policy, philanthropy, you know, that set of things. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And has the advent of AI, you’re obviously at the forefront of AI, has that had any impact on the organization, the structure of your team? 

Frank X. Shaw: We created a team of people simply focused on how we were going to use AI as communicators. So we did that two years ago. Like, that was the first foray into making sure that we’re thinking about what is going to happen from an AI standpoint in communications. And you know, the key part of that is like we just have to embrace experimentation. Anybody who says they know what’s gonna happen from an AI standpoint is probably wrong.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Oh, you should be better placed than most of us, though. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, it can be dangerous though because it’s just as bad to be too early on something as it is to be too late. So you have to find that middle ground. And the way we’ve been doing it has really focused on experimentation, and, you know, really working to just try a bunch of different things. AI isn’t one big black box, it’s a set of tools. Everybody uses tools in different ways. And so we’re certainly driving that. You know, we’ve used it to reshape measurement and how we’re thinking about measurement. You know, using Co-Pilot as a front end to this big data set. Like so you have a conversation with the data is really interesting. So we’ve done a bunch of things that optimize the workflows. Now we’re thinking about like, what does this mean for the future? Like, you know, there’s increasingly powerful agents that can complete tasks in, you know, super-interesting ways. How do we take advantage of those things to help us do our jobs better? We’re living in a much more complicated world, so we’re feeling a little bit overwhelmed a lot of times. What do we do to make sure that we can make sense of things and so we continue to do our jobs in a high-quality way.   

Shahar Silbershatz: Can you talk to us a little bit about the interplay between marketing and communication? So how does it work at your company? 

Frank X. Shaw: Marketing is centralized under Takeshi Numoto. So we’ve got a marketing leadership team, which I sit on, and you know, our focus is to make sure that we drive, you know, alignment across those things. There’s regular engagement around prioritization, messaging, what we say, when we say it, and it’s very collaborative. You can easily get into this situation where you have to feel, you’re trying to drive ownership of something, and as soon as you try and drive ownership of something, then people fight about it. Because like, if I own something, that means somebody else doesn’t. And so like what we really try to do is drive consensus around what we’re trying to do. We have a big event coming up here in a little bit that our consumer marketing group is really involved in, it’s a news moment, so I’m really involved in it. Instead of saying, well, like it’s news, so I should quote own this. It’s like, okay, what does that partnership look like? How do we drive a really effective partnership? Like what is the marketing message? And then how do we translate that and use it as a communications vehicle. Because it’s not the same thing, right? Marketing’s like, in a marketing world, you have a set of messages, you land those messages. Communications, you look at those messages and say, what do I have to do? Or what do I have to create for somebody to believe these messages? And so, you know that there’s always tension there because sometimes marketers will say, this is our tagline, why aren’t you using our tagline? I’m like, well, you know, you’re doing your job. I’m doing my job. And, you know, find that middle ground. So it’s a very collaborative process. We run, as I was saying, this news review process that gives us visibility into what the key priorities are, you know, that is a deeply collaborative process with both marketing and engineering. so we’re driving alignment as early as possible on, like, Hey, you know, this is what we’re going to say at this point of time. Now let’s rally our teams against it.  

Shahar Silbershatz: It’s an area where there’s a lot of talk often about marketing versus comms and also part of the seat at the table discussion. I mean, you and the CMO, you both report to the CEO, or is there different reporting lines between the two of you? 

Frank X. Shaw: Yeah, no, Takeshi reports to the CEO, and I report to Takeshi. Again, like every company is gonna have a different structure. The important thing is to really understand, like, who are your internal stakeholders, regardless of reporting. Like the company holds me accountable external and internal communications. That has nothing to say about reporting. And so like when there’s something happening, you know, I will engage with our legal team. I’ll engage with our finance leaders. I’ll engage with the CEO, regardless of reporting, because the accountability is there. So I feel accountable to our senior leadership team. I report to the CMO, because you know, the alignment across marketing is just so important to our works. But you can create it in a variety of different ways that is somewhat independent of reporting.  

Shahar Silbershatz: And it might be also something around the seat at the table. Some people get preoccupied around reporting lines when it comes to the seat at the table, where really you’re saying it’s about relationship and it’s about who you can actually be influencing. 

Frank X. Shaw: Yes, and which table do you wanna sit at? And there’s lots of tables. And so what you really want is you want to have this sense of like, when you’re doing your job, you’re not at the table. When you’re great, when you’re doing a great job internally you’re not at the table and there’s a conversation happening, somebody says, oh, we need to bring comms in on this. Right? That’s when you know you’ve achieved success. You know, you’ve done it so well that people are like, oh yeah, this, change we’re making in our sales compensation structure could be controversial, and so even though I don’t have anybody at my table right now, I am now going to reach out and find the right comms person to do that work.  

Shahar Silbershatz: I’m definitely gonna use that. What table? When people say, talk about the seat at the table. That’s a very good point. 

Frank X. Shaw: And you can get so obsessed with it, and then you want to be at all these, and then you just find yourself in meeting after meeting after meeting and it’s like, right, I don’t want a seat at the table anymore.    

Shahar Silbershatz: That’s a good point. And what about the CCO role in itself? I mean, how do you see that evolving? 

Frank X. Shaw: It’s a little challenging because I think every company is idiosyncratic about how they think about communications. So I don’t think there will be a single way of doing things. I think about the work that I do on a regular basis. A lot of it has almost nothing to do with what we think about as the core communications tasks. Right? But it’s around, are we convening the right people to get to a decision? Are we finding compromise between different groups? Because in any company there’s usually two different points of view on any given topic. So what is our job is like, Hey, we have to come to a decision. This is a core piece of the work that I do, is like, you get the people in the room, you find a middle path, or you find a path that everybody agrees with so that you can move forward. Because a lot of times what we do is intermediated by what we say. Like, I’m gonna write a blog post and so if this team thinks that blog post should be X and this team thinks that should be Y, right, like we’re gonna have to use that blog post as a forcing function to drive cohesion. Is that part of the communications function? Yes, it is. And it’s part of the job of the CCO, right? To really understand those internal relationships and dynamics, to understand where the company is going and why, and then make sure that we’re doing the work that ends up in something that has a communications attached to it, but doesn’t always have to start with that. 

Shahar Silbershatz: So in a sense, you’re saying the role is not really changing, but how we affect or how we deploy the skills and how we deploy, how we discharge our responsibilities might change as it gets more complex. 

Frank X. Shaw: That’s right. And we spend a lot of time as communicators thinking about relationships, external relationships, right? You know, like the relationships you have with an analyst or with a reporter or with a creator. You know, like that’s something we’ve always invested our time in. You know, we have to spend as much time on the internal relationships, especially at larger organizations, larger, more complicated organizations, because our ability to connect the dots externally is really dependent on our ability to connect the dots internally and understand what’s happening. And that means you have to focus time on building relationships at all levels of the company, not just with marketing and communications, but with engineers and salespeople and people in the legal and the finance teams and HR, in such a way that you’ve got a sense of like, what are we doing? And then we can be effective as communicators of telling that.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah. And this really brings, again, the human element back into it, which is about building relationships and that’s not going away.  

Frank X. Shaw: That’s exactly right.  

Shahar Silbershatz: I want to wrap up by asking you, so we talk a lot about the being always on, how do you switch off? 

Frank X. Shaw: I find being outside, doing something physically active, is an absolute requirement for me. And so if I can do something outside for about an hour a day, then I am a much better human being and I have much better ideas. So I commute by bicycle a couple of days a week. So, you know, it’s about 45, 50 minutes each way. You know, you’re not really thinking about work, you’re not doing calls during that time period. And that just gives everything chance to sort of settle on this. And then here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s just a beautiful area. And so, you know, I’ll go outside, we’ll do hikes and, you know, snowboarding and kayaking and things like that. Just anything that will get us outside, you know, away from devices and the ability to sort of like see the world. So that’s my big thing. And then I do a lot of reading of science fiction and speculative fiction. It is not really like the day job, but is a little bit related to it, you know, you get some interesting ideas from some of that, but it is just entertainment and escapism. 

Shahar Silbershatz: That sounds great. Frank, it’s been an absolute delight to have you with us. Thank you so much. 

Frank X. Shaw: It’s been great. Thank you very much.   

Shahar Silbershatz:  Many thanks for listening to this episode of Always On. If you haven’t done so already, check out some of the other episodes. They’re packed with unique insights from seasoned experts at leading companies.  

Oh, and if you have any comments or questions about anything you’ve heard on the pod, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us a line at [email protected]. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, take care.