Leadership Communication Inc.

"Here’s the challenge: in an era of increased scrutiny, where AI can generate perfectly polished corporate-speak in seconds, the impulse for companies is to push for the high-gloss statements that cover every angle. Stakeholders have become expert BS detectors. They’ve seen enough algorithm-optimized messaging to know when they’re being managed rather than leveled with. AI is challenging our notions of authenticity, which makes a real human connection even more important."

https://chiefexecutive.net/leadership-transitions-demand-honesty-not-just-press-releases/

Leadership Transitions Demand Honesty, Not Just Press Releases Handled well, a leadership transition is less a single announcement than a series of deliberate, human moments that rebuild trust one interaction at a time.

A webinar this morning co-hosted by KRG Advisors and Ipsos on "The Paradox of Strategic Silence: When to speak; What to say; How to Listen" provided some provocative PR data points. Note the 57% of the public who agree that "If a corporation takes a stand on an issue, they should stick by their decision, even if it makes some consumers angry."

"Vertical stripes are slimming."

It's one of the oldest pieces of conventional wisdom in professional dress. It also appears to be wrong, and has been contested in peer-reviewed research for over a decade.

The belief itself dates to at least 1813, when researchers traced it to a Japanese beauty handbook from the late Edo period. Two hundred years on, perception scientists keep finding the opposite. A 2011 study in Perception showed that horizontal stripes can make a figure appear narrower, not wider, by a measurable margin. Replications across body sizes have largely held. New 2026 research refines the picture further: pattern spacing, stripe type, and even viewing angle from front to back can flip the result.

The fashion is incidental. The interesting question is how a piece of received wisdom hardens into truth and gets repeated for two centuries without anyone testing it.

Leadership communication is full of these. Always lead with the ask. Never read from notes. Open with a joke. Mirror the room. Wear the power colour. Some of it holds up under scrutiny. Much of it is folklore in a good suit.

Medium matters too. A pinstripe that reads as authoritative across a boardroom table can shimmer and crawl on camera — the moiré effect — turning a deliberate choice into an unintended distraction. Newscasters are coached to avoid the patterns that cause it. The same outfit, in two settings, sends two different signals.

Image is read quickly, and largely below the level of conscious thought. The small details do move perceptions of authority and credibility. Which is precisely why executives should not outsource those details to clichés.

Resonant image has to belong to the leader, not the playbook. An image that isn't the leader's own will read as costume.

https://www.psypost.org/science-debunks-the-fashion-myth-that-vertical-stripes-are-always-slimming/

A study just published in the academic journal ‘Computers in Human Behavior’ finds that each smartphone notification we receive steals about seven seconds of our focused cognition. And we get an average of 100+ notifications every day.

Most communications strategies abstractly assume an available and rational audience. That kind of audience doesn’t really exist (if it ever did).

The new research finds that distraction isn’t driven by how much time people spend on their phones; instead, it’s driven by notification frequency and how often they check. Fragmented habits, not just screen time, are destroying attention.

And the fragmentation is cumulative: seven seconds of cognitive disruption, repeated dozens or hundreds of times a day, compounds into something far more serious than momentary distraction. It degrades memory, resets emotional state, and reduces the capacity to focus on anything that demands sustained thought.

That’s not just a productivity problem. It’s also a communications conundrum.

PR pros have learned to program electronic notifications as communications delivery systems: timing alerts, embedding messages, optimizing the angle for open rates, etc. But we haven’t reckoned with what notifications do to the mind before messages are even read.

The same mechanism that disrupts an audience’s attention is being used to deliver messages into these same distracted minds.

New psychology research reveals the cognitive cost of smartphone notifications A recent study in Computers in Human Behavior provides evidence that a single smartphone pop-up derails mental focus for seven seconds. Researchers found that fragmented digital habits cause more cognitive disruption than the total hours spent on devices.