Michael Scharff on The Power of Words

Mixing Board Studio Session

Michael Scharff is Global Head of Communications at PA Consulting, a UK-based innovation and transformation consultancy, where he oversees their global portfolio of internal and external communications, research programmes and activities including media relations, content marketing, brand message development, and executive and investor communications. Previously, he managed the content team at Bloomberg Philanthropies, raising the profile of the Foundation’s global innovation portfolio.

Before joining Bloomberg, he consulted with the World Bank’s “Science of Delivery Initiative” and was a senior case study writer and researcher at Innovations for Successful Societies - a Princeton University policy center - where he traveled globally and helped senior government officials communicate, manage reputations, and build stakeholder consensus. Before that Michael was based in Cambodia and Uganda where he developed and executed internal and external communication strategies for the International Rescue Committee, a major international charity. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree from the University of Oxford.

In this Studio Session, Michael and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about the importance of content marketing, using client storytelling as a way to demonstrate impact, why you should have a consistent framework for leader-led comms, and why it’s important to have an innate sense of curiosity as a comms practitioner.

SG: Tell me about what you're up to now and how you got to this role.

MS: MS: I look after communications for PA Consulting – an innovation and transformation consultancy. We're very focused on helping our clients solve the biggest, thorniest issues of today in order to build a positive human future. We're not a consultancy in the traditional sense of the word.. What really sets PA apart from the pack is the fact that we are able to deliver end-to-end innovation. We're able to take clients from the seed of an idea all the way through – if it's a product let's say – we get that product on a shelf. We can come up with the idea, do the market testing, do the strategy, do the prototyping, do the building and manufacturing, all the way to the actual rollout of that thing, introducing the client to new customers and markets.

We do this work from our base here in the UK. We operate across the Nordic countries,in the Netherlands, Ireland, and the US, which is a big focus of growth for us. We do it across seven different sectors, so it's really diverse. Everything from transport and aviation, to financial services, consumer manufacturing with start-ups and the big FMGC players, to defense and security. That's traditional UK ministry defense all the way through to tech start-ups that are working in the defense space from here and where you sit in the Valley. It's super eclectic and it's super challenging. 

It's challenging from a comms perspective for a number of reasons. One challenge is just trying to identify who we are as an organization in our customer's eyes. An organization like ours actually doesn't exist elsewhere. People tend to pigeonhole us: “Oh you’re like a McKinsey,” “you’re like a design house.” Yes, we can absolutely do the high-end strategic work for you, but we're so much more than that. We bring the best of the IT houses, design houses, and strategy houses together. The team that I work with are strategists,, designers, engineers, material scientists, former doctors, and even former cops. It's an eclectic mix of people who are coming together to deliver these solutions.

So how did I get here? When I was thinking of going to college, I could have gone in three different directions. One was broadcast journalism, the second was to do politics. And the third was aviation, to go and be a pilot. I went down to Embry-Riddle University in Daytona Beach, Florida to tour the campus and thought, this could be for me. This is just shortly after 9/11 and the aviation industry was on its knees. I put that on pause and did the politics degree instead.

I've always been interested in storytelling and understanding more about the human condition, what makes people tick. I've always had a curiosity to understand it from multiple perspectives. In most cases, I couldn't have told you a year before I landed in another role that I would've been in that role, but what I knew is there was going to be a through line of something to do with communications. I knew I really wanted to do something that was unconventional, that was exciting, and that exposed me to a whole range of different personalities and perspectives. 

I started out at an amazing organization called the International Rescue Committee where I was the comms lead in their Uganda country office. I was a 22 year old kid from New Jersey, all of a sudden, two weeks after graduation, I'm in Kampala, Uganda just having to find my way. I did that for a year and still had the international bug. I knew I didn't have enough experience yet and wanted to stay out in the field doing comms. I flew over to Cambodia, did that for another year. It was totally eye opening: traveling to pagodas and interviewing monks who were running orphanages, Mormon missionaries who were rocking up, and South Korean rice Christians. 

I came back to the US and spent a number of years in a writing/research type role at an innovation center at Princeton University. I was going out solo, for a month at a time, researching and writing stories about government leaders in really challenging places who had managed to pull their countries together after periods of conflict and upheaval. Their ability to communicate effectively, to own the message, to build coalitions of the willing, was central to their success. I was going to places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, traveling by plane across distant islands in the Philippines and Indonesia. I was by myself, just having to hack it, figuring out contacts along the way, but ending up in the presidential palaces in Liberia and the Philippines, by the gift of gab, just blabbing my way into these places. Having spent a summer in the comms office at the White House – it was the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – it was incredible to now be in the field, discussing messaging strategy with them, understanding what it’s like to operate in the center of the storm. 

I was still academically interested in these topics: how do you build coalitions and groups and partnerships, and create compelling messaging that unites folks, especially in tricky places. That's why I went and did a masters at Oxford. Of course I could have gone somewhere in the US, but I wanted to do something different and see a bit of the world that I hadn't seen before. 

Before coming to where I am right now at PA, I spent time in New York working for Mike Bloomberg at Bloomberg Philanthropies. That was a totally eye opening experience into the world of philanthropy and Mike’s unique way of operating.

SG: Communications for consulting is such an interesting thing. The professional services consulting world hasn’t been disrupted yet in the way that other industries have, but it's obviously on this path. How do you take the initiative to define what modern consulting is and bring clarity to it? 

MS: So much of it comes down to having killer propositions in the space. Speaking strictly from a communications brand angle, so much of the work that I do, and that my team does day in and day out, is trying to bring us up to a much higher level of thought. If you are a client, no matter where you sit in the world, you have a series of challenges you're trying to solve. Big, big challenges – how to keep people healthy, how to keep people safe, how to delight your customers, how to create a more sustainable world for your products.

We can take that really broad narrative and marry it with our purpose – which is super authentic and super genuine. We can have a conversation with potential clients about the fact that the work we can do, it's not because we are a consulting company, it's almost despite the fact that we're a consulting company. It's because we are this group of quite fascinating, eclectic, and skilled individuals. There really isn't another place to get the hands-on practical advice that we can offer you.

There's something about the general landscape of consulting today that is certainly shifting. You almost need to be everything to everyone – that's what a lot of companies are trying to do by bringing in all these acquisitions. But you have to be able to distinguish yourself from the rest.

That's my job as a communicator, to get customers to want to come to us not because we’re a consulting company. But because we’re a company that's able to help them on this journey to solve some really, really, really big intractable challenges. And we can do it all under one roof. As a client, I don't have to go to multiple places to get this help, I can do it all in that one spot. That's a key point of differentiation and pride for us. Being able to deliver insight and impact.

SG: What is the role of communications within the organization? What is your job? 

MS: It's a little bit of everything. I look after a PR team, an internal communications team, corporate communications, a content team, and a thought leadership team. I would say 75% of our efforts day in and day out, is all through content marketing. It's a massive, massive play for us. In the consulting industry, obviously you're selling people and you're selling your people's insights. It's all about finding really interesting questions and interesting ways of talking about those questions. I have a team in-house who are coming up with those questions, designing the research,, and marketing on the basis of it. .

Our setup is a really integrated model. My team sits within our larger marketing function, we're about 60 odd folks globally. When we create that content, we're able to then pass that over to our go-to-market marketers who are able to run campaigns off the back of it. A lot of the time is spent on the top of the funnel activity. But a lot of the team's time is also spent on the bottom of the funnel activity, more towards sales. In the industry there's often a bifurcation between the comms team and the sales team. There's often a point of tension there because the sales team wants the marketing team's time.

We've created a model whereby it's the responsibility of the marketing team to ensure that we are up-skilling and training the sales professionals and equipping them to be able to go out and have the conversations about the content that we're creating. We are not creating sales enablement material, it's more about – here's our latest thought leadership report on the state of brands in the US that are purpose-driven. And here's how we recommend you go out and have a conversation with your client about various issues.

Traditionally PA was always a privately owned company. Back in 2015, we had majority investment by The Carlyle Group, on a roughly five-year horizon. Now we are majority owned by a group based out of Dallas called Jacobs Solutions, who have a 65% stake in the group. They're a publicly traded company, so increasingly, a lot of my time is spent on working with their investor relations team. I work on communicating the value of our story, not only to the Street, but the value of our story to their 60,000 person workforce, in order for their workforce to be able to understand what we do and therefore bring us into those client relationships with them.

SG: PA is now making inroads into the United States. When you're going into a new market how are you introducing yourself or making first impressions? 

MS: The truth of the matter is that it’s really hard. We've been trying to go into the US for quite some time, it's been fits and starts over the years. Now that we have this partnership with Jacobs in the US, there's an opportunity for us to really come together. Our strategy at the moment is to be incredibly targeted at specific audiences. It's almost influencer marketing, but the influencers are our clients themselves.

As we go into the US as a relatively unknown entity, so much of what we’re doing is to ensure brand awareness and that the top of the funnel messaging is working. We do this in a very targeted way. But so much of our strategy is on identifying clients who can speak on our behalf and using them as a voice. I have someone on my team who is a full-time client story writer. They literally spend all day on the phone with our consultants unearthing really cool gems of projects, and then phoning the clients and interviewing them about what happened and how it worked.

And we try to do this in the Harvard Business School style, creating a teaching mechanism. For example – what was the thought process that went into the work? ? What was it like working in trenches there to bring to life new AI-enabled clinical trials? What didn’t go right on the project and how did we course-correct? ? We’re trying to put ourselves in their shoes.

What we really want to do, from a comms and storytelling perspective, is bring out the emotion of what we are able to do alongside and in partnership with our clients. To use those stories as a sales enablement-esque type of tool, to have those conversations. We find that that is a relatively inexpensive way to get essentially first-hand testimonials from clients. It's not just a quote, it's a thousand word story. We find that to be so much more powerful when we go in and speak to prospective clients. Client stories are a key way of demonstrating the impact that we have.

SG: For the US, it's about trying to find a core base of potential clients that could become advocates, and then build from there.

MS: Exactly that. We have three domains that we operate in the US – health and sciences, energy and utilities, and consumer manufacturing. Those are three of the seven that we have globally, but we're hyper focused on those three areas in the US. Therefore those are the kinds of stories we're going to go after and the insights that we need to bring into the market.

SG: You've been at PA for seven years now, and as you build out your team, I'm sure it's always a journey to optimize what it best looks like. What are the facets that you have on your team in 2024 that you didn't have four years ago? What do you see investing more into in the future?

MS: You need people with all of the classic comms skill sets, things that anyone would say are required to be in the communicator's toolkit in 2024. For me, perhaps one of the most important additional bits on top, is an innate curiosity. The ability to be a bit of a fact finder, be a journalist, peel back the layers of the onion. It's innate curiosity meets thought leader, in and of themselves.

We spend so much time creating content that has to be insight rich. On the one hand, we're really blessed to have 4,000 people in the workforce, who themselves are super ingenious and have lots of great ideas. These are also people that are time-poor, and they are not always great communicators and great storytellers. Although they may have great ideas, they struggle to articulate them.

There's this really interesting dilemma that I've seen over the years – no matter how the technology changes and no matter how other external factors and skill sets change, the one constant has been this ability, to use a British turn of phrase, for my guys to take a punt when they're creating content. To have an idea and run with it. That's so important, because if you just leave it up to the consultants, you're going to get a really great answer, but it's not necessarily going to be as rich. You almost need to be that co-thought leader in the room.

SG I would imagine that with 4,000 really smart people who are mostly externally faced, who are domain experts in these seven different categories, it makes internal communications complicated. Everyone's on different pages, literally. What is the thing that binds them together and how do you use internal communications as that tie?

MS: My team spends a lot of time on our leader-led communications, across the C-suite, but in particular with our CEO. What's important is a consistent framework for all the communications that go out across the company. This is going to sound so simplistic, but there's literally three pillars that underpin every communication, and that's purpose, clients and people. When the CEO gets the partner group on a call every single month, that's the framework that he uses to communicate. He starts with purpose, literally the same slide, every single time to show a reminder of what our purpose is, what our North Star is, and why we're doing what we're doing. Then we talk about our clients and then we talk about our people. People gets equal, if not more, billing than clients because culture is just so integral to what we're doing. We rinse, repeat that formula whenever we talk to our people.

When we push communications through the line further down into those seven different sectors, we ask our leaders in those various sectors to follow that same formula with how they talk about things. Consistency of messaging is super important. We also take pains to ensure that we're always pre-briefing all of the sector leaders in advance of any major consequential communication. We want everyone to be on the same page and able to answer questions in a consistent manner.

But it's really hard. There are major cultural differences between all the regions in which we work. Wherever headquarters is, there's always going to be this mentality of – there's the headquarters and then there's everyone else. We are a single P&L business and we want everyone to know that we're one team. It’s really important to break down those barriers.

This is nothing groundbreaking, but authentic leader-led communications are super important. Our CEO is young, and he is fantastic about getting out there and engaging with people. He just started a vlog, so whenever he's on the road or when he is home in his kitchen with his young kids, he picks up his phone and talks to our people, unfiltered. We barely edit it, on purpose. If there are issues or mistakes, we certainly hear about it on Fishbowl the next day!

SG: Was this his idea? 

MS: Yes. 

SG: How has it changed things?

MS: It humanizes the individual. He's got two young kids.. He's just super human in talking about the fact that say it's been a challenging day. It’s reassuring for our people to hear and it ends up being a really powerful message.

SG: You have all this deep on the ground experience from your time in Liberia, and Cambodia and elsewhere, seeing how things affect real people in all these different places that many people don't think about every day. How has that shaped you and helped you as a leader and a storyteller?

MS: I hope it makes me a more empathetic leader and a more empathetic storyteller. In everything that I do, I never forget to go down, and try to get the story. There's always somebody with something behind every decision. You realize that you might be working on a high-level piece of strategy work, but remember that there are real consequences for that work. I was on the receiving end of that when I was in Uganda. I saw the grants that were being issued by USAID – the good and the bad. 

Now that I have a relatively senior role, I never forget that everything has human consequences. And the power of words, the power of a message to sway and to influence decision makers at a very senior level. I always remember the impact that has on the most junior people in your company. It’s a great honor and privilege to do the work that I do.

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