How should academics who work in the field of business communication (or management, professional, or technical communication) think of their work? I propose that business communication should be understood as a sentinel discipline and a designer discipline. By sentinel discipline I mean a community that continually monitors (and responds to) changes in business practice. By designer discipline I mean a community that understands the instructional task as shaping the ways in which graduates will shape (and reshape) business organizations through their communicative behavior.

In this article, we replicate important findings about workplace persuasion (e.g., a preference for face-to-face rather than computer-mediated messages). We extend those findings by including videoconferencing among the available channels and determining that practitioners regard video as less effective than face-to-face and more effective than email. Furthermore, we find that business practitioners prefer multichannel strategies for upwardly directed persuasion, and that some—more women than men in our sample—call on a person to serve as one of the channels. These findings provide insights that teachers can apply in the classroom; they also suggest questions for future research.

I recommend that teachers of professional communication (e.g., business communication) incorporate into their courses the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum developed by Mary Gentile. Adding GVV materials to a course in professional communication would add an ethical emphasis to the course or supplement an existing one. GVV materials also provide communication teachers with excellent opportunities to introduce (or expand) attention to rhetorical decision making. Furthermore, GVV materials provide an opportunity for cross-disciplinary cooperation among teachers of business communication and other business disciplines.

Communication instructors have long insisted on the importance of audience adaptation. But they have said less about (a) the dimensions along which adaptation might proceed or (b) how a student might learn the art of adapting. In this article, I contribute toward addressing these two deficiencies. I suggest a dimension for adaptation—the value frameworks (or value vocabularies) in which people express evaluations of better and worse. And I propose that instructors teach adaptation by imitation. In addition to elaborating on these ideas, I also offer materials for use in classes.

We gathered data from business practitioners to learn how they describe successful online business presentations. We found that many—but not all—successful examples were described in terms of classical rhetorical concepts (e.g., source credibility and content). We also found that about 20% of the examples were described as successful because of technology deployment, audience interactivity, or both. We conclude that professors of management communication should teach the online presentation, that such instruction should include classical rhetorical concepts (with some appropriate adjustments), and that instruction should be expanded to include technology and interactivity.