Ben Trounson

I help Fortune 500 organizations build unshakeable stakeholder trust through strategic communications that turn complexity into clarity. As a VP of Global Corporate Communications with 20+ years of experience, I specialize in guiding companies through the reputation opportunities and challenges that come with transformation, crisis, and growth.

My career spans leadership roles at technology, energy, and pharmaceutical giants including Tata Consultancy Services, National Grid, Verizon, and Bristol Myers Squibb. At TCS, I helped transform the company's reputation from a lesser-known IT services provider into a globally recognized digital transformation partner for Fortune 500 clients, contributing to brand value growth from $5B to $14B over my seven-year tenure. This transformation required rebuilding narratives, executive
positioning, and stakeholder relationships across multiple markets.

I've built and led global communications teams ranging from 20 to 50+ members across North America, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regions. My approach focuses on three core elements: authentic narrative development that aligns with business strategy, internal capability building that empowers teams to execute consistently, and external relationship management that builds lasting credibility with key stakeholders including media, investors, regulators, and employees.

Whether navigating CEO transitions, major acquisitions, regulatory scrutiny, or market repositioning, I ensure corporate communications delivers measurable impact on reputation and business outcomes.

Vice President of Communications, Verizon Business

I’m soon heading west for my next career move. But first, I had to celebrate the first-ever Long Island #commsjobs event.

Great to meet a rich mix of local comms pros, talk shop, offer support, and share some fun stories. Thank you, Chrissy Jones, for hosting, and for those in attendance, such as Sian Suthers (welcome to the East Coast), Steve Lavner, and Lisa Feldman Josephy.

Agree, we'll find a sweet spot for the next event, showcasing the beauty of LI in the summer, right Daniel Méndez Aróstica, MBA?

But don't get the locals started on whether we say living "IN" or living "ON" Long Island. The hot debate continues... 🙂

VP, Global Corporate Communications | Reputation & Stakeholder Trust Builder | 20+ Years Transforming Fortune 500 Narratives | Former Verizon, National Grid, TCS | $5B-$14B Brand Value Growth

I’m enjoying the sun and sights of Phoenix today. 

Love the relaxed, yet vibrant city feel during a five-mile walk. 

And I’m thinking of my friends and family facing the big storm in the Northeast. Getting their workouts in with their shovels!

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Polish isn’t the tell with AI slop. Lack of substance is

Charlie Guo has a great piece on spotting AI-generated content and its impact on writers' confidence.  

The giveaway is surface-level polish with nothing underneath.

The answer isn’t trying to “out-write” AI patterns or second-guess yourself. 

It’s writing from real experience, with specific knowledge or having an actual POV or counterpoint. That’s still the hardest thing to fake.

Charlie's Substack is at Artificial Ignorance.

Open article: The Field Guide to AI Slop by ignorance.ai

Search traffic is no longer a given.

Publishers now expect referrals from search engines to almost halve by 2028/29, according to Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Media & Tech Trends report.

A few signals worth paying attention to:
- AI search and summaries are reducing clicks, often before content is even seen.
- Distribution is driving discovery, while owned channels are becoming trust engines.
- Journalists (and communicators) are being asked to think like creators.
- Credibility, originality (among the AI slop) and "human" connection are becoming the real differentiators.

What’s interesting is how this reinforces the importance of earned and owned media, which many of you opined on in 2025.   

You can see this shift playing out on platforms. YouTube hosting the Oscars. Netflix signing The Rest Is Football podcast (one of my favorites) for the 2026 World Cup.

I would love to hear from other comms and brand leaders. How are you adjusting to this earned attention reset? 

#branddiscovery #communications #earnedattention

LinkedIn Top Voice on Internal Communication. I help organisations create effective systems of internal communication through consulting, training and coaching.

I'm the CEO of The Curious Route, an internal communications consultancy practice based in Dublin, Ireland. I help organisations communicate better with their employees. I offer training, consulting, speaking and workshops. I'm the author of "Innovative Internal Communication", published by Kogan Page in August 2024.

I support internal communication professionals directly through my membership community, The Curious Tribe. 

My curiosity-first approach emphasises listening, questioning and observing to identify challenges, understand problems and come up with creative solutions.

I sat on the Board of Directors with the Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC) for 3 years. In 2022, I was awarded an IoIC Fellowship, in recognition that I am one of the leading experts in internal communication across the UK & Ireland.

I’ve appeared on lots of popular podcasts, including The Internal Comms Podcast, A View from the Top, The Engaging Internal Comms Podcast and Digital Rebels. I’ve been a keynote speaker at the Public Sector Digital Marketing Summit.

I've won multiple awards for my work in internal communications over the last 12 years, including:

- Finalist for “Leader of the Year” in the 2023 Gartner Marketing & Communications Awards 
- Finalist for "Internal Communicator of the Year" in the Internal Communications & Engagement Awards 2023
- Winner for “Best Internal Communication” - Public Relations Institute of Ireland Awards 2021
- Winner for “Most Effective Essential Worker Communications” - Covid Comms Awards 2021
- Silver for "Best Internal Communications During COVID-19" - Internal Communications & Engagement Awards 2020
- Award of Excellence for “Best Crisis Communications” - Institute of Internal Communication Awards 2020

Joanna Parsons FIIC

A reminder for any comms pro who needs to hear this today:

It's internal comms, not emergency surgery.

[Or as our external comms pals say, "it's PR, not ER".]

I see a helluva lot of comms professionals who are burned out, exhausted, running on empty. Sometimes they tell me they want to switch professions because they can't keep sprinting at this unsustainable pace.

I'm officially giving you permission to SLOW DOWN. No one will die if you don't finish that deck at 3pm or send that email at 10am.

We're all floating around on a rock in space, every rule on earth is completely made up and none of it matters as much as you think. It's incredible we're here at all, let's work on getting less worked up.

May 2026 be the year you find your joy again, have more fun with your co-workers and with your life.

Joanna Parsons

The Internal Comms Gal. Training & community for internal comms pros. joanna@thecuriousroute.com

The world of internal comms is changing.

AI can write your first draft in seconds. It can summarise a 40-page strategy document into key messages. It can generate ten versions of a headline while you make a cup of tea.

This is genuinely amazing.

But for all that's changing, the fundamental stuff still applies. I guess that's why it's fundamental.

✅ Curiosity. 
↪️ AI can generate content, but it can't ask "what problem are we actually solving?" and have a nuanced dialogue with a stakeholder to persuade them that they DO need a clear objective. 

✅ Relationships. 
↪️ The comms pro who's built trust with leaders over years will always have more influence than the one with the best prompts.

✅ Judgement. 
↪️ AI can give you ten options. A human decides which one is right for this audience, at this moment, in this culture to achieve this objective.

✅ Empathy. 
↪️ Understanding how employees are actually feeling, not just what the survey data says, is a deeply human skill.

✅ Nuance. 
↪️ AI doesn't know that the CEO's last town hall landed badly, or that the employees in the Dublin office are still bruised from last year's restructure. Context is everything.

✅ Gut instinct. 
↪️ Sometimes you just know a message isn't going to land, even if you can't fully explain why. You can't automate intuition.

AI gives us better tools. But internal comms is still about people trying to reach other people; that part isn't changing.

Master the fundamentals first, tinker with the tools second.

––––

🚫 Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read; join 9,490 readers who get my weekly internal comms tips straight to their inbox.

➡️ Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/ez3_eq4c

🛑 We don't talk enough about the stuff we should STOP doing.

This is how to claw back precious time to work on important, impactful work. 

Why not make a list of the things you can stop? Or a list of the things you simply aren't going to do at all? 

You can call it your "to-don't" list.

Maybe your to-don't list would look something like this:

➡️ I don't run logistics for social events...
➡️ I don't create powerpoints for other teams...
➡️ I don't organise catering or coffee for meetings...
➡️ I don't execute on any tactics without an objective...

Bring this list to your boss and discuss it. Say "hey I got curious about how I can use my time better to deliver more value to the team. Here's a list of things I reckon I should stop doing. What do you think?"

Because guess what, you simply can't do everything. 

The smartest and most successful people in the world say no more than they say yes. Having a to-don't list makes it easier to focus on what matters.

What's on your to-don't list?

––––

 🚫 Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read; join 9,495 readers who get my weekly internal comms tips straight to their inbox.

 ⬆️ Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/ez3_eq4c

Three years ago I started a newsletter. Writing helps me clarify my thinking and I figured writing about internal comms was going to help me improve my craft.

And soon people began sending me in their challenges, their problems, their dilemmas.

➡️ How do I measure the success of my work?
➡️ How do I handle this tricky stakeholder?
➡️ How do I get leadership to care?

And I became the inadvertent agony aunt of internal comms, something I’ve been very proud of for three years and counting.

Every week in my newsletter I take a real question from a reader and go deep into answering it. My answers are practical, candid and based on my own 15 year career in internal comms.

Today my newsletter hit 10,000 subscribers, which honestly still feels surreal. I made the mistake of googling “what does 10,000 people look like?” and it scared me stiff haha.

If you're wrestling with an internal comms problem right now and you’d like some outside perspective and fresh advice, I'd love to hear it. Drop it in the comments, DM me or email me. It might become a future issue.

Most importantly, thank you for reading! I love writing and I love answering your questions.

PS If you’re not on my email newsletter yet, you can sign up here: https://lnkd.in/ez3_eq4c

Gemma Pike joined The Curious Tribe with one goal: become Head of Internal Comms within three years.

When she joined the tribe, Gemma was working as an Internal Comms Manager. She felt ready for more; greater strategic responsibility, influence and impact.

She knew she was capable and she was hungry to go after it. 

So she set herself a clear goal:

🎯 Become Head of Internal Comms within the next 3 years.

With this goal in mind, she joined the Tribe in 2024. And she got to work. 

She connected with peers in the tribe who had already made the the leap to senior positions. She worked with me directly to figure out an action plan, prepare for job applications and interviews and start positioning herself for senior roles.

It didn’t take Gemma 3 years to achieve her goal.

She did it in 9 months.

Gemma is now Head of Internal Communications at Global Witness. And she’s just renewed her membership of the tribe for 2026 because leading at this level brings new challenges and she wants people in her corner who get it.

The Curious Tribe is my membership community for ambitious, curious internal comms pros who want to achieve more in their career and have more impact in their job.

If you're looking for a place to connect, upskill and accelerate your career in internal comms, you're found your people.

Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe? 👀

An internal comms manager in Australia sent me this question:

"I'm struggling to say no to stakeholders. Everyone comes to me with requests and I end up saying yes to everything, even when I know I shouldn't. I'm drowning in work that I probably shouldn't even be doing and I don't know how to push back without damaging relationships. How do you say no without being seen as unhelpful?"

I get this question a fair bit, it’s a struggle many comms pros face. We want to be helpful and sometimes we also want to be liked, if we're being honest. But this can lead to us spending time on unimportant work or getting burnt out by the volume of tasks.

How do you balance the tension between having great relationships and saying no to their requests?

The reality is that most of us have never been taught how to say no in a way that protects relationships and reinforces our value.

There’s an art to it. And it’s learnable.

I tackle this topic in tomorrow's newsletter, sharing my practical 4-step approach for saying no to stakeholders without being seen as unhelpful or difficult.

👉 Sign up here to get it to your inbox tomorrow: https://lnkd.in/ez3_eq4c

🌍 Can you name this city?

Drop your guess in the comments...

Because THIS is where The Curious Tribe is heading for our first-ever in-person Global Gathering in April 2026.

After two years of building connections online, it's time for The Curious Tribe to meet face-to-face.

A group of smart, ambitious internal communicators from around the world. 1.5 days of in-depth conversations, immersive peer learning and building friendships that last.

No windowless conference room, no crap coffee, no death-by-powerpoint. Instead we’ll have deep sessions on topics that matter in a gorgeous setting (with a rooftop pool).

Huge thanks to Blink - Employee Experience Platform​ for sponsoring this event and making it possible. 

Not a member of The Curious Tribe yet? Now might be a good time to fix that 👀

So... what city is it? 👇

😤 “Why won’t leaders listen to me?”

I’d ask you this in return: what language are you speaking?

Because I’d bet a tenner that your leaders are speaking in Business and you’re probably speaking in Communications.

Communications language = open rates, clicks, channels, content, platforms, outputs, videos, blogs.

Business language = profits, revenue, churn, retention, strategic goals, outcomes, risk, reputation.

If you want your leaders to listen to you, speak in their language (not in yours).

You're a comms professional. You can tailor your comms to any audience.

So do that for your leaders. Translate your comms work into the language of business and I guarantee they will listen to you.

––––

🚫 Don’t let an algorithm decide what you read; join 9,498 readers who get my weekly internal comms tips straight to their inbox.

➡️ Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/ez3_eq4c

"Why is Jim your favourite?"
 
"Because he listens."
 
That's a frontline worker talking candidly about her manager. No polished corporate speak, just a genuine answer about what makes someone a good boss.
 
We talk a lot about how to reach frontline workers, how to get messages in front of them, how to make sure they receive HQ announcements.
 
But do we talk enough about how to LISTEN to frontline workers?
 
Jim is such a good example of a boss that gets it. Every day he puts his clipboard down and walks the floor; not to check on production or tasks but to listen to his employees. He says hi, asks how they’re doing, asks for feedback. 
 
And he listens. 
 
He sees this as part of the job, not a distraction from it.
 
And now he’s got an app to extend that approach - by giving all his team members a way to comment, react and share ideas via Motherson One, powered by Workvivo by Zoom. Same focus on listening with a bigger reach.
 
It's a good reminder that effective communication really isn't that complicated, even at scale: it works when it goes both ways.
 
Technology helps, but it only works because the culture supports it. 
 
I’m talking about leaders who listen, leaders who care and employees who feel safe to speak up.
 
Have a look at Jim and his team for yourself as part of this great road trip series by Workvivo - link in comments 👇

Brand partnership • The Internal Comms Gal. Training & community for internal comms pros. joanna@thecuriousroute.com

The paralytic agony of having a 3pm appointment

❓ Ever felt stuck doing tactical comms work while dreaming of being seen as a valued strategic partner?

I've been there. It's frustrating.

We did a deep dive into solving this problem in The Curious Tribe last week with a live event featuring the incredibly smart and inspiring Priya Bates, ABC, MC, SCMP, IABC Fellow​, an internal comms GURU who I have admired for years.

Priya shared the story of how she grew an internal comms team from 3 tactical people to 20+ strategic professionals while working in-house, and the function moved from being buried under HR to reporting directly to the Chairman's office. She told her her remarkable journey of success peppered with candid insights and practical advice.

Key takeaways included:

1️⃣ Be comfortable asking for what you need. Expect lots of nos, but keep asking (like persistent kids do!) to get the yes that you need to deliver work that matters.

2️⃣ Learn to brag. As communicators, we tend to shy away from the limelight and speak little of our own wins. But you can't progress without connecting your wins to business outcomes and TALKING ABOUT IT!

3️⃣ Ask stakeholders upfront: "What do you think will happen if we don't communicate this well?" This gets them to articulate the risks in their own words and gets you credit at the end when those risks don't materialise.

This event was a super reminder that if we want to be seen as strategic advisors, we must seize the opportunities to position ourselves correctly and identify work that showcases our value.

This is one of many brilliant events I'm hosting in The Curious Tribe this year. Events like this are live and also recorded for playback later, exclusively available in the tribe video library.

If you're tired of feeling undervalued or stuck in tactical mode, maybe it's time to join us.

Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe? 👀

PS On a personal note, Priya is someone I've followed and fangirled over for many years, I was embarrassingly GIDDY to have her in the tribe and may have told her this is the equivalent of my Superbowl 😅 Thank you to Priya for joining us!

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