Most Indian Companies Don’t Have a Communications Problem. They Have an Alignment Problem

15 July 2026

Nishant Saxena:

A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicled how chief communications officers have “stormed the C-suite,” with nearly half now reporting directly to their CEOs, up significantly over the past decade.

In many Western organisations, communications leaders are no longer confined to media relations, internal messaging, or crisis response. They are helping shape business strategy, guide AI governance, manage stakeholder trust, and advise CEOs on some of the most consequential decisions facing their organisations.

From India, however, the more urgent question is different. It is not whether communications get a bigger title or whether it is even invited into the room where decisions are made.

This is not because Indian organisations are less sophisticated.

It is because the operating environment is far more complex.

India is home to nearly one-sixth of humanity. It is simultaneously a continental-scale market, a multilingual society, a federal democracy, a digital powerhouse, and one of the world’s youngest economies.

A leadership decision in India rarely travels through a single stakeholder group. It moves through employees spread across languages and regions.

It passes through local communities, regulators, investors, media organisations, customers, and increasingly, digital networks that amplify interpretation far beyond the organisation’s control.

A tariff decision at an energy company can energise investors, concern state-level regulators, confuse frontline staff, and trigger community opposition, all before a single press release is drafted.

That complexity is not a communications challenge that emerges after a decision has been made.

It is a strategic consideration before the decision is made. Yet many organisations continue to treat communications as a downstream function.

The business decides.

Communications explains.

Public relations secures coverage.

Internal communications informs employees.

Crisis teams respond when things go wrong.

That model was built for a slower and simpler world.

Today’s organisations operate in an environment where stakeholders assess them continuously.

Employees discuss leadership decisions in private messaging groups. Customers shape narratives on social media. Investors monitor sentiment in real time. Job seekers evaluate employers through online communities.

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly influence how organisations are discovered, understood, and compared.

Because stakeholders assess organisations continuously, the gap between what leaders intend and what people understand has become one of the largest and least measured sources of organisational risk.

Many business failures begin as alignment failures. Employees misunderstand the purpose behind organisational change. Communities perceive exclusion where organisations intended engagement. Regulators interpret ambiguity as risk. Customers lose confidence because communication lags behind events. Leadership assumes understanding when only information has been transmitted.

This is where strategic communications becomes valuable.

Its value does not lie primarily in messaging. Its value lies in interpretation. In practical terms, it means putting someone in the room who can run the tape forward. Someone who can anticipate how a decision is likely to play out in the minds of employees, regulators, customers, investors, communities, and the broader public before it leaves the boardroom.

In many Western markets, this is precisely why communications leaders are moving closer to the CEO. They are increasingly expected to function as early-warning systems and alignment architects rather than simply as media managers.

India has not fully caught up with this shift.

Many organisations still view communications through the lens of publicity, events, social media content, or crisis management. All of these activities matter.

None of them represents the full value of strategic communications. The real value lies in helping organisations navigate complexity. And complexity is becoming the defining challenge of modern business.

Consider the trajectory of many Indian companies.

In their early years, trust often flows directly from founders and promoters. Decisions travel quickly. Culture is reinforced through proximity. Relationships are personal.

As these organisations scale, however, the founder’s charisma cannot remain the primary operating system.

A founder can personally influence fifty employees. They cannot personally align fifty thousand. Institutional trust must replace personal trust. Narratives, purpose, and culture must scale in tandem.

And communications becomes one of the primary mechanisms through which that transition occurs.

This is why the organisations that consistently outperform their peers often appear unusually resilient. They retain employee confidence during periods of change. They maintain credibility with regulators. They navigate crises without permanent reputational damage. They expand into new markets more smoothly. They preserve stakeholder goodwill even when difficult decisions must be made.

This resilience is rarely the result of better press releases. More often, it reflects stronger stakeholder alignment. And stakeholder alignment is fundamentally a communications challenge.

This does not mean every organisation needs a chief communications officer tomorrow. A twenty-person startup does not need another C-suite title. A mid-sized business may not yet require a dedicated communications executive.

What organisations increasingly cannot afford, however, is to operate without a communications strategy.

A deliberate approach to stakeholder engagement.

A clear organisational narrative.

A framework for navigating change.

A mechanism for understanding how decisions will be perceived beyond the boardroom.

For Indian organisations, it also means consciously building bridges across language, class, cultural, and regional divides rather than assuming a single narrative will travel unchanged across the country.

The organisations that recognise this early will gain an advantage that competitors may struggle to replicate. For years, business leaders viewed technology as the great differentiator.

Then came data. Then innovation.

In the coming decade, another capability may quietly separate high-performing organisations from the rest.

The ability to create alignment at scale.

In India’s crowded, high-velocity, and extraordinarily diverse marketplace, that may become one of the country’s most underestimated competitive advantages.

And it begins not with a new app, platform, or algorithm. It begins with strategic communications.

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Nishant Saxena writes for Times of India, Economic Times, AFP, and other publications, and works on strategic communications, institutional trust, and the intersection of narrative and organisational performance. He has founded Comm’fident, a strategic communications led management advisory and Climate Kahani, a unique climate change newswire in Hindi.