What does it actually take to prove the value of internal communications? Regine Nelson and Keith Berman have the answer—and they don’t agree on everything.

Regine Nelson went from travel PR in 2003 to PayPal and a string of in-house tech roles, taking a six-year break to raise three children before returning as sharp as she left. Keith Berman started as an FM rock radio DJ, became a journalist for a decade, and transferred every skill he had into corporate communications—a career arc he'd tell you at a party whether you asked or not.

In this episode, we discuss how to measure IC impact without hard metrics, the push/pull distribution framework that drove a 625% increase in open rates, why every M&A playbook fails on execution, using AI for listening and workflow automation, the career path from external to internal, and much more.

Find Keith Berman at https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithberman1/

Find Regine Nelson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/reginenelson/ and https://www.reginenelson.com/

Susan Oguche spent 20 years climbing the comms ladder, from P&G to Nike to CCO of the Cleveland Cavaliers and now the founder of Brilliance Communications.

In this episode she breaks down:

• The three-stage journey from doer to strategist to trusted advisor and why you can’t skip the rungs.

• Why adaptability is the one superpower that scales across every company culture.

• How her lean Cavs team became early AI adopters when the tools were barely ready.

• What she’s building now for mid-market clients navigating GEO and content infrastructure.

• The AI ethics question she can’t stop thinking about and why trust erosion is the biggest risk for all of us.

Closing principle: “Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all.”

Find Susan at linkedin.com/in/susanoguche and brilliancecomms.com

Communications, rebuilt from the middle out.

Brooke Kruger founded KC Partners in 2009 out of the financial crisis, built the business by treating candidate relationships the same way she ran media relations on the agency side, and has spent 16 years placing senior communications professionals at high-growth tech companies, VC firms, agencies, and corporations. This episode is a practitioner briefing on the current state of comms hiring: what AI fluency actually means in an interview room, why references now need to be ready within an hour, how companies are ghosting candidates and what that costs their brand, and what a clean hiring process actually looks like from both sides of the table.

Connect with Brooke at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookechilenkruger/ and KC Partners at https://kc-partners.com/