The corporate world has never suffered from a shortage of nouns. Transformation. Innovation. Alignment. Stakeholders. Every decade invents a few more, then dispatches communicators to make them sound as if they belong in a sentence. Catherine Riedel has spent more than 25 years doing something harder: working out what those nouns mean before asking anybody to believe them.
Her career has crossed public-relations agencies, large corporations, consulting assignments and university classrooms. The subjects have included aerospace, enterprise technology, manufacturing, organizational change and government-facing software. The job beneath the jobs has stayed remarkably steady. Riedel studies an institution, identifies the point it is actually trying to make, and builds a route from internal complexity to external understanding.
Today she is Chief Public Affairs Officer for Speridian Global Holdings, the parent of a technology services business whose work reaches into cloud systems, automation, analytics and public-sector platforms. Her remit is not tucked into one channel. It covers awareness, reputation and relationships with business, government, media and the technology community. Four audiences, each fluent in a different dialect, all quite capable of detecting fog.
“Execution is the easy part. Making sure your strategies will achieve your goals and set you up for the future is a road not often traveled.”Catherine Riedel, Next Level Everything
The question before the campaign
Riedel wrote that line for Next Level Everything, the consultancy she founded. The company name has the cheerful maximalism of a late-night brainstorm; its philosophy is more restrained. A client arrives with the latest trendy idea. Riedel's response is to step back. The idea may be possible. It may even be exciting. Neither quality proves it is useful.
This small act of resistance is the center of her approach. Communications teams are often summoned after a choice has been made, when their role is assumed to be polish, volume and distribution. Riedel places the craft earlier. What is the objective? What will change for the audience? Does the strategy fit the business? Which future does it prepare the organization to enter? A press release can announce an answer. It cannot rescue a missing one.
Her portfolio records the method at work. For Dover Business Services, she helped develop a value proposition and visual identity for a shared-services operation supporting 27 companies. The problem was not a lack of activity. It was that internal customers did not yet see the benefit of the new arrangement. The assignment therefore began with relevance: what did the change mean to executives and operating leaders, and how could the new unit present itself as a partner?
A second Dover assignment made the stakes more concrete. The organization was moving roughly 20,000 American employees across 27 operating companies toward a shared payroll system. Different companies had different schedules, tools and procedures. Riedel analyzed a year of guidance from an executive committee and helped turn it into 16 common standards. Communication then became operational infrastructure: people needed to know when they would be paid, what approvals would change and what they had to do.
There is nothing glamorous about explaining a Thursday payday. There is also little more personal inside a company. The assignment shows Riedel's taste for the place where strategy encounters a calendar, a manager and an employee with a reasonable question. Clarity becomes less an aesthetic preference than a form of respect.
A career in several dialects
The ability to translate across institutions was trained over a long route. Riedel earned a political science degree from Michigan State University, then a master's in public communication from American University. In 1994, the university's Graduate Review published her analysis of a television public-service announcement. The title belongs to its period, but the underlying interest is familiar: how a complicated institution addresses a public audience through a limited format.
By 1996 she had moved from a marketing and communications management role at The Dodge Group to become a senior account executive at Harpell/Martins & Company. Later work connected her with Edelman, where she became a vice president, and with corporate roles including director at Abbott Laboratories and media responsibilities at Allscripts. In 2010 and 2011, her name appeared on announcements at Allscripts and Kemper, evidence of the steady, mostly invisible labor of being the person reporters call when a company has decided it must be understood immediately.
Consulting broadened the range. Next Level Everything documented work for Boeing, Dover, 7Wire Ventures, Livongo, FTD.com and other organizations. Riedel helped shape a digital education effort around Boeing's centennial, matching corporate goals with partnerships involving PBS, Teaching Channel and Curiosity Machine. She also worked on a digital platform that gathered Boeing's global engagement activity into a form that investors, advocates and employees could navigate.
Her media work put executives and company stories into national outlets including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, USA Today and the Chicago Tribune. Those names are the visible scoreboard. The more revealing detail is the variation in the assignments. A television interview demands compression. An opinion column requires a sustained argument. A local launch needs texture and place. A reporter on deadline needs an answer before the perfect sentence has finished dressing.
The classroom test
Riedel also taught communications as an adjunct at Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University. Teaching public speaking is a useful stress test for any theory of professional communication. Students cannot hide behind a brand book. They must stand up, find the point and deliver it to a room that has no contractual obligation to care.
One public student review of her Loyola course is a tiny sample, but a vivid one. The student remembered speeches, group projects, mandatory attendance and a professor willing to help outside class. The description matches recommendations on Riedel's professional profile, where former colleagues emphasize both strategic discipline and her attention to developing people. A tight ship, in this telling, still has room for passengers to learn the ropes.
Her own learning has remained visible. In late 2023 and 2024, she completed courses covering artificial intelligence, responsible AI, business use of ChatGPT and cybersecurity foundations. Credentials alone do not make a technologist, and Riedel does not present herself as an engineer. They do show a communicator refusing to discuss a changing industry entirely from the shore.
That matters at Speridian. Public affairs for enterprise and government technology requires enough fluency to know which simplifications are honest. It also requires an ear for the anxieties of institutions asked to modernize without interrupting the work citizens depend on. The vocabulary may feature APIs, AI layers and cloud platforms. The durable public questions are older: What changes? Who is responsible? Can we trust it? What happens next?
Words, with a pulse
Riedel's public persona is professional, but not embalmed. When the Associated Press announced a style change making “healthcare” one word, she offered a quick approval, then turned to unfinished business: “Good news. Now, about the Oxford comma…” It is a compact joke from someone who knows punctuation can become tribal identity among people paid to notice it.
Her current posts tend to amplify colleagues, company milestones and the people using or building technology. She volunteers as social media chair for the National Charity League's Hinsdale Clarendon Hills chapter, where her profile says she developed the chapter's Instagram presence from governance through launch. Even a social account, in Riedel's version, begins with rules and purpose before the first post.
Her public list of services is similarly broad but revealing: brand marketing, public relations, content strategy, change management and marketing strategy. Read together, they describe a communicator who is interested in the whole journey of an idea. The brand gives it a recognizable shape. The strategy gives it a reason to travel. Change management helps it survive the trip. Public relations tests whether the outside world finds any of it credible.
The through-line is not merely a fondness for clear prose. It is a belief that communication should help an organization think. A strategist sees the landscape. An operator gives the idea sequence. A teacher watches for comprehension. A public-affairs executive understands that reputation is accumulated through relationships rather than installed like software. Riedel has occupied each position, sometimes at once.
The fashionable idea gets a hearing. The useful idea gets a strategy.
Corporate language is easy to mock because it so often arrives without a human owner. Riedel's career offers the less cynical alternative. Find the owner. Ask the impolite early question. Reduce the complexity without insulting the audience. Put the message where somebody can act on it. Then, and only then, execute.
This is patient work in an impatient profession. It rarely puts the communicator at the center of the picture. That may be part of its elegance. When the message is sound, the company appears more coherent, the executive more precise and the change less bewildering. The craftsperson recedes. The meaning remains.