global discussion. local perspectives.
The communicative organization acts on the insights that relationships have real value, that reputation is shaped through relationships, and that the organization’s own values must be lived in constant dialogue within as well as with its customers, partners and other stakeholders.
This morning's edition of the New York Times carries on it's front page an enligthening article by Alissa Rubin on the Taliban's public relations campaign in Afhganistan, casting a well informed and brilliantly reported portrait of how the Taliban's are increasing in their effort to gain the support of the people.
Co-authored with Mike Klein In the later part of the year that ends today, much attention has been paid to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But another wall seems to have been definitively torn down this year with much less brouhaha: the distinctions between social, political, commercial and employee communication. The Public Relations model of defensive “representation” is thus beginning to give way to the political campaign model of proactive...
Last week I had the pleasure of discovering the Champagne Bar at St Pancras station in London in the company of Michael Klein, an excellent internal comms professional currently based in Brussels. The subject of engagement came up, and Mike got pretty passionate. He thinks that the term “engagement” is bandied about too lightly and that organizations haven’t really thought through what kind of engagement they mean or really want. While he has articulated his...
Last night, at New York’s Yale Club, I participated in the Institute for Public Relations’ Annual Distinguished Lecture and Awards event. The lecture was by Jon Iwata, IBM’s Senior Vice President, who heads the marketing, communication and citizenship organization departments of that company. A full house, jammed with many of America’s most senior and reputed public relators. On my side, a lot of curiosity for Iwata. I have always admired IBM and, as he’s been...
Business as UnUsual as the reset for organizational thinking and Changing Mindsets by focussing on the consequences and not the concept of climate change for the public debate. These are my major takeaways from last Friday’s closed door sherpa meeting of global experts, leaders and thinkers of sustainability convened in Rome by Enel. Basically this amounts to what I would call, mostly a stakeholder rleationships agenda. Period. On one hand, the Business as UnUsual concept...
Few would argue that, at its core, the public relations role is about engagement. It’s about conversations and building relationships with stakeholders, both identified and unknown. In the social media sphere some proclaim that there are new rules for engagement…but I don’t actually think that much has changed
The King Report on Governance for South Africa 2009 and the King Code of Governance Principles (King III) plus the Practice Notes that support it, were released at the beginning of September. According to Toni Muzi Falconi, “it constitutes a dramatic acceleration of the growth of our profession. Can we now prove to be up to the challenge?” In March this year, just after the draft King III Report was published for comment, I invited...
As I was reading the thoughtful article by Carne Ross in Europe’s World on the need to re-think national diplomacy, I was struck by the parallels with discussions of the evolving role of public relations as a profession. For instance, he states, “For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public’s mind from what they actually do.” You could easily substitute...
As our global public relations community intensifies its discussion and analysis of the storytelling approach to organizational communication, may I strongly suggest you make good use of this link to the just distributed issue of Warren Feek’s The Drum Beat newsletter, entirely dedicated to storytelling? As editor Kier Olsen DeVries writes in his introduction: This issue of The Drum Beat focuses on stories, asking: what do we mean by the use of oral history, or...