global discussion. local perspectives.
"Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating" - this sentence is extracted from an interesting op-ed column of last Friday’s NYT under the title 'the power elite'
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...
I have just concluded my course on global relations and intercultural communication at NYU in New York. The intense interaction with 10 highly committed graduate students –two Russian, three American, one Brazilian, one Colombian, one British, one Singaporean– allowed me the opportunity to review some of my less resilient stereotypes and learn much more from them than each of them individually from me. That is the beauty of communication -even in the non symmetric environment...
A few days ago, I accompanied a few colleagues to an important pitch for a global public relations program on behalf of a prominent market leader on which we had been feverishly working for the three preceding weeks.. We went through the whole proposal and, at the very end, the Ceo asked: ‘ok, this is all very fine and dandy, but how would you estimate the impact of all this on our bottom line?’.
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...
In replying to a comment by Don Bates to a recent post on this blog, I invited him to write a guest post to better illustrate the reasons why he believes that a specific, existing and comprehensive software program (comPro Executive) can significantly support public relations professionals in adopting and adapting a new global stakeholder relationship governance operating platform which, together with many other scholars and professionals all over the world (although we might call...
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...
Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of debate and chatter about the implications of social media. As a consequence, Toni Muzi Falconi asked me whether I’d like to draw some lessons for PR Conversations. Thanks, Toni, and here goes: It is often said that we are witnessing the birth of a media revolution which amounts to a social, economic and political transformation. I don’t agree. I’m almost sorry what follows isn’t a bold settled...
Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of debate and chatter about the implications of social media. As a consequence, Toni Muzi Falconi asked me whether I’d like to draw some lessons for PR Conversations. Thanks, Toni, and here goes: It is often said that we are witnessing the birth of a media revolution which amounts to a social, economic and political transformation. I don’t agree. I’m almost sorry what follows isn’t a bold settled...