Our Issue Management Category
Since its adoption as part of the Rio Declaration in 1998, and its repeated use by the European Commission in various fields, the Precautionary Principle has quickly become lodged in the language of business and consumerism as one of those phrases that everybody pretends to understand but probably cannot precisely define.
The most common definition of the Precautionary Principle is as follows: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.
There is a principle in German environmental legislation known as the “Vorsorgeprinzip” (principle of prevention), which is applied to situations where there is a known cause-effect relationship and therefore a clearly defined risk. This is not the same thing. The Precautionary principle does not, as is sometimes implied, mean that industry must provide evidence that a product or process is “risk-free” for it to be accepted or licenced. Such a situation would mean an end to any innovation at all, and the European Commission is well aware of this. But it does suggest that reasonable doubt could be enough to justify the application of the approach. By the same token it should also follow that reasonable evidence should be enough to avoid it, though this happens far less often.
There is a continuing risk that the precautionary principle is becoming a victim of its own rather meticulous application. In this sense a considerable extension of the precautionary principle is happening simply because of instances in which the public demonstrates non-scientific concern about a controversial product.
In supporting the Precautionary Principle, we must be aware that the device should always be, as the European Commission proposes, proportionate, coherent, temporary, non-discriminatory and should always be based on as scientific a risk assessment as possible.
It is a fact of life that there will always be some scientists prepared to suggest that practically anything could constitute a risk to people, consumers or society as a whole. It is not a fact of life that regulators, politicians or other public officials have to believe them.
The Precautionary Principle is a good one and is of considerable benefit to society and consumers. The industry and those who regulate in good faith must continue to co-operate to ensure that the principle remains relevant and appropriate and that it is not used as an excuse for restriction or prohibition. There is certainly no shortage of official and authoritative channels for these options.
“What’s more dangerous, pesticides or horse manure?” The answer may surprise. Researchers await the first human death from pesticide residues, fifty years after DDT was introduced and thirty years after its use was banned in the United States, but horse manure is claiming lives daily through the bacterial contamination of organic food.
We take our health for granted and it is natural that we do. We do not examine the whys and wherefores of living longer, on average, than our grandparents and their grandparents, but with a current life expectation of between 75 and 80 for the average European, no less than 30 years have been added to this average total during the course of the 20th century. It’s a miracle of science, so they say.
If it is, then science has been regularly and consistently performing miracles on our behalf for several generations. Some might say even here that it has been playing God. What right have scientists to indulge in research that will result in people living longer using ‘artificial’ drugs and medicines? Modern pharmaceuticals, as well as processed food, have been stretching our life expectancy despite the fact that we did not directly ask for it.
What did people do before pasteurisation? What did people do before fluoride was added to water?, before the widespread use of food additives, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides? What did people do before penicillin, iodine, chlorine?
Well, to be completely and brutally accurate, they died, often wracked by a very painful disease such as TB, rickets, smallpox, polio or some other disease now extremely rare in the developed world. It’s an uncomfortable but telling fact, informing us that science has indeed made major strides on our behalf in this century and that virtually all of these have benefited humanity and especially human health, in one way or another.
There has been a reaction to many of these advances. Organic farming, in particular, is just such a reaction in the most precise sense. Before the introduction of pesticides and other synthetic additions to the crops, all farming was organic, in the sense that organic matter was used for crop protection and fertilizer.
There has been controversy about the degree of toxicity in organic crops. Organic farmers have been forced onto the defensive and have stated that organic produce is no more toxic that conventional produce. This may often be the case but I doubt it as a general rule. Many will be surprised to hear that organic farming can be toxic at all but therein lies one of the confusions that beset this debate and that makes new agricultural technology so easy to criticise. I have no objection to organic farming at all. But I would not insist upon feeding it to my children. Here is why.
Essentially, organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. Animal manure is the biggest reservoir of the bacteria that are making so many people ill.
In truth, until the last few years the threat of food-borne bacteria was relatively mild in the U.S. It was prudent to refrigerate one’s food and to wash one’s hands before preparing food or eating, and those simple procedures kept food-borne illnesses to a minimum. On occasion, neglect of these rules would cause a family to suffer severe stomach aches. And every year a few weak individuals — the very young, the very old, or those who were already quite ill — would die from exposure to food-borne bacteria.
As these lethal new bacteria spread, organic foods have become a more risky food choice.
Organic and “natural” food consumers also face an increased risk of illness from toxins produced by fungi — and some of these toxins are carcinogenic. Refusing to use artificial pesticides, organic farmers allow their crop fields to suffer more damage from insects and rodents, which creates openings through which fungi can enter the fruits and seeds. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly tests samples of various foods for such dangers, and it routinely finds high levels of these natural toxins in organically grown produce. It found, for instance, that organic crops have higher rates of infestation by aflatoxin, one of the most virulent carcinogens know to man.
The organic-food sector stresses the natural production of foods and beverages — even to the point of refusing to pasteurize milk and fruit juices. As a result, many people become seriously ill after consuming products they mistakenly believe are purer than other foods. For instance, in 1996 E. coli 0157 sickened more than seventy people who contracted it from unpasteurized apple juice produced by the Odwalla Juice Company. One young girl in Colorado died because of this. Odwalla was fined more than $1 million in the case and now pasteurizes its juice. But more than 1,500 other companies still cater to the “natural means raw” idea by selling unpasteurized beverages that can prove deadly.
Even without pesticides and pasteurization, producers could render their organic and natural foods safe through irradiation. Irradiation uses low levels of gamma radiation to kill bacteria, and the process also preserves the freshness of foods such as strawberries and chicken. But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently proposed an organic-food standard that would have allowed irradiation, the plan drew more than 200,000 angry protests from organic farmers and caterers.
According to recent data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC), people who eat organic and “natural” foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157: H7). This new E. coli is attacking tens of thousands of people per year, all over the world. It is causing permanent liver and kidney damage in many of its victims.
“Natural food” proponents claim that organic farming is “earth-friendly,” but it’s not. The ugly secret of organic farming is that its yields are only about half as high as those of mainstream farmers. Approximately one-third of the average organic farm is not planted to marketable crops at all; it is planted to green manure crops (such as clover) to build up the nitrogen fertility of the soil depleted by the previous crop. If the organic farmers gave up animal manure as a nitrogen source, the percentage of land they keep in green manure crops would have to become even higher. Mainstream farmers take their nitrogen from the air, through an industrial process that requires no land to be taken from nature. Also, the organic farmers suffer higher losses from destruction by pests. They expect it. Books on organic farming tell their readers to live with it.
For all these reasons, widespread organic farming is simply not a viable option at this time, unless you can afford it. The first consequence of a global shift to organic farming would be the plowdown of at least six-million square miles of wildlife habitat to make up for the lower yields of organic production. That is more than the total land area of the United States.
Agriculture already takes up 36 percent of the world’s land surface. (All the world’s cities cover only 1.5 percent.) A world with a peak population of 8.5 billion affluent people in 2050 will need at least 2.5 times as much farm output as we have today.
In fact, the worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea are leading the biggest surge in demand for meat and milk the world has ever seen. It is now probably too late to save wildlands by preventing people from acquiring a taste for meat and milk, and there is certainly no sign of mass conversions to vegetarianism around the globe. It is becoming uncomfortably likely that disasters will have to happen before the world wakes up to the realisation that organic farming takes us further away, not closer, to sustainability and feeding the world’s hungry millions.
If the world does not triple the yields on the high-quality land currently in farming, we will pay the price not in human famine but in forests and wild meadows cleared to produce more meat, milk, and produce.
Giving up pesticides would mean the certain destruction of millions of square miles of wildlands, much of it in the species-rich tropics. Because much of the world’s biodiversity is in those lands, a move toward widespread organic farming would cost nature far more than the careful use of today’s safe, narrowly targeted pesticides, high-powered seeds, and factory-produced fertilizers.
To most of us agriculture is a deeply conservative sector, inspiring notions of constancy rather than progress, of stability and assurance in a shifting and uncertain world. That ploughman seems to have been plodding home wearily for generations before and since the image was so magnificently evoked by Thomas Gray.
For urban and sub-urban dwellers, agriculture can also present a confusing impression: of muck and machinery counterbalanced by laboratories, white coats and test tubes.
This dissonant impression makes the sector seem complicated. In turn, it produces misunderstandings in the media as with the general public. The impression needs to be challenged. We could start with the erroneous prevailing assumption that our food is generally of lower quality now than fifty years ago because much of it is grown with the help of synthetic chemicals.
The astonishing fact about agriculture in the developed world over the last few decades is the unprecedented increase that has taken place in both quality and quantity, increases that would have been impossible had we rejected the chance of using all currently available agricultural technologies.
With an area of farmland more or less unchanged, production per acre has trebled in most areas in the past couple of generations with the remarkable result globally that despite a doubling of the world’s population, the same acreage of land feeds double the amount of people. In 1950 the world’s 611 million hectares of cropland produced 692 million tons of grain. By 2000, the world planted 700 million hectares of cropland producing over 2,000 million tons of grain. In other words, in just 50 years, three times less land is required to produce 100 tonnes of wheat. Without crop protection, the production of the six most important crops in the world (rice, wheat, barley, corn, soya and potatoes) would be more than halved. (Enquete OMS)
The quality of fresh and processed foods has risen substantially in the same time. Dairy products more generally have benefited from various improvements including, in particular, pasteurisation, and diseases such as tuberculosis, caused by impurities in milk, or rickets, caused by vitamin deficiency, have now virtually disappeared from this country.
Staples such as corn, wheat, rice and barley are all stronger, healthier and more wholesome by several multiples than a few decades ago. Improvements in plant science have revolutionized the nutritional content and freshness of foods as well.
On top of all this the average price of fresh food has actually declined considerably in real terms in the past three generations, due to the lower prices paid for agricultural produce. These achievements are essentially due to hard work as well as to all that muck and machinery.
In addition to this, farmers are considered not only as food producers but also – just as importantly – as stewards and guardians of the land. Farmers’ knowledge and experience help to sustain the land and keep it fertile, using a mixture of experience generated and inputs bought in. This is the best guarantee of sustainable agriculture: unrestrained access to whichever inputs are the most appropriate for the continued assurance of quality and sustainability.
These changes and many others have amounted to a revolution, not just a change of scenery, possibly more spectacular in scope and significance than the first agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century.
In short, everything has changed about agriculture in two or three generations. In all these upheavals, farmers have quietly taken on the changes and continued to be as prodigious and as focussed as ever in the production of good quality food.
They need more support and better choices if they are to continue to be prodigious in the future.
The phrase “creating edge” made its debut in biz-speak at least around 40 years ago (although there is no certain origin). It had a longer history in real language and dialogue, as cliches must: the phrase first arose in theater criticism to describe acting that was so impressive it was ‘on the edge of reality’. How ironic that such overused words quietly wait so long before biting your legs.
It has now expired in polite society, barrack rooms, music notices, boat decks and theater reviews, and is treated largely as a ironic joke phrase in popular intercourse but it is still going strongly if blindly in that parallel universe of biz-speak, thanks probably to its multiple meanings, its promise of clarity and its actual delivery of doubt and ambiguity.
Someone who is creating edge should be proposing ideas, projects and programs that are imaginative and exciting and which rock the institutional, social or corporate boat. The description is intended to be a positive description and in biz-speak comes with an unspoken addition that such boat-rocking should not be in a capsizing way. As such, it is often explicitly included in large companies’ Mission Statements, Visions, Values, Dreams, Guidelines, Overall Objectives, Pathways, Roadmaps, Manifestos, Corporate Challenges, Global Challenges, Constellations and Star-maps. I am sure I saw it in my tea-leaves the other day.
A person in a company who truly creates edge is, however, often and literally on it, and can find himself or herself on the wrong side of it, even when having, perhaps to much applause, created it.
When senior managers and their acolytes use the phrase they generally offer an example, normally from safely outside the company, of creative expression that can seem to get doves fluttering in their dovecots, the cat prancing among the pigeons, and various worms crawling out of half-opened cans. Not to mention the unthinkable: Pandora thinking outside her box.
A little instability is A Good Thing, the rolling stone will not gather moss unless it moves, and the comfort zone can lull you into inactivity. People who create edge are good for destabilizing those who are too comfortable, and for helping the idea along that companies are at their best when they remain in perpetual structural change.
Hmm… It is significant that none of this actually stands up to any proper scientific test, nor any academic assessment or review. This is a theory without an author, a movement without a prophet, a manifesto without manifest, a morality without commandments, a business case without any supporting evidence or even operating instructions.
No-one has ever proved that constant corporate structural upheaval is good for companies, people or society. But permanent upheaval definitely needs consultants and agencies to fill the research void by talking and repeating themselves about creating edge and getting uprooted from comfort zones.
However, the reality is that those creative people creating edge cannot be allowed just to create the edges that keep the workers and doers worried and over-working but squarely in their place. Unfortunately their habit also causes concerns and worries to the senior management. This is the creation of true edge. And this of course is unacceptable.
Perpetual structural change must of course exclude the senior management, who obviously need to be settled to do their job properly. Let’s face it, senior management never wanted to encourage people to worry them. It has quite enough to worry about already.
So creating edge in this direction cannot be allowed to happen. Most tough-talking CEOs can be heard saying that they hate surprises. This, more than any other phrase, is responsible for corporate intellectual sclerosis and constitutes copper-bottomed proof that creating that sort of edge is just not allowed.
So those truly involved in the creation of edges are deliberately and pointedly excluded from seniority by most companies, because thinking on the edge means knowing where the edge is, which means having a view of the outside perspective, which in turn means that you cannot be trusted.
In practice, contrary thinking is required to achieve geniune creativity. This becomes self-evident when we realize that thinking the way your leaders and bosses think results most often in mimicry, in the parroting and repetition of meaningless phrases, a clever skill and a sincere form of the much respected practice of flattery, but still requiring an absolute minimum of creative thought, as well as providing the spark that unfailingly gives birth to prejudice.
No, if someone senior tells you that you are creating edge, check your contract and employment conditions immediately, run a quick internal test on their “creative ambiguity” rating, review your messages and join Linked-In; you are about to be performance-assessed out of your job because you are a menace to many.
What is Public Relations? The PRSA’s recent proposal for a new definition of public relations seems simple and straightforward: “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
The definition from 1982 was more succinct: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” The 1952 definition was: “Public relations is a management function that seeks to identify, build, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and all of the publics on whom its success or failure depends.”
Conscious that many fine minds have come together to prepare and debate this definition, which is proposed as the start of a debate rather than the conclusion, I still find it extraordinary that these definitions are so close together across a total period of 60 years. But never mind 1952, in communications terms even 1982 is a several planets away from 2012..
The literal difference is in the use of the two new words ‘strategic’ and ‘process’. It is already significant that neither word is free of careless use within and around the profession.
‘Strategic’ signifies that PR is not just a press clippings and media coverage notification service for an organization but a valuable advisory function that contributes ideas, intelligence and direction to communications planning.
No organization can achieve its goals without developing good and effective relationships with those groups with which it needs to interact (its publics), hence PR must be considered as strategic advice. As such it is the cousin of public affairs practice. However, it is not good or realistic PR to insist that all such activities must be part of a strategy. This is because reactive, unplanned and spontaneous PR occupies much more of our time as practitioners and even more in-house than we all admit.
The other word ‘process’ is also a reasonable addition. Connected to its advisory function, PR can be seen as a continuous series of related events, incorporating the creation and planning of activities that are inter-related and thematically aligned. But here again, beware of denying the often crucial roles of reaction, intuition and spontaneity in PR. These words are always unwelcome to process enthusiasts (but the elephants always stay for tea).
Some have expressed their fear in excellent discussions on these boards that the definition will become irrelevant in a few years since ‘strategic’ has unfortunately become a cliche and is steadily changing its meaning through overuse.
The phrase “mutually beneficial relationships” is where the heart of the ensuing debate has been located. And here lies the reason why the definition may soon need to be changed in a way that better reflects the astonishing changes now taking place in the media and communications.
Firstly, the conventional financial and market model of PR agencies, especially of the biggest ones, is no longer working properly. The myth of ‘mutully beneficial” has helped to sustain a legend that PR created its own function of career hoppers and marketing intellectuals. With the impending loss of a dependent media the word beneficial will probably be the first to go.
Changes are necessary to reflect what the more progressive PR practitioners have known for some time. The cleverer and more imaginative clients are demanding more focused and better quality work, and a realistic recognition of the new tools and platforms becoming available. Newer PR agencies that get this point are operating from a different and more effective business model.
The term PR itself is being made less relevant by the new media, in which the consumer-producer relation is changing: push is being replaced by pull, and consumers are revising company brands.
The place in which reputation and profile are primarily assessed and judged is no longer the business pages of the newspapers or the fashion pages of women’s journals, but the millions of opportunities for access and contact being provided by social media networks at all times of the day and in most parts of the world.
Networks incorporating news, views, comment, music, photos and videos are gradually but certainly becoming the main currency of modern public relations activity. And most important of all, they are being taken, not offered, just as brands are being mixed together with shapes, forms, profiles and impressions by the customer to create a public relations environment in which customers perform the mediation that is crucial to communications impact, sometimes without even knowing it.
Anyway, here is my suggestion. “Public Relations is advice that gives access, context and meaning to media, generating value from the resulting relationships and communications between companies and their stakeholders.”
April 13th, 2012
Regressing in agriculture and technology: the new conservatives
For some people, agriculture has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Not with farmers, but with the general public and politicians, especially those who live in urban and suburban areas.
Most farmers have had no trouble over many years understanding and trying new technologies, but all too often they have been prevented from applying them, surprisingly, by some of the most conservative force of public opinion.
Generations ago, many opposed and regretted the replacement of horses with mechanized tractors, and before then, the replacement of “night soil” with chemical and artificial fertilizers. Today’s anti-technologists are probably even more conservative than in the past, since a selectivity has developed in the modern conservative taste.
There is one policy when shouting at regulators, politicians and scientific companies; there is another when pushing a cart or trolley around in the supermarket. At once deploring Monsanto, Bayer and agribusiness in general they will take care to buy themselves the cleanest and best looking vegetables in expensive supermarkets.
Some anti-technologists, of course, do not suffer from any hypocrisy on this score. They prefer fallen fruit and will pick out the most mis-shapen vegetables and the dirtiest greens from organic markets. They put the conserve into conservatism. Good luck to them.
Understanding and employing new technology has always proved crucial not only for some farmers to continue to meet growing food, feed and fuel demands but also for other less fortunate farmers to move from subsistency to profitability and this is no less true now that the world population is accelerating upwards.
But modern conservative anti-technologist opinion cannot bring itself to relate to the economic development arguments for the application of technologies in agriculture (the only safe path out of poverty). The anti-technologist claims that you have to sort out the unfairness of modern global food distribution flows before the short term and, in their view, the lesser problem of people starving right now in empty marketplaces.
If there is any genuine concern about current and future hunger in the world, then we must allow modern science and technology to help with food production, whether this be to breed improved varieties of food plants with higher and better yields, or to generate new and more cost-effective production methods, or develop yet more effective fertilizers and pesticides.
Genetic modification can be used to achieve disease resistance or herbicide tolerance or other traits in the future that may be of even more direct benefit to people. But biotechnology is not the only issue in the overall debate about technology in agriculture. It is one technology among many, but it attracts much of the opprobrium.
In many respects the most crucial debate in agricultural technology really concerns the threats to ban products that currently work well in assisting food production, not those that face innumerable obstacles to getting approved for sale and use for the first time.
For the conservative anti-technology activist it is all the same, but many developed countries, especially in Europe, having helped to ensure that GMOs will never be approved, have now turned their attention to an even more conservative task, that of rolling back the years and banning technologies that had already been approved, licensed and successfully used, sometimes for several generations, and which are still vital to farmers in countries with low levels of food security. How sustainable is that?
These are not just conservatives, these are the policies of reactionaries, hypocrites and bigots. The agricultural and rural communities know this, but lots of clever people don’t.
At the beginning of the AGM season here is a pertinent question.
How do you deal with people who hate your company? There are some organizations and even more individuals who dislike companies so much that their dislike can seem to border on an obsessive hatred, an inability to think rationally or with moderation. Or, at least, this is how it can appear to companies who are being challenged or even threatened.
Every company has them. They can be lonely losers, self-obsessed, wielding specific and narrowly targeted influence way beyond the real circumstances of their actual situation. They can be embittered ex-employees with a burning grievance or sense of having been swindled or unfairly dismissed. They can be powerful, influential, rich and externally obsessed, like Ralph Nader, millionaire, Lebanon-born American king of NGOs, six-time candidate for President of the United States, and hero of the campaign against the US car industry and General Motors in the 1960s and 1970s.
Admittedly most companies hardly ever bother with the first two categories, but the third category is a recognized problem, posing a real and running threat to corporate reputation. General Motors was certainly obsessed with Nader. It hired private detectives to tap his phones, check his bins and exhaustively investigate his past. It also hired prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations (unsuccessfully). It is far too long ago for him to be accused of being a secret Muslim.
Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case early for $425,000, a very large amount in the 1960s, equivalent to nearly $10 million today.
Nader’s lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover “overzealous surveillance.” Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law and funding his own substantial additional projects. The car industry’s own goal was complete. Indeed it was a hat-trick.
Nonetheless, forty and fifty years on, companies still try to counter-spy, to uncover private facts and more about individuals who appear to display a hostile approach to them. They still try to smear those they perceive to be their enemies, and in doing so forget their lines, their responsibilities and their own stakeholders’ expectations.
I have, unhappily, witnessed a few of these operations, and none of the actions that I have observed to this effect has ever worked without some form of countervailing blow-back. Significantly none of the actions were ever taken on the basis of a management consensus; most were minority actions taken with the private approval of very senior management.
Sometimes, particularly with regard to social media, it’s best not to engage vociferous and determined opponents substantively once it becomes clear that a debate is not being offered.
But some companies get stubborn and self-righteous. They want not only to be right but they want proof and a certificate of it. Deep down, they want their critics to make public grovelling apologies, little realizing that in this there is no difference between them and their tormentors. Eventually they lose credibility with their real customers and other stakeholders by being seen to beat the same drum over and over and enter a corporate trance like an addled hippy.
However, companies need to mix circumspection with passion. They need always to be responsive. They don’t have to turn the other cheek but they should not hide and should never fail to respond with a sense of the debate as a whole and not just the last thing said.
They need also to remain genuine (as long as they had been before) and to show continued understanding of the issue or the grievance.
But really none of these things can be done if you do not demonstrate a transparent commitment to talk directly and openly with external groups and any other individuals who are taking you to task. They may not reply satisfactorily but you have done your best and you will thus impress the people and institutions watching you who really matter.
Just as the nature of reputational risks varies from company to company, so too does the potential damage of each such risk that any company faces.
But one of the biggest risks of all is probably the most difficult to cover or even to address.
This concerns the inherent honesty of the company concerned and that of their senior management. Some companies have integrity built into their culture, an honesty that stays embedded because of the practice of the personnel; senior, junior, top and bottom. Other companies do not have integrity but they think they do. Others have little or no integrity, know they do not, but claim they do, believing the outside world to be gullible. Others yet again just have no integrity, do not claim to do so, and do not care. This is most normally demonstrated in their treatment of personnel.
For the companies who are dishonest or in denial, this situation presents a very difficult early hurdle to overcome for the in-house reputation manager, especially one arriving new to the company and to the task from elsewhere.
It is a commonplace observation in the larger and international companies that new recruits or external consultants are effectively the only people who can even aspire to change things in the company, as everyone else is too tired, too discredited, too ground down, too arrogant and too ‘experienced’ to stake their careers on what will be often presented as disloyalty.
Companies where this observation is a commonplace are generally institutionally corrupted, perhaps not irrevocably so, but it’s difficult to see how transparency can work in such an environment, or how a genuinely ethical culture can put down roots.
Another sign of corruption can show from the attitude of the senior communications manager. Is he or she a hoarder and guardian of information or a provider and sharer of information? If the former then that person is far less likely to be honest in other areas of decision-making and leadership.
In such companies, communications resources get consumed by the bigger functions of the company, for example in brand maintenance (featuring the ever-expensive advertising) and enterprise risk management rather than issue, stakeholder or reputation management.
These are also generally the companies in which a senior manager asks you repeatedly for the business case for reputation management. As a response you can ask the questioner to provide the business case for NOT having reputation management. But update your CV first…
Many companies have adopted and implemented robust enterprise risk management (ERM) systems, largely because it is far easier to make a short term business case for these. But, given that reputation disasters can encompass enterprise disasters, companies should also be developing processes to address threats to reputation with at least as much effort as they do with threats to enterprise.
Progressive companies with integrity are unlikely to have these problems. They allocate appropriate resources for covering reputation and issue exposure.
Communicators in these companies, managed and encouraged by sharers of information, are making better-informed decisions affecting reputation and this is creating a robust platform for strong and confident external relations.
In fact, if this platform isn’t there for all the company communicators and not just the CEO and senior management acolytes then the reputation of the company will inevitably suffer, whatever the enterprise or the markets may do.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, not just in the social media but in modern social life generally. Not to put too fine a point on it, the doors of perception are both swinging open and getting a lot more difficult to walk through.
As communication channels proliferate, people are passing more data but communicating less with each other, and they are reverting to a hand flutter as they pass each other instead of stopping to talk.
Where is this all going? It is very difficult to peer through the rolling gloaming but while our eyesight improves, our lines of sight become more encumbered, and get refracted. We are declaiming and talking more, and we are debating and listening less.
As the US Presidential elections loom in the shadow glitz of the future, and recent elections in Europe are analysed and digested, we are realizing that people are starting to believe nothing. They are assuming that everything they are told is dubious, unlikely or just counterfeit, a product of spin, misdirection and lies.
When a company claims that they are a people business, it is more than likely that they are quite the opposite. If you are told that customers come first, you will be put on hold for more than ten minutes or referred to a web site (how irritating is that?) If a company claims to be a thought leader, you can be sure that they are near the back of the elephant trail and waiting for the next idea to be prattled back down the line. The only certain outcome of this behavior is the graveyard.
Some tabloid newspapers have given up with the truth altogether because the truth doesn’t sell. Unfortunately this is true whether it is the media, second hand cars, third hand policies, corporate responsibility or snake oil. If something sells that does not necessarily give it value. It simply confirms a price.
But when people believe nothing, they will believe anything. One might be forgiven for suspecting that for this reason alone it is in the interest of all propagandists to keep people ignorant and suspicious, because like this they can be manipulated with the greatest of ease.
The way back is through genuine and committed communication, a communication that waits for an answer, that explains and illustrates, that is patient and painstaking.
For companies, the best way back to the foothills of corporate reputation would be the banning of all internal email messages within sites and a training course on how to use that dusty thing hidden by the books called a telephone.
But to be realistic, the indiscriminate use of email is adding to the growing communication problems that companies have with their stakeholders and especially with their employees.
Also, they should stop grabbing the tail of the company in front..
There are some very odd and strangely influential elements in politics, business, public affairs and public relations, and the question of uncertainty is one of the most important of these.
In business-speak, this is often defined as ‘ambiguity’. Leadership qualities are ascribed to those who can ‘manage ambiguity’. It may well be that in the rarified language of the self-appointed business manager, leaders profit from being ambiguous and by transmitting ambiguity while their teams are healthily tested by their resulting uncertainty (about what the leaders are talking about) and anxiety (about their job security). But that’s not good leadership. That is just bad management, pure and simple.
In political debate, declamation, affirmation and confirmation represent what might be termed the hard currency. Uncertainties, doubt and ambiguity represent soft currency: debt, credit, loans, mortgages, pensions and all those values that pretend to be hard currency, but which have the capacity both to inflate and devalue it.
Political debate is a balance of the two. It balances promise with fulfillment and matches credulity with credibility. Nevertheless, the expression of uncertainty is such an important part of politics and policies that it needs some examination.
How exactly is ambiguity good for business? The partial realism that lies in ascribing ambiguity is very easy to decode.
When leaders get too powerful, power starts to corrupt them and they stop being transparent (if they ever were).
They see plots against them, they start to micro-manage, it becomes in their interest not be too easily understood. They decide that their own judgment is more reliable than that of anyone around them.
They turn schizophrenic and they start believing their flatterers. It happens all the time.
But the reason why the lemmings in multinational HR and internal comms functions have started commissioning training and seminars in managing ambiguity is because they realise that their flush has been busted, that it is no longer possible to assess leadership qualiities from above as they are used to do, but that the importance of managing upwards should be recognized and dignified by a title that they have chosen.
The maximum of cynicism is the pretense that you are managing ambiguity.
Never believe anyone who says this. And, by the way, on a personal level, if your partner ever says it, you are definitely being deceived…
