Our Reputation Category
Many years ago, I helped to organize a slogan competition at both the Labour and Conservative party Conferences in Britain. It was fascinating to see what slogans the delegates came up with as they wandered past our stand, representing British advertising. Of course most of the slogans offered on both sides of the political fence were identical and extraordinarily unimaginative, indistinguishable from the official party slogans at the time.
You know the sort of thing: “Forward to a Bright Tomorrow”, “Leading the Future”, “Power to all the People”, “We Make the Tough Decisions”, and so on. I cannot even remember most of them, except one, the one that I decided was the best, as it happens, from a Labour Party Delegate. It was very simple, although it took me a while before my politically overworked and feverish mind could encompass its simplicity:
“Tax is the cost of living in a civilized society”.
How true – and how rarely stated – is this?
The idea behind it is as old and as simple as buttons but the implication is huge, opening up a new line of significance for the assessment of corporate reputation.
Powerful individuals and big firms should be assessed, and their reputation proportionately enhanced, on the overall contribution they make to the communities and the populations in which they operate and from which they benefit. But I am not talking about corporate social responsibility, with its family days, site exhibitions, charitable contributions, patronages and local sponsorships. Important and valuable as these are, they are not the real benchmark of a socially responsible company.
The payment of tax, whether national, regional or local, is the real bottom line of corporate responsibility. Many companies cannot be faulted on their voluntary and well publicized efforts in social responsibility, but the same companies employ lots of effort and people to maximize their tax breaks and minimize their returns and are most unwilling see their profits taxed more than the absolute minimum necessary. Some of the tax bills of leading US corporations are, quite frankly, breathtaking in the complexity of thought and application that led to such a small assessment.
And many large US corporations are on record as insisting that the US should balance its budget and cut social spending so that the national debt can be managed but they also contribute hugely to that debt (of $14.5 trillion) with their extraordinarily and cleverly low tax bills.
A range of potential legislation comes to mind, but perhaps the first necessary regulatory change is that governments should remove tax concessions for all those self-serving charitable donations, sponsorships, scholarships and corporate foundations and simply ask corporations to enter a straight-as-a-die tax return on the basis of its turnover. The bigger the better. The bigger the more responsible. The bigger the contribution, dare I say, the better the reputation. I can certainly see a relatively easy corporate reputation assessment becoming available..
So, to corporations the message is: stop being charitable, stop these tricky and clever negotiations with the tax authorities and just start paying tax, for tax is the cost of living in a civilised society. For everybody. Including companies.
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.
Somalia, the world’s most failed and least governed state, is incapable even of investing its own government with the powers and the authority it needs to distribute the aid that it gets from the international community. So it has little chance of protecting its people or fighting international crime. But up until some years ago, a very profitable part of the Somalian economy was coastal sea fishing. In this at least, Somalian coastal areas were a horn of plenty.
Thanks to excellent research by journalist Christopher Hyatt* and others, some uncomfortable details emerge that are perhaps not well enough known.
Following the 1991 civil war, large numbers of Somalian refugees fled to the coastal areas to escape the drought and warfare and in the hope of benefiting from the country’s long-established and successful fishing communities.
Soon afterwards, large foreign ships could be seen from the shore. These ships, from Europe and Asia, were entering Somali waters, driving away the native fishermen, and undertaking large scale fishing operations with drift nets and underwater explosives, also destroying coral reefs along with the previously sustainable Somalian fishing industry.
But the ships that were stealing the livelihoods of the fishermen were not only there to plunder Somalia’s marine resources. In 2005, a study conducted by the FAO found evidence of “illegal dumping of industrial and nuclear wastes along the Somali coast”. The United Nations Environment Program also confirmed that “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990’s”.
So what had been happening just off the Somali coast was nothing less
than a bullies’ paradise, a mutually agreed and largely unreported free-for-all in the Horn of Africa region for international companies, who dumped their waste in the waters off Somalia rather than disposing of it properly elsewhere.
The Somali fishermen continued to scrape a living, but the fleets decided that even this could damage their profits. They started to chase out the fishermen. The High Seas Task Force, a group of ministers and NGOs who combat illegal fishing, reported that the foreign ships were caught “pouring boiling water on the fishermen”, also crushing smaller boats and “killing all the occupants”. In a country where famine had taken the lives of 240,000 people since the beginning of a civil war, the fishing communities saw no option but to challenge the invading fleets.
The local fishermen began arming themselves when heading out to sea and set up groups such as the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia, whose initial motive was to scare away the foreign ships with menaces. The Volunteer Coast Guard’s intimidation alone did nothing to deter the foreign fleets, so they decided to start boarding them, demanding ransoms for the release of their crew.
The tactic of hijacking and hostage-taking were successful. A type of Robin Hood style protection racket was born. Inevitably, this led to warlords and gangsters to take advantage and the local fishing boats armed in defence found themselves attacked not only by foreigners but also by other Somalis, who wanted their boats so that they could launch their own attacks on any vessel which happened to pass their way, whether it carried oil, food aid or bananas.
Now organized armed criminals (possibly financed by the pan-African direct action group al-Shabab) whose only motive is financial gain have learned from the desperate fishermen. Since the element of terrorism is also at issue, the international armed guards patrolling Somali waters have become less patient. An EU spokesperson has documented cases where “armed security teams have opened fire on fishermen believing them to be pirates” because their training “hadn’t been that good” in explaining that many Somali fishermen carried weapons in order to defend themselves from pirates attempting to take their boats, and trawlers attempting to take their livelihoods.
According to a recent BBC report, Somali pirates seized a record 1,181 hostages in 2010, and were paid many millions of dollars in ransom. In the fall of 2011, more than 300 hundred people were being held hostage by various pirate groups based in Somalia.
The economy of the coastal area, the Puntland, has now been transformed from reliance on fishing to reliance on providing the pirates with a suitable standard of living from the organized criminality.
Just feeding and housing the hijacked crews helps sustain the economy in Puntland. A BBC report describes life in a Somali pirate town: “Eyl has become a town tailor-made for pirates – and their hostages. Special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships. As the pirates want ransom payments, they try to look after their hostages.”
The pirates are a combination of ex-fisherman, ex-militia, and computer geeks. And they don’t see themselves as criminals. One interviewed by the New York Times said: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
Somalia does not take action against these pirates; it cannot. It has a barely functioning government. A few years ago, there was no government at all.
So here is the problem. It’s one of those with local impact and global implication. It is not quite the same as is often reported in papers with a requirement for a fast, safe, comfortably predictable and intuitive story, but it relates a genuine grievance ignored, an environmental challenge turned down, and not least an ethical challenge of huge proportions spurned.
By 2012, international naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden were making it difficult for Somali pirates to launch attacks. But, at least 40 vessels and more than 400 hostages are still being held in or just off Somalia, according to the Ecoterra International group which monitors piracy in the region.
The truth is not the same as the reality. The UN had already proposed twice, in 2005 and 2006, that an embargo placed on fish taken from Somali waters would mitigate the problem, but they were quite simply ignored. No significant diplomatic action taken from this perspective has occured since. Most efforts now concentrate on making the seaway safe for the tankers and arresting the pirates.
In this question of global trade interests against a subsistence economy and ethical trade, public pressure could also encourage stricter regulation on EU-registered trawlers, were this issue and its history better publicized and distributed.
In a peculiar but direct way, the plight of those living in and around the coastal communities of Somalia, and most especially the way their life dependencies have changed from sustainability and fishing to dependence and criminality, have become the responsibility of all those who use and waste most of the world’s oil.
Somehow, the fact that this affects one of the poorest, hungriest and most needy countries in the world, means that nothing apparently can be done to hinder those sacrosanct world trade flows and their doubtless unintentional impacts.
*http://www.wessexscene.co.uk/politics/2012/03/28/we-have-helped-create-the-somali-pirate-problem/
April 27th, 2012
Reputation Contrast: Two captains of the England football team, 50 years apart
John Terry is the current captain of the England football team. Well, actually, technically he isn’t because he has been charged with a crime and is awaiting his case in court. Many claim that he is also a good player, even one of the best, and those who support Chelsea certainly think he is a brilliant player. Last week he was sent off in a crucial European match in which Chelsea were involved. Away from the play, he deliberately kneed one of the opposition’s players in the small of the back. I rather doubt it hurt as much as it looked and the player concerned rolled around in agony for a while but John Terry was promptly sent off.
Why did he feel the need to knee the player, a Spaniard, from behind, off the ball, and without provocation, apart from the fact that the Spaniard was getting past him easily and often?
Amazingly John Terry said in a post match interview that the man had run in front of him and that his action was unintended and an accident. “I’m not that type” said Terry. It prompted a flurry of UK trending activity on Twitter around John Terry excuses of the “He assaulted my fist with his chin” type.
In September 2001 Terry was fined two weeks wages by his club after drunkenly harassing grieving American tourists in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks. A year later, he was caught on camera in public urinating in a beer glass, which he then dropped on the floor before leaving the pub.
In January 2002 Terry was involved in an incident at a West London nightclub. He was charged with assault and affray, but was later cleared. In the same month, Terry was fined £60 for parking his Bentley in a parking space reserved for disabled people.
In 2009 Terry was investigated by Chelsea and the FA for allegedly taking £10,000 from an undercover reporter for a private tour of the club’s training ground.
In January 2010 John Terry won a “super-injunction” preventing any reporting about his affair with the girlfriend of England team mate Wayne Bridge (and mother of their child), which collapsed in a welter of recrimination and accusation after it became clear that he had had a four month affair with her. His England team mate later caused a minor media flutter by refusing to shakle hands with him at the next game.
Last November, Terry was investigated following an allegation of racist abuse made by Anton Ferdinand, a fellow footballer. He has since been charged and now faces a criminal trial this July. Video footage circulated on the internet has led to accusations that Terry called Ferdinand a “fucking black cunt”.
Terry is reliably reported to be paid almost 10 million pounds per year.
Robert “Bobby” Moore, OBE captained West Ham United for more than ten years and was captain of the England team that won the 1966 World Cup. He is widely regarded as one of the all-time greats of world football, and was cited by Pelé as the greatest defender that he had ever played against.
On 29 May 1963, 22-year-old Moore captained his country for the first time and was given the job permanently the following year, when he also lifted the FA Cup as captain of his club, West Ham. The following month he captained England to its first (and almost certainly only) World Cup win, assisting three of England’s goals. Of many memorable images from that day, one is of Moore wiping his hands clean of mud and sweat on the velvet tablecloth before shaking the hand of Queen Elizabeth II as she presented him with the World Cup.
Moore was awarded the coveted BBC Sports Personality of the Year title at the end of 1966, the first footballer to do so, and remaining the only one for a further 24 years. He was also decorated with the OBE in the New Year Honours List.
The year 1970 was a mixed and eventful for Moore. He was again named as captain for the 1970 World Cup but there was heavy disruption to preparations when an attempt was made to implicate Moore in the theft of a bracelet from a jeweller in Bogotá, Colombia, where England were involved in a warm-up game. Moore was arrested although subsequently the case was dropped entirely; an exonerated Moore returned to Mexico to rejoin the squad and prepare for the World Cup. The strongest explanation (other than a completely false accusation) was that he covered for a known kleptomaniac in the England squad.
Moore went on to play a leading role in England’s progress through their group. In the second game against favourites Brazil, there was a defining moment for Moore when he tackled Brazil’s Jairzinho with such precision and cleanliness that it has been described as the perfect tackle.
Throughout Moore’s total footballing career of nearly twenty years at international and club level he was booked only once. After an unsuccessful career in business, blighted by his attempt to pay off all those who had invested in a business of his that failed, Moore died of bowel and liver cancer at the age of 51 on 24 February 1993.
On 28 June 1993 his memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey, attended by all the other members of the 1966 World Cup Team. He was only the second sportsman to be so honoured, the first being the West Indian cricketer Sir Frank Worrell.
Moore was made an Inaugural Inductee of the English Football Hall of Fame in 2002 in recognition of his impact on the English game as player. The stand replacing the south bank at West Ham’s ground, the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park, was named the Bobby Moore Stand shortly after Moore’s death.
In November 2003, to celebrate UEFA’s Jubilee, he was selected as the Golden Player of England by The Football Association as their most outstanding player of the past 50 years.
Bobby Moore left just over 20,000 pounds in his estate when he died. He had continued to pay off those to whom he imagined he owed money.
“He was my friend as well as the greatest defender I ever played against. The world has lost one of its greatest football players and an honourable gentleman.” Pelé
“Bobby Moore was a real gentleman and a true friend, the best defender in the history of the game.” Franz Beckenbauer
“Moore was the best defender I have ever seen.” Sir Alex Ferguson
“Immaculate footballer. Imperial defender. Immortal hero of 1966. First Englishman to raise the World Cup aloft. Favourite son of London’s East End. Finest legend of West Ham United. National Treasure. Master of Wembley. Lord of the game. Captain extraordinary. Gentleman of all time.” Inscription on the Bobby Moore Sculpture.
John Terry and Bobby Moore. Reputations contrasted.
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.
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.”
“A lie can travel halfway ’round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain once said.
The desire to be first with the news, even at the risk of being wrong, is nothing new. But social networks and Internet accessibility have combined to contribute more errors into the newsfeed than ever, now that everyone has become a journalist.
With speed at a premium, some websites have built a following by actually trafficking in rumors and uncertainties. The ability to post quickly means that misinformation can be initiated and spread quickly, and although it can also be corrected quickly, few notice the correction, as they might have done more often in the printed press. In many cases no-one bothers even to retract, finding an excuse in the defense that rumor is itself newsworthy.
When bad drives out good..
For those seriously and professionally involved in news and information, these developments are a menace. It is better to delay until you have the facts right, or you risk adding to the flood of misinformation and error. But you don’t get the headline and indeed your story may be spiked beyond retrieval by the time you have perfected and checked it.
So the bad drives out the good; the careless drives out the accurate and lies chase out the truth. It’s a truism that certainly predates the Internet.
The danger for us news and info addicts is similar to the fate that faces most of the world’s currencies (and their users). If currencies go on devaluing and pretend that they haven’t (the pound sterling is a perfect example of this over the last century), then in the end the whole system becomes totally devalued and therefore completely worthless.
A similar fate awaits people’s trust in news and information, especially from traditional outlets. There may be a collapse of credibility that will see news replaced entirely by entertainment, and information replaced by fiction. Should we be worried about this?
The signs have been increasing for some years, and there is some evidence that people are becoming more sceptical and even cynical. But I fear that in practice and overall the opposite is true. People are actually becoming more gullible, trusting and over-sensitive. Exaggerated fears, not large yawns, are the scourge of those trying to communicate directly, honestly and realistically.
When people believe nothing they will also believe anything. This is why we should all try to restore respect to dialogue, and value to communications in business, politics, economics, society and culture. And we must do it quickly, robustly and with settled determination. We must put on those shoes before the lie closes the circle.
In the USA and in Britain, as well as France, Spain and several other countries (except China) there are popular campaigns to try to get government to use ordinary or plain langauge, but this is a hopeless and misguided cause. Why? Because it’s the wrong target. Government is not where the problem starts.
Meaningless and convoluted English starts in the corporate world, with its mutually inconsistent need to appear creative and innovative at the same time as seeking ever higher impact for stories and descriptions that are listless, if not completely lifeless within their natural environment.
So it is that cliches are reheated (for they cannot be born) in corporate publications, web sites, texts and narratives, CEO speeches, reports, internal communications, training programs, with their granularity and their edge creation. Company communications, regrettably, have moved, in grammatical and literary terms, from defenders of the faith to purveyors of complete bullshit in less than two generations.
Words acquire and maintain their meaning through public consensus, not because companies decide what they mean, like Humpty Dumpty, that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”.
The whole point of language is that, like many other things, it must be free of artificial constraint in order to live and to closely express what people want to convey. Like a waterfall it must find its own way through using only the linguistic equivalent of gravity to help it, namely the need for comprehension.
The reason why English has become the modern lingua franca is precisely because it is allowed to find its own way, in some cases, to split into different derived langauges. It is free to live and multiply and certainly forces no words into meanings that are not popularly accepted by their users.
Received corporate-speak English, with its half-understood words, deliberate confusions, rigged culture, convenient ambiguities and general multilingual meaninglessness, should be knocked off the wall, broken into pieces and never put together again.
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.
