The What… and The How

A quick three question quiz:

1) Who was the HP Chairman who resigned her position over the recent HP Board leak investigation scandal?

Right, Patricia Dunn. You probably knew that.

2) Who was the HP Board member who was widely reported to have done the leaking that precipitated the investigation?

Can’t remember? It was George Keyworth.

3) For extra credit, what did he leak?

I’ll bet you’re having a harder time with this one… it’s reported almost nowhere, except that we all know the Board was “pooped” after it concluded discussions about it.

This brief morality tale is provided to illustrate one simple point: from a media and public perspective, the “how” of your actions in any response are likely to be as, if not more, significant than the “what” to which you are feeling compelled to respond.

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In another note, rumor has it that Bill is stirring from his slumber and may have his first post for us any day now. He gave an exhilarating address at Notre Dame recently and we’re waiting to hear about it. Keep your RSS readers peeled.

(posted by Ray Jordan)

“…so this is a tragedy for us.”

Following so closely on the heels of a couple of postings about declines in company reputations, I must put forth a plea to my colleagues: let us please be careful in our language.

Over last couple of days: 94 confirmed cases of e coli in the United states due to contaminated packaged spinach; 14 gravely ill patients; one confirmed death of a 77 year old woman in Wisconsin.

Yesterday, after Natural Selection Foods did what from a distance looked to be all good things with timely recalls and warnings, a spokesperson for the company told the Associated Press and New York Times and other outlets, “What we do is produce food that we want to be healthy and safe for consumers, so this is a tragedy for us.”

A tragedy for us?

FOR US?!?!

Sorry, but I’m still shaking my head…

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

“Reputation” gaining on “corruption”

OK, here’s a silly little thing.

Check out this Google Trends display. There’s a suggestion that we’re becoming increasingly more interested in “reputation” than in “corruption” (except perhaps in Washington, DC, as the chart shows). That’s an encouraging little social sign, no?

Perhaps we are what we search.

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

Unraveling one slender thread around reputation

Sometimes you get some interesting pieces to a puzzle; and only months later as more pieces arrive do you start to see how they may be fitting together.

Let’s try putting a couple of pieces together on the topic of business reputation in the United States, thanks in large measure to data generated from the often insightful Pew Research Center.

First, let’s start with the sobering finding that public regard for business corporations has been in a downright plummet… from 73% of Americans favorable in 2000 to 45% favorable in late 2005. How low is 45%? Well, in 20 years of data collection, it’s never before dropped even as low as 50/50. Here’s a link to the Pew Research Center report.

Now, let’s mix in a broader finding from reputation research. This finding is that a large portion of the public regard for a company can be traced to the public perception of how that company treats its own employees. Although I’ve seen this regularly confirmed in proprietary research over the years, I don’t have a ready link to a publicly-available study. (I’d be happy for any comments that might remedy that.)

Now for the linkage. Pew has new research about workers in America that shows a profound shift in the levels of loyalty between employers and employees. According to Pew, “By a margin of 56% to 6%, Americans say employers are less, rather than more, loyal to workers now than they were a generation ago… By a similar margin of 51% to 8%, the public says workers show less, rather than more loyalty, to their employers now than they did a generation ago.” Here’s the link to that research.

So, to summarize:

Unprecedented drop in the underlying loyalty between employees and employers.

Unprecedented drop in public favorability towards business corporations.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Causality is tougher to prove. But this potential link does raise a couple important questions, given the pressures of today’s business environment:

1) can the sense of loyalty ever be restored between companies and their employees, generally recognized as one of their most valued assets?

2) if the answer to 1) is “no”, is there anything in the relationship between employer and employees that is powerful enough to substitute for loyalty – purpose, personal challenge, intellectual growth, etc?

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

Breakneck change, but keep basics at the core

Our profession is getting increasingly sophisticated, spurred on by fast-paced technology and a desire to keep up with our colleagues.

I worry about losing sight of the importance of keeping basics at the core of what we do best, or should be doing best. Using sound judgment in our counseling, having the ability to write with clarity and persuasion, being able to bring special insight to serving the public interest, and expressing it better than anyone else at the table. These are but a few of the basics we should be mastering.

Some years back, a young hotel trainee had the golden opportunity of talking with Conrad Hilton, the mastermind behind the worldwide chain.

“Mr. Hilton,” he began, “what advice can you offer young people trying to emulate your extraordinary career in the hotel business?”

Hilton reflected for a long minute, and replied, “Keep the shower curtain inside the tub.”

I wonder how much attention we pay to keeping the shower curtain inside the tub?

This is not an isolated example. A close family friend of many years became one of the nation’s most distinguished neurosurgeons. If ever a profession suggested an endowment of God-given, sophisticated skills it is neurosurgery. At least, that’s what I thought.

The doctor’s hobby is repairing and rebuilding expensive cars (he started with jalopies) and he has a drive-in basement that houses his collection. One day I watched him as he performed a delicate procedure on a carburetor.

I asked him “What drew you to this hobby?”

“What I’m doing here is not unlike neurosurgery. Discipline, precision, dexterity. It helps me when I go into the operating room.”

So brain surgery, too, has basic skills that shout for attention and fine tuning.

In future visits here I will explore this subject further because it is important to define and analyze which of the basics are most important and how they are applied at the senior professional level.

(Posted by Larry Foster)

“Unmediated” media

Online social media is an interesting phenomenon. Many companies working outside of the information technology arena are still having a hard time getting their arms around it.

One way that may help is to think of this as a space where a company can tell its own stories, in its own voices, unfiltered by the priorities, agendas and gaps in knowledge and context that are sometimes present among professional journalists.

The media, by it’s nature, “mediates” information on behalf of its common audience. (The common Latin root “medius” is no coincidence.) Online spaces, particularly those characterized as “social media”, provide companies natural vehicles to carry their own voices and stories to publics whose priorities or focal points may not line up precisely with the common audience served by journalists.

So, in effect, these spaces provide a media space that is unmediated by third-parties; thus the somewhat self-contradictory notion of “unmediated” media.

Note that I say this space allows for company “voices”, not “voice”. The price of entry for companies in this space is authenticity. That comes from individual voices. They may speak in harmony, but they cannot speak in an authoritative, opaque, singular voice.

When you think of it, can a company really have a single voice? It may have a single vision, a strategy, an underlying ethic, a culture. But with its many audiences, products, issues, it will sing with thousands of voices. A company’s song is one built of the harmonies of a chorus, not the solitary wail of a diva.

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

Chief Communications Officers… and Wikipedia

You know, over the past nine months or so, I’ve become fairly impressed with Wikipedia. A year ago, it seemed so far from useful that I held out little hope. But in the interim it has grown and matured in fine fashion. Today, for me, it is generally more useful than Google search as a means of getting a quick introduction to a new topic. (For instance, a paltry, partly-correct sentence in Wikipedia last year about a relatively little-recognized secondary fermentation in winemaking has become a downright informative discussion of malolactic fermentation.)

My disappointment was palpable, then, when I searched Wikipedia a few days ago for references to “Chief Communications Officer”. I use that term to refer to a communications professional who has the chief communications advisory relationship with a senior business leader of a company, organization or corporation. Sadly, I could find no reference whatsoever on Wikipedia to “Chief Communications Officer”. Plenty about the other chief officers you’d expect – finance, information, operations, etc., but not communications.

But, wait, there WAS a “CCO” listed on Wikipedia.

Oh, not “Chief Communications Officer”… but “Chief Credit Officer”. C’mon now! “Chief Credit Officer”?? Good grief.

I believe the language we use with respect to our profession has a profound effect over time on the profession itself. Wouldn’t you counsel your clients the same? Well, now there is a Wikipedia entry for Chief Communications Officer. I made it up. Pretty much from thin air. Give me a hand. Wikipedia is a collaborative effort. Good for people who need help. I need help.

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

Two legends in their own time… and me

And now for further introductions… I’d like to introduce the two gentlemen I have invited to join me on this blog as authors and contributors: Lawrence G. (Larry) Foster and Willard D. (Bill) Nielsen. Full bios are linked as separate pages, but what follows are a few highlights.

Larry Foster was Corporate Vice President of Public Relations for Johnson & Johnson from 1957 to 1990. He established the public relations practice for Johnson & Johnson, and became a biographer of the noted corporate leader Robert Wood Johnson, authoring a book titled, Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel. Larry is one of those people who already has an award named for him, putting him in the category not only of being a legend, but a downright institution. Larry had the extraodinary opportunity to be heading public relations for Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crises of the 1980’s.

Bill Nielsen was Corporate Vice President of Public Affairs of Johnson & Johnson from 1990 through 2004. Bill retired from Johnson & Johnson in December, 2004, after more than three decades in public relations and communications, having spent his first 18 years with Carl Byoir & Associates and Hill and Knowlton. Throughout these years, Bill has been a tireless proponent of the deep importance of public relations and communications to the pursuit of business, and by extension to progress in society itself. Read his talk at the Institute for Public Relations called The Character of PR at 2005. Phenomenal.

Larry and Bill are truly legends in their time.

Me? I’m Ray Jordan, the current Corporate Vice-President of Public Affairs and Communications for Johnson & Johnson, having been in this position since 2005. Are you detecting a pattern? Good, you’re catching on fast.

So, Larry, Bill and I share a common history of responsibility for the communications function in one of the world’s most extraordinary companies. Now, with that heritage, you’d expect this blog to be all about Johnson & Johnson, right?

Well, wrong. Our heritage is shared, and that gives us a perspective on the profound importance of communications and public relations in business, especially in an era like ours with its extremes of communications speed and transparency. Our shared heritage will be used to comment on the functions of communications, public relations and public affairs. We will not opine on the ongoing activities of Johnson & Johnson, however.

Think about it: dealing with the ongoing businesses and reputation of Johnson & Johnson is my day job (ok, I’ll admit, night job too). And as much as I truly cherish the friendship and counsel of Larry and Bill, you would understand that the last thing I need is two generations of predecessors using a public forum like this to advise me day-in and day-out on how to do that job.

So, this forum is framed by the shared experience of three professional communicators who care deeply about their profession and who respect each other’s perspectives. I cannot tell you in advance about the specific topics we will find compelling, nor the synchrony or discord you will find among our views. All I can do is implore you to sit back, adjust your RSS reader, and enjoy…

(Posted by Ray Jordan)

Greetings… and the beginning of our introductions

Greetings and welcome. Please allow me to begin with a few introductions: first, the individual whose comment comprises the title of this blog, Arthur W. Page. Arthur Page was a vice president and director of AT&T in the 1930’s and 40’s, in charge of what we would today call communications and public relations. I won’t replicate here what you can read in the link, but in the course of his writing, Page established a series of public relations heuristics (or “instructions” or “laws”, if you’d like), now generally referred to as the Page Principles.

Want to achieve top- notch public relations or communications performance? It’s relatively straightforward: keep the few Page Principles squarely in mind; then figure out how to implement them rigorously in a multi-faceted commercial, government or non-profit institution employing up to hundreds of thousands of employees serving up to tens of millions of customers or constituents. (I said “straightforward” didn’t I, not necessarily “easy”)

(Posted by Ray Jordan)