Promoting his book in The Times Kaletsky says that after the recent crash capitalism is in a period of transition comparable to the 1930s and 1970s. As a leading US diplomat told him:

“Since the crisis, developing countries have lost interest in the old Washington consensus that promoted democracy and liberal economics. Wherever I go in the world, governments and business leaders talk about the new Beijing consensus — the Chinese route to prosperity and power. The West must come up with a new model of capitalism that’s consistent with our political values. Either we reinvent ourselves or we will lose.”

Kaletsky remarks that at Davos the world’s leaders were in denial. Instead of thinking about the future, it was easier to focus on the past, to quibble about regulations and argue about who was to blame.

Kaletsky thinks governments everywhere will interefere more on economics and maybe less on welfare.

I agree. There’s some big changes coming and it is time we discussed the choices we face.

It strikes me that Kaletsky’s book could be the catalyst that sparks the debate about issues such as:

• How will the West compete with China and India?
• Is Kaletsky right that the world has to choose either a Chinese or a Western model of capitalism?
• Will China remain overtly nationalistic and the West broadly globalising?
• How does AGW fit into this?
• How will the West define optimum state economic interference?
• Will the governing elite find economic policy hard to sell to voters?
• Will international competition lower the chances of bells-and-whistles CSR?

Richard Edelman I fear is on the wrong track when he predicts that Kaletsky’s findings fit well with the dominant messaging emanating from CEOs at this year’s Davos:

“The new expectation of business is as a social actor, doing well while doing good. There is a continuum for business executives, from sole reliance on philanthropy to a more complex change of business process to incorporate sustainability into operations.

My first observation is that CEOs were in denial when they belittled the importance of shareholder value and shareholders. My second is that change is about instability and that does not fit well with sustainability. My third is that the good that business does is business done well. The Edelman approach separates “doing good” from “doing well” as if there was something wrong or embarrassing or negative about the core function of business. The Chinese, on the other hand, have no such doubts about the virtue of business done well.

But we are agreed that things are about to happen. We are agreed that there’s a great debate to be had. And once again, even when I disagree with him, I say hats off to Richard Edelman for raising our horizons and for being at the forefront of discussion. The debate has begun. Watch this space.

No related pages.

The problem is that “get it right” often conflicts with “get it fast”. Three Mile Island got it fast and wrong; there had been a core meltdown and they said they’d be back online soon. The British police embarrassingly got it fast and wrong when they said emphatically they’d shot a terrorist at Stockwell tube; he turned out to be an innocent Brazilian on his way to work. They got it wrong again when Ian Tomlinson died at the G20 summit. The police said he never came into contact with them; this innocent bystander was shown later on video being hit by police.

So the urge to “get it out” and “get it over” can make the crisis live on embarrassingly forever as a stain on the reputation, as it did in all these cases.

“Get it right” should always be what matters most. So I’d add to Mr. Buffett’s advice that if getting it right means a crisis-hit body pauses for thought while the heat’s on, so be it.

The media may be hacked off at first if the people at the centre of the storm beg for forbearance whilst they work out exactly what’s happened. But that phase will pass and then what’s remembered is that no-one got fobbed off with lies. What’s more, if a culture of quick response gets too rooted, organisations develop a line – a self-serving line – which can’t then be shifted in favour of the truth.

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My profession seems to be obsessing on stakeholder relationship management. I see why. When the angry mob is howling at the gates, it seems sensible to pretend that crowds have wisdom. Like politicians, media and most bosses in the West, PRs are terrified of seeming elitist. They believe that leadership is no longer possible, or is toxic.

I have often banged-on about how PRs fear that corporations are seen as evil, so now mistakenly believe they must wear a bleeding heart on their sleeve. That’s not my point today. I want to stress here that it is a profound problem that PRs and many organisations – from firms to political parties – dread leadership and responsibility.

There’s a shortage of adulthood

What I’m on about today is related to a wider social problem. I think it’s time the grown-ups behaved like adults.

We live in a society in which people strut about in a macho culture of bullying, slap-head, hyper-fit, scowling aggression, but at the slightest set-back everyone’s weeping and in therapy.

Big cars, sharp suits and watches the size of dinner plates don’t confer anything worthwhile on a person. Aren’t you struck by how fragile the self-esteem of so many modern pseudo-adults seems to be?

We have watched stars, CEOs and politicians behave like greedy, petulant, hysterical teenagers rather than heroes, but what is striking about many of them is that they have so little fortitude. Most CEOs disappeared from view when the credit crunch struck. We just heard how the British Prime Minister’s inner circle phones bullying help-lines to complain about him. Their confidence is wafer thin.

At this year’s Davos we were told that profit, shareholder value and shareholders are no longer priorities. All stakeholders are now equal. Such talk came from Western leaders. The bosses in the East held their nerve.

We need corporations rooted in a solid culture

It’s this bifurcation I’m after. I want to try to make it understood that ordinary decency, a workable sense of fairness, a sellable ideal of enlightened self-interest - proper trust between firms and employees and customers and wider society – has to flow from a far deeper sense of corporate culture than can ever be achieved by becoming a weather vane.

Today I want to try to get a proper handle on this particular concern: that our clients cannot afford to aim to become whatever the ether-mob, the gobby bloggers, the placard-wavers fancy. They can’t pick up a self-definition by triangulating the top three or four messages they get from a consultant. Even if they did, they’d have to live it and that involves sticking with it and that involves ignoring the next fashion which hurtles into view out of the mists.

I am tolerably sure that floating along on public opinion is never good. It sometimes leads to rushing weirs and crashing Niagras, but more often to long dreary shoals where no-one’s boat floats.

The public says it wants to humble corporations and corporate bosses, just like it  says it wants to humble political parties and politicians. So it has created the risk that firms, parties and institutions become rudderless (sorry, I couldn’t resist another water analogy).

In fact though, if there’s one thing the public fears and distrusts more than strong, mean, unaccountable and self-serving public bodies and leaders, it’s bodies which are too weak to do their job.

Before we can have listening and flexible firms, we need to have firms which are quite strong and quite clear about what they actually want to be.

So the perpetual self-abnegation involved in stakeholder relationship management is a folly. I believe it is a chronic abdication of responsibility. It is also constitutes a surrender to short-term market and social instrumentalism.

It is a myth that the best reputations must be sustained by stakeholder management crowd sourcing. Good reputations are not based on living within limits set by consumer or voter research and stakeholder engagement, but on breaking down barriers and achieving something significant.

Reputations, trust and success

The best reputations arise from doing things and from keeping promises and delivering results and sometimes from managing failures well. Reputations that endure do so because they inspire.

Great companies and governments transform the world by creating demand and conditions that didn’t exist before. They often do so at great risk in the face of fierce opposition.

There’s more for PR to do than to get their clients to reflect what audiences say they expect or claim that they will accept. There’s more for PR to do than to try to forge consensuses before advising firms to make decisions. Good PR acknowledges that what’s wanted in society is not fixed. Great PR helps society transform the prevailing perceptions of sustainability on business, cultural and environmental matters.

Successful countries from the democratic UK and America to today’s China and India were not built on the back of listening, engagement and consensus, but on the back of courageous leadership and innovation. Let’s review a few examples.

According to Edelman’s trust survey, trust in business and government is strongest where stakeholder relationship management matters least and among the weakest where it seemingly matters most. By a significant margin, China leads the world in both categories. India and Indonesia score highly. While Russia records higher trust levels than do France and Germany.

Moreover, the PC, the internet and Google’s search engine are all examples of top-down disruptive innovations, not ones driven by bottom-up demand-led engagement-based consultation. They did not arise from listening to the market or to stakeholder groups.

Google

Google’s search engine was an innovative marriage between algorithms and computing power. Google created its own demand.

The motto of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was “question everything”. As this review of recent books on Google explains, they were like postindustrial Henry Fords, using digital technology to eliminate all inefficiencies in traditional economies.

Ironically, Google’s Eric Schmidt’s recent Washington Post piece, Erasing our Innovation Deficit, advocates bottom up crowd-sourced innovation. It under-estimates the risk-taking top down investment and leadership which helped Google succeed, the internet take-off and the US put a man on the moon: see here. However, that weakness should not detract too much from the mostly timely, insightful points Schmidt makes.

Unloved Microsoft and lovable Apple

Microsoft at its peak never won our empathy. Microsoft never engaged with stakeholders. It hardly consulted anybody. Bill Gates wielded Microsoft’s power like a blunt instrument against all comers, including customers and partners. But if Microsoft was always unlovable, Apple is its polar opposite. Its fans adore it, believing it to represent an anti-corporate, culturally-fresh, arty sort of an entity. That’s mostly nonsense, but in any case Apple achieves this myth-making with top-down communication and command and control management.

Rock ‘n’ Roll

The electric guitar transformed music. It created new possibilities by creating new sounds. It helped spawn Rock ‘n’ Roll, including Punk, that outraged public opinion. But its hall of fame contains some of the greatest reputations of the last century. But as Simon Cowell shows, even this grass-roots business is managed from the top, even if it draws inspiration and talent from the bottom.

Ryanair: nobody’s friend

Last, Michael O’Leary’s Ryan Air’s low-cost digitally-networked business model revolutionised the airline industry. It was an achievement of an aggressive innovative genius, not of stakeholder collaboration, which he despises.

These examples provide evidence of Joseph Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction that drives the capitalist market. They support my argument that PRs who think our trade is all about aligning values, listening, engagement and relationships need a reality check; though I’m very pro using those techniques in the right context.

Key manifesto messages

In contrast, I say PRs should be more prepared to defend, advocate and promote risk taking. They should be less concerned about what’s acceptable and what’s popular. They should be more willing to celebrate elitism and success. They should be less concerned with the crowd as it is currently constituted or inclined to emote and opine.

PRs should be more willing to celebrate the arrogance of the change-makers who bring innovation to society. We should be less concerned with bad headlines and with tyranny of media produced crises. Instead we should focus our campaigns on achieving positive outcomes and on getting things done. We should be the torch bearers honing the narratives and messages of the people and forces which challenge or ignore society’s constraints. In that game PR plays a transformative role.

The blog which got me going

Here’s the article that inspired this manifesto: To listen, to engage: empty buzzwords? Let’s discuss. It sums up the risk adverse stakeholder relationship management approach of mainstream academic PR. According to this school of thought progress depends on winning the public’s trust by establishing empathy. For them it is all about connecting with stakeholders by gathering sense:

“The consequences of the interpretation-of the comprehension-of the gathered sense need to be explicitly related to the listener’s decision making process and are inherently fuzzy, non linear and situational. The competencies are creativity, feasibility, and time framing with their respective tools.”

This piece of gobbledygook is typical of current PR thinking. It springs from a misplaced faith in Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model of PR. Amusingly the author is so sure of his ground that he asks What comes after Grunig? and replies, “the answer to that looming question is that after Grunig…comes Grunig.”

The danger here is that Grunig’s supporters have ended up trying religiously to make reality fit the theory. That’s the trap, if I’m any judge of PR-related text, that the Stockholm Accords, arising from the Global Alliance’s World Public Relations Forum debate, is falling into right now.

In summary, my point is that PR is a multi-faceted, flexible profession. Sometimes it is top-down and one-sided. Sometime it is a two-way interactive real-time force. In whichever way it does its job, however, PR is an objectives-driven art rather than a science that’s reducible to orthodox formulas. My take home message is that PR makes its most useful contribution to society when it advocates transformative risk-taking on which great reputations are built.

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Who was Tiger Wood’s audience when he apologized? Surely, he wasn’t speaking to the public because he has not really offended it, has he? Surely he wasn’t addressing his wife either?

On the contrary, he said his wife was blameless, which immediately provoked the responses (a) we knew that already, dummy; and (b) now I don’t like you for the way you’ve spoken about your wife in a PR thingy. So let’s get this straight: until the apology none of us had any reason to think he was a prat, like it was our business anyway.

The truth is presumably that Tiger Wood’s made his awkward apology for the benefit of his future at least partly with his sponsors. But the thought that they were previously completely oblivious to Tiger’s love of luscious ladies is too naive to believe. Tiger was rampant in his enthusiasms off the course. So if Tiger made a mess of his apology it was perhaps because it was insincere except for the regret at getting caught and having to clean up the mess.

But whatever the critics like me may say, what the hell else could Tiger Woods do? And doing it badly may be better than not doing it at all. The reality is that there’s a threatening popular culture at play in society which shrills, “apologise, reform, move on, or we’ll bring your house down.” Besides, one needs to shut things down: if Mr Woods hadn’t said his piece – at length and comprehensively – his re-entry to public life would have been dogged by the media’s sense that there was still some meat on the bone.

One could blame the media. But I don’t. The media reflects popular culture rather than makes it. No, it is the the two-faced smirking sponsors that I blame, and the public whose judgement they fear, of course. Tiger Woods couldn’t resist, for instance, taking a swipe at Accenture in his apology, whom he called “friends”, but who actually walked out on him.

On the face of it, the sponsors are right to be nervous. According to a survey conducted for PRWeek about the John Terry affair, 62 per cent said footballers’ personal lives shaped public opinion of them and a significant 71 per cent thought footballers appeared “above the law”. The funny thing is that neither John Terry or Tiger Woods has broken any laws, but that’s an aside. The public seems to demand of public figures what it would never demand of itself.

Sponsors fear cross-contamination between their chosen ones’ fallen reputations and theirs. This has created a risk-adverse climate. They and the public have become stuck in a cynical cycle of expressing moral outrage at exposures of what would once have been of little concern to anybody but the families of those involved.

But I don’t think we should take the public’s prejudices too seriously because the public doesn’t take them seriously either. So my call is to bin the research findings.

Here comes more advice. If sponsors want to appear authentic, they need to stop creeping to shallow and shifting public opinion. When the sponsors’ stars are found wanting in some way, they should stick by him or her. I am pretty sure the sponsors’ realism and their loyalty will resonate well with the public.

Can’t we respond like adults to the frailties of our super stars? What do you say?

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I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There’s parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane fly away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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When Obama was elected some PR theorists said it was the dawn of a new age of democratic and decentralized public engagement. In the words of Richard Edelman, delivering the Grunig lecture at University of Maryland, the main evidence for this was:

…Obama campaign’s mobilization of five million volunteers, who are able to make decisions on how best to contact voters, attract funds and communicate on social media.

But one year on, the evidence does not stand up. The trend today is toward disengaged elitism, not mass engagement.

As Obama’s popularity plummets, Jacob Weisberg’s writing for Slate blames the childish, ignorant American public – not politicians – for his country’s political and economic crisis. He whines about how the GOP has put the nation in an angry, populist, tea-partying mood.

The Tea Party Movement is a kick in the goolies (English slang) to the Obama Presidency. According to Reason Magazine, the campaign is materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown’s election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates. It adds that its core messages appeal beyond the movement’s ranks.

Meanwhile, Kurt Andersen rants in New York Magazine about how the walls that the founding fathers erected to contain the mob may no longer hold. He says irregular passions and artful misrepresentations are being whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web (the author of Reset is dead set against nonsense and the worst aspects of modernism).

In contrast, Andersen describes the essence of America’s democracy as being, by the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much. Lamenting the emergence of the tea-party citizens, he says they are:

…under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy.

It seems, then, that critical thinkers are “deserting” dialogue and increasingly seeing Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model as a threat.

The reason is that Middle America is feared. It’s a case of What’s The Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank’s bestseller, which attempted to solve the conundrum of how so-called ruling class conservatism became the creed of millions of ordinary Americans. His answer was that the masses were so stupid they’d been duped. Our old friends, cognitive dissonance, false consciousness and denial are in play.

Obama nearly let his elitist contempt for the masses – the white and black working class – out of the bag during his campaign with his ‘cling to guns and religion’, remark.

Anybody who still harbours a hope today that Obama’s regime is listening to criticism from friend or foe, let alone engaged in dialogue, hasn’t taken note of the recent rant from the White House’s chief of sfaff Rahm Emanuel. He’s been dismissing liberals as “retards”.

Regular readers of this blog know that I admire elite thought and achievement. They will also know that I believe that it is the job of leaders to lead.

I’m a critic of the two-way symmetrical “orthodoxy” that Grunig espouses. It is my belief that if one seeks answers or to find one’s direction in the crowd, one comes up with confusion (or worse, a horrible gungho certainty), which leads to paralysis (or a parity of unpleasantness).

Nevertheless, I maintain that dialogue, consultation and two-way communication has its place. But so does decision-making, which must not be shirked.

In reality, I don’t think there is any correct model for conducting PR. That’s because PR is an art, not a science. It is more results-driven than method-driven. It is a flexible tool designed for a specific purpose, which comes from above. Put simply, PR serves whoever pays for it, or whomever else it is accountable to, including the law and other stakeholders.

Moreover, how could anybody have ever really thought that somebody with Obama’s preacher-style approach to politics could ever become the leader of a new engaged movement based on real-time dialogue?

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As somebody who once was accused of organising a race riot in Handsworth, Birmingham, I know something about definitions.

My first defence was to say that if it was organised, it was not a riot. The police perhaps kindly ignored that challenging thought and moved on to my second line, and accepted it: I was attending a conference in London when it happened.

But I digress. Here’s some examples of some crises.

When Edward VIII abdicated from the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry his American lover Wallis Simpson, it created a crisis. It did so because it threatened the nation’s sense of itself and might even have wobbled the UK’s constitution. The credit crunch was a crisis. It threatened to very severely disrupt capitalism by destroying huge amounts of wealth (especially savings) and confidence. Note: what actually happened was very nasty but has so far fallen well short of what was threatened. So it was a crisis and we seem to have got through it.

Those events threatened abrupt or decisive change. They created very real and deep fear. The worst outcomes were seriously in play, and did not materialise.

There are, of course, cases where dramas needlessly become full-blown crises.

For example, there are the cases where people imagine a danger which would be dreadful if it did occur. One was Three Mile Island in 1979. The ironic thing about Three Mile Island was that the worst case scenario core meltdown occurred within the first minutes of the accident. It was such a non-event that nobody noticed, not even the plant’s operators. Meanwhile, the world’s media stood outside the plant for weeks hyping up the “what ifs”. (BTW: Three Mile Island still generates electricity today, just as electricity was generated by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors until very recently.)

Here’s another twist. Disasters are quite often not crises. That’s to say, a chaos is unleashed, but nothing very much is threatened. When Richard Branson interrupted his holiday to fly to the scene of a Cumbrian train crash in 2007, that was not crisis management, so much as good PR and (for all we know) a compassionate act of a good boss responding to a disaster. Of course, if Branson hadn’t turned up, and was thought callous, that might have produced a drama for Virgin, since one cannot afford nowadays to be invisible at such moments. Even so, it would not have been a crisis.

Interestingly, when it comes to accidents, firms rarely get punished as hard as did Windscale, Value Jet, and Union Carbide, all of which anyway survived their genuine crises. Yet it is at least possible that rebranding a disaster or crisis-hit organisation merely produces a legacy of bad-taste jokes and ill-feeling about slippery PR. That’s to say, there may be a deep understanding among the public that accidents do happen. That understanding can withstand, I maintain, the media approach (and victim reproach) which tend to assume that total safety is available and would have been achieved except for the villainy of firms and governments.

As people speculate about Toyota’s fate, the fact is that there’s never been a major car firm destroyed by a recall or by an accident. Companies destroyed by sudden events are normally in the class of totally corrupt Enron and its grey accomplice Arthur Andersen. In both companies trust collapsed because their skulduggery accurately defined what their brands were about. Their reputations were beyond repair, and quite rightly so.

Then there’s the likes of Ratners. The collapse of that company had more to do with a loss of nerve in response to a gaffe than, arguably, necessity dictated. But Ratners’ experience was another exception that stands out precisely for that reason. If you doubt that, just look at the positive share prices of oil companies today and then review their accident-prone histories.

But let’s stay contemporary here. Toyota’s worldwide recall is not a crisis in the true sense of the term. It is actually a drama focused on a narrow range of issues. The chances are slim that it will become a long-term disaster for Toyota. That’s not to say that slow sales, halted production lines and global recalls of millions of cars is business as usual. It is just to remind us to retain a sense of perspective.

For a start, who’s panicking? Who thinks their Toyota (their car, their share, their job) is really threatened here? Here’s the important thought: we see this storm and we think, “Toyota’s a damn good car-maker and will be an even better one after this”. Maybe a few victims (some half-embarrassed that they panicked instead of finding neutral), with their US lawyers rubbing their hands behind them. But I don’t think anyone seriously believes that Toyota’s existence is threatened by its current problems. Though I imagine that the pressure must be bloody uncomfortable for Toyota’s bosses, and not good for the nerves of Japan’s stock exchange in the midst of recession.

Before we lose our nerve, or tell Toyota to, we should remind ourselves how well Ford survived its tribulations with its “exploding” fuel tanks in the Pinto and Mercury Bobcats (1.5 vehicle recall). It was claimed they killed 27 people. Ford ordered the recall – and did not contest the accusations – because it was more motivated by supposed public perception than by what it knew to be true (The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America, by Paul H Weaver, a Touch Stone Book).

So most things labeled as being a crises aren’t any such thing.

We PRs need to consider very carefully whether we should avoid the elephant trap which is laid for us here. We should perhaps develop a determination to avoid reacting to every drama and panic and even disaster as though it were a crisis for our clients. The media, after all, is in the business of making a crisis out of drama, and we all too often risk doing half their work for them.

Heather Yaxley writing on PR Conversations hit the notes well recently. She attacked PR crisis management theorists for their panicky hyper-active overreaction to dramas:

Tell it fast becomes tell it before you know anything.  Tell it all means let the media and its rent-a-quote experts speculate about worst case scenarios.  Be open means unlimited social media engagement (regardless of what the legal or other ramifications may be). Have the CEO (or celebrity if a personal faux pas has occurred) lead communications with mandatory appearances on chatshows, a tour of news stations,  and a YouTube apology.  Mea culpa – the universal panacea: “I’m sorry if…” – anyone resisting the calls is bullied until they comply.  The pound of flesh must be paid.

I fear she rightly roughs me up a little for my recent piece Where was Mr Toyoda yesterday? She certainly compellingly argues that every so-called crisis is different. She adds that too many PRs try to impose commoditized crisis management plans onto unique situations:

It’s a comfort blanket of how to…, what not to do…, common mistakes and miracle cures.

I would add that PRs often corrupt the everyday management of risk in business. The sensible cry from PRs for clients to stay ahead of the game risks turning the commonsense desire to spot problems before they occur into crisis management paranoia.

The result is the creation of a risk-adverse culture which inhibits innovation. That’s a point that is well argued in Paul H. Weaver’s The Suicidal Corporation. It is why I’m recommending people read it. The creation of a risk-adverse culture helps spread indecision and insecurity. During media hurricanes it becomes a sort of PR own goal. In other words, making decisions under under pressure calls for risk-taking, but risk-taking like winning and losing is habit forming.

The truth is that people admire and respect risk-takers and they make allowances for their failures. Moreover, unpopularity in the media is just as temporary and superficial as popularity. Bad headlines don’t destroy good reputations, no more than positive ones make them. Good reputations are based on innovation, delivery on promises and a certain arrogance based on success. They are sustained by people’s experience of the brand  (El Buli, Ryanair, Apple, Toyota and much more).

Hence, rather than becoming hyper-active advocates of risk-aversion, PRs should instead do more to inspire courage and balls into the mindset of their clients. PRs could do much more to push back on media and other agendas and to help their clients ride out the storms they face with their integrity intact.

The reassuring lesson from most Toyota-type troubles is that consumers are as quick to forgive as they are to condemn. So I’ll risk a prediction. There’s every chance, as Insigna’s Jonathan Hemus says here in The Guardian, that Toyota will come out of its storm with its reputation enhanced (though his advice is too skewed toward institutionalized risk aversion for my liking).

So a crisis is a crisis when it threatens the viability of something or other. Otherwise it doesn’t qualify. The job of PRs is to make sure situations never do qualify or to clear up the mess if the you know what hits the fan.

Oh, I never did advocate that people riot, dread the thought. But I do own up to having been a revolutionary, which is something completely different.

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This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was very downbeat. Still, even as profits are becoming difficult to make, we are still (Davos-style) asked to believe they’re not that important anyway.

To take one important example, Edelman’s trust survey reports that respondents rated financial returns at or near the bottom of their priority list in nearly all of the world’s major economic regions. Business, it seems, should be more concerned with wider social issues and causes that are not necessarily connected to its core purpose.

What’s this? False consciousness? Cognitive dissonance? Denial?

As Sandra MacLeod puts it – in an interesting piece here on sustainability and CR – the aha factor was “we can do well by doing good.” She makes some good points about CR, but they’re not ones that will help companies finance innovation.

Meanwhile, business leaders Twitterd from Davos things like “we have to change the success measurement system beyond just money and share price” if we are to rebuild trust.

Few business leaders at Davos felt confident enough to question the notion that shareholders and profit don’t matter most. Few argued that one big problem is that there’s too much waffle. It was almost taken for granted that all stakeholders are now equals.

So, I welcomed the robust counter view in The Times today from Jonathan Waxman, Professor of Oncology at Imperial College London. He makes a compelling case in defence of the importance of the bottom line. He highlights how much harm to the greater good can be done when the profit motive is undermined:

Today it is unusual to see people die in the industrialised world from diphtheria or pneumonia, and we are at the edge of developing effective therapies for Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes.

But where do these marvellous advances originate from? Not, as you might imagine, from the golden glades of the University of Arcadia. The universities have elaborated hypotheses and elucidated mechanisms, but it is the profit motive and the market that have been responsible for these life-improving changes. Big Pharma, that boggle-eyed devil in the undergrowth, has brought forward virtually all the drugs that make our lives liveable.

He points out how the bureaucratization of risk management by over-regulation strikes at the bottom line and sidelines R&D. This is no small matter.

SmithGlaxoKline is axing 6000 staff, mostly from its R&D departments, and AstraZeneca is cutting 8000 more, while Pfizer its slashing its R&D budget from an equivalent of around $11 billion today to around $8 billion and $8.5 billion by 2012. As Waxman says:

The bottom line does matter to the drug industry — and Britain has created a regulatory environment that makes it harder for them to make money and produce the drugs that we depend upon.

He calls for an overhaul of the regulatory system. I concur. I would add that in the interest of the greater good we need to overhaul our attitude to profit, and the bottom line, and to rehabilitate its importance in the public mind. That’s a pressing PR challenge.

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Forrester Research, the independent technology and market research company, is banning its researchers from blogging. It seems that the “personal” nature of blogging and Twitting is a challenge to Forrester’s business model

Forrester is wary of allowing its staff an opportunity to develop an exit strategy around a social media presence focused on themselves. For a useful report, see Forrester crimps bloggers: epic E2.0 fail.

The Forrester stance reflects that made by the likes of the WSJ, Apple and some British football clubs. This emerging trend challenges head-on the advice provided by many so called social media gurus. One such example is Neville Hobson in the UK. He advocates making corporate communication personal, which was advice I dismissed in a recent debate with him: Corporate blogging: now it’s personal?

Meanwhile, David Cameron has ordered Conservative candidates to clear their remarks made on Twitter with head office. It would seem that keeping control of the message is top priority for the Conservatives, just as it is for most corporates.

Anyway, social media is not going to play a major role in the forthcoming UK election. An exception to that will be the sites of outsiders such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, both of whom have a direct link to mainstream media and neither of which is constrained by party discipline. Curiously, whilst they’re great at dishing the dirt, neither is especially interesting on – as it were – political philosophy.

Another exception will be the BNP, which will hide out on the web because its members fear canvassing in public, and because it will not get a “fair” hearing in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, Obama’s link to the social media world has been exposed as being just a one election campaign stand, rather than the ongoing relationship it was reported to have been. In short, Obama surfed a wave of enthusiasm that does not exist in the UK today, and which no longer exists in the US either.

Last, the Edelman’s 2010 trust survey provided some startling insights into a new and rapid trend reversal:

“Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent. Trust in information from digital media – blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news – remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

To be fair, Edelman reports that trust in all media has fallen, but mainstream media, it would seem, is holding up much better than social media in the credibility stakes. In particular, business magazines are doing very well indeed when it comes to being trusted (here’s a useful summary from Silicon Valley Watcher).

Counter-intuitively, I think that all these trends reveal that social media is coming of age. I believe that we have learned a lot from a period of experimentation and false hopes over the last few years. Now all that remains is for some social media “gurus” to catch up with reality and to start giving sound advice to the corporate world.

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They died in August 2009. This weekend Toyota will start work on 2.3 million recalled cars in the US by inserting a stainless steel bar under the accelerator pedal to stop it sticking (though the cars in that recall do not include the type the family was driving). However, the company will also recall millions more cars in which there’s a threat that the mat could trap the accelerator.

Many people – including some accident investigators and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple - doubt that Toyota is addressing the real problem. They claim that it lies in the car’s software governing the electronic throttle control rather than with the pedals and mats.

There’s been 26 reported incidences in Europe. But news that Toyota first dismissed cases of accelerators sticking as a quality rather than a safety issue has damaged trust here. Meanwhile, the US media and the internet are full of stories of cars driving over cliffs. It’s a PR nightmare.

We know from experience that perception and fear are not easy forces to combat. Especially when at least four lives have been lost and customers are fearful for their own safety (Toyota used the adjective “rare” carefully to keep the level of risk in perspective).

But it is no wonder that the fallout from this episode has hit Toyota’s sales hard. Some Toyota owners are now too scared to drive their cars. Lawsuits are stacking up.

So Toyota had no alternative but to put the full weight of its brand’s reputation behind fixing the safety and the perception problem.

To its credit, in October 2009 the company’s president Mr Toyoda — grandson of the company’s founder — expressed his sorrow over the deaths and he apologised for the company’s performance in the US. He candidly admitted that Toyota was shamefully unprepared for the global economic crisis that has devastated the auto industry, and is a step away from “capitulation to irrelevance or death.”

However, yesterday, the same Mr Toyoda did not lead Toyota’s press conference in Japan which was called to set out the company’s global recall policy. That was a mistake. His absence was an embarrassing PR distraction, as highlighted in The Times today.

Therefore, it is difficult to challenge the view, expressed in the same article, of Ed Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research in Tokyo:

“The whole thing has been very badly done. They hid from the problem for a long time. They didn’t attack it with full energy and they didn’t react with full energy. It’s crazy that they spend so much on advertising and now they are letting all the goodwill get washed away.”

Toyota better have some clear answers when they come to Washington later this month for their Congressional hearings into the crisis. And Mr Toyoda would be well advised to come in person to face the grilling.

Nevertheless, I rate the chances as high that done right Toyota can fix, reform and move on from this dual crisis of recalls and recession just as many other carmakers have done in the past.

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