He writes about the sometimes bizarre personal behaviour of his colleagues, and asks:

“What is interesting is why politicians take the risk. … My theory is that it’s precisely because of the supreme self-control you have to exercise at the top … Your free-bird instincts want to spring you from that prison of self-control. Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control.

“Suddenly you are transported out of your world of intrigue … and put on a desert island of pleasure, out of it all, released, carefree … It’s an explosion of irresponsibility in an otherwise responsible life.”

Alice Thomson in today’s The Times amusingly remarks that Tony stops just short of advocating adultery as a form of stress relief. But she notes how the white lie of former prime minister Stanley Baldwin that “we are a Cabinet of faithful husbands” ended under Blair. She quotes him saying:

“They [the public] now understand, they empathise, and to some extent they indulge.”

Former Thatcherite minister Cecil Parkinson was never forgiven for fathering a child with Sarah Keays in the 1980s. Fallen Tory minister and now sports commentator David Mellor will always be defined by Antonia de Sancha sucking his toe, says Thomson. But former New Labour ministers Robin Cook, John Prescott and David Blunkett are now more likely to be assessed on their political records or even their croquet playing than their off-side affairs with women, she adds.

I’d love it to be true. But the signs are not good. Foreign Secretary William Hague’s special adviser has just resigned over “untrue and malicious” allegations made against him. Supposedly the two shared a room on the election campaign trail more than once. Who cares what two men did in a hotel room? Their families, perhaps. But the rest of us don’t give a damn if the married shadow and then actual Foreign Secretary is gay or bisexual or not. It would be rather fun if he declared himself a modern metrosexual man in the style of David Beckham, and then still denied the charges.

Of course it doesn’t seem all that likely that a millionaire author would need to bunk up with a staffer as though he were a broke sportsman or musician on tour. But there you go. And one might conjecture why if the events were wholly innocent why WH didn’t just show the media the finger. Though it is plausible that WH felt his wife’s dignity was owed a full-on denunciation of the hacks and their innuendo. Mind you, if the accusations were true, it would still be proper for WH to lie his head off in the style of Hollywood’s “A Guide For The Married Man“, directed with a light touch by Gene Kelly, for the sake of anyone he cared about who cared.

Tony Blair is fluent in French and he has made French values (Swiss, Italian and German ones, too) almost acceptable in British public life. Surely, given that boost, now is the time for David Cameron to say in defence of Hague and his adviser – “move on, it is at worst a family matter. It is of no concern of ours. By all accounts the adviser is a star and good at his job. Both men deny ever having a relationship. Let’s call next business, please”.

I’ll come back to the meat of Tony’s memoirs when I’ve read them myself. But here’s a few first impressions. There’s something very confusing and masked in Tony Blair’s book. Sure, it is confessional: Princess Diana-style. But is it honest about the big issues? My first take is that Tony is all over-the-place and gushing in the book. That’s not helpful when one is interested in finding a rational core to what went on. But then again, his was a three-term emotional roller-coaster of a government from beginning to end. His memoirs, I suppose, were always going to be about him and how he feels and felt, rather than what really went on and why.

Available now: Blair’s memoir A Journey (Hutchinson) priced £25.

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Apropos Paul Seaman’s excellent coverage of the trouble at HP, a big FT analysis piece (“Moral Hazards”, 14/15 August 2010) suggests that there’s a new and very strict “moral” climate about. In particular, the modern CEO has to be virtue personified. The FT notes that CEOs aren’t often castigated for sexual failings, per se. However, if affairs are linked to employees (see the recent case of Mr Hurd, the CEO of HP), then it becomes a matter of abuse of power. If they are linked to competitors, then conflicts of interest are cited. Being casual or naughty about expenses is bad in a more obvious way: because no-one else is allowed lax accounting. (Again, see the Hurd case.)

It’s hard to argue against these versions of the new strictness. Leaders should show a good example, and so on.

I am less thrilled by the way any kind of lying is now bad news, even if it’s small stuff done to cover up embarrassment rather than bad behaviour (see the case of Mr Browne, of BP). In the good old days, white lies were regarded as inevitable and invaluable and there’s merit in that old hypocrisy.

Still, if we insist on banging on about openness, and perhaps we should, then I see that it becomes harder to keep little convenient zones of condoned mendacity.

But I am uneasy about this new Puritanism and I doubt that it will be kept in proper check.

I meet a very wide range of leaders of every kind and always in conditions of strictest privacy. I think I can say that it has taught me that “there’s none so odd as folk”. I mean that it is almost impossible to predict who will have dark secrets, terrible doubts, awesome strength in a crisis, great honour, sudden feebleness. Some people show all of these in a fortnight.

Of all the fallibilities people show I’d say sexual weaknesses (or secrets) outmatch greed, cruelty, fear and a whole bunch of others put together for frequency and career-crashing potential.

So I repeat the earlier caveat: sexual shenanigans (or secrets) should only matter insofar as they are a corporate problem, which ought to be not often. But in the real world, sex still has enormous power to drag reputations under.

This is part of a wider problem.

We see already in politics that there’s a demand for a new institutional and personal purity. The same taste seems to be spreading to firms. The worrying thing of course is to wonder whether we want colourless parliaments peopled by colourless politicians, or colourless firms led by colourless managers.

It seems obvious that politicians can’t be any good and be quite normal. They have to be risk-takers of a high order, and the more so if they are operating in a lively democracy which tips people out of power pretty swiftly and even chaotically. Many good politicians are chancers, and sometimes on a large scale. I should say that scandal is inevitable.

Firms are a bit different, because they are so diverse. A one-man band, or a family firm, or a partnership can be as odd as its customers like. A public firm, especially a large one, is much more likely to be dull, and perhaps needs to be. But should we want its bosses to be very dull?

As a rough guide, the more entrepreneurial an outfit, the more its bosses will be a little naughty. It follows that only if you want an accountants’ paradise can you ordain a firm run by the well-behaved. (And it isn’t guaranteed that accountants will be either dull or decent, of course.)

Here is a way out. We can require the bosses of firms only to be as honest and as well-behaved as they promise to be. I know: you’d still not know whether you’d trusted a liar. But you take my point. We can be very strict about the stated rules, but beyond that, a person’s private life should indeed be private. I think that is Max Moseley’s excellent point as he insists that the media should not have been allowed to pry into his sex-games. But we see the difficulty.

Max is saying he has a right to his privacy. It doesn’t follow, but I think it is implied, that there are lots of things which might damage a person’s reputation or standing which he or she has a right to keep secret. I agree. I don’t think it’s fair that a leader should be required to satisfy the public that they wouldn’t be shocked by his or her private behaviour. So the public should be shielded from it.

That’s the deal. CEOs (like teachers, footballers and all the so-called role-models) must be squeaky clean in a quite new way, and be shielded from prurience in a quite new way. Only if we have the sense not to pry can we be guaranteed to see good behaviour wherever we look.

No related pages.

Here’s the essence of Professor Karnani’s case:

“Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.”

Here’s the essence of Mr. Edelman’s reply:

“[Edelman's case studies] demonstrate that contrary to Karnani’s assertion, the decision isn’t whether to run an effective, “smart” business or a socially responsible, engaged one. Performance with purpose (a term used by PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi) is not an either/or proposition.”

Now, as it happens, Richard Edelman makes a good point. But he also misses it completely. The core social purpose of a corporation is to provide whatever goods or services it is in business to deliver – be that street cleaning, cigarettes, incubators, medicines, machine guns or bubble gum. Mr Edelman, in contrast, believes that a smart business is an engaged one with a purpose. Engaged in what else other than what it does, I ask.

Mr. Edelman tries to explain it with three examples drawn from his client base:

“Unilever’s Omo Detergent adopted the “Dirt is Good” campaign – aligning with the brand’s business proposition by asserting that “every child has the right” to be a child and get dirty. After fielding new academic research highlighting the importance of outside play for the physical and social development of children and engaging parents, governments and NGOs to take action, the campaign triggered real social change – Vietnamese schools agree to assess national provisions for school recess while the brand commits to build 100 playgrounds over three years.”

He’s shooting himself in the foot. Unilever’s campaign has self-interest at its core. The aim here is to produce more dirty children that will require the use of more of its product to clean up the mess. Moreover, from my experience as a parent, kids don’t need much encouragement to get their clothes dirty or to play outside (try stopping them).

He tells us how the Clorox Brita’s FilterForGood campaign:

“…inspires consumers – and communities – to take a personal pledge and even engage in (planet) healthy competition with others to reduce their bottled-water use, as well as informs them about other environmentally-friendly decisions that each can personally make.”

In essence, he’s positioning his client’s “healthy product” against the bottled water industry’s and mains suppliers’ supposedly environmentally unfriendly or unhealthy alternatives. That is, for as long as Brita remains a client and come the day Edelman represents, say, San Pellegrino, or has to convince us that a utility produces a product fit to drink straight from the tap. This should warn us that the “public interest” Mr. Edelman favours is often just the selfish interests of his clients.

Then, if those two weak cases weren’t enough, he adds:

“The Pepsi Refresh Project, partnering with NGOs and experts, is directly crowd sourcing ideas from consumers to foster innovation in social good – awarding more than $20 million this year to fund local community initiatives and ideas that refresh the world.”

Regardless of the trendy crowd sourcing, that’s just a classic – old-style – brand marketing and awareness-raising campaign. It is, actually, a very low budget one for a company with $9.4 billion in revenues.

One wonders why Mr. Edelman didn’t mention another esteemed client: Ryan Air. It is one which is likely to accuse Professor Karnani of being soft rather than harsh in his defence of profit. Ryan Air states unambiguously that shareholder value comes before its staff, customers, partners and suppliers. Ryan Air has little time for stakeholder PR or for CSR, except as the butt of jokes. Here’s the brief that Edelman pitched for:

“Wanted: PR firm who is able to LOL at the advertising gags, and doesn’t mind poking fun at expensive airports, rivals, prime ministers … and even popes! No precious, sensitive, politically correct or clock-watching publicists need apply. Long hours, stamina and patience of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel, are all prequisites.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against corporations acting responsibly or managing their risks properly. I accept Ryan Air is an outlier; though it is one which has moved an entire industry’s behaviour in its direction. It is just that most CSR is shallow dishonest nonsense that sails close to propaganda, as BP’s Beyond Petroleum clearly did.

It is precisely such transparent charades and double-speak that generates the disabling cynicism that undermines public confidence in modern institutions. So there’s something refreshing about Professor Karnani’s bluntness and Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary’s loud mouth.

Of course, in one sense there’s a bit of voodoo coming from both Mr. Edelman and Professor Karnani. The problem with deciding between profit-first or profit-with-purpose is that they are difficult to separate. Firms live within society and have all kinds of unavoidable obligations to fulfill as they produce profit.

One has to ask some tough questions about Mr. Edelman’s motivation, however. His main concern seems not to be the public good as much as helping firms restore their credibility and by so doing avoid state interference in their affairs. He says:

“We are at a very important moment in the relationship between business and society. The catastrophic economic events of September 2008 undermined the confidence in the private sector’s ability to self-regulate. Bankruptcies of centerpiece companies in the global economy, such as GM, plus reputation issues for leaders in finance (Goldman Sachs), energy (BP) and transport (Toyota) have called into question the values of corporate leaders. In the race for public credibility, it is fortunate for business that its prime regulator, government, is not seen as a worthy replacement as the leader in the dance.”

My beef is not with what Mr. Edelman wants to achieve; a free and mostly self-regulated market place. It is with how he believes that he can win public acceptance for it. I rebel, as do most people who are moderately sceptical of corporate humbug, to his pandering to the more infantile elements of this discussion; you know, the audience who cannot (supposedly) be told the truth because it would destroy their illusions.

So, I’d like to leave you with what I think is an effective demolition of Mr. Edelman’s style of PR, by quoting Professor Karnani’s robust expose of it:

“Executives are hired to maximize profits; that is their responsibility to their company’s shareholders. Even if executives wanted to forgo some profit to benefit society, they could expect to lose their jobs if they tried—and be replaced by managers who would restore profit as the top priority. The movement for corporate social responsibility is in direct opposition, in such cases, to the movement for better corporate governance, which demands that managers fulfill their fiduciary duty to act in the shareholders’ interest or be relieved of their responsibilities. That’s one reason so many companies talk a great deal about social responsibility but do nothing—a tactic known as greenwashing.”

Exactly!

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Here’s what Vidal says:

“A three-year investigation by the United Nations will almost entirely exonerate Royal Dutch Shell for 40 years of oil pollution in the Niger delta, causing outrage among communities who have long campaigned to force the multinational to clean up its spills and pay compensation.”

Of course, he slips in that Shell paid for the research (though it was environmentalists who campaigned to make “polluters” pay for such reports). He quotes Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends the Earth International and director of Environmental Rights Action, saying:

“It is incredible that the UN says that 90% is caused by communities. The UNEP assessment is being paid for by Shell. Their conclusions may be tailored to satisfy their client. We monitor spills regularly and our observation is the direct opposite of what UNEP is planning to report.”

But it beggars belief that a 100-strong multi-national team of UN investigators could be bribed or influenced by a research budget of $10 million from Shell. The report, it seems, will find that the majority of the spillage and environmental degradation was caused by locals, as Vidal reports, “illegally stealing oil and sabotaging company pipelines,” a practice known as bunkering.

I have plenty of reservations. The main one is the casual assumption by so many journalists that there is a handy split (let alone a 90/10 split) between “the communities” or “communities” and Shell. The official report is not yet out, but it is clear to me that the distribution of blame cannot credibly be split 90/10. That’s because Shell, however influential, is just one of many players in the region in the oil business. For a start it is partnered with the state oil company. On the “other” side, too, there are myriad complex relationships between every sort of “official” power, the “communities”, and criminal gangs.

There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that criminality both at a local level (from gangs to corrupt officials) and at a national governmental level (within the oil ministry and its state-run companies) must take most of the blame for the region’s plight.

Here’s what Mike Cowing, the head of a UN team, told Vidal by email:

“UNEP is not responsible for allocating responsibility for the number of spills being found in Ogoniland. Rather, we are focusing on the science. The figures referred to are those of the ministry of the environment and the department of petroleum resources.

“This is a Nigerian issue, not a UNEP issue. However, I would add that from our extensive field work throughout Ogoniland we have witnessed, on a daily basis, very large scale bunkering operations.

“It’s very controversial. We cannot say whether a particular spill is from one cause or another. Our observation is that there is a serious [bunkering ] problem. I am being seen to be siding with the oil companies, but I am not.

“We were provided with the official spill site list. This is given by the oil companies themselves but is endorsed by the [government] agencies. We are not on the side of the oil companies.”

What Vidal does not mention is that Shell has allocated at least $22 billion, a sum approaching what BP is spending to clean up the Gulf of Mexico, to clean up the Niger Delta (see my: Let’s interrogate Shell’s CSR in Nigeria). It seems that Shell is prepared to take responsibility for the clean up, despite, and with the proven moral authority, that it caused just a small fraction of the overall damage.

According to Vidal, the UN team took 1,000 soil and water tests, and other investigations were carried out, and hundreds of communities consulted.  This scoping of the extent of the problem will most likely form the basis for focusing the clean up effort that Shell looks set to fund also.

Will this work? I think it might, up to a point. But on the ground it is most likely doomed to fail. That’s because the scale and complexity of the problem in a region of 30 million people is beyond Shell, and currently beyond the Nigerian government’s ability to solve.

It was always simplistic (and mostly entirely without foundation) of the likes of Amnesty International to accuse Shell of human rights abuses and causing mass poverty on top of the pollution in the region.

However, the UN report looks set to give Shell what it badly needs: a shield to defend itself in the West against the nonsense it has suffered from campaigners over many years. That’s got to be good for its reputation and PR. The rest of the solution rests with the Nigerian people.

Having said that, the question remains about just how honest Shell is going to be about the realities it faces on the ground. Those are realities which should urge Shell to set realistic expectations, or risk the issue blowing up in its face at a later date on a greater scale, the way it did for BP with its Beyond Petroleum charade.

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So what kind of resolution should we be advising our clients to seek in this brave new world? Well, perhaps we should be telling them to win public confidence.

With the modern mantra people are told to trust only what’s transparent. The opaque will have to make a case for itself. Actually, I think almost all conspicuous transparency is fake. I am sure that in an honest world, we have to live with opacity. We need institutions to be capable of trustworthiness and secrecy and we require a public which accepts that fact.

There’s a difference between trust in individuals and confidence in institutions. Confidence is what brands are all about – it is the emotional bond marketing tries to generate – because it is about convincing people that promises will be fulfilled. As true friends know, true trust requires one to forgo the expectation of reciprocity as the basis of the relationship (call it open-ended). Confidence in firms and institutions, on the other hand, is conditional, negotiated and limited. As Norman Lewis usefully observes:

“Seligman [Adam B. Seligan's book The Problem of Trust] argues convincingly that if a trusting act was based upon calculation of expected outcomes or on the rational expectation of a quantified outcome, this would not be an act of trust at all but an act based on confidence.”

Here Norman Lewis explains:

“Trust not only entails negotiating risk, it implies risk (by definition, if it is a means of negotiating that which is unknown). But the risk is specific. It is based upon the implicit recognition of others’ capacity to act freely and in unexpected ways. Unconditionality and engagement sit at the heart of trust relations.”

Lewis supports Seligan’s argument for minimal state interference in privacy enforcement on the grounds that it would abolish risk and enshrine distrust in legal doctrine. They’re on to something that PRs know about; trust and reputations are about what people say and think about you, what they confer on you. Lewis remarks:

“Trust is therefore a very rare commodity and because it is based on free will, trust cannot be demanded, only offered and accepted. Trust and mistrust thus develop in relationship to free will and the ability to exercise that will, as different responses to aspects of behaviour that can no longer be adequately contained within existing norms and social roles.”

But I’m not sure that I share their distaste for legal sanctions as strongly as they do. Sometimes the law is required to put people and companies in their place. But that’s an issue of degree. I do share their desire to link levels of privacy corporations provide with levels of confidence people put in them. So where there is low trust or confidence there should be low privacy and vice verse.

In short, we should trust our lawyers and doctors with our inner lives. But we should be wary on Facebook of what we reveal and worry about what they will do with the information and why.

The best indication of the levels of consumer confidence that exist in society has to be the choices people make when it comes to spending their own money. Right now, the free services the likes of Google provide, gives them an incentive to betray our privacy. Otherwise they’d have no sustainable means of economic survival; no ad revenue and no innate value to attract investors.

However, that said, the key to success lies with PRs and their work to change social attitudes. This challenge is about managing relationships between firms and institutions and their various stakeholders. That will require that we engage and listen and respond to the real-world’s concerns.

We have to help firms and institutions set realistic and meaningful expectations about the bargain they are striking with different audiences, in return for the level of confidence they demand or expect from others. As Lewis insight-fully observes about life online:

“The tentative conclusion and the fundamental insight this approach offers is that privacy attitudes and behaviours will change according to the level of trust or mistrust people have with regard to the people or institutions they are interacting with. How much they trust the potential beneficiary of their self-disclosure is now [I say going to be] the overriding motivator of behaviour.”

If PRs want to be seen to be advocates for trust, confidence and reputations in society, this is among the biggest debates of all that we should seek to influence.

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PRs are well aware of the “Streisand Effect”, coined by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, as the exposure in public of everything you try hardest to keep private, particularly pictures. Barbra Streisand, of course, tried to put the genie back in the bottle when she took legal action to have photographs of her home removed from the internet.

For celebrities, privacy and reclusiveness used to be a potent means of attracting attention and creating mystique. But, as Andrew Keen pointed out in his muse on Jerome David (J. D.) Salinger’s death, privacy is no longer a guarantor of publicity. We live in new times.

Here’s what Eric Schmidt has been saying recently to the WSJ:

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.

“Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”

He goes on:

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”

And he’s got a point. Upcoming facial recognition software will be able to identify people just from their photographs on the internet. It is unlikely that we will ban or restrict its usage, so we shall just have to learn to live with it.

The WSJ adds that Google also knows where exactly you are located (that’s the wonder of mobile devices). Supposedly, the next generation of smart mobile devices will be able to second-guess what you want. Schmidt claims:

“The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

Schmidt is certainly correct to imply that markets were always in the anticipation business. Goods are mostly produced for people in advance of their purchase and at considerable risk that there will be no demand for them. He says of the future:

“The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

The logic of Schmidt’s thinking is that he can take risk out of the equation. It is as if he believes that Google can ensure that every player in the marketplace is a winner. He seems to be advocating that we can have serendipitous-seeming planned production (I’ve stretched his logic a bit to highlight the utopianism he espouses).

What Schmidt overlooks, of course, is that his world view only works in “markets” that lack competition, and which favour oligarchical monopolies. I think Schmidt faces antitrust, competitiveness and consumer backlash issues over privacy, which might yet knock his vision for six.

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Browsing and Web searching are yesterday’s stuff, the next big thing is “getting” things from major suppliers on the internet via apps for a fee. In the words of Anderson and Michael Wolff in the latest Wired:

“Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK. Have you looked at your cell phone or cable bill lately?”

As Anderson and Wolff say, consumers will pay for convenience. How else can we explain the success of iTunes selling otherwise free music for 99 Cents a pop? And therein lies the secret of the internet.

Rather than professional content becoming valueless, it has risen – or is in the process of being resurrected – once more to become the most valued commodity of all in the media, distribution and consumer world:

“We are returning to a world that already exists — one in which we chase the transformative effects of music and film instead of our brief (relatively speaking) flirtation with the transformative effects of the Web.

“After a long trip, we may be coming home.”

Explaining how this works out in business terms, they say:

“…technologists have steered clear of actual media businesses, seeing themselves as renters of systems and third-party facilitators, often deeply wary of any involvement with content. (See, for instance, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s insistence that his company is not in the content business.) Jobs, on the other hand, built two of the most successful media businesses of the past generation: iTunes, a content distributor, and Pixar, a movie studio. Then, in 2006, with the sale of Pixar to Disney, Jobs becomes the biggest individual shareholder in one of the world’s biggest traditional media conglomerates — indeed much of Jobs’ personal wealth lies in his traditional media holdings.”

What does this mean for PRs? Well, for starters the old top down model of influence still applies on the internet. PRs are going to have do some rethinking about how they advocate conversations, crowd sourcing and word of mouth PR. Some old-world notions of brands, reputation, quality and service are going to come back in to play (they never really went away). But at the same time, as Anderson and Wolf point out:

“…the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt.”

And, as Anderson and Wolff also note:

“According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. ‘Big sucks the traffic out of small,’ Milner [Yuri Milner] says. ‘In theory you can have a few very successful individuals controlling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast, and that favors the domination of strong people.’

“Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

So it’s not yet a done deal when it comes to who controls what and how. However the trend is certainly clear. The utopian dream of paradigm shifts is over. Welcome back to familiar reality – even if it is virtual and digital.

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Tony Blair knew he might as well have kept the money he’s going to earn from his book for all the love giving it away would get him. But he also knew he didn’t need the money; that it was blood money; that he owed it to the soldiers. And, he knew that he needed to de-taint the book if it was going to be read, which is what mattered most to him. With a controversial gift, which in itself attracts readers and interest, he decontaminated the brand, not his, but the book’s.

No related pages.

There was no upside to HP’s reputation from ridding itself of Mark Hurd. The Economist described HP as Hurdless chickens. Wall Street pulled the rug on the share price. Shareholders looked on bewildered as, as the FT reports, transparency turned to opacity as the Board lost its nerve. Now let’s review how this might make a movie.

Married and slightly nerdy CEO gets obsessed with an events contractor, B-movie actress and former soft-porn star. He buys her dinner more times than he ought. She claims she was sexually harassed and hires a top lawyer with a nose for publicity.

The CEO gets cleared of the charge by the company. But he has difficulty explaining the more than $10k (perhaps $20k) he claimed on expenses to entertain her. He gets told to jump ship. As a result, HP’s share value drops by around $13 billion. That would be the opening scene. Then would come the flashback.

Mark Hurd’s predecessor knocks billions off HP’s share price after her fraught merger with Compaq proves nigh on disastrous. The Board that once backed Carly Fiorina decides to ditch her, but the news leaks. Yet only fellow Board members were in the know. So she orders private detectives to spy on the Board to uncover the traitor. Before they can report, Carly’s fired.

However, the chairman of the Board continues with the investigation (widened to include senior executives), which stoops to lies and deceit and unethical borderline legality. When the rest of the Board discovers how the culprit was identified, members resign in protest and the chairman is forced out. From then on, whenever somebody knocks on their front door, they fear that they’re being bugged by a colleague (the film would portray their spouses’ paranoia).

Carly’s merger antics alone mean that from day one, Mark Hurd is CEO of a company with a psychologically damaged and neurotic Board. The breaking of the spying story and near-implosion of the Board, just deepen his problems. But against the odds, he restores HP’s fortunes, winning widespread praise for the turnaround.

To top it all the temptress in the story proves to have a heart (surely that’s a heart on her sleeve?). She weeps and says she never wanted him fired. She backs up his defence and says that they never had intercourse. The audience weeps with her on behalf of their fallen hero.

What can we learn from this mess?

Above all, the scandal at HP is more about a failure of corporate governance, team-building and trust, than it is about Mark Hurd’s peccadilloes. The major issue for the Board was trust, and the issue of Hurd’s seemingly falsified expenses.

Contrary to popular opinion, corporate governance is not about CSR and personal ethics so much as about improving corporate performance. It is about making the right operational choices. It is about protecting shareholder interests and about assessing strategies to ensure that corporate assets are used properly to achieve corporate purposes. As Larry Ellison has pointed out, HP’s Board has clearly failed to do its job.

The PR consultants at APCO recommended, rightly, that the Board should proactively make a full disclosure of the “scandal”. However, they wrongly advised that Hurd should be sent packing. They produced mock scandalous headlines of what the media might say if Hurd was not ousted. This scared the risk-adverse, emotional Board. In APCO’s favour, however, they probably knew better than anyone else just how broken were the internal relations at the top of HP (leadership requires trust to function). This was no ordinary crisis.

The Board was like a rabbit caught in headlights. It first froze, then panicked. Not for the first time it collectively put personal feelings before the company’s interests.

Meanwhile, Wall Street punished the Board and the company for firing Hurd.

But what about Mark Hurd’s role in all this? His comment about his resignation (cue $40 million pay off) was revealing. He said:

“I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust and integrity that I have espoused at HP”

So, he knew that he broke the bonds of trust at HP, and that he was guilty of hypocrisy on the morality front. So here’s my guidelines for how to avoid such moral hazards in future:

• Don’t let PRs sell the politically correct narrative of your personal life.

• Don’t use personal virtues as a shield to promote your professional ones.

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

• Avoid the temptation to indulge in moral outbursts on any topic.

• Don’t bring your personal life to work or include it in your PR.

• Those who live by the sword die by it.

• Don’t lecture anyone (especially not your staff) about personal morality.

• Always assume that everything always gets into the media in the end.

• The public love sinners and winners. It loathes saints.

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Kellaway’s cheeky cut and paste of a supposedly considered piece of internal corporate communication provoked a flurry of emails, saying things like:

“I’ve just read the latest Martin Lukes column and it wasn’t funny. I think you’ve just taken him too far from the real world. The stuff about Twilight was just silly. Can you please make him closer to real life in future?”

For those not in the know, Martin Lukes is the former chief executive of a-b glöbâl, released from prison in Florida, reunited with his BlackBerry. Here’s some of the less controversial codswallop Martin Lukes usually conveys:

“Hi Nitin – A quick heads-up on this incredibly exciting project: the roll-out of a Hippocratic oath for every co-worker.”

“Disastrous meeting. Bloody CFO obsessed about ?IF! delivering value. Can you send him Oliver’s report – it doesn’t add to the sum of human knowledge, but he seems to want proof of output …”

“Hi Adrian, A couple of pointers following our useful meeting just now. I know you are concerned about the P&L implications of the Employee Hippocratic Oath, but it seems you have neglected to consider that it will pay for itself by encouraging staff to steal fewer pens and paperclips.”

You get the point, I hope. Anyway, the words of billionaire hedge fund chief Tom Barrack to his staff at Colony Capital described his “personal breakthrough”. He told them in an email how, after a tough couple of weeks, he took some “yacht time” and chanced upon his daughter’s copy of Twilight. He wrote:

“Gang”

“I don’t get it … but I feel it. Taking the agenda-less time to absorb a point of view that I had ignored while loved ones around me relished it was an oasis for my soul.

“I feel renewed and refreshed, having gotten out of my comfort zone and experiencing something so totally out of my normal realm.”

After rambling on about love, anticipation and vampires, he resorts to what one guesses he rates as a rabble-rousing conclusion:

“Move your cheese!!!! … The earth is turning on its axis. Planets and moons and suns are in orbit. Gravity is pulling and tugging, and molecules and quarks are warring inside of us. We need movement to live …”

“It is hard for us to dream … it is time for all of us … to spend more time outside the strict arithmetic cadence of our business … we must really find the ‘moment’ …”

There’s a simple lesson here. Running a company is best left to the likes of Mr. Barrack, who is clearly a world leader at directing hedge funds. PR, however, is best filtered or produced and managed by professionals. Every C-suite needs access to an experienced wordsmith who leads their executive communications. She, or me if it’s a he (please forgive the shameless plug), needs to have a sound knowledge of business issues, sharpened by years in the front-line.

But before I disappear into the Twilight Zone, I’d like to remind readers of my debate with Neville Hobson, where he put the case for allowing (encouraging) corporate blogging online to be personal and unmediated by PRs, and I replied that it must be kept corporate, but made human: Corporate blogging: now it’s personal? I now feel vindicated by this example of how the personal in the corporate sphere can become pathetic when it gets divorced from professional oversight.

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