My profession seems to be obsessing on stakeholder relationship management. I see why. When the angry mob is howling at the gates (actually mostly not so much a mob as a media, protester and Twitter scrum), it seems sensible to pretend that crowds have wisdom. Like politicians, media and most bosses in the West, public relations professionals 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 have heard how former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s inner circle phoned bullying help-lines to complain about him. Their self-confidence was revealed as being wafer thin.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos we are repeatedly reminded that profit, shareholder value and shareholders are no longer priorities because all stakeholders are supposedly equal. Such talk comes from Western leaders. The bosses from the East generally hold their nerve and sometimes express disbelief. The split between the two world views has become so stark that Richard Edelman reported enthusiastically from the 2012 WEF gig how Ian Cheshire of Kingfisher, Europe’s leading home improvement retailer, opined that: “we have to get consumers in developing countries past wanting the “American Dream of more.”’

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 media or 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  - or rather the media and campaigners say so supposedly on its behalf –  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. It is a chronic abdication of corporate responsibility. It constitutes a surrender of leadership to instrumentalist short-termism, which causes a loss of vision and direction, encourages low-ambitions and, ironically, undermines public confidence in modern corporations and institutions.

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, America and India to today’s undemocratic China (I’ll defend democratic accountability another day) were not built on the back of listening and forging an instrumentalist-driven consensus. They were built on the back of courageous leadership and innovation that won the trust and confidence of their people. This gave the masses things of value  to believe in, such as the American Dream.

Now let’s review a few more conundrums and case studies that highlight how current wisdom is flawed, before I propose my manifesto’s alternative approach.

According to Edelman’s trust survey, trust in business and government today is strongest where stakeholder relationship management matters least and weakest where it seemingly matters most. By a significant margin, China leads the world in both categories and its media are supposedly the most trusted on earth, too. India, Brazil and Indonesia score highly. While Russia records trust levels for both business and government that hover around the same level year-on-year as France’s and Germany’s.

Meanwhile, 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 that 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 advocates in a Washington Post piece, Erasing our Innovation Deficit, bottom up crowd-sourced innovation. In it he underestimates 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; it didn’t need to differentiate itself through branding while it was transforming successfully how we all worked and played on our PCs. Microsoft hardly consulted anybody as it developed what some viewed as monopolistic tendencies. 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 (almost uncritically until recently), believing it to represent an anti-corporate, culturally-fresh, arty sort of an entity. That’s mostly nonsense, but in any case Apple achieved this myth-making with top-down communication and command and control management. Apple’s path was classic old-style branding designed to attack and differentiate itself from a dominant incumbent.

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. It created its own space and its own demand.

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 and more importantly for the right reasons.

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: we could start by making economic growth our focus.

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 and an addiction to jargon and spin. 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, fell into.

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.

This is an updated piece that was first published in February 2010

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Lindsey Hilsum

Campbell issued this warning at the University of Westminster, following a short ceremony in which the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism – in memory of the distinguished BBC correspondent who died in 2008 – was presented by his widow, Lady Dip Wheeler, to Channel 4 News reporter Lindsey Hilsum. In her acceptance speech, Hilsum remembered a time when Wheeler had praised her reporting and she ‘walked on air’ for days afterwards. Following in Wheeler’s footsteps, Hilsum’s reputation rests on coverage of world historic events.

The event was attended by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who arrived late.

The Charles Wheeler Award not only recalls its eponymous hero, it also calls up journalism’s preferred image of itself – humane and high-minded, accurate and analytical. Wheeler himself really did embody these qualities: he took accountability to the public so seriously that even in retirement this world-renowned reporter had himself openly listed in the London phonebook as ‘Wheeler, Charles: Journalist’.

Meanwhile, on the streets outside the award ceremony, the day’s headlines added strength to Campbell’s dire warning.

Charles Wheeler

The biggest-selling morning papers had led with further personal details about ‘sex cheat’ Ryan Giggs. The Manchester United footballer was said to have undergone follicular replacement therapy following stress-related hair loss.

Later in the day, the London Evening Standard plumped for the personal presence of Mayor Boris Johnson at a police drugs raid in Tottenham – this made the front page. When a suspected drug dealer awoke to find the Mayor of London in his flat, along with police officers, he is reported to have said: ‘What the f*** are you doing here?’

‘I don’t think this chap was pleased to see me’, the Mayor later said. But Johnson must have been pleased that his celebrity status was affirmed by media coverage associating him with decisive police action.

We once thought Ryan Giggs led a passive sex life; but it is none of our business either way

The hairs on Giggsy’s head were headline news. Imagine the front page splash (and the follow-up pages inside) if CSI-style reporters had bagged the pubes from his mistresses’ beds! But the forensic fetish for personality goes way beyond philandering footballers and their ‘wagms’ (‘m’ added for mistresses). It extends to public officials such as Johnson, now known much less for their politics and far more for their personal presentation (in BoJo’s case, the mop of tousled, blond hair which says ‘public school but people-friendly’).

The way his hair is distressed is BoJo’s mode of address: I’m half-way between Hugh Grant and Ron Weasley, and it just so happens I head-up the government of London. Celebrity is the medium, there’s not much message besides, and many journalists seem happy to carry it – the lighter the better.

BoJo is an “hairlarious” politician

In the same vein, subsequent press coverage of the Charles Wheeler Award ceremony featured the banter between the two biggest celebrities in the room. From the stage, Campbell joshed Johnson for arriving late and for going out early on the drugs raid.  Though dedicated to the public role of journalism, even this event was partly colonised by the media-bred, scandal-fed, all-embracing, self-referencing cult of personality.

So Campbell’s warning could not have been more timely; and when I heard him issue it, I really thought I had found a kindred spirit. Charismatic, too, even if his claret and blue is a wrong ‘un (Burnley instead of West Ham).

Recognising that journalism’s recent regression is relative rather than absolute, Campbell used the same phrase which I had made use of in an academic conference the day before: British journalists are defaulting to ‘a new centre of gravity’ (my conference paper proves prior usage). He called upon journalists to re-discover what they are for – as I and my colleagues have done in Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org , and again in the recently published book Journalism Studies: a critical introduction. He even agreed with my proposition (I know this because I asked him) that journalists should stand up and say: Giggsy, celebrity, even (for the time being) the ‘question of privacy’ – it’s all sheer follicles! These are non-events, they should be non-stories, and we just have to drop ‘em and go after the ones that matter.

So Mr Campbell and I agreed on four of journalism’s famous Ws: who should do what, where and when. But we parted company on the fifth. Why the compulsive downshifting to molecular celebrity? Campbell came back on this question with the 2Ts answer: time and technology. As he sees it, new media technology drives journalists to churn stuff out all the time, so they have no time to do anything else. But this is like saying that politicians are overtaken by events: it’s true and it’s a truism, with no explanatory power.

Yes, journalists under time pressure will stay within existing tramlines, but that does nothing to explain why tracking celebrity has become the line to follow. Furthermore, it’s by no means certain that online journalists are generating content more rapidly than, say, Harold Evans sitting under the clock at the subs’ desk of the Manchester Evening News, writing and re-writing reports of the 1952 Harrow train crash for successive print editions.

Even if there really is more new stuff today (rather than different ways of cutting up the same old), why should journalism’s expansion have to end in journalism-lite? We might have expected more to mean heavier.

Alastair Campbell had Tony Blair's ear

Though criticising journalism for its default mechanism, Campbell himself was defaulting to technological determinism, which alongside environmental determinism and the new neurological determinism, now constitutes the centre of gravitas on why people do/should not do the things they do. This is a silly place for intelligent people to find themselves in, though not because it contains elements of determinism. Anyone who thinks we simply make our own history must have lost sight of the circumstances we didn’t choose – to coin a phrase. The problem is one of misattribution: the wrong sources (digital media, brain chemistry, the Earth) are being identified as determining factors; and dodgy determinisms such as these can only have a damaging effect on the subjective, collective determination to raise our game.

It’s socially determined, stupid!

Instead of technology, neurology and nature, the following, brief episodes – flashes from the history of news – are intended to show that journalism has been socially determined; and so too is our capacity to change its centre of gravity. Revealing the real elements of compulsion can only make the case for concerted change more compelling.

‘News’ – to be distinguished from something which has happened, that happens to be new – has various preconditions, one of which is the position from which to report it. This position was fully established 300 years ago in the merchant city of London, where it was personified in the Spectator magazine, co-edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Lloyd’s Coffee-House

In an enormous variety of essays on all aspects of city life, Addison was consistently striving to establish standards of behaviour. The deliberately self-regarding style of his essays reflected new manners and morals, and the Spectator helped to compose well-mannered deliberation into a whole way of life for the emerging bourgeois class. If such refinement seems far removed from the rough and tumble of eighteenth century markets, with fortunes lost and found as tides turned and ships went down to the bottom, it turns out that Addison identified the London Exchange (one of the city’s leading markets) as the most uplifting place in the world. For Addison, valuating commodities and evaluating human behaviour were one and the same habit of mind.

In their mind’s eye, members of his mercantile milieu habitually met at an agreed point of comparison, from which to carry out a continuously comparative study of the world’s worth. Their valuations applied to people as much as things; and their meeting place was also the starting point for a new approach to common values – moral as well as commercial.

To arrive at their shared position, London’s traders were obliged to divest themselves of some personal interests, while investing something of themselves in the creation of common interests, or the public interest. Commonality such as this can only be an abstraction from strictly personal existence; yet it also materialised in London’s eighteenth century coffee houses and in the publications that these traders went there to read. Thus the first, fully fledged reporter, standing aside from particular interests and standing in for the common interest, was called into existence by the unstinting gaze of the merchant. Eighteenth century London had to have its own embodiment of this combination. In the form of the Spectator, founded in 1711, the merchant city acquired the press it deserved.

Professional journalism’s obsession with murder

With hindsight, it appears that the Spectator was a reporter in slow motion: he had the time to compose essays at a time when, relatively speaking, every day was a slow news day. In the 1900s, two centuries later, journalism was already 200 times faster. Not because the associated technology was so very different (nota bene, Alastair Campbell); instead, the whole world was turning like never before.

Meanwhile, the press had become a murder factory: not often a killing machine (though wartime propaganda often amounted to indictment, excitement and incitement); more that the newly established, professional news industry ran on a murderous diet.

‘Get me a murder a day’ was the watchword of popular newspaper editors from the end of the nineteenth century to the turn of the twenty-first. This staple was said to keep the accountants away. Tabloids especially, though they contained a variety of entertaining and informative content, defaulted to the murder story. When facts were sacred, morbid details were the holy of the holy. Even when a reporter’s copy did not begin with someone enjoying the peace of the grave (in news, what happened last comes first), his approach often verged on the murderous. ‘Newsmen’ – in those days it was customary to style themselves as such – were used to looking down on events, and the people in them, from the same vantage point as Lee Harvey Oswald overlooking the presidential motorcade in Dallas.

Nothing but wannabe celebs, confessions, sex, drugs, murder and fire on the front-page

If professional news reporting contained more than a whiff of gunsmoke, it was not because objectifying human subjects is always an act of epistemological violence, only matched by the pathological arrogance of abstracting from their personal particulars. These are the complaints levelled against professional journalism by critical theorists and, latterly, self-doubting journalists; but this does to journalism just what journalism stands accused of, namely, character assassination.

Western journalism was professionalised towards the end of the nineteenth century. It had to be. By that time there was so much more to human life that only a trained observer could hope to encompass it, itemise it and formulate news items before something else came along. At an unprecedented rate, human beings were making more things, making more of themselves, and, in the same process, producing new ways of objectifying themselves, including professionally produced, commercially viable journalism.

Insights into the age of stereotyping

Though journalism was trying to capture the liveliness of human beings, character assassination did indeed occur whenever journalists wrote off being human by reducing it to a formula. Thronged with stock figures and predictable personae, many ‘news’ stories amounted to typing, not writing, i.e. stereotyping rather than character development.

However, the hack’s propensity for the hackneyed results not from objectification but from human subjects being alienated from this process. Our alienation from making the world of objects – making the world our object, is how we came to lose a crucial part of human life – a loss of life which has to be acknowledged in contemporary culture. Popular journalism registered this loss by finding itself in the murder story; hence the editor’s craving for murder, and the reporter targeting his subjects as if about to commit one. This suggests that professional journalism’s quest for murder, was as much the sign of its own times as Addison’s earlier search for morality.

In the meantime, the Spectator’s mercantile habits – evaluation, evaluation, evaluation – had been extended from already finished objects on sale in London’s markets, to include the human activity of making new objects for sale. This is a shorthand description of the transition from merchant capital to industrial capitalism, which took place in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of industrial capitalism not only entailed the production of millions more things and millions more people to produce (and consume) them, it also introduced a new level of commonality between all things and all people. From now on, anything anyone did, automatically existed in comparison with everything everyone else had ever done. Each human action occurred twice over: in its particulars, and in relation to human activity in general.

No mere repetition, this was an historic achievement. By virtue of their comparability, human activities were liberated from their local settings in time and space. Unleashed in this way, our productive activity served to mobilise even more activity. In the further development of both personality and commonality, there was more to being human; and a wider spectrum of humanity for reporters to report on. Furthermore, there was greater demand for a multi-faceted continuum – art, politics, media – that could hold it all together.

Yet togetherness was promised rather than fulfilled. The same process which brought people together to make the world, and prompted them to consume journalism’s re-making of the world, also contains that violent moment when productive activity in both its aspects (the general and the particular) is forcibly transferred over to the thing which prompted it – capital, and taken over by the people who own capital – the capitalist class. In this moment, when what we do together is commonly privatised, those who have been active are suddenly alienated from their own actions, estranged from the things they have made but no longer own. As millions of people are separated from the actions they have performed together, so we lose the life we have lived together. Aside from productive activity, there is still another life to be lived, but this is typically biased towards personality rather than commonality. Fully associative life is repeatedly destroyed – so many times over that we hardly recognise its destruction.

What’s really changed in the last thirty years?

This carnage, which is as widespread as capitalist production, was indirectly reflected in journalism’s passion for murder. We were misdirected, however, by the indirect nature of this reflection. Though professional journalism has continually spanned the continuum between personality and commonality, when describing the world exclusively in terms of personal experience, it presents both commonality and its violent destruction as a straightforward function of personality. Such misattribution amounts to another obituary for the independent life of our shared humanity.

In the twentieth century, morbid tendencies within popular journalism were offset by mass participation in democratic politics, with its (limited) tendency to move along the continuum in the other direction, from personality towards commonality. However, after the demise of mass political participation in the 1980s and early 1990s, the path was clear for further separation of the productive life of humanity from the rest of our lives. In this instance, separation has occurred literally – along geographical lines.

After two decades of further estrangement, the Western way of life now largely depends on the actualisation of labour in far-flung places, increasingly in the East. Even if we are not directly involved in financial speculation, the personal existence of ‘Wessies’ is increasingly derivative: we derive our existence from the creation of value elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in their restricted leisure time millions of ‘Essies’ prefer to speculate (non-financially) on the lives of those with more time to cultivate their personality – us ‘Wessies’. We duly oblige, securitising our debt to the East by performing a continuous spectacle, trading representations of ourselves – merchandising the self – on the various media platforms which now comprise ‘contemporary Western culture’.

How too much attention turned to sex-cheating celebs

Pamela Anderson announces she’s going on Big Brother

In these circumstances, do not ask why the bell tolled for Big Brother. The show ended and the house was shut down in 2010 (it’s due to be revived on Channel 5 from August 2011), but, from the p-o-v of the industrialising world, you and I have taken up permanent residence in UK Reality TV. We’re all (minor) celebrities now.

Yet life in the spectacle is an impoverished form of existence. As we are further removed from the commonality occurring in production, we tend to fall back even further on our personal life, which tends to become yet more superficial just as we pack ourselves into it, frantically networking in the forlorn attempt to derive more significance from it. Worse still, we cannot but feel that being so dependent on interpersonal existence amounts to betrayal of that other life which we might have had in common.

The fact is we are cheating on an important part of our humanity – our commonality, the other-half-life which ought to partner our personal existence. It’s been so long, we might not know what it is exactly, but we know we are betraying it; and from where we are, we feel compelled to do so.

Hence the newly compelling attraction of storylines based on intimate, personal betrayal. This type of saga has supplanted the murder story because it represents, indirectly, the most important, recent development in world history – the betrayal brought on by the further separation of personality from commonality. In journalism, this estrangement has been translated and contained within narrowly personal terms, i.e. transposed into suitable terms for a local audience whose centre of gravity has moved along the human continuum towards the strictly personal. Thus for Western news editors, today’s must-have is a personification of intimacy, self-presentation and alienation: enter the celebrity sex-cheat!

Bill Hagerty, editor, BJR, left. Lady Dip Wheeler, far right. Lindsey Hilsum centre.

But we need not be utterly compelled by the dish of the day. That humanity’s two halves have drifted further apart, may mean it’s harder to realise their connection. However, if more journalists can be persuaded to perform like Charles Wheeler, buoyed by a proper account of why they have been asking so much less of themselves recently, that in itself will add to the measure of humanity.

Dr Andrew Calcutt teaches journalism at the University East London. He is editor of Proof: reading journalism and society www.proof-reading.org; and co-author, with Dr Phil Hammond, of Journalism Studies: a critical introduction (Routledge).

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The White House, of course, does put a positive spin on all negative perceptions. The line is that the president inherited an economic mess that is taking longer than expected to fix; recovery is underway, affirming the president’s policies; the benefits of ObamaCare will soon become evident; Osama bin Laden has been taken out; the Afghanistan “preemptive withdrawal” strategy is working; and Libya is a matter for European and Arab countries and doesn’t require US leadership.

Still, much as we PR folks pride ourselves on our craft, there is a limit to what talking points can achieve. This narrative may satisfy political sympathizers but it is surely not enough to explain Barack Obama’s continuing level of popularity as the United States enters its election campaign season. Almost all of his predecessors had better economic records or could boast some significant progress in foreign policy. The fact is, Obama’s basic record does not compare favorably. So here are some non-spin explanations as to why he is still very much in the game.

First, there is currently no alternative to Barack Obama. Republican hopefuls have only just begun vying to win the opportunity to challenge him. The most likely choice at this point in time appears to be Mitt Romney, hardly a popular politician in his own party given the failing health care entitlement he introduced as governor of Massachusetts. Tougher opponents like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey have said they won’t be competing. Several other candidates could emerge, including Sarah Palin, the bête noire of European intellectuals, but at the moment there is no clear leader rallying the conservative base.

Second, although the economy is doing badly, many voters are willing to give the president a little longer before judging whether his deficit-led/ weak dollar approach has helped or made things worse. The jury is still out on Obama’s economic policies.

Third, Obama is the consummate social justice politician governing in a social entitlement era. Most people in Europe have grown up expecting the state to take care of their old age and ill-health, and to intervene in economic activities for the common good. The United States is perhaps a generation behind this curve but its entitlement programs are in many ways more generous than Europe’s. The wheels of our entitlement culture are beginning to look wobbly, with riots in debt-ridden Greece, resistance to austerity measures in Portugal, and budget travails in California. But the financial limits of big government are still not widely accepted among independents and liberals. The US federal government has been protected from high interest rates by the reserve status of the dollar but with the big three entitlements – social security, Medicare and Medicaid – all heading towards insolvency, judgment day is coming ever closer to Washington. The backlash has begun in the United States with the Tea Party movement but hard political choices can still be deferred for now and Obama has even extended the gravy train with his controversial ObamaCare legislation.

Fourth, the US media is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, pro-big government and overtly partisan. This means that the president does not have to contend with the same levels of scrutiny and criticism as his predecessor or his political opponents. The new electronic media and Fox News have injected some balance into the equation, but the playing field is still heavily tilted in the president’s favor.

Add to these four facets the personal appeal of the president, a predisposition among Americans to want their presidents to succeed, the absence of personal scandals and the discipline of former officials to keep differences to themselves, and we have the basis for Barack Obama’s current approval levels. In Europe, his unwillingness to flex America’s muscles, particularly in Libya, is also an approach that has been largely embraced.

But two things are sure to change over the next year. First, Barack Obama will have an opponent who will challenge and bring greater attention to his record. Second, voters will be entitled to make a judgment on the president’s economic record. Will they feel better off than four years earlier? Will they believe that the economy is getting better as a result of the president’s policies?

Public relations cannot claim the credit for the president’s approval ratings. Too many other factors are at work. A lot will happen between now and Election Day and, as the campaigning gets underway, the real spin starts now.

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They shouldn’t need the warning, but some seem to. This stuff is likely to be claptrap.

The social sciences often get in a muddle when they pretend to be scientific. Economics, sociology, history and pre-history, all blaze the trail here. PR, a trade of fuzzy-logic and rhetoric and impressions if ever there was one, ought to be very nervous when its practitioners affect to have a scientific underpinning.

But here we are with PR academics and some hands-on PRs getting into neuro-science and algorithms to improve, for instance, stakeholder relationships.

The question is just how much can we rely on quantitative behavioural measures and neuro-scientific insights into our brain patterns to assess qualitative human variables such as our opinions and feelings.

There is a school of PR thought that promotes to clients the predictive power of algorithms and neuro-science to assist in identifying the “relationship value” of networks amongst an institution’s stakeholders. PR Professor Toni Muzi Falconi advanced the thinking recently in his piece Improving stakeholder relationships through nets, neuros and algorithms, saying:

“Computer science allows the use of algorithms, which greatly reduce the need to research more than small samples of stakeholder groups. Likewise, neuroscience allows the integration of qualitative and quantitative indicators, which are closely connected to how relationships influence one another.”

Describing what he is looking for, he added:

“Interactions within stakeholder groups (or between the groups) can reveal – through graphics – the primary relationship nodes, as well as their interconnections. A mathematical analysis of these networks, supported by computer-led software, offers the essential numerical elements of specific indicators/variables.”

I accept that in a digital world we can trawl for lots of interconnected data. Yet it would be a big mistake to read too much meaning into what’s revealed. As Heather Yaxley commented on PR Conversations:

“Whether or not we have relationships with brands and whether or not they can, or should be trying to map our relationship is equally problematic. For example I am not a great fan of Carphone Warehouse generally, but it gave great service in replacing my Blackberry. So what does this mean? Nothing. I don’t care about the company, don’t want it to engage me, build a relationship, etc. It provided a service when I needed it – end of story.”

She, not for the first time, is spot on. However my concerns, and I suspect hers, run much deeper. There is something potentially very dangerous and worrying about this trend that puts PR in the hands of the latest psychological and sociobiological prejudices. For anybody who thinks I exaggerate, here’s the first paragraph from a press release promoting the latest edition of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science:

“Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published…”

It goes on to describe research findings which showed:

“Simply thinking about ‘choice’ made people less likely to support policies promoting greater equality and benefits for society, such as affirmative action, a tax on fuel-inefficient cars, or banning violent video games.”

This research reinforces that of other psychologists (including neuro scientists) such as Barry Schwartz, who say we are oppressed and made unhappy by too much choice and freedom. This camp argues that we should limit the scope of our choices and lower our expectations. They say likely as not when given too many choices people will make the wrong ones. They add that anyway too much choice causes stress (according to their brain-imaging scanners and other research etc.).

To persuade us to think the right way and make the right choices, these people believe that PRs should become masters of the subliminal (for which, read ‘manipulative’) message. The Association for Psychological Science press release, for instance, reports Krishna Savani of Columbia University observing:

“’In America, we make choices all the time—in the cafeteria, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall,’ Savani says. He wonders if, in the long run, all those consumer choices might have a cumulative negative impact by making people less sympathetic towards others and less concerned about the collective good.”

So, I guess the implication is that Savani and Shwartz can restrict and then manipulate our neurons to make the choices for us instead. They, of course, unlike us more irrational beings, know what is and is not in the public interest. They can even try to justify the merits of their preferred choices with some research, as Toni Muzi Falconi puts it, “[of no] more than small samples of stakeholder groups.”

The message (I’m not saying it is Falconi’s) from such psychologists seems to be that capitalism, choice and democracy are overrated.

In fact, one of the arguments for PR to adopt neuro-scientific findings is precisely to spot hard-wired human characteristics. This is, I say, a problematic social and neo-eugenic-type outlook. Of course, there is nothing wrong with eugenics in principle: it allows us, among other things, to eradicate some very awful inherited diseases. But we should worry when neuroscientists or geneticists research aims to give scientific weight to ideas that are more philosophical in content (or a matter of prejudice or politics). As we all know, some other very backward ideas in history were once said to have had a similar scientific basis.

That’s why I have to applaud Andrew Mayne’s piece on Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist where Mayne said that psychobabble spreads when scientists:

“…suffer from expert bias and assume their expertise in their own field also gives them a proficiency in totally unrelated areas like economics and political science. Add in group reinforcement from their peers and you have a group of politically and religiously homogenized people who have very different ideas from you and I on what exactly ‘the public good’ means.”

I have also to concur with Andrew Mayne’s view that:

“Market theory, evolutionary psychology and neuroeconomics have reinforced what Adam Smith already told us, that the best measure of what brings about the public good isn’t found in measuring just one choice, it’s the cumulative effect of all the different choices that we make as a society. Choice causes anxiety, but it’s an important part of being a human and not a member of an ant colony.”

We should note, then, that if PR is even remotely about helping people make informed choices and about respecting the moral autonomy of different players, the psychobabble runs in the other direction.

Having said that, up to a point I suppose that PRs and marketers do indeed rely on the usefulness of algorithms. For instance, our supermarket loyalty cards and our behaviour on Google allow for useful data-mining to predict what we might be interested in in future. The more supermarkets know about what consumers buy and what types of consumers purchase what types of products and when the better they can serve their customers. Moreover, Google’s entire business is rooted in the smart use of algorithms, which we all manipulate to get the messages of our clients at the top of the pile.

But we shouldn’t get carried away the way that Google’s Eric Schmidt does. He believes that his company’s algorithms can really see inside our minds. He says Google can take serendipity out of the equation. Moving on from telling us how Google is run, he implies that its model could be used to organise the world economy. It could, he believes, enable society to predict electronically in advance what consumers will desire and want in the future. The logical implication being that capitalism can do what communism aims to do, which is to plan production in a conscious fashion; in Schmidt’s world by seeing into our “unconscious” minds to discover what will soon become a concrete demand.

If I may wander for a moment, Schmidt’s view is very Edward Bernays. Now I admire – and sometimes defend – Bernays. He was clever and insightful, but he was a propagandist: a manipulator. His ideas were in tune with - and perhaps inspired – propaganda techniques on both sides of WW2 and the Cold War. And he used it to flog stuff. It is true that he deliberately used ideas about the “unconscious” which he got from his uncle Sigmund Freud. I could argue (in line with keeping science out of PR) that the unconscious is a pre-scientific idea, as old as the Greek Psyche with their sophisticated understanding of art and illusion: so he wasn’t all that scientific or original really. I’d rather argue that when propagandists hope to deploy scientific canniness in the media world to influence mass opinion, I hope and believe that good old unscientific prejudices, and deep-seated ideas and reasoned argument will, if they are allowed to, see through the guff. The success of the Bernays-Goebbels axis (so far as it existed except in the mind of Adam Curtis) was not the success of science, not even in its Freudian form, but the failure of the German mass-mind to detect bollocks.

Ok, now that’s off my chest let’s get back to Schmidt. He believes that most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, but to tell them what they should be doing next. But he sees this as involving more than providing choices. Schmidt views it instead as others deciding (taking the risk and guess work out of the marketplace) in advance which choices we will make:

“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 [in advance].

Though that only works – if for one moment we suspend disbelief and imagine it ever could – if Google plays the role of the communist centralized state by exploiting (and retaining) its de facto monopoly on internet search, aggregation and interaction. But I feel comfortable in saying that will never happen. It won’t happen for the same reason that Schmidt’s reasoning is flawed. Innovation, competition and new risk-taking continually redefine the human experience in new and unpredictable ways, the way Compaq, Microsoft, the internet and Google did recently.

Of course it is wonderful to see a modern capitalist like Schmidt saying that scientific and technological imperatives engineer choice out of consuming and uncertainty out of producing. But the hubris of the thing antagonises one. Doesn’t he know life’s more complicated than that? Doesn’t he spot that if he was right, we might hate him and flock to a search engine that did stuff differently? It is at least intriguing to see a man predicting that what looks like the triumph of his business – information and individualism – is merely the triumph of manipulation. But hold on. This isn’t really manipulation: it’s anticipation as the word ought to be used. It’s not all that creepy or conspiratorial so much as an expression of over confidence.

Every business in the world takes a crack at getting ahead of the taste of its customers. For my money, the better they get at it, the better my life will be. And of course the genius of the modern world is that huge firms are getting better and better at working out the zillions of niches they have to cater to.

Anyway, you readily see, I think, that any claim that all this is scientific is nonsense. It is about as believable as the now discredited, but recently fashionable, idea, which suggested equations devised by boffins could produce packages that strip the risk out of financial instruments and end the boom and bust cycle. So let people aim to map the human mass mind: I imagine they’ll have all the luck which has attended those who try to map a single one.

For more on this from me see here.

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As the three companies faced their interrogators, behind sat protesters wearing T-shirts embossed “Energy shouldn’t cost lives”. When the proceedings closed the protesters screamed at the BP spokesman, “Hey, Hey, Lamar MacKay, how many fish did you kill today?” They chanted “Boycott BP”. They seemed to have friends in the Senate. Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey said:

“We were told that the Titanic was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t sink, and we were told that this well was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t spill. Unfortunately both of these technological marvels ended in tragedy.”

Actually, nobody ever said that either accident couldn’t happen. Though the makers of the Titanic and BP both at some point understated the potential risk involved in their respective challenges. That’s all the more reason, I believe, for BP to use this latest incident to set the record straight with the public about the realities of its business.

But right now the White House has vowed to “keep a boot to the throat” of BP. That’s an understandable response while the oil flows unchecked from the seabed. That does not mean that either PRs or BP should see it that way.

However, PR dogma suggests that BP should bite its tongue. The PR rulebook, designed to maintain a licence to operate, opines that if people think BP’s the villain it should act like one. Larry Smith of the Institute for Crisis Management and Timothy Coombs of Eastern Illinois University advocated this viewpoint to Slate:

[It's] literally true: BP owns the oil but not the rig. But it’s a shoddy communications strategy, says Smith. Wherever the fault lies, BP shouldn’t be splitting hairs. Companies should take the fall and work out recriminations behind closed doors, says Coombs. For example, when the chain Taco Johns had an E. coli outbreak, it didn’t publicly blame the lettuce supplier. It took responsibility. And, of course, sued the lettuce supplier later.

Effectively, Coombs is arguing that BP should adopt a cynical strategy in which it says one thing in private and another in public. His logic – and that of most PRs – is that the truth is too nuanced and complex for the public to comprehend. The argument goes that perception is everything. As the WSJ explained, they’ve got a point:

When you consider that analysts’ worst case scenarios put the eventual cost to BP at around $8 billion, yet $30 billion has been wiped off the company’s market capitalization since the crisis began, it becomes clear that this reputational damage has a value.

The problem is that by accepting full responsibility for the accident, BP would promote itself (dishonestly) as incompetent. How would that help maintain its credibility and reputation? Hence, I much prefer BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s strategy of accepting full responsibility for cleaning up the mess caused by its oil, while quietly but firmly disputing that it caused or was responsible for the accident. But Malcolm Gooderham, MD, TLG Communications, dubbed Hayward’s approach a “Miss” in PR Week. He also contrasted Hayward’s stance to that of his predecessor, Lord Browne:

“The virtue of Browne’s tenure was that despite the disasters, he is revered because of his strategic achievements. The challenge for BP today is to define a new thought leadership agenda.”

Browne’s thought leadership led him to re-brand British Petroleum as Beyond Petroleum. It was deceptive positioning and slightly bonkers to boot. To his credit, when Hayward took control of BP, he quietly downgraded the tag-line’s prominence. It now merely serves as “shorthand for what we do”, which is petroleum, and it hardly features at all in BP’s PR. What’s more, the irony of BP’s current plight is that it follows Mr Hayward’s determination to re-oritentate itself on technological competence rather than geo-political flair.

So what’s my advice to BP today?

• BP should concentrate on proving itself committed and competent as it cleans up the mess and reconsiders safety strategies
• BP has to speak with one voice in public and in private, now and in the future
• BP should use this crisis to educate the media, public and political elite about the realities of complex accountability
• BP should seek to lay the blame wherever the facts take them, even if some more of it falls on them
• BP should remind the world that energy is bottled force; BP is as good as any in handling the hazards involved in fueling our world
• BP should state the Browne years of Texas and Alaska lapses are behind them and what happened in the Gulf of Mexico was not caused by the same internal flaws
• BP needs to stress that the oil that’s now being drilled is located in inhospitable conditions and has inescapable risks
• BP should repeat and repeat that whatever lessons can be learned will be learned and that no stone will be left unturned in discovering them.

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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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In front of the public, the union now stands embarrassed and apologetic about its threatening behaviour at Xmas.

In front of its members, the union is demoralizing its most ardent activists, and it is reminding their less militant colleagues how head-strong and damaging were the tactics the union first pursued.

In front of BA’s management, the union’s dilemma is crystal clear. BA’s cabin crews’ mood is becoming by the day more realistic and resigned as the union loses its grip on its own members and events.

Of course, all this will help secure a negotiated settlement, or it will lead the union into taking industrial action that lacks the punch to do anything more than lead the cabin crew to defeat because the strike lacks both conviction and support.

The one lesson that PRs need to take note of – which I’m afraid is not yet on most of our radars – is that BA created its own monster. BA put its cabin crew at the centre of its PR, marketing and brand ambassadorial promotion to the world. BA cabin crew were heralded as the key component of what made BA “the world’s favourite airline”.

But the BA experience – and the alternative methods employed by the likes of Ryanair – should modify the thoughts of trendy PRs who think they have some new magic via internal comms to use employees as a PR stage army on the employers’ behalf.

As I said last year about the BA affair, BA cabin crew believed their own PR and then got angry when they realised that their needs were secondary to the survival of the mother ship. The reality was that their “unhappiness and discontent” didn’t really matter much to the company or to the public.

Over the years, the cabin crew had not much changed but perception of them had. They’d lost the gloss of being big sisters in the sky. They had gone from being slightly bossy friends to dreary smug over-paid self-seekers. Maybe that was BA’s mistake. They patronised us for years and encouraged their staff to be agents of the airline’s superiority. Wasn’t this after all, Bomber Command with trolly dollies? Neither the airline nor their staff nor their union noticed that one of the Ryanair effects was to make flying more like coach travel.

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First off, here’s the essence of the message or warning Buffett, according to Gaines-Ross, emails his staff every year:

“We can afford to lose money – even a lot of money. We cannot afford to lose reputation – even a shred of reputation. Let’s be sure that everything we do in business can be reported on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly but intelligent reporter. In many areas, including acquisitions, Berkshire’s results have benefitted from its reputation, and we don’t want to do anything that in any way can tarnish it. Berkshire is ranked by Fortune as the second-most admired company in the world. It took us 43 years to get there, but we could lose it in 43 minutes.”

My first insight is that quotes don’t speak for themselves because they are open to interpretation. So here’s what I think Buffett is saying.

Buffett seeks a reputation which disciplines his profit-seeking. He seeks a reputation which has the effect of being a proxy for his share value but also imposes a professionally disciplined nuance to his profit-making. The distinction I am drawing is between profiteering and professionalism. Profiteering is the pursuit of profit without discipline (think about the worst excesses of the last boom).

Not all profit is worth having (just as PR agencies like to pick and choose their clients). Not all disciplines are good.

So the point is, has Buffett defined the kind of discipline which usefully mitigates and polices his profit-making? I rather think that the world’s richest man and most successful investor has done so. I’m certain that that clarity is the secret of his success.

In short, I think he has found the right approach to reputation. He knows how to get the right sort of reputation to do the good work only reputation can do, because he knows that reputation is everything.

But, and it is a big one: one only wants to care about being thought well-of by people who matter. That is, preferably by people who matter because they are intelligent, rigorous, involved, serious, as well as valuable. Hence, Buffett in his quote implicitly qualifies his remarks regarding journalists by using the word “intelligent”, as if the vast majority don’t qualify.

I recognise, however, the danger of comparing chalk with cheese. Reputations are multi-faceted, multi-audience constructions, and client-directed in terms of what we want to achieve for them.

So what, I asked myself, do they (Buffett and O’Leary) have in common?

I think the commonality is in the risk factor. Both fear that stupid people, or third parties with competing agendas, could hold the fate of their reputations in their hands.

Ryanair has gone for pre-emptive PR by setting low expectations. While Buffett has gone for the high ground at the other end of the spectrum. Both have sought to make whatever they do consistent, robust and authentic. Hence, worrying about good or bad headlines in the abstract need hardly bother either party at all.

However, both fear losing their reputations, because that is what both companies – like most others - are built and sustained on.

But therein lies a difference. Buffett needs to be thought a good thing by a very few people who can be assumed to be savvy and serious and not likely to be deflected by mob opinion. In a rather small world, it helps Buffett to be thought easy or at least reliable to deal with.

Ryanair needs to appeal to more people, but in slightly different terms. Ryanair know that their customers know that for the most important thing – arriving safely – Ryanair is regulated by regulators not by reputation. Or rather: Ryanair has a reputation for being a loud-mouthed and stroppy player in a highly-regulated environment; while old-fashioned City values of my word is my bond still outweighs regulation in Buffett’s world.

Buffett is in a position at once more robust, nuanced and remote. Buffett’s numbers are kind of obvious, aren’t they? Indeed, it is easier to assess Buffett’s performance than Ryanair’s. But Buffett really might regret acquiring a reputation for being profitable but difficult to deal with. Buffett might find it profitable to have a reputation for being tough but fair. Ryanair, on the other hand, doesn’t mind being thought a pain in the arse, provided the basics are in place.

Conclusion
It is obvious that reputation is what PRs do. It’s important then that when I argue for no-frills reputations, or rock-solid but authentic reputations, I remind you (and myself) that reputations come in all shapes and sizes. You may know that Ryanair’s loud-mouth git PR appeals to a strand of my thinking and prejudices. But so too does Buffett’s low-key persona.

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Some of the details are startling. A man stabbed himself in the stomach during a staff meeting (he survived) and a woman threw herself out of a fourth floor window (she died). On Bastille Day, Michel Deparis, a 53-year-old France Telecom employee, was found with a suicide note blaming “overwork” and “management by terror.”

The firm’s Chief Executive Didier Lombard responded by saying that he would do everything he could to “stop the infernal spiral” of suicides among workers at his former state-owned Telco. He warned, I think sensibly, that:

“The more you talk about this kind of thing, the more you put it into the heads of anyone who is psychologically unstable.”

But he has been forced to talk about the issue because it has become politicised. Last week Lombard was ordered to account for the suicides in person to Xavier Darcos, the French labour minister, whose government is also a major shareholder in the firm. The French media has given the story a sensational outing and blamed France Telecom.

However, not everybody is convinced that the firm is responsible. Oliver Barberot, France Telecom’s head of human relations, told the French satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaîné:

“It’s not that dramatic, I have seen worse. The numbers of suicides are not even going up. In 2000 there were 28 and in 2002 there were 29.”

Moreover, the suicide rate among France Telecom’s 102, 000 employees is no higher than the national average: 16.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, and in the most vulnerable group, men aged between 45 and 49, 41.6 per 100,000. And it happens that the median age of the firm’s employees is approaching 50. Lombard, however, has not put this hard-headed rational rebuttal at the heart of his PR response.

Regardless of the facts, there’s a more powerful narrative at play. It is one we know well. Since it was semi-privatised in 1996, France Telecom has shed almost 60, 000 workers. For those that remained life has got tough, as Christopher Caldwell usefully described in this weekend’s FT:

“France Telecom set targets for early retirement. It reassigned people to tasks other than the ones they had been trained for (engineers-turned-cellphone-salesmen is the image in the French press). These job switches were often accompanied by mobilités professionnelles: employees were reassigned to work far from their homes. Maybe to France Telecom, this was a way of keeping in meaningful work people whom the new economy had made obsolescent. But to unions, it smacked of playing with workers’ minds until they cracked under pressure and left.”

After the bad publicity over the suicides, Lombard has suspended the mobilités professionnelles and employed more human relations staff and physicians specializing in occupational medicine. He’s also sent his heads of department on tour around France to investigate why their workers are so unhappy.

Perhaps, indeed, the redundant workers are statistically happier than the ones who kept their jobs? Who knows. But if so the unions have something to answer for.

Certainly, the attitude of the union hardly seems to be sustained by the facts. Patrice Diochet, the CFTC union’s national secretary, says,”There is no humanity anymore, no neighborliness. Only business counts.” (If that were true more workers would have been sacked than have been, and France Telecom would be robustly defending its business against emotional blackmail).

But is either side – unions or management – responsible for the suicides? I think not. As Caldwell points out:

“There is always a temptation to interpret suicides ideologically. During the wave of suicide bombings in the Palestinian territories earlier this decade, pundits were quick to diagnose “despair” among the men who blew themselves up. Are we to assume the recent fall in suicide bombings means a decrease in despair? A perennial staple of American anti-socialist rhetoric is to ask why, if socialism is so great, Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world. (It doesn’t, actually, and never did.)”

That’s the point. Suicide is deeply personal. Its causes are difficult to fathom. The argument still rages, for instance, as to whether psychoanalyst Anna Freud contributed to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide (as Adam Curtis suggested in The Century of the Self) and to that of one of the Burlingham children, who killed himself in Anna’s house, after a life-time’s experimental therapy designed to produce a happy balanced individual, instead of the suicidal drunk he became.

I’m not sure that in the current climate one can criticize France Telecom for taking the line of least resistance. Third parties – such as me – are setting the record straight in a way which the firm could not (at least not without appearing hard-hearted).

Maybe the pseudo-firm (part state-owned, highly politicised, national icon and all that) cannot be blunt. Perhaps, anyway, it is employing dark-arts third party strategies to out-source the messaging. Maybe it has some bad practices it would rather wrap up in this suicide-bundle and get shot-of in one fell swoop (or grovel).

This is France, after all. Guessing what is going on is an art form that’s beyond most foreigners. But one’s heart does sink when one sees a big company getting into such an emotional muddle with its PR.

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“I know the value of my players and I’m not worried at all. My concern is that they don’t get too frustrated. I totally believe in them and I have so much faith in their qualities for us. I am sure this spell is going to be over soon.”

I hope he’s right. But the manager’s perception, like our dreams, often fades and dies over the course of 90 minutes’ play. But when West Ham’s fortunes turn, you’ll read about them bubbling here.

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