Utopian PRs have been dreaming about “one world, people and planet” in which all the barriers between various publics come tumbling down. They envisage a connected world in which the lines of demarcation between internal, boundary and external stakeholders dissolve as they connect transparently and interactively in a value chain that links interdependent companies to their consumers and markets.

But such views ignore some major issues.

One is that in an open digitally-connected world, there’s more need than ever to conspire – organise, ghettoise, corral – to keep things confidential and hidden behind closed walls.

Indeed, we will see the kind of problem which Freedom of Information rules can produce: a clever, covert, closed decision making in which everything which really matters is centripetally driven to a cabal. (Remember the government of Tony Blair?)

Arguably, the more open things become and the more control bosses relinquish to networks, the more restrictions they will have to impose on those who operate in them. This might, paradoxically, lead to even tighter control on commercially sensitive information than exists today. It might lead corporates to adopt a civil service mantra of only releasing information on a need to know basis.

Another issue that the utopian PR camp ignores is competition. Companies forging various so-called value networks are as likely as not to form lots of them. They are as likely as not to value some more than others and to find themselves involved in contradictory and conflicting chains.

This will lead to lots of tension and uncertainty within corporates and institutions, such as government service providers, as they are forced to choose between their various product ranges, service offerings and partnership relationships, according to either their broader interests or their ability to sustain them. The resolution of such problems, or issues, will remain driven from the centre, from the top, by corporate or institutional bosses concerned with strategy.

Moreover, because of competition, PRs at either end of a chain, not to mention the middle, might find themselves pulling in different directions and unable to always align their interests, messages and narratives. There is no reason to believe that just because we introduce new tools into the workplace that real-world tensions, politics and commercial interests, will evaporate. We should, I warn, avoid the technological determinism trap.

My point is that we should not think that corporations are about to relinquish control to horizontal or flat digital networks. We should not kid ourselves that top-down management and communication are about to die out. Neither should we imagine, as the PR utopians do, that existing internal silos, lines of responsibility and accountability, will be or should be altered very much by commercial Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications.

Here’s what Norman Lewis, Managing Partner at Open Knowledge UK, had to say on this when he commented on my piece There’s no social media revolution:

… it’s definitely the case that social media like any other technology does not alter the realities of the business world. (I very much like your points about the chaos that would ensue in a company if everyone could relate to sales, customers etc). This is based upon the naive hippie prejudice that enterprises can become democracies run in the interests of employees empowered to act like free agents.

Another of the problems that’s being overlooked by utopian PRs is how social media usage in the personal sphere is maturing. They seem to have missed the point that the major stumbling block for social media of all kinds is privacy, trust and control over personal data. It would seem that social media users are emerging from the immature days of the early adoption period and starting to ask tough questions.

In the commercial sphere the risks and drawbacks have been fairly clear from the very beginning.

There is no doubt that knowledge-sharing, collaboration and instant feedback and decision-making all have great appeal. There is also no doubting that patents, IP, confidential information and in-house knowledge lie at the heart of commercial value. It is also obvious, or should be, that for legitimate reasons such as their survival, corporates are going to be reluctant to dilute and devalue their brand value and identity in an undifferentiated network. So the open Web 2.0 information flows between various players presents itself both as an opportunity and as a risk.

Yet there’s even more reason for PRs not to get over-excited about Web 2.0′s ability to transform the workplace as utopian PRs do when they talk about paradigm shifts. Some believe that Michael Porter’s value chain model has already been replaced – or almost so – “by fuzzy (and not linear) and immaterial (rather than material) networks that normally disintegrate the distinction between internal and external publics.” But the truth is that Web 2.0′s commercial applicability is in its infancy and has yet to make a great impact.

The point the utopians miss is how much experimentation will be required to ascertain where and how to make Web 2.0 and social media applications work best in the corporate and public sector domain given the virtual impossibility of measuring their benefits accurately.

Don’t get me wrong, however. I favour innovation and risk. I decry our current risk-adverse culture. I look forward to seeing more Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications introduced by business and institutions to deliver products and services. I don’t doubt for a moment that they can boost productivity and add great value.

I also accept fully that Web 2.0 and 3.0 provide a new sense of power and control to consumers and poses new challenges to corporates. So of course corporates need to manage this threat and turn it into an opportunity. But that aspect of the story was not what this post was about.

Note: This first appeared here in May 2010.

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1. PR should help leaders lead, not listen

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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I know that the worst case “media-generated scenario” for Fukushima goes on getting worse every day, nevertheless, we ought to be bold. Indeed, dammit, I’ll risk being cocky. Nuclear PR professionals – but also disinterested intelligent bystanders – need to communicate in a relaxed, mature and non-defensive tone:

• Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.
• Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.
• People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.
• Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.
• We can have it all – nukes, coal, oil, hydro, wind, wave, solar and every other alternative energy source you can envisage.

See talk tracks, proof points and soundbites below…

“Fabulous new-improved nuclear plant will suffer calamity of some sort at some point.”

There’s no reason why nuclear spokespeople should say otherwise. They can even add that whilst science, engineering and risk analysis suggests it is extremely unlikely, the extremely unlikely will as likely as not turn into some kind of reality. But so what? Particle physics meets sod’s law, like everything else.

The point that nuclear PRs need to repeat is this: we will go on getting better at developing nuclear technology. We shall go on getting better at creating nuclear plant suited for the environment in which they are located. Fukushima is the same age of technology as Chernobyl and TMI and they provide us with lessons for the future.

“Media fallout is the biggest nuclear hazard.”

For a few days or weeks some population (like today’s Tokyo) will face some uncertainty. The media will make it as bad as possible. Maybe that’s the point. Almost all the media have talked nonsense about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl since they happened. As the media’s eclipse of Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami victims in preference for speculation over Fukushima reveals, it’s like a disease with these people.

“People work hard to increase their risk of cancer.”

Maybe things will go wrong and they’ll face an actual higher cancer risk from nulcear power as well as today’s “merely” feared one. But the most concerned type of citizen already works hard to create increased cancer risk: they diet and jog and meditate so as to live longer. After all, longevity is their biggest cancer risk (and almost everyone else’s too), and, in the nuclear age, we are living longer lives than ever, thanks to nuclear medicine and obsessive lifestyle anxiety.

“Nuclear has been pretty safe so far, and better than the greenest source.”

Regardless of Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now (with luck) Fukushima, nuclear energy has an unsurpassed safety record among the major electricity-generating sources. For instance, there have been 0.006 fatalities per GWe year of nuclear electricity produced compared to 15 times as many fatalities per GWe year for natural gas; and 1000 times as many fatalities per GWe year for coal, oil and hydropower.

Here’s a few examples for hydropower. In China around 170,000 people died when Banqiao and Shimantan burst in 1974; almost 30,000 immediately and the rest because of latent effects. A decade earlier Europe also had its fair share of similar accidents. In 1959, 400 people died in France when the Fréjus reservoir ruptured; and in 1963, 2000 died in Italy because of crumbling ground at the Vajont reservoir.

We shouldn’t forget the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform killed 167 people in 1988. BPs recent problems must be fresh in all our minds, too.

If the scale of a potential accident rules out an industry’s right to exist, then what are we to make of Bhopal, India, in 1984? A Union Carbide chemical plant there killed three thousand people when 40 tons of toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked and contaminated the surrounding environment. But we all know that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries benefits many more people than they harm.

I’m not trying to spread fear here about other energy and industrial sources. All energy is bottled force. The entire energy industry has mostly handled its controlled release responsibly. But the evidence suggests that nuclear technology is low risk. Windscale killed nobody. Three Mile Island killed nobody and left no measurable long-term carcinogenic risks in its wake.

Meanwhile, we should remind the world that the Chernobyl accident killed around 50 people in 1986. Most of its exclusion zone is now being dismantled and being re-settled and farmed again safely. Though as many as 9, 000 people (4, 000 of those among the 6 million most affected population) might die a slightly premature death from Chernobyl-related cancers. However not only is that worst-case outcome unlikely, we shall never know because that statistic cannot be measured among the many millions of people it encompasses.

The biggest risk from nuclear energy is people’s fear of it. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, unfounded fear and anxiety was the most damaging consequence of the accident investigators could discover (see here for a full interrogation of Chernobyl’s death toll). But that fear is something the media helps generate.

Hence, the media also must learn from its past mistakes. It, too, must face up to its responsibility to protect the public. A little less hype and scaremongering over Fukushima would make a most welcome start. The next step would be to have an honest debate about risk and energy policy. That’s something nuclear PR can help facilitate.

“We can have it all.”

However, we can have nearly everything: nuclear (with the odd calamity); oil and gas (with more frequent calamities; bought from dictators and religious fundamentalists); solar (might become seriously lovable and economic quite soon); wind (not always, and not where you’d like it); hydro (big hazards; plenty of enemies); conservation (if we can be bothered to live like cavemen). It’s all possible, and all has real risk or drawback, including (variously) fear, guilt, patience, or tedium. Which do we prefer? Which most solves the global warming problem?

Well, clearly nuclear energy has fewer greenhouses gases than coal, oil and gas. Green alternative energy sources provide far from proven technological solutions, at greater cost than nuclear energy. Moreover they have to yet to show that they are adequate to the task of replacing coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy. The least risky route of all would be if our governments hedged their bets and adopted a mixed bag of solutions (read all of the above).

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Clearly, the pictures of the reactor building’s side walls and ceiling exploding that we all saw live on TV were startling. But it was obviously not a nuclear explosion. As Malcolm Grimston, associate fellow at Chatham House in London, remarked:

“Thankfully, although the explosion was spectacular, it wasn’t devastating and it seems the force was not sufficient to breach the reactor’s metal shell.”

Of course, the authorities in Japan rightly evacuated around 170 000 people from a twenty kilometer radius from the plant. But that was a precautionary move, not one born out of panic. There was some mildly radioactive steam and or hydrogen that needed venting from the plant. It was wise to remove people from its vicinity while the gas dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere.

To put all this in perspective, the authorities have rated the incident so far at 4 on the 0-7 international scale of severity. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was rated 7, with the official death toll being just under 50, though as many as 4,000 could die eventually as a consequence of that accident. The 1979 Three Mile Island accident was rated 5. Notably in that case nobody was killed or seriously injured, and no long term health consequences are expected.

Sure, the recent earthquake and Tsunami have pushed the safety defences at Fukushima to the limit. We don’t know yet whether the two troubled reactor cores at Fukushima “merely” suffered fuel damage, a partial meltdown or the near full meltdown that occurred at Three Mile Island. But we can say with some certainty that that lack of knowledge is not that important. It took years before we knew the full extent of the meltdown at Three Mile Island. That’s because it is not possible to poke one’s head, or even a camera, into the reactor core until it cools down and the radiation levels allow it.

There is something very credible and laudable about Japan’s safety-first nuclear culture at work in Fukushima. They have flooded their reactors with seawater – which effectively destroys them – to make 100% sure that they cool down harmlessly; the main threat being hydrogen and steam explosions caused by the reactor’s heat.

The picture emerging from Fukushima is “reassuring”. The onsite and offsite consequences – no deaths and just a few injuries and some dispersal of mildly radioactive gas – have been limited. That’s what a safety case and the regulatory authorities demand from a nuclear plant’s in-depth multi-layered defences.

It is my view, that the Japanese handling of this nuclear incident at Fukushima - whether they made mistakes or not – will validate the safety case for old nukes.

So there’s something very skewed, overblown even, about the media’s reporting on Japan’s earthquake and Tsunami disasters: we know there are tens of thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless or stranded, yet everybody is talking excessively about a troubled nuclear plant that has not and most likely will not kill anybody.

However the media were playing up to stereotypes over Japan’s nuclear troubles. There’s a rich history associated with nuclear scaremongering, not least because the public has an appetite for horror stories. At Three Mile Island in 1979 the meltdown occurred at the outset of the shutdown. The media and politicians then spent weeks terrorizing the world as they speculated about the terrible impact of a meltdown that had been so undramatic that nobody noticed it had happened already with little consequence.

As I have reported extensively on this online review, while Chernobyl was an horrific disaster, it was no where near as bad as the doom-mongers claimed – see here here and here.

So the western nuclear industry now has a major PR challenge on its hands. The challenge will be to convince the world that core meltdowns do happen and that the evidence shows that they don’t matter much (Chernobyl being a unique case). That calls for some straight and upfront risk management communication, one that can show that new nukes are even more reassuringly safe than old ones.

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My countryfolk are screaming foul. Oh dear, they were always dreaming. They never stood a chance. It is possible that England’s governing Football Association thought that PR could influence the outcome. The Russians showed them what nonsense that was. They lost the technical and commercial bids and the wider PR campaign. Yet they won the vote to host the World Cup because they were offering what FIFA craves. The Russians probably also focused almost exclusively on the private views of the 22 committee members, rather than FIFA’s public rhetoric.

Never mind any possibility of corruption’s persuasive powers, there were sound reasons for Russia’s win. FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter has long been intent on spreading football’s influence across the globe. As the BBC reported:

Russia wrapped things up with their Fifa member Vitaly Mutko pointing out that eastern Europe has never previously hosted the World Cup.

“Twenty one years ago the Berlin Wall was broken,” said Mutko. “Today we can break another symbolic wall and open a new era in football together.

“Russia represents new horizons for Fifa, millions of new hearts and minds and a great legacy after the World Cup, great new stadiums and millions of boys and girls embracing the game.

“Russia’s economy is large and growing, and Russia’s sports market is developing markedly.”

The last World Cups have been in Japan and South Korea (2002) and South Africa (2010). The next ones will be in Brazil (2014), Moscow (2018) and then Middle East (2022). The fact that Russia and Qatar were high-risk choices should provoke a “so what” response. Risk is a challenge to overcome and not a reason for inaction or rejection.

Actually, wouldn’t a good liberal, kindly, globalising, civilised view be that it is exactly right that FIFA’s choices fell as they did? Russia (which has for centuries half-yearned to be Europeanised) and Qatar (which has for several years been an invaluable Western-bridgehead to the Moslem world) are the very places where football may be a benign influence. Indeed, why not argue that football mostly thrives in Westernised countries, but can be a force for culture and good in more backward countries just as it is in Manchester’s Moss Side?

The British footballing establishment’s moan that FIFA is bent, or at least manipulatively dishonest, reeks of sour grapes. It is a statement of the blindingly obvious. But given what goes on from the FA downwards in Britain’s domestic game, claiming moral superiority whiffs of cynical hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, anybody who blames the British media for FIFA’s rejection of England’s bid is looking for scapegoats. The BBC’s Panorama‘s controversial last-minute report on FIFA’s “wrong doings” lacked substance and was far from convincing and very possibly libelous. However,The Sunday Times did cleverly catch two of FIFA’s World Cup selection committee openly selling votes for cash. But so what? England was already defeated. In this battle, winning never depended upon the media’s support.

The question, then, is why did prime minister David Cameron expose himself to inevitable humiliation on the world stage? There are a couple of linked possible explanations. Clearly, he would have quite liked to host the World Cup. Presumably, it would have helped pay for the 2012 Olympic infrastructure losses. He may have lusted after the competition’s ability to bring his people together around a vision of sporting glory at Wembley Stadium: but that would have been a dream, too, surely? We might have proven ourselves good losers and warm hosts: as South Africa did. Indeed, it may well be that we rise to similar opportunities during the Olympics. Let’s hope so.

The only explanation I can propose is that at home David Cameron was in a no-lose situation. Backing the bid, and going down with the ship, gave him a chance to modify his Top Toff Tory, Squire Cameron, image: he was at one with us oiks, at small cost to his pride. (Ditto, the heir to the throne, by the way.)

We have to hope that Britain’s Foreign Office and its spy network had enough inside information to advise David Cameron wisely about the FIFA process (if not he could have asked me). Hence, it is doubtful that defeat came as a complete shock, even if the lack of even minimal support did.

It is time that people got real about football. It is the last bastion of the politically incorrect and skullduggerous old world. It gets away with it because it is a game that provokes passion precisely because it does not obey the real world’s rules. If Cameron and Barack Obama, who wailed that the rejection of the US bid was a mistake, had remained cool and stood aloof, Russia’s and Qatar’s victories would not have been half so consequential politically, indeed they could have been welcomed gracefully.

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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.”

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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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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Vision 2050 advocates that big business solves mankind’s major social and environmental problems in partnerships with government and society. The aim is to produce enough food, clean water, sanitation, shelter, mobility, education and health to provide for 9 billion humans.

Here’s some of what they think needs doing over the next forty years to make a sustainable planetary society possible:

“These include incorporating the costs of externalities, starting with carbon, ecosystem services and water, into the structure of the marketplace; doubling agricultural output without increasing the amount of land or water used; halting deforestation and increasing yields from planted forests: halving carbon emissions worldwide (based on 2005 levels) by 2050 through a shift to low-carbon energy systems and improved demand-side energy efficiency, and providing universal access to low-carbon mobility.”

The WBCSD explains that:

“As part of this transformation, Vision 2050 calls for a new agenda for business: to work with government and society worldwide to transform markets and competition. New rules for markets will reframe environmental challenges as economic challenges, driving innovation and competition in the direction of sustainability and away from resource- and energy-intensive production. Rationalizing prices to include such externalities as climate and biodiversity impacts will make corporate environmental efficiency a true competitive advantage across all industries and regions.”

How to interrogate this stuff from an independent PR perspective? Sceptically, I suggest.

Big business likes this stuff because it sounds and even is virtuous. It has the merit of turning all kinds of uncertainties into market opportunities. I certainly warm to Vision 2050′s commitment to raising productivity (output) by improving land usage and making better use of genetically modified organisms. I can also see the logic of accepting political realities and in proactively helping governments turn costly externalities into profit-centres.

It’s worth noting, though, that this means that externalities and social desirables become goods and services which have a state-subsidy or state guaranteed price.

The problem is that state planning risks making the future of the world dependent on the short-term political thinking politicians are prone toward, which is the very opposite of what Vision 2050 aims to achieve. Certainly, WBCSD hopes that governments will map the paths to achieve pre-advertised and pre-announced priced services (the ex-externalities), which is something that may or may not happen.

Yet, when the state is required to map out the big things it wants to happen, won’t it be natural (as the WBCSD knows well) that big firms will be able to gear up to deliver it quicker and better than small firms? Won’t government find itself talking with the big firms which can deliver big stuff?

For instance, BP may have cocked-up in the Gulf of Mexico, but a small firm couldn’t have even begun to get the deal. If you electrify cars, the trains, build new track, put in huge windfarms or solar arrays, deliver new low-pollution chemical plants etc, etc, almost all the sustainability deliverables get delivered quicker by giant firms. So the big problem-makers become the big problem-solvers. Yummy. Trebles all round. And a PR victory to boot, you would think. Perhaps, says I, but it is a short term and limited one. Here’s why.

Vision 2050 assumes that in the future the world will have to cutback on carbon dioxide usage to combat global warming. However, what if we could either suck the carbon from the atmosphere or clean it up effectively as we go at little cost? With the former solution we could turn-reverse global warming and keep using fossil fuels. With the latter solution we could make use of all the fossil fuel resources we desire for as long as they are available without making AGW any worse than it already is (evidence suggests there are still huge reserves of gas, oil and coal waiting to be exploited).

Moreover, if the nuclear fusion technology comes on tap in the next 40 years then our energy usage could increase in intensity almost without limit forever. Energy production might remain centralized with the emergence of fusion. It would also make desalination possible on a grand scale; ending all worries about water shortages in a world that is two thirds covered by oceans. We already know how to build gas pipelines over distances of thousands of miles to deliver energy to our homes, so building a global water-pipe network should not be beyond us (something states might legislate for but might not pay for; while the market might be able to sustain the entire costs because it is profitable to do so).

By making best use of nuclear fission, solar and wind technology, this might facilitate the trend toward greater decentralized energy provision that environmentalists demand and Vision 2010 supposes: that is until fusion  - or something else – replaces them all (again subsidies might help, and they might not, and special pleading might not be attractive to taxpayers either).

My point is not to favour this or that solution over some other possible solution. My point is that innovation creates new industries, new possibilities and paradigms. Another issue is that the WBCSD Vision 2050 is in the business of envisioning. In that regard, I accept that the BCSD has identified all sorts of problems which are up ahead, and it may be right that government has a role in fixing them, helped by big business. My concern is only that we should be careful when big business signs up for a green agenda, but only because it’s neat and now it suits them.

Regardless, they may still be right. But I suspect they’d be quick to argue, whatever the reality was, for legislation, controls etc, which make their life more mappable. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it takes away some of their virtue, which they so boldly lay claim to. In any case, they may – as I fear – wrap us in all sorts of expensive taxpayer action which turns out misguided and which leads to its own backlash that undermines their credibility and reputations for honesty, integrity and insight.

The future is almost certainly unpredictable. And perhaps my most important point of all is that we should instead be encouraging new risk-takers to emerge to solve today’s and tomorrow’s problems. Such risk takers are as likely as not to be competitors to today’s major solution providers. They will make best use of scientific and technological breakthroughs to challenge the existing order. Such innovation and innovators rarely emerge from partnership relationships (cosy clubs) but unfold as the work of disruptive entrepreneurs, as the railways, automobile, IT, internet and bio-pharmaceutical industries did.

Vision 2050 does have PR potential, certainly for spin. It also has potential for making progressive progress through the promotion of partnerships, even if its difficult to know in which field. What grates on me is the self-interested certainty that is embedded in the content and tone of Vision 2050. At the very least I counsel that however well intentioned Vision 2050 is, I don’t think it is a sustainable plan over the next 40 years given the nature of the unknown unknowns – such as politics, serendipity and competition – that are as likely as not to tear the plan’s assumptions to shreds.

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BP is on a knife-edge. They can’t seem attractive (and suitably penitent) whilst blaming others, and yet they are not alone in causing the accident in the Gulf. (Leave aside that they’ve got a gaffe-prone CEO who says that he wants things to go well because “I’d like my life back”. A severe shortage of pre-accident media training there, I fear.)

But in time – and that time isn’t yet, not by a long chalk – BP may well find itself able and required to discuss (first in private with sympathetic mature journalists and opinion-formers) where other parcels of blame lie.

It may well be that Transocean or Halliburton or others are culpable in some degree, perhaps even greatly. But how about those nice regulators who are the thin line between corporate greed and the fragile public and planet?

I am pretty sure that if there’s blame to be spread, the regulator is as much at fault (or as innocent) as BP or other firms. Indeed, I am inclined to think that the regulator is more to blame based on what I’ve learned from the circumstances behind all of the disasters I’ve ever studied. I’ll return to this another time, but from Titanic to Three Mile Island, I’m struck by how technological failure has flowed from regulatory failure rather than greed. I mean that very often – most often – the private sector fails when the public sector thinks it’s doing fine and has signed-off on its behaviour. (The modern financial failures are examples of this, by the way.)

So I reason that it was more the regulator’s job to drive, own, the “what-if” process than BP’s. It isn’t exactly BP’s job to be gungho and alpha-male. But, certainly, in the modern highly-regulated and accountable world the corporation is in a proper and allowed tension with its regulators. Indeed, I hold the view that regulators are rather feeble in hardly ever accepting a proper share of responsibility.

Unless BP has purposely pulled the wool over our eyes, something I doubt, or didn’t carry out its agreed obligations, which remains possible, I think BP ought to be cut a good deal more slack than it actually will be.

It looks likely that BP was operating in the Gulf of Mexico at the edge of technology’s capabilities in a high risk environment. (Krauthammer in the Washington Post argues that’s because of green prejudice, a nice argument I won’t pursue.) If it turns out that BP’s bad luck was to have an accident that no regulator or operator on earth had made allowances for then BP has the makings of a sound defence.  Though, paradoxically, even if that’s proven true, that’s an argument which can’t be pressed too loudly in polite society without risking a backlash.

There’s little doubt, then, that the blame will stick with the corporations (it may widen from BP as Shell fears here). That’s not least because regulators and the politicians will wriggle out of it and the media will prefer to hound BP and the other corporations to hounding the regulators and governments. That’s unless, and I’m dreaming here, the balance of third party opinion comes down on BP’s side.

I am almost sure – and far from happy about it because I believe BP should say what it knows or believes to be true – that there is very little BP can say today credibly in public. It cannot exonerate itself to any degree without appearing to avoid responsibility. It is up against quite deep human prejudices and tastes.

People love disaster and villainy. That’s why certain accidents have had mythic narrative power which no amount of good evidence can shift.  The Titanic, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, are powerful cases where the very names have stuck emblematically in our minds. Their very mention comes with the clutter of preconceived ideas about class, capitalism, corporations, technological over-reach. BP will, presumably, now join that list. Like the others, it will probably be a good example of an operation which went on to do good work whilst exploiting plenty more technology. But it will serve as an example of bad-intentions and hubris.

It is just possible that this event will sink BP. But that would make it truly unique (even the owners of the Titanic didn’t go under).

Away from the hype, the financial market will look at this issue in a wholly cash manner. What will the accident cost? Will BP face difficulty getting US or other licences? Yes, this might well be a transformative event for the entire petroleum industry. But the market may think that BP is becoming case-hardened in a big-time way.

Therefore the outcome of the whole affair provides BP with an opportunity to take pole-position in the battle to reshape the industry’s worldwide image. After all, the world remains as dependent as ever on petroleum, so there’s a lot of mutual self-interest out there. There’s also a lot of cognitive dissonance. Plenty of firms feel forced to align their reputations with tragedies, real and very often imagined, as if they were responsible for them, but still do good business regardless. Some of my colleagues – cynically, perhaps – call that hit on the company’s reputation the price of securing a licence to operate.

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