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

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

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

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

Here Norman Lewis explains:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Before we go on, it is worth building on part 1′s theme: what exactly do the Stockholm Accords expect to achieve? Here’s what the event’s website says about their objective:

“The aim of the Stockholm Accords is to articulate and establish the role of public relations in the “communicativeorganization”[sic] within a fast-evolving digital and value-network society.”

In essence, the Accords suppose that we live in a new “networked society in which communicative organizations are vital to organisational success” (forgive the clumsy words, they’re theirs, not mine).

In essence my beef is that this exercise over-complicates everything. Most PR is an effort to help clients both be and appear more attractive. You can usefully enrich that proposition by noting that there are internal and external audiences; that everything about an organisation can be part of its good or bad messages; that building up a good reputation may be useful for when things go wrong (as they will). One may want to stress how non-stop and intrusive and persistent modern observers are. Perversely, the globalised, modern world is more like a village than ever: everybody thinks everything is their business.

As I argued in part 1, the Accords ignore the obvious: society is, and always has been, networks personified. Moreover, all human interaction depends upon communication and relationships, or nothing whatever would have been or will ever be achieved. Of course, the digital bit is sort of new. I say sort of because the internet is now second or third generation. It strikes me that the Accords’ authors are really saying that their thinking boils down to considering technology’s influence on human behaviour. This narrow obsession has sent them and their new definition of PR’s role off in the wrong direction.

There’s no wisdom in a mob, but there’s often treasure buried in crowds. So, of course, I accept there is something in Reed’s Law. (See: “The Law of the Pack”). I accept its proposition that digital networks can scale exponentially by transforming technological platforms into social networks that add value. But in the business world, Reed’s Law is just a statement of potential. It remains a theoretical construct that might prove to be hopeless if taken too far. The commercial world is in recession. It is not currently up for the risky experimentation and investment that would be required to test the weaknesses and strengths of Reed’s Law. This is something I discussed in part 1 No. 2 & No. 14 (without mentioning Reed). In part 1, I also cited SM’s irrelevance in the British General Election and its only fleeting influence on American politics.

My charge is that the authors of the Stockholm Accords lack historical or sociological insight. Most of today’s social developments from the breakdown of traditional politics, to the shift in community alignments, or the fall of religious influence, to the decline in trust in, and authority of, traditional institutions, pre-dates the internet.

In other words, the internet and social media usage were shaped in the wake of already existing currents, including the already declining mass media. That was particularly the case with SM, which is more often used as a retreat from public life rather than as its lifeblood. That’s one thing China’s SM usage has in common with the West’s. There’s mass disengagement and passivity in society, which is the polar opposite of empowerment, which so many PRs like to crow about. That’s not to say SM is irrelevant, or that it does not have influence or empower people, sometimes, in this or that circumstance or usage.

It is the failure of the Stockholm Accords to look at these real world tensions during the boom and now during the recession, and the Accords’ myopic worship of all things digital, which I criticise. But let me make it plain. This blog celebrates technology and advocates innovation. It is obsessed with understanding them and with exploiting their potential. But it does not endorse technological determinism, which I believe the Accords’ authors do.

So, that’s the preamble. Let’s now look at the Stockholm Accords one by one.

Stockholm Accords on governance:

“The increasingly adopted stakeholder governance model empowers board members and organisational leaders as ultimate custodians of stakeholder relationship strategies and policies, as well as of monitoring their implementation.

“In today’s value networks, a communicative organization requires timely knowledge of economic, social, political, legal and environmental developments, as well as opportunities and risks affecting the organisation, its direction, its actions and its communication.

“Public relations professionals:
• co-create organizational values, principles, strategies, policies and processes;
• constantly report on the dynamics of stakeholder involvement;
• inform, shape the organisation’s overall communication abilities;
•  measure, evaluate and account for results;
• deliver timely analysis and recommendations to ensure an effective governance of stakeholder relationships, enhancing transparency, trust and sustaining the organisation’s ‘licence to operate.’”

My reply

I dealt with the above extensively in part 1. But let me now add a few more brief remarks;

• The stakeholder governance model or doctrine is seriously flawed. An organisation can’t look to outsiders as the first source of its probity and efficiency.
• Firms, governments and institutions primarily pursue self-interest. This will include a measure of enlightened and widened self-interest.
• PR is indeed uniquely useful in our complicated, media-orientated times. But we should beware over-stating the newness of our skills and roles.

Stockholm Accords on management:

“Effective and timely decision-making related to operations and resource management are essential for organizations seeking to enhance their license to operate. These management choices must be sensitive to the concerns of internal and external stakeholders, seeking equilibrium between societal and organizational goals.
A communicative organization listens to its stakeholders, uses this input to improve the quality of its decisions, and communicates through its behavior.

“Public relations professionals:
° help understand and interpret broader societal, political and economic interests and aspirations;
° participate to the solution of organizational issues and lead those that are particularly focused on stakeholder relationships;
° help to legitimize the organization; by increasing the communicative value of products, processes, services; and building financial, legal, relational and operational capital.”

My reply

Yes, PRs are the professional diplomats of the modern organisation’s internal and external relationships. But we won’t do the job better by having theories and ambitions which are too fancy for the valuable but recognisable work they have to do. Way too much of the Stockholm Accords’ approach brings in more posy sociology, management-speak, media studies, post modern guff. This is the way to lose the interest of clients and audiences alike.

Stockholm Accords on sustainability:

“An organization’s sustainability is based on balancing today’s demands with the ability to meet future needs, based on economic, environmental and social dimensions.

“In this network society, sustainability leadership offers a transformational opportunity for the communicative organization to enhance it’s license to operate and demonstrate success across the triple bottom  line.- economic, social and environmental.

“Public relations professionals identify, involve and engage key stakeholders contributing to appropriate sustainability policies and programs by:
• interpreting society’s expectations for sound economical, social and environmental investments that show a return to the organization (the advocate);
• creating a listening culture – an open system that allows the organization to anticipate, adapt and respond (the listener);
• ensuring stakeholder participation to identify what information should be transparently and authentically reported (the reporter);
• going beyond today’s priorities to anticipate the needs of tomorrow, by engaging stakeholders and management in long-term thinking (the leader).”

My reply

Sustainability has to do with robustness and flexibility, which can be darn hard things to reconcile. We need to be modest: sustainability is about the future, a thing we know very little about. We should not pretend to know the recipe for survival (or to assume, for instance, that environmentalists are any cleverer at it than supposedly un-green capitalists).

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of internal communication:

“Internal communication enhances recruitment, retention, development of employee loyalty and commitment to organizational goals by ever more diverse and segmented publics.

“In the network society a communicative organization goes far beyond today’s traditional definition of full-time employees, understanding that internal stakeholders now include full-timers with tenure generally shortening, part-timers, seasonal employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, agents, distributors, volunteers and more.

“Public relations professionals constantly address:
° how organizational leaders communicate;
° how knowledge is shared;
° how decisions are made;
° how processes and structures are created;
° and expand communication to include many boundary publics that are also often considered as highly trusted sources of information about the organization and essential players contributing to the organization’s success.”

My reply

Yes, many of an organisation’s relationships are now both important and fleeting or arm’s length. Actually, that will often require an unattractive wariness. The need for secrecy, privacy and caution is greater than ever and has to be communicated as well as possible.

Stockholm Accords on the new boundaries of external communication:

“The network society mandates that a communicative organization expand its scope and skills to focus on customers*, investors*, communities*, governments*, active citizenship groups*,  industry groups*, mainstream, digital and social media*, and other situational stakeholders*.

“Public relations professionals:
° promote, support and contribute to modify products, services or processes;
° bring the voice of the organization into regulatory and community decisions;
° adopt social networking and research skills and tools to listen to stakeholder demands and report to management so that they may be appropriately interpreted and, where relevant and effective, integrated into the decision making process;
° strengthen brand loyalty* and equity*, thus reinforcing the organization’s license to operate;
° work with all organizational functions, through every step of production and delivery, to craft and implement effective communication programs*.
° actively participate in dialogue*, evaluate and measure results*, and accordingly adjust their practices.”

My reply

This looks like PR’s pitch to stick its nose in everywhere. Nice try, and to some extent justified.

Stockholm Accords on co-ordination of internal and external communication:

“In value networks, each communicative issue* is multi faceted*, multi stakeholder* and inter relational within and between different networks* and positioned in diverse legal frameworks.

“The communicative organization must balance global transparency, finite resources and time sensitive demands dealing with dynamic changes in inside/outside territorial borders and new conflicts of interests emerging from multiple stakeholder participation*.
Dialogue with internal, boundary and external stakeholders must be coordinated with the organization’s mission*, vision*, values*, implementation*, promises*, as well as actions* and behaviors*.

“Public Relations professionals:
° research, develop, monitor and adjust organizational behavior and communication behaviors providing leadership for issues based on stakeholder and societal relationships;
° develop a knowledge base that includes social and psychological sciences, best practices and formative research to create, evaluate, measure and implement programs for continuous improvement.”

My reply

This looks like a pitch for PRs to be rulers of the universe: all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. I don’t mind this accord but it is not so much edifying and energising as yawn-making. How about: “Almost every aspect of your work will convey a message about your organisation, so expect a good PR to take an interest in everything you do.”

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Here’s a muse on how the stakeholder doctrine failed both politics and business and how it may not survive the challenge from the BRIC countries where there’s a bit more realism about life.

Let’s start in the present with UK politics. Then we’ll turn to how stakeholder doctrine originated in the trendy 1960s in the business sphere. Finally, I’ll make the case for saving the term “stakeholder”.

What a difference thirteen years makes. Tony Blair’s mission, he said, was to use the stakeholder concept to redefine rights and obligations and to extend accountability in society. Under Mr Blair there was a flurry of government-NGO-private business partnership arrangements. The “Third Sector” swam into view. This was the stuff which Geoff Mulgan and the think tank Demos were promulgating. I suppose the point was that Thatcher gave us popular capitalism and Blair’s mission was to widen the remit to a new participatory, networking society. Trying to move things on, and find a new Tory mission, Mr Cameron castigated Mr Blair’s “bureaucratic accountability” (all that tick-boxing, all those targets which Blair actually inherited from John Major), which he claims he’s going to smash. Mr Cameron has his own “power to the people” agenda, and we’ll see if it happens.

As the New Labour project makes way for David Cameron’s Tories (or something less new than New Labour), we should remind ourselves that the slogan was a fiction. The new active politics was top-down, not bottom-up. This really did mark a significant shift from past practice: Tony Blair’s infamous decision-making “sofa government” was the most unaccountable clique to rule the UK in modern times. It was perhaps even more closed than aristocratic rule once had been. The involvement of stakeholders turned into the manipulation of stakeholders and the sidelining of a democratically elected parliament.

Of course the idea that politics is everybody’s business – that we are all stakeholders in it – is the very core of modern democracy. The term may have gone out fashion in politics, but the political class is obsessing on how to engage people, which is much the same as trying to make more people feel like stakeholders. Indeed, the tragedy is that so many people don’t feel and act like social stakeholders. They’ve volunteered themselves to be on the sidelines, not least by not voting. It’s tempting, too, to think of anti-social people as being the reverse of stakeholders. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the idea that people are stakeholders in the degree to which they pay taxes and don’t sponge, but that’s another story.

But whilst the idea of everyone being a social or political stakeholder – at least in principle and as an ideal – is valid, and whilst the phrase was borrowed by politicians from business, I don’t think it make sense in a business context.

So now let’s go back a bit and look at how stakeholder doctrine worked its way into business.

The 1960s origins of stakeholder doctrine

The word stakeholder has been around most likely since the 1930s, perhaps before. But its modern persona began to take shape in the 1960s. According R Edward Freeman’s history of the term:

“The actual word “stakeholder” first appeared in management literature in an internal memorandum at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International, Inc) in 1963. The term was meant to generalize the notion of stockholders as the only group to whom management need be responsive. Thus, the stakeholder concept was originally defined as  “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist.”

The groups defined as stakeholders back then consisted of little more than shareowners. So it was tightly defined and designed to help organisations understand and achieve their corporate objectives. But over time, as Freeman describes it, the meaning of stakeholder theory changed dramatically. It began to include people whose personal interests were closely related to those of a firm (employees and so on).  As the doctrine evolved it eventually came to be defined, as Freeman put it, “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives.” It later evolved to mean the whole of society. This radical development in stakeholder theory dates from around 1975 with the introduction of the “stakeholder audit”. The aim of this was to measure the social costs and benefits of business to all its stakeholders and to give them equal importance to financial results. So what was a deliberately narrowing term transmogrified into its reverse: something as wide as possible.

Freeman identified “stake” as an “interest” or a “share” (in an undertaking) and he considered three groups of stakes: Equity stakes (held by shareholders); economic or market stakes (employees or customers); influencer stakes (interest or activist groups).

Of course, stakeholders like publics are often found in more than one role. Employees can be shareholders, customers can be activists, suppliers might be creditors etc. Their interests might be contradictory in the different roles they occupy. Moreover, the stakeholder’s perception of his or her own interest might not be measurable clearly either by consultation and or research (that’s an issue I’ve looked at on my PR blog in relation to Edelman’s trust survey results here here here).

Reasons to cutback on stakeholder hype

Here are my concerns about the stakeholder doctrine in business:

• Firms were no longer run for the benefit of their owners who risked their capital in them.
• The objective of business with stakeholder theory became the balancing of stakeholder interests (this precluded favouring one group over another) rather than maximising shareholder value by achieving specific corporate objectives as defined by the owners.
• The foundation stones of capitalism are the concepts of private property, the rights of its owners to exploit it, and the first duty of its agents being owed to principals. Those foundations have not been overthrown in a social revolution. Rather they remain legally binding but weakened by populist nonsense in the public domain. The suspicion has to be that stakeholder theorists are crude propagandists trying to effect change by the back door, or that they are self-deluded.
• Stakeholder theory created ambiguities for corporate governance – exactly to whom and for what is management accountable?
• If management is effectively accountable to everybody, then it is not accountable to anybody.
• If “active publics” define stakeholders, as Jim Grunig seems to suggest, then perhaps that gives them power over the silent majority that they don’t deserve? For sure, laws and democracy were long-ago designed to limit activist power in the interest of the greater good.
• The specificity of the terms stakeholder, public and “activist public” as useful categories is rendered meaningless if one accepts Freeman’s definition of what constitutes a stakeholder, which includes the unborn, the environment and much more.
• At its most absurd stakeholder theory identifies irreconcilable forces as each other’s stakeholders. Hence Greenpeace becomes a stakeholder in the nuclear industry.
• Stakeholder theory does little to tackle the real problem business faces today; which is that managers have become unaccountable to their owners for their poor results. Today’s recession is partly caused by irresponsible bankers destroying shareholder value because they pursued short-term interests. The recession is about falling profits, failing businesses and their social consequences, not a shortage of CSR (BTW: corporate governance is not primarily about the relationship of corporations to society).
• Right now, business has to make brutal decisions. Consensus will matter but so will speed and agility. Stakeholder management techniques, if taken seriously, are slow. They lack the robustness to be tough and to set priorities which produce clear winners and losers.
• The insight that stakeholder theorists claim as theirs that relationships, networks and consent are crucial to business success has been known since trading in goods and services began.

How some of this works in politics

• Politicians who big-up stakeholder politics on the basis that it’s particpatory can be taken with a pinch of salt. New Labour went in for the Big Conversation and masses of consultation, but it often turned out to be a sham.
• In the modern perverse definition, stakeholders are self-defining. Victims – or anyone who says they feel strongly – have to be listened to as though they were experts.
• Representative democracy empowers people who go to the trouble of getting elected: stakeholder politics risks undermining that process.

Whose side are PRs on?

One of the startling logical implications of stakeholder theory for PRs is that we no longer remain representatives of our employers. Rather we become brokers of different interest groups, listeners, facilitators and managers of the many stakeholder relationships an organisation has. In this brave new world PRs are more likely to want appear on the side of activists or competitors than on their employer’s side. This fiction needs a reality check in the interest of transparency.

What then was the great attraction of stakeholder theory? In my view it was the opportunity to have power without accountability or risk. This compelling doctrine is a hippy hangover from the post-World-War-II boom. It promised all the benefits of business and political life without the responsibility and disciplines of them; no wonder it became popular among freeloaders.

How to rescue the term stakeholder

Stakeholder theory therefore requires a radical overhaul because the challenges ahead call for risky and accountable leadership. So it will either reform, get real, or be blown away by necessity as the democratic West reorganizes to compete with the BRIC countries.

We should begin with this proposition. It’s a nice compromise, I think. Stakeholders are people with a stake in a firm’s – or any entity’s – well-being. So yes, it can be much wider than shareholders or voters alone. What’s more, legitimate stakeholders may differ very strongly about what a firm’s or country’s aims should be, just as shareholders and voters can. Plenty of people who are not strictly speaking stakeholders may have very interesting and useful views to contribute. Having skin in the game is not the measure of a person’s value to a firm or to the rest of us. But the more skin you have in the game, the more of a stakeholder you can legitimately claim to be. If we are to rehabilitate the stakeholder category usefully, we must first cut the crap.

Note: I owe a debt to Elaine Sternberg’s “Stakeholding: Betraying The Corporation’s Objectives“, SAU, 1998, for insight on this challenging topic.

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The report explored Wikileaks’ claim to speak truth to power by pulling down the controlling, secretive barriers the establishment erects to protect itself. Wikileaks uses zillions of ISPs to bounce leaks from whistle-blowers around the world leaving no way of tracing the originators.

This insurgent, trendy phenomenon has some impressive backers in the media world who endorse the idea that it’s good to leak. These include AP, the Los Angeles Times and The National Newspaper Association, according to Wikileaks.

Perhaps they’re seeking novel ways to do investigative journalism in the face of cutbacks in budgets; a case of old media seeking new lifelines through new media. According to The National, “Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.”

Wikileaks (ominously, in my view) is currently behind attempts to introduce legislation in Iceland to turn the island into an offshore “Switzerland of bits“, a safe haven for digital leaks. They’ve positioned it tantalizingly as a potential new business model for the bankrupt country.

Let’s unpick this and begin with the question: whatever happened to trust?

Is every leak a blow on a whistle that can justify itself in the public interest? Aren’t we supposed to want more trust in society? Does that exclude firms and official bodies hoping to trust their employees? How should we balance the tension between trust and the right to whistle-blow?

Well, as somebody who thinks that trust is vital to the functioning of a healthy society, I think the balance has to weigh – even positively favour - the right of institutions and individuals to keep things private, secret and confidential over the right of others to leak.

We have to trust that one another’s rights are going to be protected or we will destroy the bonds that make society function pleasantly and decently, not to say ethically and legally. Transparency has its place, but so does opacity. Reputations have a right to protection against defamation and they have the right to the benefit of the doubt when attacked, just as private property does.

We all have public, private and sometimes very separate other lives which would collapse like a house of cards if they were made transparent. Hence, the restraining arm of the law has a valuable role to play when it comes to protecting our collective freedoms.

That’s why as PR I have recently been on the side of gagging orders on behalf of John Terry, Tiger Woods, Trafigura and the British National Party membership list.

Very often, I have been glad that these issues are under the control of the courts, and very often I’ve found that the careful balancing of peoples’ competing human rights (to privacy, to free speech) are more sound than some giddy free-for-all masquerading as a crusade against censorship or for open-ness.

However, I accept it is a moot point whether the US justice system handles such matters better than does, say, the UK. But, whatever, I’m against a truly free press, just as I’m for democracy precisely because as well as protecting our freedoms, it limits them.

The UK Cabinet and any other organisation have a right to keep some things under wraps. They also have a right to expect that people they hire in any capacity will feel obliged not to betray them.

As a PR I know that the most embarrassing part of most crises is the behind-the-scenes highly-strung incompetence, panic and failure of leadership under pressure. My colleagues and I have always mediated that nonsense: that’s our job.

In a crisis the role of PRs is to keep the focus on the real issues the outside world cares about. Mostly, PRs put out fires which have little fuel but which generate lots of heat. But if ever we leak the detail of the inside insecurities we witness, the outcome becomes far worse than the original crisis warrants.

For instance, the problem at Three Mile Island was the stream of conscious transparency that the operators presented to the world as they grappled to grasp what had gone on inside their malfunctioning reactor. That was the very opposite of a cover up.

So it is no wonder, then, that governments want and should have the right to keep much of their inner workings secret. The same should go for companies and individuals. Moreover, at the heart of any profession is a lack of transparency – call it client confidentiality – which makes them honourable and trustworthy. Lots of people can do good, but not if what they say is leaked. As a list of such types, let’s begin with PRs, lawyers, priests, doctors, consultants and therapists. I don’t mean that every confidence accepted by every one of those is of equal importance and equally inviolate. I mean that very often what these people know is useful because it’s private.

That’s why Wikileaks is bad news. It is why I am pleased that it is currently so short of funds that it cannot function properly. And it is why I think that it would be in society’s interest to curb the power and effectiveness of this new threat.

At the end of the day, society has more right to keep its secrets secret, than does Wikileaks have a right to wreak havoc, and to keep its sources hidden while doing so.

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Holmes rubbishes Shell’s Andrew Vickers’ comment to the FT where he said of his company’s Nigerian challenge: “We’re not operating in the North Sea”. According to Holmes, this response is no longer a viable defence. He says if something is clearly unethical or unacceptable in New York or London or Amsterdam, it’s unethical and unacceptable in the developing world too.

Now, I’m an advocate of CSR. It is good and useful if it helps or forces firms and their customers to consider the wider implications of business and to manage risk. But Nigeria should help us see that CSR cannot be implemented evenly and easily everywhere. On this I speak from experience.

In 2007/8 I did a near year-long stint in front-line PR in Nigeria. It was a great and complicated experience. So here’s a snapshot of my take on things there.

You can’t do business in Nigeria as you would in the UK. Those who say you can haven’t been there. The standards in Nigeria are improving in some sectors and very much so because of foreign involvement. However foreign companies are forced to use Nigerian suppliers and most of those (if not all) are corrupt by Western standards. That corruption can be transparent or opaque. It takes many forms, but the culture of kickbacks is systemic. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

One petty example I observed as widespread practice was the necessity to grease the wheels of accounts departments to ensure invoices were settled (that barrier existed even at the heart of localised multi-national companies). Another was arranging a meeting with a state governor. He set the precondition that my client sponsor the upkeep of a roundabout and road section. He also demanded a photo opportunity and press release to go with it. That was CSR, but not as we know it.

As a PR I was faced with the fact that all TV and radio news coverage of any commercial event or promotion had to be paid for by the minute as if it were advertising (though the cash did not always guarantee a positive report). This advertorial approach was not readily transparent to viewers. However because TV and radio are mass media with great influence in Nigeria, no PR campaign could bypass them.

Moreover, most journalists expected brown envelopes in exchange for turning up at press conferences. Most western companies obliged them with such bribes. Most listed them euphemistically as lunch and travel expenses for media (or the PR company buried the payments in their invoices). Front-page spreads were sometimes bought. This practice was widely condemned during my time, but still took place; that’s how some CEOs got their picture on the front-page attending gala dinners with their wives etc.

Having said that, Nigeria is topsy turvy. It has a free, robust, critical, opinionated press that covers the political spectrum. The Nigerian media embodies the highest and the lowest standards in the business. Sophisticated readers of Nigerian newspapers know how to spot puff and how to spot the nuggets of merit. Hence doing credible PR in Nigeria is a job for experts rather than for charlatans with fat wallets.

The Nigerians are rightly famous and infamous for being very smart and very interested in money. The culture has not encouraged what one might call pro bono or European attitudes to business, but that’s changing. As the economy improves – and signs of that are everywhere – firms are realising that they have to operate according to international standards. Self-interest is driving improvement. Many Nigerians are highly-educated. In general that tends to bring with it a desire that Nigeria should operate to Western standards.

But, and it’s a big but… Nigerians have powerful obligations to family, tribe, religion, region, village and business partners. They live and operate in a world in which corruption and reciprocating favours goes very deep and very high. It is an environment in which political instability and violence are in some places severe and endemic. This edgy reality is likely to continue for many years.

Actually, much of what constitutes Nigerian PR would be called lobbying in the West. It takes place behind closed doors. It involves haggling and trading favours of many sorts in return for winning the support and third party endorsement clients require to win influence with networks that matter. Reputations are often battered in robust discussion or, sometimes, held hostage as an adjunct to negotiations.

For instance, the anti-corruption drive is often corrupt. Many of those under investigation for various fraudulent business practices are “victims” of their rivals’ desire to replace them with equally dubious practices of their own. Sometimes fraud accusation and investigations are simply methods of holding reputations to ransom in return for under the counter cash or business.

Instability and profit go hand in hand in Nigeria. Oil is part of that: it’s both a cause and a victim of the instability. However one could spot similar trends in telecommunications with Area Boys (local thugs) and their protection or otherwise of base-stations; and much of the banking industry was recently exposed as being cash dispensers of non-repayable “loans”. The point is that the prevailing chaos suits many powerful players. In such circumstances it is silly and wrong and counter-productive to imagine that one can operate as though one were in the UK or the US.

When I worked in the country, I was sheltered from much of the worst of the country’s habits. It was understood that I would operate to broadly European rules. But I would have been myopic not to have spotted what was going on around me. It would have been absurdly naïve if I thought things could change as rapidly as I would have liked. Worse, I knew and was enthused by the thought that if I and other Westerners totally washed our hands of the place, we would be pandering to the worst of the country instead of tending to encourage the best.

And yes, before you say it, let me. There are all sorts of Nigerians. And, yes, African culture’s great. The amazing thing in Nigeria is how much gets done, not how much breaks down. The country has a vibrant entrepreneurial feel to it. The people are friendly and open etc etc. But we have to accept that the liberal standards of Amnesty are European, and North European at that. One has to accept that liberalism’s universalism is, ooh, sort of colonialist in a good way, but it is also bossy and arrogant. That’s perhaps why Western NGOs are deeply unpopular in Nigeria.

In Nigeria I did not work for Shell or in oil. My clients were in banking, pharmaceuticals, telecoms, consumer goods and the state. I was based in Lagos and sometimes in Abuja, but never in the Delta region where Shell operates. So I don’t know the Shell situation well. But I read the papers and I’ve listened to locals of all backgrounds talk. That enables me to make the following incomplete observations:

* In Nigeria, Shell is a minority shareholder with management responsibility. Often, with operations badged as “Shell” it is actually an operation in which Shell Nigeria is a minority partner. That makes a Shell an easy scapegoat and target for all sorts of lobbies ranging from government to NGOs.

* If Shell weren’t involved in the operations as managers the situation on the ground would be far worse than it is (unless another Western firm replaced it).

* Shell’s operations are often blamed for eco-problems that are caused because of plant shut down for years by sabotage of a criminal or political nature.

* The sabotage and hostage-taking caused by criminals, sometimes politically-inspired criminals, and politically-motivated direct action, often involve desperately poor people. They are all very complex and intertwined.

Amnesty may well be right to draw attention to this matter. They may be right to target Shell (sadly, who else will care what goes on in the Delta region if Amnesty did not target Shell as the bad guy?). My instinct suggests that Amnesty is courting headlines and targeting the good guy. But whatever the truth of this matter, it’s still right to remind people that life’s not black and white.

The truth is that if the media and activists insist on the impossible as a CSR requirement, firms will either have to stop doing business in countries such as Nigeria or tell lies. Neither is a good way forward for the developing world or for corporations.

No related pages.

Let me remind readers how some PRs responded to Obama-online-mania and the idea that he listened as much as talked with social media:

As we all know, there is a tendency for politicians to prefer the sound of their own voices more than those of their constituents and supporters, but the key to Obama’s success was that he used social media not just to talk to supporters, but to talk with them.

Frankly, I am unimpressed by the idea that Obama got into social media in order to listen. I imagine he and his team had their ears to the ground in all sorts of ways and that they could as it were have over-heard most of the chatter they needed rather than join up in order to listen.

Arguably, there was something fraudulent about the personal connection that social media conveyed Obama as having with his audiences. The truth was he was as remote and mediated on social media as he was in mainstream media. But here’s Edelman’s take on the first step potential voters took to engage with Obama’s campaign:

The Obama campaign gave prospective supporters a menu of options:
•     Personal – You could start by friending Obama on a social network. Then, you might sign up for text messages and e-mails to stay informed about the campaign. As a supporter, you may make your first donation or register to vote.

But now we know that Barack Obama personally did not talk or engage with anybody via social media. Nevertheless, he was supposed to embody a new style of communication some call the public engagement model, which now appears to be as transparently one-way and as contrived as anything the traditional world of media could devise.

My point here is not to knock social media or to advocate a boycott for PR purposes or anything of the sort. My point is that those who advocate that social media forces on corporates a new form of touchy-feely engaged PR, are not inline with reality. Their major case-study has always been Barack Obama, but their evidence does not stack up.

Social media is supposed to be about the personal, not about PAs and PRs doing it (corporates don’t do personal very well; for good reason, as I argued here)

My message is that the old rules apply on social media as much as they still do on old media. There is no new age of communication so much as new technology and channels and new opportunities and threats that comes from everybody having access to the digitally-connected world.

I do not deny that social media played a valuable role in Barack Obama’s victory, particularly when it came to surfing youth enthusiasm and raising funds to pay for his TV ads. But it was social media that was in quite important ways hijacked and even corrupted from its most obvious value to most of its users.

I think the Obama campaign duped the social media and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the blogosphere will be more cross than most when they do fall out of love with their erstwhile hero. Think Labour and their luvvies in 1964 and 1997.

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Roman represents the future of our trade. His quality of thought is becoming more common – though far from common enough – across the in-house and agency world.

Roman Geiser

He embodies how PR is maturing as a business under a new generation’s leadership as it enters its Golden Age.

His take on things ranges from radical ideas for repositioning Swiss banks, to questioning the effectiveness of the S in CSR.  He’s prepared to think big about what disintermediation could do for his clients, while staying alert to the possible downsides for society as a whole. He is cleverly nuanced about social media (a tad over-enthusiastic for my taste, but there you go).

He joined the agency world seven years ago. His background was as a public affairs lobbyist for an umbrella organisation of Swiss businesses. Then he was hired by Jäggi Burson-Marsteller, a formerly family-owned business based in Zurich and Bern, which was bought by BM, Young & Rubicam.

So, as he readied himself for his journey as a PR agency EMEA COO, I asked him to give us an insight in to his business and thinking. Here’s the outcome:

Strategy, evidence and today’s market

PS: I’d like you to describe what the recession has done to your clients, to explain how well your business in EMEA has fared.

RG:  It really depends market by market and positioning by positioning of each unit we have in our organisation. In Switzerland, we work for industries such as energy, pharmaceuticals and food.  If you take those three industries, they’re doing pretty well in the recession.

We see a clear trend to specialisation and focus.  The mid-sized agencies in this market – those offering 360 degree service – have an issue. Clients either want an agency that really understands their business, or an agency with functional or specialist expertise, for instance agencies that are 100% specialised in digital media and social media.  So there is a need for all agencies to find a sweet spot.

We see a certain cautiousness. There’s a psychological impact on even healthy businesses. Investments are taken more slowly than before.

Some services have become commoditised.  However the more strategically an agency is positioned the better it is protected from the crisis.  So offering product PR in the fast moving consumer goods area, for example, has become a low margin business.  Or even doing financial communications around standard transactions like public offerings has become internalised by banks and commoditised.

That means the higher up the value chain you are, and the better the quality of service you offer, the better off you are during the crisis.  Services like doing press releases, or just media relations in multi markets – those are not services where you can differentiate your brand. They are really price-based discussions which put your margins under pressure.

Burson-Marsteller is known in the industry as being extremely strategic. Of course, all agencies claim that!

PS: What exactly does ‘strategic’ mean?

GS:  If I take the Swiss example, we are very successful in healthcare.  We have a team of scientists here.  We have four medical doctors and a professor at Rockefeller University.  You need that kind of calibre to really bring evidence to the table to provide analysis. Then you can have a discussion with the client based on “This is the existing mindset and this how we get to where we want to go”. For me, that insight and knowledge and in-depth analysis based on qualitative and quantitative research is evidence-based.  And it starts at the beginning of a project.

Froth on the boom’s coffee or the caffeine in the latte?

PS: Do you agree with me that PR was guilty of putting the froth on the late boom’s coffee? Or put another way, if bankers have had to say sorry, do we need to, too?

RG: I understand where you’re coming from. One of the key reasons to have a PR agency, or a trusted advisor, is to bring critical faculty to the table and to ask the right questions. And, for sure, in certain industries the PR industry profited from the hype and we were part of the overall economic system.  At the same time, I believe there were great attempts to warn and also to support CEOs in their function.

PS: To warn?

RG: Yes to warn. You like to quote Dr Leslie Gaines-Ross on your blog. She recently highlighted how the trend from celebrity CEO to credibility CEO, more of “please show me” and not just the glamour stuff, began some four or five years ago. And that’s a kind of clear anti-hype warning that came from the PR industry itself.

Burson-Marsteller tried to engage the Swiss Bankers Association, for instance, in some pre-emptive reputational research during the boom. But what do you do when a decision-maker tells me “Thanks for your advice but we don’t have an issue”? That’s why I feel we did our job properly.

What kind of capitalism comes next?

PS: Will the new boom produce a different capitalism, particularly considering that the world’s most dynamic economies are going to be amongst its least democratic?

RG: I don’t think that there will be new models to capitalism.  I mean, it’s a pretty well established domain, right? There will be a new global balance of economies being at the table as equals with with the US in some fields.  That, I believe, is certainly more than a trend.

PS: Is there a new morality to capitalism?

RG: First, capitalism is not anti-moral. Second it’s been in practice for decades. So it won’t have a new shape or new dimensions in future.

I wouldn’t jump to saying: “Here is the new global regime with new power bases”. For instance, I still see the US, just by its historic capability for revitalisation, reinvention and innovation, as a strong leader and player in the future.  But it’s interesting to see that the most recent growth and first signals for recovery came clearly from China, also from India, but basically from China, which is new.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power of the old economies. In a world which is getting much more complex, with multi-stakeholder management, with so many stakeholder groups having an impact on your business, that calls for managing complexity.  And if you look at the continent which really has experience of managing complexity from language to cultures, it is Europe.

Where is PR headed?

PS: What are the three major three trends that will dominate the PR landscape over the next ten years?

RG: The key trend definitely is social media and digital communications and the shift of paradigm from mass media into more dialogue-oriented communications. That’s a huge shift. But its impact varies from market to market, culture to culture. For instance, Switzerland is highly digitalised, but it also values privacy. People don’t speak up on blogs here, as they do in the UK, and give their opinions.

Second, I would say, is the balance of purpose and performance in an organisation in order to build trust longer term.  It’s basically the question of: “What is the purpose of a corporate, of a multi-national?”.  It’s very often around employees.  It’s around the products and the services for consumers.  So it’s around the mission and vision of a company

The third trend is multi-stakeholder transparency in a globalised world.  Companies operating around the globe need to demonstrate transparency and to explain themselves to many more stakeholders in the age of trend No. 1.

It’s not about structures but about leadership

PS: How will PR agencies change their business models and services?

RG: The first one sounds easy, but it’s extremely complex to make digital communication more than an add-on to your communications programmes. Very often you say “What could we do digitally?  Do we do a website? And yes, there are new trends like Twitter.  We need to offer that in our communications programme”.  And that’s the wrong attitude.  I believe digital or kind of low-cost media needs to become an integrated part of all communication concepts.

At the same time, you need to understand your business extremely well to see the limits of digital social media, such as in pharmaceuticals for obvious regulatory reasons.  Going into it with a kind of hype attitude can be dangerous. It’s new, but it’s more than just a fad. But it’s not a revolution. It’s an evolution. It’s an evolution which brings the business more into the dialogue-oriented sectors of communications.

The multi-stakeholder global trend goes into new agency models, which I believe are going to be more international.  PR agencies are still coming out of the first phase of family-owned businesses with very local business models.  But we are becoming more digital and more international.  Offering that service to your client becomes more and more important.

Of course, managing the matrix of markets and practices in agencies is extremely demanding. It needs people who like to work together. And it starts at the top.  So if you have a management team or market leaders who like each other and work together well, you have the key ingredients for not working in silos any more.  So there is no real ideal structural model. You can have all kind of bonus systems and financial incentives. But what is really needed is investment in a team that works together collaboratively and which produces success stories together. That’s the way to go.

What are reputations made of? A five point list

PS: How would you explain the success of Apple and Ryanair’s PR, both of which, for different reasons and in different ways, seem to do everything wrong, and yet seem to get everything right in terms of their reputation and business strategy?

RG: My explanation would be that it is always multi-dimensional. Let me list the top five elements that create great reputations for firms.

First, is how they develop talent and how attractive are they for potential employees.  Take Apple.  They are doing that extremely successfully.

Second is product and services of high quality.  You can be as digital as you want.  You can be as corporate responsible as you want.  If you don’t get your product right, if you have a problem explaining your hedge fund to your target group because you don’t understand it yourself, you might ask yourself the question, “Is my product really a good product”.  In the case of Apple or Ryanair, they have solid services, good products, which fit into very specific target groups.

Third, transparent leadership structures.

The fourth is financial results and performance. If you drive a business which is financially sound, you create the momentum for a sound reputation. And that brings me to number five.

The last one on my list would be CEO reputation.  And here again both Ryanair and Apple score through the roof on that one.

It is the balance between these five factors creates a good reputation and trust. You do not need to be top on all five. But it’s always a dimension of those aspects.  And other reputation studies maybe have a different ranking. But it’s those that I’ve listed which are the key drivers that count.

Time to ditch the S in CSR? And what is CR about?

PS: Is CSR a marketing tool or a genuine attempt to inject morality into capitalism?

RG: This really comes under my “purpose and performance” answer. Let me explain. I prioritise the  concept of responsibility rather than the social bit of it. That’s because “social” is corporate giving and sponsoring. But corporate responsibility goes to supply chain management and to diversity in the workplace. It goes to labour standards in all kinds of countries. It goes to compliance issues, too.

If you take corporate responsibility or give that angle to CR as a communication platform, we are talking evidence-based communication. We are talking about content and not just about how you brand it or how you position it and how you make a better marketing tool out of it. It is really about how you run your business and how you act responsibly in the roles in which you operate.

Elevator pitch to put Swiss banking back on track

PS: Good to hear. I’ve always advocated dropping the S in CSR and also for promoting business sustainability much more forcibly than we currently do.

Now, moving on. Please pick an unpopular person, institution, firm or country and make an “elevator pitch” for it.

RG: I’d pitch the financial sector in Switzerland.  And what I’d be pitching would have nothing to do with communications.

PS: Okay, go ahead.

RG:  Behaviour drives communications and reputations. It’s all driven by behaviour.  And the first behaviour recommendation I’d make to the Swiss banks would be not to base a product or the financial sector on a system of differentiation of tax evasion and tax fraud.

The only differentiation that matters is excellence in Swiss banking. There are huge assets which come with excellent banking and the positioning of it. So Swiss banks should not hide behind a smart legal differentiation of evasion and fraud. That’s not the way to go.

Second, nobody likes secrets.  We do like privacy, though.  Why is Swiss banking branded “banking secrecy”?  It’s the protection of the individual and the protection of one’s privacy that matters. And that is a different concept.

My third point would be look at self-regulation. I say don’t wait until the regulators push their positions on you.  Self-regulation can be a very healthy way to come out of the crisis stronger and to keep enough room for your core business.

My fourth is look at the products, because the banking products have become too complicated. There are many ways to shape products in more understandable ways. After all, good products, as we discussed earlier, are one of the key drivers of reputations. Products need to be much more transparent. Any risks in those products require a clear assessment of the portfolio. Sometimes in the boom years, the underlying risks were not clear even to specialists working in the field.

Power shifts in media – good news and not so good news

PS:  Ask yourself the question I should have asked you.

RG: A point you haven’t mentioned is the role of old media, if you want. There is right now a power shift of who produces relevant content and who has the power to invest in content?  And that shift goes from media to the PR sector.  It goes to in-house PR, external PR. And as a PR man, I could say it’s a great strength. But as somebody who is socially or politically aware, I would say it can do harm to the balance of democracy, because media have an important role there.  And sizing down all those newspapers, and taking away their ability power to do in-depth research is a problem.

At the same time you have big companies, PR firms basically involved in paid-content production.  It doesn’t mean that the content is not correct, but it always presents one perspective in a discussion and I believe there still needs to be strong media to play a role in public debates.

Certainly, big corporate can become the media. Why not have Nike TV doing sports programmes? But I like the “competition of ideas”. If you want to have a competition you need a few players being part of that competition.

PS: Do you have any closing remarks?

RG: Yes. If you ask our founder Harold Burson what makes a great PR person he says “curiosity”. And I think it is fascinating right now to be a PR person. There are so many things going on. We are challenged more than ever before. There’s loads of opportunity. I think we can say it is a new age, as you say, a golden one.

PS: Thanks. Great stuff, if I may say so.

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The first time I considered transparency as an issue was as an eighteen year-old reading Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son. One of them contains this 18th century nugget that I’ve never forgotten:

“Without some dissimulation no business can be carried out at all. It is simulation that is false. Dissimulation is only to hide your cards.”

When I read Paul’s piece it was that quote that came to mind. There are often good reasons not to be too transparent even in public service, I thought.

Consider gays in the US military. The Don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT) is a semi-official licence designed to encourage opaqueness in the military. Personally, I favour the right of gays to serve openly, but if one is going to fudge the issue this seems to be almost an acceptable way to do so. It may be inadequate to purists, but it was a halfway decent staging-post to somewhere more honest (and may be not all that superior).

Or consider collective responsibility in government, as did The Times’s Danny Finkelstein in last Sunday’s edition of Westminster Hour on BBC Radio 4. He said that politicians who always speak their minds honestly cannot be good colleagues, because party government consists in the necessarily artificial device of assuming that there is a collegiate view.

Or consider the necessity of ordinary social deceit. The “Does my bum look big in this?” dilemma faces many people.

Or consider whether a schoolboy owes respect to a headmaster who has not yet (in the boy’s view or that of his father) “earned” it. Well, there is a necessary hypocrisy which suggests that respect is owed ex officio. (See Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, 26 October 2009.)

Or consider the politician who in public espouses infant vaccination but can’t get his spouse to allow it on his own baby? Must he be forced to come clean about the status of his own child?

These cases make me feel that transparency may or may not be valuable in this or that circumstance, but also that it is a new species of infantilism to think that transparency is always and everywhere a Good Thing as a matter of principle.

Perhaps, though, transparency is a decent principle for governance? Again, I think not. Transparency could actually be very bad for corporate and political governance. It may produce the unintended consequence of driving all serious deliberations and decisions deep underground  (off-the-record management that’s not accountable to anybody, ever etc.).

When it comes to managing public finances I agree wholeheartedly that transparency is increasingly hard to argue against. But surely, there’s something wrong when transparency in the UK results in the controversial backdated caps on MPs’ expenses recommended by auditor Sir Thomas Legg? Of course in that case – and there are many – the problem isn’t the transparency but the childishness which greeted the facts it revealed.(Too many of the public were unable to cope with the idea that they were contributing to their legislators’ lifestyles.)

I doubt that forcing people to reveal the “truth” will lead to either party (the informant or the informee) becoming wiser or nicer, at least not quickly.

There’s a very real danger that people will simply lie, or be forced to dissemble with greater and greater sophistication. Or they will become mealy-mouthed, say-nothing niceness cyphers.

Indeed, more transparency can only work well if we all become more and more indifferent to the information we increasingly glean. If we do get to the position where everyone knows everything about our finances (or our sexual orientation), we will also need to be in the position of saying, “So what?” to those who make a big deal of these things (or seek to bully or blackmail us). But there is something very authoritarian about arriving there. Surely, some things are personal, or secret for good political and commercial reasons, and revealing them should not be a public requirement?

As Paul Holmes rightly says on his blog, “transparency is less and less tenable as a strategy, because information has a way of fighting free of constraints….” What does this mean for PRs? I think it means that we need to push back on the demand for transparency as a principle. We should be very specific when we use the term and seek to identify when and where it is best to advocate or reject its use.

Otherwise, I fear, transparency is doomed to become the new opaque, and that wouldn’t be honest, would it?

No related pages.

The issue is: should corporate officers blog and if they do is it right that someone else writes their material? I say that corporates should either avoid blogging, or if they do it it’s best to get a professional on the case.

Here’s the detail. I believe that all corporate utterance is collegiate, not personal. We should not expect that a corporate voice is speaking personally. To that extent, one should steer corporate people away from the appearance of purely personal speech (ie, in blogs) because it’s a falsity. But if there is corporate blogging, then one has to accept that it has a corporate mindset and spin (unless it stays bland and covers nothing much). Corporate blogging isn’t personal and PRs might as well get involved, and probably should.

I think Neville’s point is only a little different. He believes (and I rather agree) that a blog is a personal thing in a special way (it is – as it were - a hand-written note) which is different to a speech (which might – as it were – be a typewritten thing produced by a committee). Thus Neville insists that it is wrong for a CEO to have a blog but delegate it. But Neville thinks that a CEO, say, can speak with a personal voice and that his utterance is personal not corporate at that point. And I think Neville believes that the corporate and the personal can be aligned.

The difference between us may be that I think that corporations (and institutions) should steer clear of pretending that they are people and have personalities that are free of corporate ties. They have qualities, and even aspirations, but these are group things. I resist their becoming too chummy, and so I resist their blogging and tweeting as if they are something they are not; I want to keep the corporate voice authentic. Corporates should be too formal to be capable of the mateyness involved in the ’social media’ world – except as part of transparent marketing.

The David Brain “I was muzzled” experience will be faced by any CEO as soon as the subject matter gets sensitive – political issues; product recalls; we’re sorry about this or that mess etc. The Brendan May “I watch my words because I fear for my future” remark is also one that will strike a chord with many bloggers.

Moreover, these two men are leading PR professionals. I admire them for making transparent the constraints under which they work (they’re sending us a message) as a result of working for corporate bodies. Their way is the way to build trust because it is authentic, honest and transparent.

Moreover, one of the things I’ve learnt from my experience is that the last thing any corporation needs is a loose cannon.

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