Public relations professionals don’t really do philosophy: we’re in the people business, and sound-bites suit us better than Immanuel Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785). As for our clients, well, we’re bound to note their lust for the latest guru-speak getting lift-off from an airport bookshop. Read on ›

Prudential CEO Tidjane Thiam has just learnt the hard way that he is accountable first and foremost to his shareholders. His climb down over the £24.6 billion proposed bid for AIA now looks set to cost his company £450 million and might yet cost him his job. We care partly because the Pru has for decades been the watchword of, well, prudence. Read on ›

Note: This piece needs to be treated with care. I was the victim of a sophisticated hoax. I apologize to anybody who was mislead. But I’m leaving the post here as a spoof of a spoof. It shows how even if the anti-Shell campaigning trickesters got their way, it would not address the problems in Nigeria in a sensible or realistic manner but would actually make things worse.

Yesterday “Shell” (go to hoax press release) said it was going to clean up the Niger Delta, compensate local communities for past injuries, and institute a local stakeholders’ program that will help lift the region out of poverty. That sounds like good news. But what if the real victim is the truth? Read on ›

Here’s a PR manifesto offering a post-credit crunch reality check that sticks up for maintaining the primacy of shareholder value in business. Read on ›

In 1994 Tony Blair promised to turn the UK into a “stakeholder society” when he declared New Labour, New Britain. It was the cornerstone of his “Third Way” politics. But nobody’s talking about either term in the current UK General Election. Maybe the wheels will come off the “stakeholder” rhetoric in business too.   Read on ›

Oh! My! God! Organizing for America, the successor to Obama for America, is searching for a Social Networks Manager: apply here. But before you do read this. Read on ›

Being socially aware didn’t make Big Pharma innovate. Here’s a risky piece reminding us that profit matters more than seeming nice and safe, whatever the Davos savants pretend or their mantras might say. Read on ›

When local boy Roman Geiser, Burson-Marsteller’s Swiss CEO, was catapulted into the stratosphere as Chief Operating Officer for EMEA, I just had to make the twenty-minute train ride to Zurich to interview him. Read on ›

Some of the remarks about PR’s need to reform in McKinsey Quarterly journal (Rebuilding corporate reputations) are OK if hackneyed. But the wider thesis is very shaky. Here’s why. Read on ›

If we want a glimpse of where PR might go over the next ten years, we should examine Japan. The world’s second-largest economy’s property bubble burst 20 years ago. Since then deflation, recession and reality have broken the country’s commitment to consensus building, as Leo Lewis argues in “Japan’s harsh new reality” in today’s Times. Read on ›