Boyd Neil has written a valuable manifesto in favour of CSR entitled “CR on the Hotseat” on his PR blog The Intangibles. Here’s my manifesto and it isn’t against Corporate Social Responsibility. I just put honesty as the highest responsibility. And I do think CSR has such a bad image it should be ditched in favour of sustainability, eventually. Read on ›

The Financial Times’ management columnist Stefan Stern and others have been assessing the point and meaning of this year’s Davos. Much of it comes to the need for capitalism to express itself differently. Read on ›

PR Week reports that the British Bankers’ Association (BBA) executive director of communications Lesley McLeod says the banks are getting a bum rap because of “inexperienced’” reporters who “fail to understand the crisis” or the “issues” it presents. What, and the BBA has to sit idly by? Why doesn’t it get stuck in? Read on ›

Here is a good example of preemptive crisis management. It is a text-book example of how to manage a controversial issue by facing up to market realities. Read on ›

Yesterday Barclays Bank won the vote to endorse its billions of Arab fund-raising. Its board was attacked from all sides, even by those voting for the deal. Welcome to the world of recession business. Clients are going to have hard cases to sell. That’s our real job. It’ll be exhilarating. Read on ›

A new survey reports that over two-thirds of consumers “would remain loyal to a brand during a recession if it supports a good cause”. Why wouldn’t they say so? And so what? Let’s try a little rebelliousness here. Read on ›

Over lunch at the “Weinstube zum Rothen Ochsen” (Red Bull) in Stein am Rhein I catch up on this week’s FT output. I discover the chairman of Channel 4, Luke Johnson, commenting:

“The overriding truth about bad publicity is that it is rarely as damaging as your worst fears. Even Bernard Matthews Farms is prospering again, in spite of taking a battering last year over bird flu. There is a lot of noise out there in the media jungle, and stories soon get forgotten: the bandwagon rolls on.” Read on ›