01/03

If the spokesperson said only that -- and it is not clear that she did -- H&R Block missed a huge opportunity to emphasize its concern for customer privacy.  The spokesperson should have said something along this line.  "H&R Block guards customer privacy and if one of our employees abused our customers' trust, we will work with authorities to prosecute that person to the fullest extent of the law." 

Instead, it  looks like the spokesperson gave a lawyer's answer that satisfies no one and in the end, damaged H&R Block's reputation.   I just hope it isn't true.
 

01/02

The PR agency business suffered a dreadful 2002.  And, if this year is more of the same, forecasts won't help agencies or many practitioners looking for work. 

Just look at the forecasts of the past.  They were proven hollow with the end of the economic bubble.  Why did communication conglomerates buy PR agencies in the first place?  They were supposed to offset a downturn in advertising because PR was last to be cut.  It didn't work that way.  PR plummeted along with advertising, promotion, direct and every other communications vehicle.  The fallout was savage.

Looking about PR today, it seems strangely like the business in the early 1990s when there was no great growth except through purchase of agencies that added incremental revenue to the big firms' bottom lines.  However, the difference this time is there are fewer agencies to purchase and they will hardly add to the high growth expected of the PR business. 

There is nothing on the horizon that indicates high growth will return to the business for some time to come.  While this is not a forecast, it is my way of remaining cautious about the future.  The Happy Days of three years ago weren't all that happy, it turns out.  They were illusionary like a drunk seeing visions.

It's hell to sober up.
 

01/01

Hangover.  None. 

Wild party:  None.  Went to bed early.

Explosions and noisemaking.  Some.  They woke me.

Task:  Taking down Christmas decorations and sneaking peeks at football games.

May your New Year be better than the last one.
 

12/31

The astonishing part of the book was how ingrown and arrogant IBM had become.  As Gerstner writes, for nearly 30 years, IBM's customers bought whatever the company built in mainframe technology, software and peripherals.  The result was that IBM forgot about customers and became a series of empires built around country heads and convoluted staffs with precise rituals that told where one stood in the "Big Blue" pecking order.

To get rid of this, Gerstner largely did his own internal corporate communications.  Only once does he mention PR in the book and that was when he appointed the head of PR whom he liked a great deal.  Where was everybody else in PR and internal communications?  It doesn't seem like they figured much in his perspective of the problem.

That's as it should be.  The CEO is the prime communicator and CEOs who rely on others to frame their views are not leaders and soon found out.  Gerstner relates that the hard part of running a company in deep distress was not to forget what one had set out to do in the first place.  This was especially true because nearly everyone resisted the changes needed to turn the company around.  He says it was always tempting to let someone bend the rules just a bit, but if he did that then everybody would bend the rules all the time.  He had to communicate firmness.  And he had to inspect and compensate employees on the basis of the New IBM -- all difficult tasks in an ingrown company.

Gerstner was resented.  He was an outsider who didn't know and appreciate the "IBM Way."  But, it was distortions of the IBM Way that wrecked the company.  Rooting out the bad while keeping the good took every bit of his communication skill.  I have seen similar distortions of reality -- notably at Wang Laboratories just before it fell from grace.  It was not pretty.
 

12/30

The book is a must-read for PR practitioners who believe all media is good media and that whatever is the rage of the moment should be used to gain "ink" for a company. 

Gerstner felt the media distracted him from running IBM.   He writes that many reporters came unprepared and some came to slam the company no matter what the facts were.  He did write, however, that there was a core of reporters who knew what they were about and were good to work with.  He chose to deal with them.  What this tells me is that Gerstner's PR head was selective about letting reporters in to see Gerstner, and that is as it should have been.  Some reporters are so bad they are an embarrassment to publishing and a headache for PR practitioners.

A second group he did not like much -- and, in fact, came close to detest -- were investment bankers.  He claims they were largely responsible for the bubble in the late 90s during which hundreds of worthless IPOs were foisted on the public.  In retrospect, Gerstner appears to be right.  Sadly, too many PR practitioners blindly followed these "salesmen with suspenders," and never questioned what Wall Street was doing. 

I have a bias about investment bankers.  I worked around them briefly and came to detest them as much as Gerstner, but for other reasons.  They were as arrogant as any group of individuals I have met.  It was their arrogance and greed that drove them to the depths of irresponsibility they showed in the late 1990s.  And, because they are smart intellectually, they manipulated unquestioning reporters with one silly idea after another. 

But good can come from evil on occasion and my guess is that business media will rarely again allow themselves to be hoodwinked by investment bankers without a harder look at the facts. I just hope that PR practitioners are as skeptical.

If that happens, Gerstner will be smiling. So will I.