Advanced Search

Effective PR counselors understand the business that they represent as well as do their peers in the executive suite, and they work with them to meet the needs of the company's multiple stakeholders. They adopt a businessperson's perspective, not a journalist's. Good press is not an end in itself, and bad press is not to be avoided at any cost -- certainly not at the cost of lying. Effective PR counselors know how to balance a business's interests with those of its stakeholders to help its leaders find win-win solutions.

CEOs should ask a potential PR counselor who the company's most important audience is. If the answer is anyone other than a company's own employees, the CEO should keep looking.

Business has a bad image today not because it is too focused on creating wealth but, rather, because it has defined the beneficiaries of that wealth creation too narrowly. Corporations exist to create wealth for all who provide their resources and bear the risks of their failure. Such wealth comes in the form of dividends, rising stock prices, jobs, careers, healthier communities, and valuable products and services. Sadly, many business leaders have myopically focused on just one expression of wealth -- an ever-climbing stock price -- and on professional money managers, a small sub-segment whose fortunes rise and fall with the daily stock tables.

All business begins with the public permission and exists by public approval. . . . So we, like all other companies, live by public approval, and roughly speaking, the more approval you have the better you live. Of course, the fundamental way of getting [approval] is to deserve it.