PR-Bridge

Jim Collins shot to worldwide acclaim with his 2001 bestseller Good to Great. For years the book sat atop or near the top of the national bestseller lists, selling more than 1 million copies in hardback alone. Thirty seconds ago, I checked to see the book’s place on Amazon’s list and it stands at #63 among all books sold. For business readers, Good to Great sparked a Harry Potter-like frenzy. It changed the way books are marketed and the way people speak about business topics. No one should be surprised by the number of red-covered books lining the shelves in the business section of the local bookstore.

In a recent issue of Fortune (The 100 Best Companies to Work For,” 2/2/09), Collins emerges to participate in a Q&A that provides his assessment of the business world in today’s troubling times. Interestingly, Collins’ next book will address how companies survive when the world spins out of control.

Interestingly, the terms “advertising,” “marketing,” and “public relations” do not appear in the index of Good to Great. Perhaps one should imagine that like many management gurus, Collins has little interest in these disciplines, setting his sights instead on the C-suite. However, reading the rather short Q&A, there is a nod to communications that the general reader might pass over.

When asked what companies do to get through difficult times, Collins responds: “No. 1, in times of great duress, tumult, and uncertainty, you have to have moorings.” He cites P&G, GE, J&J, and IBM as those with “an incredible fabric of values, of underlying ideals or principles that explained why it was important that they existed.”

Aha! What an empowering moment for the often trod upon communications team, particularly the overworked and understaffed internal communicators. Collins explains, “What we have found is that what really matters is that you actually have core values–not what they are…You need to preserve them consistently over time.”

In my experience, it is the internal communications team that is focused on implementing what Collins outlines. Obviously, it is impossible to do if the CEO and the management team are not in agreement. But, when the execs and communicators that support them work together to spread the values message throughout an organization, great things happen.

What I find in the classroom and many textbooks and other publications is a overly simplistic view of internal communications. Students and others default to a definition of internal comm as “keeping the employees happy.” What I attempt to convince them is that the objective is several levels deeper: educating employees about the goals and aspirations of the organization and its leaders and showing them how their individual work helps the overall organization meet those goals. This difference is more than just fancier words and semantics. In teaching tomorrow’s professionals, the ability to go beyond easy answers is critical.

The part about “values” is just one paragraph in the Collins Q&A and because he does not have any particular insight into how internal communications works inside an organization, he quickly moves to tagging “talent” as the other piece of the puzzle. However, even within his discussion about great companies hiring the best people, the value of internal communications shines through.

Collins discusses Boeing after World War II, reeling because its military production fell to almost nothing. Rather than go under, Boeing’s leader Bill Allen advocated applying what the company learned making militar aircraft to the commercial plane business. Boeing’s employees rallied, according to Collins, in “the sense that they were all creating something together,” even though an outsider might have labled it crazy.

The point Collins does not connect is that talented individuals – like the Boeing employees — understand the link between their success and the organization’s success. Some of that feeling is certainly the hallmark of bright, capable workers, but it is also in the glue that internal communicators create, essentially locking employees and aspirations together.

Strategic management gurus often talk about big-picture ideas, like “values,” and this rhetoric sounds really great in speeches or books. Tactically, however, organizations that are successful in building and living a mission statement understand that it takes more than just air to make it part of the culture. Collins did not mean to address the value of organizational culture in the Fortune piece, but those charged with maintaining culture should feel proud nonetheless. Outside the CEO’s office, there are few individuals with a more daunting task than those responsible for an organization’s culture.

The essay that follows is excerpted from my new book, The 2000s, an examination of popular culture’s role in shaping society in this decade. I am interested in studying the role of marketing (an umbrella term to encompass Marketing, Advertising, and Public Relations) in shaping people’s perceptions. This piece argues that marketing plays a critical role in public education. Obviously, the notion flies in the face of the common perception of all marketing as evil, but I feel that like so many stereotypes, this one deserves closer examination. 

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Advertising’s pervasiveness, in some respects, actually opens doors to public discussion about marketing efforts and one’s place in the larger world. People use ads as a barometer for assessing their own values and role as citizens. Consumers also receive a great deal of educational information from companies through marketing campaigns. Bank of America, for instance, launched a new product in January 2005 called SafeSend that enabled Hispanic customers to remit money to Mexico free of charge. Previously, Hispanic customers had to use costly payday loan establishments or wire transfers to send money back to Mexico, which topped $20 billion in 2005

In examining Burrell Communications, a large African American-owned advertising firm, communications scholar Irene Costera Meijer sees client work that uses “positive realism” to show black consumers a view of life that is purposely thoughtful, engaging, and well-rounded. A McDonald’s ad created by Burrell that showed a successful black father visiting his child’s school, for instance, provides “a new story of responsible black male citizenship that can be the source of inspiration and guidance for men and women, whites and blacks.”

Meijer sees advertisements like this providing positive social impact. She explains that marketers should consider using positive images “that create so-called win-win situations, images which are good for the market and can change people’s ideas about themselves and hopes for society.” According to Meijer, advertising can provide valuable stories of what it means to live the good life, which are otherwise hard to find in mainstream media channels. “Such stories should be seen as part of the wide array of practices and technologies with which individuals nowadays have to constitute their sense of self as–among other things–citizens of ever expanding communities.”

Of all the disciplines falling under the marketing umbrella, none is more essential to the education process than public relations. As a business function, public relations is driven by the bottom line, but professionals, as opposed to charlatans who do little more than produce spin, fluff, and puffery, conduct themselves ethically. Their goal is to inform consumers about their clients’ products and services. Public relations perhaps shines brightest in crisis situations, when public education is most critical. The most important crises that public relations professionals handle are community disasters such as plane crashes, fires, explosions, and major workplace incidents.