The Harvard Club, New York City
Ray Kotcher
Senior Partner and Chief Executive Officer, Ketchum
Dec. 7, 2006
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you today. I must say, I keep getting feelings of déjà vu. Your annual meeting’s theme is “Reinventing the firm and maintaining excellence in an era of dramatic change.” One of our major industry associations, the Council of PR Firms, held a half-day seminar last month that paralleled that theme as we in public relations seek to achieve engagement in today’s far more fragmented media world.
Both of our sectors are undergoing dramatic growth and change.
Let’s take a look at my world for a moment, the world of public relations and the media. This world has become one in which today’s process is participatory in nature. It no longer is about top-down broadcasting of messages but bottom-up network effect and community dynamics – it is a dialogue, a conversation. And it is not as much about technology.
Yes, this change is enabled by technology but it is more about the dynamics of the media and the interaction of the traditional media and the new media and the alchemy of that interaction. It also is about social dynamics – today the ability of PR to manage perceptions and behavior has never been more powerful.
It really does fulfill the destiny that one of our industry’s forefathers, Edward Bernays, saw for PR so many years ago: The importance and power of communication in the management of social interaction and behaviors – the engineering of consent as he called it. And with the advent of the new media, we in public relations have our best opportunity ever to produce content that is two-way and engenders conversations and dialogue – time-honored public relations skills.
As Paul Saffo, the director of the Institute for the Future, says in Newsweek about the intersection of content creation and the new media’s two-way dialogue: “Loading photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube is creation . . . as is adding an entry to Wikipedia – just as the time clock symbolized a worker-centric economy and the credit card represented consumers, the computer mouse is the symbol of the new creators – personal media are very different from television with its one way message: Shut up and watch, then buy what you see. On the Web, one must always be clicking, selecting and browsing. Personal media don’t just allow two-way interaction – they demand it – and this is the cornerstone of the new age of the creator. This is truly a revolution without bystanders.”
So, just as you as consultants are trying to make sense of all that is happening in your sectors today so that you might better guide your clients through this kaleidoscope change, we in PR face a similar consulting challenge. In my brief remarks today, I would like to offer some counsel around communication, the type of counsel we at Ketchum well might give to one of your firms dealing with dramatic growth and change.
So let me offer five lessons that invariably apply in situations where a client is going through dramatic change, especially as it relates to major growth. Here are the five:
- Lesson one: Recognize that the change you’re experiencing is the ticket to your success. And, if you agree with that, you might also agree on the opposite – that those consultancies that fail to change will fail to succeed.
- Lesson Two: Swiftly embrace the growth and change within your consultancies.
- Lesson Three: Understand what the forces of change and growth mean to your organization and its future.
- Lesson Four: Think creatively in how you will communicate to your internal community about this period of growth and change.
- Lesson Five: Join the conversation; ready yourself to face the challenges – good and bad – of tomorrow.
Five rather simple thoughts – recognizing, embracing, understanding, communicating and joining – now here is the detail.
Lesson one: Recognize that the change you’re experiencing is the ticket to your success. And, if you agree with that, you might also agree on the opposite – that those consultancies that fail to change will fail to succeed. You can take small steady steps or great long leaps and strides in dealing with this change – but you must move forward to set the stage for the other lessons.
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times “Foreign Affairs” columnist and author of The World Is Flat, coined the word “glocalization” to describe how outward a national or local or corporate culture is – how open it is to foreign ideas and influences. The other aspect of this is how “inward” the culture is – how strong its sense of identity is and how well its members collaborate with one another.
So I ask you to ready yourself for communicating change – are you and your firm’s colleagues truly a team? Is collaboration a given? Is everyone ready to tackle this new period of growth and change with a unified spirit? And you must acknowledge that this period, just like the one when times are really difficult, will affect everyone in your organization in some way, and not always beneficially.
Here’s what many of us in the public relations sector have decided – and it very well may apply to you. We must be versatile and flexible. And we must become as flexible externally as we are internally. What do I mean? I mean that we must organize ourselves to meet complicated clients’ needs with internal specialist skills.
At the same time, we must be able to work quickly and seamlessly with a host of other external agencies and consultancies and freelancers and internal staff. We at Ketchum work with agencies from within Omnicom – our parent company – as well as with those from other disciplines – such as yours – and even other public relations agencies. We are bent on showing how this “sleeping with the enemy” approach adds extra value from such cooperation and not mere tolerance.
We’ve gotten positive feedback from our clients by adopting this approach because they see us acting in this way rather than just talking about it – it demonstrates that we will do whatever it takes to help them meet their goals. While not a point today, just a reminder, actions do speak louder than words. So remember even if you aren’t saying something out loud, it may be what you are doing that is getting the attention.
So, as you recognize the change you are going through, remember it pays rich rewards to emphasize Collaboration, community and credibility – and to ensure it encompasses your employees as well as your clients and others.
Lesson Two: Move swiftly to embrace this recognition of growth and change within your consultancies. We have an offering at Ketchum for our clients’ new chief executive officers, and we are seeing more turnover in top management than ever before. It’s called “The First 100 Days.” Some of you may have similar offerings for new corporate leaders. Our mission in any such assignment is – through communication – to ensure that a new CEO gets a quick start in influencing key stakeholders inside and outside the organization, setting the stage for continued success.
Consider that you’re the master of your firm’s ship – and many of you are just that. As CEO – or as adviser to the chief – you should recognize that you have an enormous impact on your team’s psychology. And you also should understand that in today’s fast-changing business landscape, speed is both an expectation and a demand. So you must quickly communicate what this growth and change environment means to the entire organization.
Here are some of the internal challenges you must address:
- Leveraging new technologies
- Building significant depth of talent
- Executing new business strategies, in particular, collaboration
- Developing high-impact strategies for your brand
- Evolving models for relationships with each other, your clients, your profession, etc.
What we advise is that you adopt a clear positioning so that everyone knows what the CEO – or in your case, the consultancy – stands for. We recommend a communication platform for taking that positioning out to your internal and external communities. We urge that you establish early priorities for dealing with growth and change – and that you also set a more detailed communication and leadership plan to take you through the post-100-day period.
You might hold a workshop where your leaders articulate their core beliefs and views about the firm’s direction, challenges and opportunities in this new era. We at Ketchum promote a “message-mapping” approach that dozens of our clients rely on for really grappling with the nub of a new organizational change. It often can take nearly a day to really capture the core message of the particular challenge, what we call the home base – and then also agreeing on the key elements or points in the next layer away from the central home base and the outlying proof points that back up the inner circles.
But being clear on your message is what helps the organization to begin to embrace change. It also helps the leadership of the firm to speak from the same page. First, the CEO comes out with clear communication around embracing change, and then the leadership follows. Remember, in the end, all communication is local. The CEO influences everyone from afar, but the local managers and direct supervisors are the ones who pull it through.
Lesson Three: And, frankly, I could have led with this one. You must really try to understand what the forces of change and growth mean to your organization and its future. As I mentioned at the beginning, we in public relations and media communication in general are in the midst of a profound change in our business.
Consumers today are in control of their communications – whether it embraces traditional media like newspapers and local TV, or new media like social-networking sites, blogs, and mobile media, or what’s most likely, a solid mix of those various media – the alchemy of that interaction.
But it’s not time for us to wring hands. The origins of public relations were in boom times and the boom of the time was a medium called newspapers. We’re in another boom time and the boom in our era is wired people, social networking, that kind of coactivity.
Consider this: In a media study Ketchum just completed with the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center, nearly half of all women and 39% of all men rely on word of mouth from family and friends when gathering information to make a decision. Social networking sites are used by 19.4% of women and 14.8% of men. And influencers – those people who shape consumer views about what we purchase and how we think about products and services – use media, traditional and new, at much higher levels than the typical consumer and thus serve as the public’s editors and multimedia “minders.”
That makes this an extraordinary exciting time for our particular industry. It strikes me it’s the best of times. One of the largest marketing organizations, Procter & Gamble is telling us in PR that we deliver the best bang for the buck on an ROI basis. Our firm and agencies such as ours are growing by double digits and, I would say, one of the reasons we are is that companies like P&G realize they no longer own their brands. Consumers do and public relations is the best tool to help companies help consumers manage the company products.
That details some of our realizations. What are yours? You must find them – and I’m sure you have many. Does everyone in your organization understand them?
Which brings me to Lesson Four: Think creatively in how you will communicate to your internal community in particular about this period of growth and change. Our change-management group, Stromberg Consulting, tackles these types of assignments for clients all the time. It has discarded the old term “internal communication” for a much broader descriptor: “employee engagement.”
Employee engagement entails much, much more. Employees today must be engaged in the programs you devise for dealing with growth and change. They must be ambassadors for it. They must be actively involved in helping develop and cheerlead for the programs. Which means they must understand your objectives and initiatives and actively buy into them.
You could establish what’s known as a wiki to help you and your employees work together. A wiki is the ability of a group or entire organization to define or articulate something – let’s say it’s your growth plan or your dealing-with-change plan – together online with each having the ability to make a suggestion to the document.
IBM adopted a wiki when it allowed its employees to establish a company policy for handling employee blogs. There’s nothing more satisfying, frankly, than knowing you had a part in setting goals or a plan, and that your organization considers your contributions vitally important to its success.
So, if your organization is scattered widely, perhaps between continents, a wiki might be beneficial to you.
Or perhaps you should launch an internal Web log, or blog, that would serve a similar purpose of engaging employees. Your managing partner or some other leader might establish an internal online blog that explores various issues confronting the firm, and employees can offer their views and suggestions online to each posting by the executive. Yes, it’s a bit like the anonymous suggestion box, but it’s much more engaging for employees – from the support staff to the IT team to the senior consultants themselves. And it isn’t anonymous at all – it requires employees to claim who they are and what they think.
There are many fresh and innovative ways today to engage your employees and your external constituencies, and this engagement is two-way and can prove invaluable. Be sure, however, to be transparent in your dealings with your organization and clients. And I assure you, what disgruntled employees can do today in our digital age to illuminate their frustrations with their organizations is frightening. But don’t allow the interaction to scare you, being open with employees, communicating swiftly, is what gets them engaged.
So on that note, let me give you Lesson Five. I gave the commencement address this past summer to graduating seniors at Boston University’s College of Communication. For many of us, it’s been quite a while since we attended our own college commencement. I found this commencement truly an exhilarating experience – and I hope I was just as energetic and eager to begin my career then as many of today’s graduates seemed to be.
I advised the graduates to “Join the Conversation” – which, for them, is a planetary conversation that is integrating people with people as never before and building dynamic new communities powered by fresh technologies.
You and your colleagues have your own conversation. And I urge you to join others and not to be isolated within your particular firm but to broaden your world – to make a difference. And in that spirit I highly recommend the Michael Porter article in the current Harvard Business Review on corporate social responsibility.
Lesson Five incorporates that message. But there’s a much bigger message to convey, which I said to those fledgling communicators at Boston University. I told them that while today may be a period of opportunity and personal growth, the outlook ahead suggests some very daunting challenges for us all. According to the very reputable Institute for the Future, by the end of this decade, we can expect these headlines:
- Biodisaster – natural or human made – lurks on the horizon.
- Extreme meteorological and geological events continue to threaten human life.
- China’s rapid growth redraws global economic, political maps.
- Megacities leave giant ecological footprints as they sprawl across the developed and developing world.
- Tech innovations spur even greater fervor and zeal and a deep personalization.
I have no doubt that as management consultants hearing those challenges, you undoubtedly see opportunity for you and your firms to help clients deal with these gigantic issues. For that’s the real lesson of today. While you may face challenges today coping with what the forces of major growth and change mean for your own firms, you recognize there will be far different and perhaps “darker” challenges to face tomorrow. And hopefully as you face those challenges, you will remember the five lessons of communicating change.
As Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” When you begin communicating change to your employees, remember this motto. Show employees that you recognize, embrace and understand change, that you are willing to communicate about it with a clear vision and that you are asking them to Join the Conversation.
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