Michael Porter sets agenda for 2011

Sure to be a must-read piece for those involved in corporate communications, financial PR, corporate governance and public affairs, is an article by Professor Michael Porter and colleague Mark Kramer in this month's Harvard Business Review.  Famous for his work on competitive forces and industrial clusters, Porter is damning on business, short termism and failure to put society or "shared value" at the heart of its business activites.
 Michael Porter.

"The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community."  A major theme of the article is the concept of "shared value" which the authors say is not CSR or philanthropy but "reconnecting business with social progress."

Coming from the pen of such a leading figure in business strategy, and in a leading business publication, the article is sure to put more focus on the stakeholder/shareholder debate; and also the more modern framing of the argument around concepts such as sustainability and the need for organisations to think about and implement such concepts in a more fundamental way.

Is Rolls-Royce too wedded to key stakeholder relationships?

Following Rolls-Royce's handling of communications as a result of the major engine problems on the new giant Airbus has been instructive if somewhat painful from a UK PR plc perspective.  No wonder, that according to PR Week's latest edition, it is in discussions with leading consultancies on getting some additional help. One or two of the media have even linked it to BP in terms of a major UK brand not understanding the new rules particularly in a crisis PR situation.

(Image: Wing damage to Rolls-Royce powered Quantas new generation Airbus A380 which landed safely in Singapore.)

What are the new rules?  Well that is an exaggeration - but I think that social media has enhanced the role of a more generalised public opinion as opposed to a key stakeholder approach which is the approach which Rolls-Royce took in response to the situation.  The trouble with this is that the company decides if a stakeholder community is important and of course it may be that public opinion decides that actually travel safety issues are of a great deal of interest to many of us, not just investors, customers of Rolls-Royce and regulators, something which Lex in the Financial Times pointed out. The response of Quantas, operators of the plane in question, was particularly instructive and showed it understood about the need for a wider communication approach to the incident.

It turns out courtesy of CorporateComms that the Director of Communications at Rolls-Royce does not believe in the impact of social media which seems unfortunate in the context and particuarly so as other media are now developing this aspect of the story.

For those PR practitioners interested in reading more regarding the role of generalised public opinion particuarly in crisis PR situations, there is a very good paper in the academic journal Corporate Communications by Oyvind Ihlen of the University of Oslo.

Wikileaks exposes public and private communication dilemmas for organisations

The explosion of coverage about Wikileaks and its exposure of US diplomatic correspondence has raised a whole range of political and foreign policy issues and comments; as well as a wide ranging debate about the role of information, social media and its impact, new forms of media and so on. 

From a PR perspective, I find it interesting that leaders and some media commentors have been so outwardly unsettled about the process as though the way you speak publicly about a country and organisation can be radically different about the way you communicate it in public.  To have such a disconnect, I would suggest is not feasible in a global networked society.

Certainly I think we have the right as citizens to know that the ruler of Saudi Arabia is encouraging the USA to bomb Iran or that China is accepting of the idea that there should be a  unified Korea in due course.  These are important pieces of information that should have been brought out of the private sphere into the public sphere.

Might organisational culture issues also be at work here.  Could the diplomatic service of countries be somewhat traditional in their approach to communications - believing it is acceptable to have two modes of operation - the public sphere mode and the private sphere mode and only in  the latter mode where you are totally "honest" about the country and rulers.  Of course Habermas would have been able to point out that "rational discourse" is a facet of a genuine public sphere something which does not appear to be going on - it all appears to be stored up for the private message to Washington.  In terms of reputation, legitimacy, transparency and relationship management having such a gap between public and private communications raises serious issues for an organisation.  In an networked global environment, traditional communications approaches by the diplomatic service or other large organisations - and banks seem to be next in the Wikileaks crosshairs - are no longer feasible and will need to be re-thought.

It should be noted that the British Foreign Office has created a blogging community on its web site giving views from round the world.    Is it a genuine conversation?  Certainly it is an interesting initiative although a search on the site suggested that nobody was confident enough to talk about Wikileaks which suggests that "rational discourse" is somewhat lacking!