Attended this week a very good session at the IoD to launch Dr Roger Hayes and Dr Reggie Watts' book on leadership. The book provides an excellent insight into current and emerging stakeholder agendas and their influence and agendas for leadership. Roger has been a great supporter to the PR programmes (postgraduate and undergraduate) at Greenwich and to the re-validation of the programmes which we are currently working on for commencement in 2016.
The event had some great input from the audience. Has the focus on leadership at the "top" of the organisation become too powerful a discourse? Input from the floor suggested that actually an emerging focus is on leadership in middle management which is now seen as crucial for successful organisations.
Another important topic raised, was that of "corporatism" and the sense that major brands and organisations have become so powerful that they are beyond the power of governments (and stakeholders) and there is a need for some mechanism of international governance. The implication behind this was that stakeholder agendas have perhaps lost their momentum to the power of the corporation. Interesting to note that one politician who has been speaking on "corporatism" is Nigel Farage and that a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review criticises Hillary Clinton's campaign as being too "corporatist." Is "corporatism" a discourse which is growing in power? It is not a term I have been particularly conscious of for a number of years, but I will start to look out for it now.
Agendas around corporatism tie in well with the work which Greenwich and our European partners explored in terms of lobbying and governance in the EU. Also with the new proposal which we have applied to the EU for funding this year which is exploring the role of PR as public diplomacy.
Governance of major organisations is an interesting agenda to be discussing in the same week which has seen one of the most powerful global non-governmental organisations, FIFA, brought low by an old fashioned form of governance, the law.
FIFA will discover that it will be very hard for them to be masters of their own destiny now that the "court of public opinion" has been supplemented by the actual courts. The trouble with power leaders such as Sepp Blatter is they can travel so far without listening to their stakeholders; but there always comes a day of reckoning. National governments will not allow FIFA to run rings around them in the future as they have done to date.
The event had some great input from the audience. Has the focus on leadership at the "top" of the organisation become too powerful a discourse? Input from the floor suggested that actually an emerging focus is on leadership in middle management which is now seen as crucial for successful organisations.
Another important topic raised, was that of "corporatism" and the sense that major brands and organisations have become so powerful that they are beyond the power of governments (and stakeholders) and there is a need for some mechanism of international governance. The implication behind this was that stakeholder agendas have perhaps lost their momentum to the power of the corporation. Interesting to note that one politician who has been speaking on "corporatism" is Nigel Farage and that a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review criticises Hillary Clinton's campaign as being too "corporatist." Is "corporatism" a discourse which is growing in power? It is not a term I have been particularly conscious of for a number of years, but I will start to look out for it now.
Agendas around corporatism tie in well with the work which Greenwich and our European partners explored in terms of lobbying and governance in the EU. Also with the new proposal which we have applied to the EU for funding this year which is exploring the role of PR as public diplomacy.
Governance of major organisations is an interesting agenda to be discussing in the same week which has seen one of the most powerful global non-governmental organisations, FIFA, brought low by an old fashioned form of governance, the law.
FIFA will discover that it will be very hard for them to be masters of their own destiny now that the "court of public opinion" has been supplemented by the actual courts. The trouble with power leaders such as Sepp Blatter is they can travel so far without listening to their stakeholders; but there always comes a day of reckoning. National governments will not allow FIFA to run rings around them in the future as they have done to date.
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