Writing Boots

Yesterday Shel Holtz posted a video that was played at the Council of Public Relations’ recent “Critical Issues Forum.” Its title was, “What is the most dangerous idea in PR today?”

The ideas amount to: the Internet is going to change PR and a pile of clips isn’t the end-all, be-all.

Ooh, real scary. I’m going as one of these ideas for Halloween!

You want a dangerous idea? Here’s a dangerous idea that I call “The Subversive 60 Percent”:

I believe a responsible communicator in an average organization spends only 40 percent of the time doing the chores he or she is assigned to do, and 60 percent doing what he or she knows needs to be done, even though management, and in many cases including the vice president of corporate communication, doesn’t have the foggiest.

Most of that 60 percent will appear to management, if management notices it at all, like unnecessary thoroughness and deck-chair rearrangement.

But another portion of “The Subversive 60” will actually run counter to the organization’s strategy. Though all communication activities must of course be portrayed as being strategically aligned win-wins, sometimes you just go ahead and run the goddamn story even though you know it might spark a counterproductive uproar. You put the clueless CFO in front of a hostile employee crowd because he needs a wake-up call. You let the platitudinous CEO letter go out like that, because that’s how the old turd talks. You do communications that bind your constituencies together as communities, whether or not it binds them to your organization.

How do you justify such active and passive subversion? Simple: Your employees—or customers, or investors—have a right to know the truth … about you’re your organization's strengths and weaknesses, about your competition, about your organization’s effect on the marketplace and the environment. And you, as the communicator, are in a unique position to deliver that truth.

Although your contractual duty is to help your employer further whatever combination of foolishness, benevolence, wisdom and greed its leaders concoct, your larger obligation is to the society in which your employer does business. You’re a human being first and an employee second.

Protect your job—but first, protect your conscience, even if it means quietly and cleverly going against your employer’s will.

The most dangerous thing about this idea is that it’s not an idea; it's a practice: You’re already doing it to one extent or another, and you have been, your whole career.

(You don’t like that dangerous idea? Well what dangerous idea do you like?)

In the discussion that ensued on a post on his blog, "More With Les," the communication consultant and university lecturer Les Potter said something that threw me just a bit. (Or at least it stuck in my craw; the post was in September, and I'm only bringing it up now.) Potter wrote:

What happened to the profession that journalists used to "sell out" to, for the fat paychecks and the nine-to-five hours? When (exactly) did "our type of work" begin to demand such slavish devotion? And if we're going to work 60-80 hours, shouldn't we be doing something that's a little more glamorous or lucrative or both?

But first: Do you agree with Potter's claim that, to succeed in communication, "these hours are not optional"?

The headlines in employee publications are rarely as arresting as the headlines in The Wall Street Journal. That's because The Wall Street Journal wants its readers to read, to understand, to react. Whereas employee publication editors usually want employees to scan, to vaguely appreciate, and then to go back to sleep.

Not the communicators at Roseburg Forest Products, not now.

The October issue of the Vital Signs employee newspaper carries the front-page headline,

In response to economic crisis, Allyn discusses short-term pressures in light of long-term plans

and the subhead

Things go from bad to worse

and the lead

In a housing market with housing starts the worst we've seen since the Great Depression, Roseburg's executive team is looking at the best way to weather the nation's economic crisis. "This trough is much deeper and longer than we had anticipated," said [CEO] Allyn Ford. "Our priorities are to first, make it through this trough, and then to be well positioned to lead the industry when the market picks up again."

Credit for that Reveille—and the article that clearly explains the company's game plan—goes to Vital Signs executive editor Kris Backes, and writer/editor Eileen Burmeister (a Writing Boots regular).

If all employee communicators met reality as squarely and expressed it as starkly as Backes and Burmeister do—and they don't save their candor for crises either—no one would ever question the value of the employee communication profession.