Author: Jim Horton

Fifty US Senators have signed a petition calling for the Washington Redskins football team to change its name. They consider the moniker a slur against Native Americans. The owner of the team thinks otherwise.  He sees it as a positive image honoring Indians. One name, two views. An observer can interpret this either way — as racial bias or political correctness run amok.  What should the team do?  Bend to the will of politicians and activists or stay the course and keep a name that the team has had for decades without incident?  It is a tough call but other sports teams have changed their names, considering it the proper approach or a route of least resistance.  It is hard to provide PR advice in a situation like this, especially if fans love the team’s name.  It is not a matter of expense but of principle.  Ordinarily one would go with the political correctness of the moment, but names are not easily changed or branded.  The controversy will continue, but sooner or later it will either fade or overpower.

President Obama didn’t create the secret waiting lists at the Veterans Administration hospitals. Most of the misbehavior didn’t occur on his watch. No matter. The boss takes the heat for failures below him and is responsible for cleaning it up. Much like Mary Barra at General Motors, the crisis was handed on to him. In fact, Obama has even less responsibility for the failure than Barra, a GM lifer. Yet, Obama gets to deal with the scalding rage of both sides of the aisle. He has tried to tamp down the ire but it is taking time to do so, and he hasn’t stopped the waves of criticism so far. He could be forgiven for saying, “Don’t blame me”, but a leader stands in and takes the abuse while turning a situation around. The demand of Congress and the public is loud and clear. “You’re the boss. Fix it.” There are many perks for being President. This isn’t one of them.

The power of images in persuasion is amusingly demonstrated in this story. It is a face-off between Apple and Microsoft over the future of tablets. Apple believes a tablet is its own device and is unrelated to other technology. Microsoft sees the tablet as an extension of its operating system for PCs and laptops. Apple took a visual shot at Microsoft with a street sign image showing a tangled road. Microsoft returned the blow with another street sign showing one road branching in two directions. The image war wasn’t lost on the audience, and it was good publicity for Microsoft, whether or not one agrees with its product direction. Microsoft used Apple’s imagery against it. Now Apple will have to find something else to make its point.

This is what Sen. Marco Rubio is saying about whether he smoked pot earlier in his life. It is a carefully worded non-answer. One can assume that it is a well trained media response, rehearsed and play back on camera. Rubio never answers the question with a yes or no. He provides a reason for his failure to respond and repeats his opposition to pot smoking. Non-answers are more common than “no comment” but they are just as unsatisfactory to the questioner. Sometimes, however, one must use them. There are situations in which the facts should not come out, especially as Rubio suggests, when no one would believe them anyway. Instead, he falls back on his key message. He doesn’t want anyone smoking marijuana. He is clear about that.

New York University is learning the peril of starting operations in a different culture. Although the University set guidelines for how workers should be treated at its Abu Dhabi campus, The New York Times has found that laborers were exploited and mistreated. That is a blow to NYU’s reputation even though it had no direct control over the contractors who hired and sometimes paid the East Asian workforce. How could NYU have let this happen? The University’s answer is that it didn’t know. A tort lawyer would charge that the University should have known, given the history of poor treatment of foreign workers in Arab countries. If there was a mistake in building the campus, it might have been in oversight that NYU neglected. If the Times’ reporters could document abuse, one would think that NYU could have done the same. There also could have been naivete — assuming contractors would abide by the University’s principles but failing to check if they were. Either way, the Abu Dhabi campus has become a sore point and PR headache for the University and a cautionary tale for other academic institutions who might wish to move into different cultures.

China’s real estate bubble has popped and air has gone out of the market. This is a PR headache for the government. Many Chinese invested in apartments as their principal form of savings and wealth. Now it is in danger of disappearing. Bureaucrats can attempt to re-inflate prices, but it will only prolong the time until they plummet again. The problem is that China is over-built for the population it has. The poor can’t afford to live in new high rises. The middle class has purchased tens of thousands of them on the expectation that someone will live there someday. I asked a friend who recently traveled to China whether news reports of empty cities are true. He assured me they are. How can the technocratic government ease the burden and still maintain GDP growth? It has put in draconian measures but they might not be enough. Developers meanwhile have sparked protests because they are discounting to attract more buyers, and banks are holding millions of mortgages that could be underwater. This is a dangerous time for the central government and how it communicates to citizens who are watching their hard-earned money disappear.

Wearable computing is nearly here. Is PR ready for it? How will we change strategy and communications to account for Google Glass and body sensors? Individualized communication will come to the fore as it has already done with social media. However, wearable computing is a step beyond. It is instantaneous and in many cases will not require input from the wearer. Of course, a concern that has arisen already is loss of privacy. That will happen to anyone who decides to wear a computer in some capacity. But, implicitly, the wearer is giving electronics the right to record, to transmit and communicate. It is not too early to consider how PR should use the computerized body to send messages and build support.

Americans want their military forces to stay home. The globe may be small today with international flights and worldwide manufacturing, but that doesn’t matter. The public is tired of engaging terrorists and Taliban. Well they should be. It has been more than a decade that the US has been fighting against terrorism. Unfortunately, the world is marginally safer now than it was. This means that the current and next president have a PR job to do to convince the public that the US must stayed engaged with other nations whether we like it or not. It might not be easy, especially with the pull-back of forces from the Middle East. One might question who appointed America to be the police force for the world. The country took on that role post World War II in the face of communism. Now the exchequer is exhausted, the debts piling and the cost of armaments skyrocketing. It’s time for others to take over, but that doesn’t mean the US should seal itself off. It is a member of coalitions and not the driver. Maybe America’s citizens will accept that.

There ought to be public shaming of executives who game the system to look better.  Consider this example.  Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) was developed to help investors better compare companies.  It is a step toward greater transparency.  But executives have found ways around it so they can’t be measured against peers.  There isn’t much of an excuse for this.  It’s bad investor relations, and it is obvious to anyone who looks at what the companies are doing.  Rather then force compliance to XBRL, the move now is to get rid of it for small companies who find it a burden to tag their numbers in the 10-K.  Executives can talk all they want about their concern for investors and consumers but when something as basic as this becomes a way to obfuscate performance, their actions speak louder than words.

When does it make sense to give away proprietary technology?  When it risks being eclipsed and failing as a product.  That is the decision IBM has made for its Power microprocessors.  It has turned the chip into open architecture to get more people to use it.  Now, IBM will need to build relations with collaborators who adopt the chip design.  The OpenPower Foundation already has two dozen members. Public relations among manufacturers is often fractious because each lets self-interest control decisions.  It takes a far-sighted CEO to understand that cooperation is better in the long run.  IBM is clearly hoping that its collaborators are willing to work with it, but the company should not be surprised if foundation members are demanding and attempting to modify the Power chip to make it once again proprietary to their designs.