Month: September 2015

Google Books started out as a generous and innovative idea.  Google wanted to scan all of the books in the world and make them available online.  Then, it ran afoul of authors and publishers who didn’t want their works made available free when there was still a chance of remuneration.  Since then, Google Books has gone silent.  It is sad that such a major project has run afoul.  Maybe Google will take it up again when the legal challenges are settled.  In the meantime, it is a lesson that even the best intentions can be thwarted and positive public relations turn against one.  The problem with Google’s idea is the sheer size of the project.  People don’t trust such a task to be just from the goodness of the heart of a major corporation. It seems the larger a corporation gets, the greater its vulnerability — or, at least that is the case here.  One wonders what more the company can do in order for it to  resume its project.

As this article points out, the cost of healing or delaying fatal symptoms in healthcare is hard to determine and fraught with cost-benefit calculations.  If the only regimen is a high-priced medicine for a particular condition, health care providers have to hold their breath and pay.  They can scream later to the government that it is not right to hold patients and health care funders hostage to the cost.  Drug companies seem to be following the path of charging whatever the market will bear, given that the market is captive to their pills. Their reasoning has long been that it is expensive to develop a new drug.  Researchers go down tens of thousands of blind allies until they find a molecule that is effective and safe.  Critics counter that the drug discovery process is inefficient and unnecessarily expensive.  From a PR perspective, it looks like drug companies are gouging patients, and they need to do a better job of explaining why a drug costs so much.  If there were more transparency in pricing, that might help, but the key in the end is lower cost and until pharmaceutical manufacturers can achieve that, they will be targets for abuse.

Collegiate rankings are a much fought-over area of education, and as the White House discovered, it is best not to do them.  The reasons are clear.  Using a single measurement ignores multiple outcomes.  It is poor PR to proclaim rankings on the basis of one or even two measurements.  The publicity factor is high, of course, as winning schools trumpet their positions and losing schools argue with the methodology.  Publicity is not what rankings should be about.  Rather they should measure real aspects of education and their outcomes. That is difficult to do no matter the yardsticks one uses.

News has come out of a flaw in General Motors’ OnStar GPS and communications system for vehicles.  It turns out that five years ago, university researchers demonstrated a software hack of OnStar that would allow someone to take over control of a car except for steering.  GM did nothing about it until this year.  Apparently, the auto giant felt the vulnerability wasn’t a priority until other hackers demonstrated they could take over a Jeep a few months ago. So, now GM is downloading software into millions of vehicles’ OnStar systems to prevent such an event.  This comes under the heading of “What were they thinking?”  Certainly the company had to be aware of software intrusions elsewhere.  How could it have dismissed hacking of its own vehicles for so long?  It was a consumer and PR failure to have disregarded the fact that OnStar was vulnerable.  One hopes after this black eye that GM will act more quickly in the the future.

Book stores were among the first businesses to be affected by the internet and it hasn’t changed.  Try as they might, bookstore chains haven’t found the key to unlock increasing sales.  The public has found other means, such as Amazon, to buy books.  This raises the question of whether it is time for the mass merchandiser to give up, throw in the towel, admit defeat?  It would not be the first to do so nor the last.  It takes courage to hang in and tinker with the sales model to see if an answer might be forthcoming.  At some point, however, one will need to admit that the economic proposition is fundamentally broken and the public has gone elsewhere.  The relationship with consumers has gone flat and no amount of work will bring it back.  What will there be to do other than shutter stores and pull back?  The chain will be a shadow of the days when it was great, and it will have to content itself with that.

University of Utah Health Care is pioneering cost accounting in health care and in the process is controlling expenses as it has never done before.  Traditionally, cost accounting was reserved for manufacturing where stop watches and minutely examined activity were the norm.  University of Utah Health Care has brought that standard to medicine, something that needed to be done but no one felt able to getting it accomplished.  In the process, Utah has become the model for other states and health care systems.  Its actions are an unusual but essential form of public relations in that it is giving the public efficient but effective care.  Look for the Utah model to spread to other systems.  It won’t be easy to install in every healthcare system because there might be resistance to working within models of care delivery.  Doctors might rebel, but for those systems that do install cost accounting, citizens will learn for the first time what health care costs.

In the migrant crisis enveloping Europe, Germany has stepped up more than any other country in taking refugees in.  It will absorb 800,000 this year, and it claims it can handle 500,000 a year for several years more.  This is a river of humanity entering a country that historically was standoffish.  The numbers will change the culture of Germany over time and in its diversity, it might start looking like the US.  This augurs favorably for Germany to remain a democracy in which demagogues have little traction, especially if migrants get to vote.  Germany’s stance is an act of country public relations — reaching out to people who have nowhere to go and letting them find food, housing and healthcare.  It should be a lesson to nations like the US, which is trying to seal its border to the South rather than develop plans and policies to integrate Hispanics into the American culture.

This fellow was a master of public relations.  He knew what his customers wanted and he maintained a guarantee of satisfaction that built the company to what it is today.  That L.L. Bean is a household name with an aura of quality is directly due to him.  He should be placed in the pantheon of executives who have made a difference in American business.  And, to think that he built his company in Maine, a state not known for large corporations or successful retailers.  To executives who maintain that public relations cannot be achieved given the marketplace in which they operate, Leon Gorman is testimony that it can be done.

There is a race between the US and China over who can build the world’s most powerful super computer.  The contest has the hallmarks of unhealthy competition and building to boast — something like the space program of the 1960s.  One wonders whether there is a true need for a machine that can crunch one billion billion floating point operations per second.  Nuclear weapons designers say they can use it, but do they actually need all that power?  This is something that will be debated as the machine is built and once started, it is nearly impossible to turn back.  There is a PR boast in having the most powerful supercomputer in the world.  It’s the “We’re No. 1.” chant that at its heart can be empty of meaning.  So, let them build but keep a focus on what such a giant machine is actually used for.  It would be a pity if there are not enough problems to solve at that size and speed.

Sony Pictures is coming out with a film that tells of the discovery of concussion-related illnesses in former National Football League players.  The NFL has only a few months to prepare for an onslaught of negative stories and for league players protests.  The NFL has been dealing with the issue for several years but not with the background of a feature film detailing its denials and eventual acceptance of the facts.  The film will dent its reputation and depending on how successful it is, the public might take away a deeply negative view of the league and its treatment of players.  In fairness to the NFL, it has been trying to teach players how to tackle without smashing helmets and jarring brains, but that might be too little too late.  The NFL has been riding high in public opinion for years.  It might have to regain that reputation after this movie.