Month: March 2016

Washington DC metro officials have announced that they might have to shut down the subway for a month to make repairs.  Should this happen, it will be a PR crisis of major proportions.  Washingtonians rely on the subway to get them to and from work and play.  It is an artery below clogged streets and creeping traffic.  Forcing tens of thousands of them to rely on buses and driving is nearly untenable.  Why must the subway be shut down in the first place?  Because it hasn’t been maintained over decades.  Deferred maintenance has now reached a level where the system cannot go on like it is.  One can spread blame for this but what good would it do?  The system needs repair or it will fall apart.  The best advice one can give is to stay away from Washington during the shutdown.

There are times when perfection in the business world is not good enough.  Here is a case.  In the dicey world of rocket launches, United Launch Alliance has had 106 perfect missions in a row.  But, that is not enough.  Newer, cheaper rockets are on the scene and they are starting to make headway against the incumbent.  There is only one thing ULA can do — cut costs while not sacrificing safety measures.  That is hard enough, but for the long-term future of the space launch business, it must be done.  The lesson here is that good PR might not be sufficient if consumers have options.  Although one can have a wonderful track record, the consumer might ask for more, and the only option for a company is to up the ante or to get out of that line of work.  It must be stressful for employees who work so hard to do well only to discover that a customer is looking around for something else.  There is a tendency to slack off when one is not appreciated.  In this case, internal relations and leadership are essential to maintaining focus.

One would not expect an aging revolutionary to suddenly change his beliefs, especially when he thinks of enemies.  So that is why Fidel Castro’s reaction to President Obama’s visit to Cuba is as expected — negative.  Castro has spent most of his life bashing America, especially after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  He is a dedicated communist and convinced of his position.  It must irk him that Cubans who left the country and moved to America have largely done well by comparison to those who stayed behind.  Castro lived on the largesse of Russia for many years until the communist empire fell apart.  He hasn’t had an answer for the economy in decades and his brother moves cautiously lest he upset Fidel and his stalwart supporters.  President Obama’s visit was a thumb in the eye of the old man, and he predictably didn’t like it.  One can only hope that a leader with courage will act to open the country economically to the rest of the world.  Cubans have suffered enough.

An Israeli soldier shot a Palestinian who was lying on the ground incapacitated.  The Israeli government is investigating the incident, but many Israelis feel he was justified.  Whether or not the soldier had the right to do what he did, it is suspect PR and a cause for inflaming already ferocious feelings between the two countries.  And, it won’t stop the killing. This is a case where there is no good PR response to the tensions between the countries.  Israel is slowly taking over Palestinian lands and pushing the people into smaller and smaller spaces.  That is poor PR and guaranteed to create more violence.  Israel is powerful and the Palestinians are weak.  That doesn’t help Israel’s cause.  The image is one of a bully, which Israel does not need.  There are no easy answers.  Each side is stabbing or shooting the other and claiming justification for doing so.  It is a mess destined to last for decades.

The day after the Brussels bombing, the pope washed the feet of Christian, Hindu and Muslim refugees and called them brothers.  The symbolic act is part of a Roman Catholic religious ceremony re-enacting the last Passover supper Jesus celebrated with his disciples.  The pope’s choice of people from multiple religions was unusual and was a potent symbol for his vision of how the world should be getting along.  The contrast between the bombings in which dozens died and dozens more were wounded and a spiritual leader bending to wash the feet of strangers could not be more stark.  This pope is given to actions that promote unity even to the discomfort of some of his fellow believers.  He has broadened the meaning of religious action through his inclusiveness and in so doing, has earned even the plaudits of cynics.  It would be interesting if more world leaders followed his example.

Food waste is a problem in the US.  Billions of pounds of edible products are buried in landfills annually because they had reached their “sale-by” dates although they remain nutritious.  That is why this announcement by Starbucks is important and smart PR.  The company will use refrigerated trucks to pick up unsold food from its stores and redistribute it to the needy.  It is a major commitment to fighting hunger and will provide 50 million meals annually when the program is fully implemented by 2021.  This came about through suggestions by employees who saw a way for good food from being thrown out.  If more corporations did the same thing, hunger in America might be an affliction of the past and landfills would have more space for garbage.  There are other services that pick up food from restaurants such as City Harvest, but the Starbucks commitment is an important step for a retail chain.

I’m going to be away for a few days on client assignment.  I will return Wednesday.

Say what you want about ISIS, the muslim terrorist group, but they are masters of generating negative publicity.  A book burning is guaranteed to get the media’s attention and a Christian book burning demonstrates the group’s hostility to religions other than its own. This kind of publicity is self-defeating, however, because it convinces the world that ISIS is a dangerous entity that needs to be stamped out.  One wonders why such radicalism is so blind to the consequences of its actions.  One explanation is the terrorists have convinced themselves that they are in the right and the rest of the world is wrong.  In other words, they are the antithesis of public relations where one listens closely to people before acting.  ISIS imposes its rigid view of life on everyone under its power and cannot allow deviance of any sort.  It’s a power ploy and not religion, at least not muslim beliefs.  Each negative act like a book burning brings the group one day closer to extinction.

Cable companies are fighting a loss of subscribers who are cutting the cord and relying on the internet for programming.  For the most part, cable has only itself to blame.  Their service was bad and charges for bundled channels, most of which few watched, are high.  One wonders why cable kings let things fester as long as they have and the answer is that they were the only outlet in many towns.  One had to deal with them or rely on rabbit ears for the few over-the-air channels left.  When one is a monopoly, there is a greater temptation to let service slide.  The attitude is to whom can one complain except the local municipality.  Cable companies are now relying more on delivering broadband than channels.  They won’t go away but their importance has diminished.  One wonders if they had practiced good public relations from the outset whether they would be in the same fix today.

A video making the rounds shows a stomach-churning scene of an employee peeing onto a food assembly line.  Kellogg is investigating the incident but the damage is done.  An employee has sabotaged the company and added a yuck factor to its food products.  There is little any company can do to avert worker sabotage.  It can happen in an instant.  A business has to hope it has enough of a relationship with employees that they will not stoop to such things.  But there is always a dissident, the disaffected whom one can’t reach.  This kind of person needs to be weeded out before he causes real damage.  Kellogg is faced with delving into a two-year-old incident, which is not easy because the worker might have since moved on to another part of the plant or out of the company all together.  Meanwhile, Kellogg is left with the task of assuring everyone its food products are safe, but really, how would the company know?