Month: August 2016

Psychiatry is a profession in trouble.  The public looks down on the field and accuses its doctors of being pill-pushers rather than diagnosticians.  Yet, there is a need for them more than ever.  Mental health is fragile in the stress of the modern era.  There is depression, suicidal tendencies, angst of many sources, brain disease of different kinds.  A primary stop-gap between harm and help is a psychiatrist.  So what can the field do to earn itself back into the graces of the public?  For one, it needs to make the field more medically based.  Rather than scribbling on a prescription pad when a new patient arrives, psychiatrists need to ferret out the root causes of an illness.  They should align themselves with neuroscientists who are studying the inner workings of the brain.  In other words, they need to be more fact-based.  That is hard and with high patient loads, clinicians have little time to explore symptoms, but it is necessary for the good of the field.  That is what PR is all about.  Doing rather than saying.  For psychiatry, good PR means work that regains public support.

On rare occasions one is dogged by writing that never seems finished.  Consider, for example, a release that goes through — count ’em — 17 versions.  Each time one thinks it is done, there is a word change, a phrase subtracted, another phrase added and yet another round of approvals.  This continues until it takes on a life of its own.  No one seems to be in a hurry to finish and arguments erupt over what should  be included in it.  So one goes through a spate of inclusion and exclusion of facts.  Eventually, that exhausts itself and the release settles back into wordsmithing that continues for versions more.  At this point, the original author has given up trying to preserve the tone and intent of the release and is making changes solely to put an end to the process.  There is no use fighting.  The exercise becomes “Yazza Boss!”  Whatever the client wants with the intent of “Let’s get the damn thing done.”  Usually by the time everyone is exhausted with making changes, the release looks nothing like it did when the process started and it isn’t necessarily good.  It just is and the quicker one can issue it and see it gone, the better.  One is thankful that there weren’t 18 versions or 20 or 25 and is left with the feeling that there must be a better way.

Federal regulators, having found a correlation between vaping and cigarette smoking, have banned the sale of vaping products to minors.  The e-cigarette lobby is pointing out that correlation is not causation and it is still uncertain that minors who vape first, smoke later.  The correlation was close enough to causation for the FDA, which promulgated the rules.  The tobacco lobby has earned the restriction it gets.  For decades it got its way in Congress and over regulators.  Now it begs for mercy.  This is a legacy of abusive PR.  It is unlikely Federal authorities will ever again give the industry a break.  Tobacco companies fought for their products till the bitter end and now are largely an afterthought in US society.  Sadly, they are still making money but their end-time has come.

Here is a $100 million blow to a bank’s reputation.  Barclays has been paying out because of its participation in the LIBOR bid rigging scandal.  Chances are the penalty won’t change its perception among consumers, but among governments and businesses, it has a bad name and deep pockets.  The fine and restitution are meant to burn into the bank’s DNA that some behavior is well out of bounds.   Fixing the LIBOR rate in order to skim profits was clearly illegal.  This $100 million adds to billions banks have already paid for the errant action.  Barclays is fortunate it wasn’t more.  One wonders how financial institutions fall into such behavior and tolerate it for years.  Surely the bank’s traders knew what they were doing and their supervisors knew as well.  From a PR perspective, there is no excuse the bank can give to lessen its culpability.

Facebook has changed its news algorithm to get rid of clickbait stories from marketers. Good luck with that.  As I write, marketers are finding ways around the algorithm to get their ad messages out.  No set of instructions can encompass all possible variations of words.  There is another way to get around the software fence, and it will be found.  What Facebook has done is touched off a war with marketers that will incorporate attack and counterattack for months, if not years, into the future.  Consider Google’s algorithm to determine search ranking.  Google is constantly improving it and shutting doors that marketers find open and exploit.  Humans are more clever than computers.  Facebook can never relax its vigilance under the assumption the problem has been fixed.  The challenge is just starting.

Convincing people not to smoke was one of the toughest PR challenges, but this one may be even more difficult.  How do you persuade people not to eat so much and to eat the right kinds of foods?  There are government and private communications urging the public to exercise more and ingest less, but the epidemic of overweight consumers continues and is climbing.  I, for one, understand the difficulty of losing pounds once they are strapped on.  It is next to impossible to get them off again and to keep them off.  Millions of Americans face the same problem.  The country needs a simple solution, communicated in depth over a long period of time, to control the epidemic of obesity.  It needs to be as massive as the anti-smoking campaigns and as persuasive.  Even so, it will take decades to work.

A successful CEO needn’t be nice.  In fact, he or she can win ugly by putting relentless pressure on subordinates to produce better, faster and more efficiently.  That is apparently the harsh style of this CEO.  He might not win awards for humanity, but year after year he puts numbers in the win column.  From a PR perspective, he might be a leader heading for a fall.  It is in difficult circumstances like this that subordinates will take to cheating to make their numbers.  They fear what will happen to them if they fall behind, so they jigger the system to look better.  It doesn’t always happen this way.  Some managers thrive under intense pressure.  They look on the CEO as a winning coach, and they are willing to endure his intensity to achieve greatness year after year.  One can’t say that one leadership style is better than any other.  The proof is in the results.

What do you do when your blood testing product has been shown not to work, you have been barred from running a laboratory and you are presenting before an audience of peers?  Why, you pivot and present yourself as a manufacturer of lab testing machines.  This is the highly unlikely scenario that blood testing company, Theranos, just did.  CEO Elizabeth Holmes took the stage and without so much as a mention or a mea culpa for the failure of her micro blood testing devices, she presented a new line of testing units, the size of a shoebox, intended for doctors’ offices.  The audience at the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry was skeptical, and well they should be.  The come-down for Theranos has been sudden and sharp.  It is a zombie company  — a walking-dead organization.  Holmes’ efforts to publicize her new machines probably went for naught.  Who would buy equipment from a company shown to be a fraud?  One must give her credit for the attempt, but she was the source of the failure in the first place.  Maybe this was her way of saying, “I’m sorry.”  If so, it was strange.

This is PR with a wry twist.  Denmark and Canada both claim a postage stamp island in the arctic.  Since the 1980s, the military of the two countries have planted flags on the island and left bottles of liquor for the other side to find.  The argument between the two nations has been going on since 1933.  One would expect that it might be settled by now, but boundary lines can foster fights that fester for generations.  There is no good reason for either country to claim the island.  It has no value although the arctic as the globe warms is taking on a new importance.  One can hardly believe that military personnel assigned to claiming the island take their jobs seriously.  They are doing the bidding of their political masters.  One hopes the liquor is high quality.

Local muslim community leaders in the French town where two attackers slit a priest’s throat last week have refused to bury the attackers.  It is a protest against ISIS to whom the attackers pledged their fealty.  The leaders’ protest is symbolic and important.  Maybe other ISIS-influenced youth will think twice about engaging in violence if they know they will be spurned by muslims.  The next logical step for the muslim community is not to wait until attacks occur but to turn in potential criminals before they strike.  That is much harder because neither muslims nor authorities can know for sure who will go off the deep end.  Still, refusing to bury the dead is a PR step in the right direction.  France and Europe need more such demonstrations from muslim communities.  The protests show that most muslim immigrants are peace-loving and not in support of the brutal ISIS movement.