Month: December 2016

I’m taking a vacation until Jan. 3.  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

It is safe to say that Ikea, the furniture and home furnishing store, is the only chain in the world having this problem.  Teenagers infiltrating its stores and conducting overnight sleepovers is an odd PR crisis.  Any number of things can happen and none are good.  The chain is right in trying to end the trend before it gets too far along.  So far, 10 of its stores have had illegal sleepovers and more teens will try.  They are motivated by a YouTube video which shows two teenagers prowling the store at night when the store is closed.  An Ikea spokesperson said it was no fun being in a store with its sensors activated, but that is unlikely to stop daring teenagers.  Ikea might have to expand security until the urge to sleep overnight in it stores passes away.

New York Life, Georgetown University, Volkswagen are but three of several institutions grappling with their history.  New York Life revealed that it wrote insurance policies on slaves as property.  Georgetown learned that its founding fathers had slaves that they sold to keep the young college afloat.  Volkswagen dealt with the use of slave labor in its factories during World War II.  Each instance is a public relations challenge.  How are the institutions going to handle it?  How will they atone today for deeds of long ago.  There is no easy answer.  Whatever one does is hardly enough for the descendants of those enslaved.  All three have taken the first step and researched the past to reveal the truth.  It is not clear in every instance what the second step should be.  Georgetown has initiated several programs.  It is unclear what New York Life might do.  Volkswagen seems content with a thorough research and making findings public.  There are no rules or protocols.  Hence, each institution can respond in its own way.  Whatever they elect to do, the past is present in PR programming.

Do people pay attention to what a CEO posts on a blog?  Yes, they do.  Tim Cook’s blog entry for employees at Apple sparked media discussion.  The journalist’s story projected the messages farther than the original target.  And, it lent additional credibility to the posting by affirming what the CEO wrote.  Often, CEOs feel they don’t have time or interest in feeding back to employees through blogging or tweeting.  They would rather do a town hall or other live session, but it is difficult to arrange those on a regular basis.  Social media can serve well in the interim.  Why don’t more CEOs blog or tweet?  It was not built into their routines as they rose in management.  They are not used to it and don’t see the value.  The more that immediate communication moves into social media, the greater the need for CEOs to adapt.  Secondary communication will never take precedence over primary, but it has a power of its own that savvy CEOs should be exploiting.

Islamic terrorists are daring the Russian government to get into a pitched battle with them — and they have succeeded by killing its ambassador to Turkey.  The shooting was an act of war — a public statement of enmity, a challenge.  Putin will almost certainly not back down from the punch in the gut.  The terrorists are foolhardy in their belligerence.  They blow themselves up in an effort to kill others.  They kill indiscriminately.  They rape and pillage and justify all of their actions in the Koran.  Peace-loving Muslims are horrified, but there is little they can do other than to cooperate with authorities in isolating radicals and turning them in.  The more that acts like this happen, the greater the burden on Islamists to prove they belong in the 21st Century and are not throwbacks to AD 700.  The communications gap is growing by day, and there is an urgency to stop its growth and close it.

Facebook is undertaking a campaign to combat fake news.  It is a belated recognition that false stories on its web site were influencing people in negative ways.  Some commentators accused Facebook of throwing the election to Donald Trump because it had not policed fake news to that point.  Facebook understandably rejected that claim but it accepted that phony stories are a public relations issue for the company.  So, it has put in place machinery and human judgement to root out the trash and keep bonafide stories.  Is it perfect?  No. Nothing can catch fake news 100 percent of the time.  But, if Facebook can reduce false stories by a high percentage, it will make a stride toward protecting its users.  That in itself would be good PR.

This is an interesting essay about women in management.  Essentially, the author says that most women choose the “Mommy Track” rather than the corporate management ladder. Professional women are beating the publicity drums for more women to stay in the company environment, but they are having a tough time getting colleagues to listen.  What the activists have missed is that Motherhood is a profession as great as anything that a corporation could confer on an individual.   Many women choose not to divide their time between the office and home.  To them, the home is more important.  Kudos to them.  That, however, leaves professional women gnashing their teeth because the upper ranks of management are dominated by men. There is no easy answer for this.  Some women can split their time successfully.  Some can’t.  There should be no shaming of those who choose not to remain in the corporate ranks.

President-elect Donald Trump wants to slash the F-35 fighter program because its cost over-runs were out of control.  Chances are he won’t succeed even though the fighters cost $100 million each.  Why?  Because Lockheed Martin, the builder of the aircraft, has carefully spread work across many Congressional districts and insulated itself from public criticism.  No matter that the fighter is 11 years overdo and the lifetime cost of the fleet will exceed a trillion dollars.  The program is pork, especially at a time when much cheaper drones are taking over tasks such as picket duty and air-ground attacks.  Although the F-35 build has been a scandal for more than a decade, Congress keeps pumping money into it.  Fortunately, it is likely the last manned fighter that will ever be built and given its cost that is a good outcome.  The military-industrial complex has been out of control for decades and it is time to rein it in.  If Trump can cut the cost of the F-35, more power to him.

How does an organization fight anonymous complaints about it?  Consider this case of attempted suicide at Amazon.  The company said nothing about it and that upset anonymous commenters in its workforce.  Even if Amazon had done so, it was open to criticism over its Performance Improvement Plan, which puts stress on its employees.  Amazon ignored the situation and the commenters, which only made things worse.  There are gripers for whom nothing is good enough, but to dispatch anonymous complaints without investigation is dangerous to reputation.  One should take negative feedback seriously.  If Amazon gains an aura of a worker’s hell-hole, it will have troubles in years to come fleshing out its workforce for high-volume periods such as the Christmas holidays.  That will damage its drive to reduce delivery times.

It is rarely good for a start-up company to bend facts about its technology.  That, however, is the case with Magic Leap, an augmented reality business that purports to have artificial images blend with real-life.  Think of a tiny elephant being held in the palm of one’s hand.  Magic Leap is apparently behind in developing its technology for either business or consumer use.  It is getting by with a huge venture capital investment and with spin — telling everybody how disruptive the technology will be when perfected.  Meanwhile, it continues to make YouTube videos that use its technology, except in one case a fabrication that it used for recruiting engineers.  Part of the company’s problem is that it chose a fiber optic system that it can’t get to work.  That is always a peril of a start-up.  Magic Leap is apparently secretive about its work, but putting out videos of its success without backup is not a good sign.  Maybe venture capitalists are used to this approach, but it ought to give potential investors the willies.