Doing public relations by the numbers: Little Mac or Big Mac?

Abstract

To appease the ruling number crunchers, so quick to decide the fates of operations, employees, and whole departments, practitioners are touting quantification as the great power hope. But if they cave to such dictates, adding no strategic value to their counsel, they invite liposuction on both departments and prestige. Follow the quantifiers’ lead exclusively and practitioners will still be whining 20 years from now like corporate Rodney Dangerfields who “don’t get no [sic] respect.” The questions are very simple, but complex: • Do practitioners consign themselves to being mere tacticians and project managers? • Or do practitioners aspire to develop ideas and strategies that create public images across cultures, heeding the turbulence of global tribalism and a technology-driven world that adds great value and respect to communications counsel? To say this in the vernacular, do we want to emulate Little Macs, such as Union General George C. McClellan and Robert McNamara, who immobilized themselves by crunching numbers. More recently, former Coca-Cola CEO Douglas Ivester and former Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro managed only by numbers, not by listening. Or do we want to be Big Macs, such as the McDonald Corporation in Belgrade during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombings, and the best and the brightest counselors who saw or created profitable opportunities and developed the avant-garde ideas public relations is still coasting on today. No public relations officer makes herself or himself popular by bearing dire tidings. Nor do they enhance their power by having to rely on projections, hunches, or soft reasoning. Tough-minded quantifiers and operations executives do not want production mucked up by some fuzzy might-bes. Practitioners must rest their counsel on experience and on a good track record, They must be multidimensional thinkers with the courage not to ape their executive peers, but be willing to tactfully ask the tough questions that others may be too political, polite, or uninformed to ask. Determinate to success are acute awareness of cross currents of public opinion, overriding issues, and dangers of pragmatic, public strategies that can make or break the company. Dr. Marion K. Pinsdorf, formerly vice president at Hill and Knowlton, Textron, and INA (now Cigna), is senior fellow in communications at Fordham’s Graduate School of Business and author of Communicating When Your Company Is Under Siege.