12/26

But that is the way it always is when expectations are high.  The brain distorts the sense of time.  And, time distortion has consequences in society -- not just for kids and adults the day after Christmas.  It is well-recognized that impatient Boards, for example, dump more quickly CEOs who do not seem to be performing. 

In the old days -- say, 1990, CEOs could do a lackluster job for years and retire gracefully.  Now, there are questions if a CEO misses one quarterly forecast.  A sense of time has collapsed and  pressure on CEOs has increased enormously.  Is it fair?  Of course not.   Only a CEO can understand what it takes to turn around a huge company with embedded behaviors and aging assets.  But does fairness enter into the perception of time?  No.  Analysts and investors bray for the hide of any executive who does not meet their perception of what the company should be doing this quarter.

Hence, communication is more important than ever to CEOs.  They should be telling employees and the world incessantly what needs to be done and marking progress carefully to counter expectations that results should be visible NOW.  There is a major role for PR to help CEOs get the word out.

What happens when CEOs become driven by imposed perceptions of time?  They take shortcuts, as we have seen, or their employees do who cannot bear the pressure.  It seems that more companies fell in the last three years because of time pressure than outright fraud.  Employees and CEOs were desperately trying to meet  deadlines the world imposed on them and unwilling to admit they were lagging the pace.

It's the day after -- and Christmas is over.  That's the way life is.

12/25

12/24

I have done most of the tracking for the past year along with my colleague, Shade Vaughn,  and have become familiar with publications I would normally never see, much less read.  Without Factiva, I could never have done  the job.  Factiva captures most Japanese and Western publications, and lets me choose just the stories my client needs to see.   Over the months, I developed keywords that make the process surprisingly fast. 

If you follow Japan, you know Prime Minister Koizumi is a reform politician who has had to buck his own Liberal Democratic Party to change a corrupt system of patronage.  Koizumi appointed Heizo Takenaka to the head of the Financial Services Administration with a charge to clean up bad debts at banks.  After a false start, Takenaka found his way and pushed banks hard.  Two major bank collapses during the year provided him with power to bull forward.  Today, no one argues with Takenaka too much.  Even bankers understand they have to get their books straight, and there is no tomorrow -- as there has been for 13 years.

A year of monitoring has had tedious moments, but it was worth the education.  And, it continues.  For how  long, I don't know, but I'm eager to learn if Koizumi and Takenaka succeed.

Why would a PR firm be monitoring Japan for a client?  My response is why shouldn't a PR firm monitor another country?  It is all part of help that PR firms provide to help clients communicate across cultures and geographic boundaries.
 

12/23

The problem wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought: I overestimated the challenge.  The difficulty, it turned out, was the message set.  I had to work through hundreds of pages of material to outline what the client will say -- and it is not entirely clear that I captured the essence.  (I think I did, but my colleagues will let me know today.  Furrowed brows are not a favorable omen.) 

But communications challenges like this are iterative.  One combs through them time and again until details are right.  Elements are not in the plan that will need to be added in a  final draft.  For example, will we use VNRs?  Chances are we will but before we know what we are going to say, that is an option in the air.  Will we use Webcasting?  I have that option in but in a limited way.  It might be expanded.   Will we use press kits?  Hard to say.  We may not need them.  How about pdfs? Certainly, but I don't have them in there yet.  DVDs or CD-ROMS?  Don't know, but we will talk about it.

I favor the least amount of media with a maximum potential for distribution.  That means using the Web heavily and posting materials for easy access and download.  The days of packing CD-ROMS into press kits are over, as far as I am concerned.  I'm not sure the technique worked well anyway.  It was asking reporters to do too much.

More is not better when it comes to distribution of information.  I have never agreed with fat press kits filled with paper that few reporters ever looked at.  Much of it was boilerplate material that was recreated every time we did a kit in the old days.  The Web has made this so much easier.  Online news rooms are essential elements of any PR department today.  I don't like remembering what we used to do before the Web.
 

12/22

Most of us would like to forget the old days when we plowed through thick directory books to find media lists that we would then check manually by dialing reporters to see if they were still there.  Paper directories were never less than a year-and-half out of date.  As much as 15% to 25% of any list taken from them had to be changed and the changes were done on paper lists that themselves were out of date in a month or two.  That is gone now. 

Every once in a great while, however, a list problem stumps everyone.  Lists are so large that it isn't clear how to do them and whom one should be contacting.

This kind of problem dropped on my desk Friday, and I need a solution before Christmas Eve.   On the surface, the problem looks simple.  Under the surface, it gets harder and harder because everywhere I look, I find a new set of media that should hear some part of a major story. 

Fortunately, on Friday morning before I understood the challenge, I sat down and speculated what an answer might be.  My speculation showed the problem was larger than anyone of us had estimated, and later, I learned my early answer was incomplete.

I have a colleague who will perform list searches while I try to figure out messages that will go to each group.  This is complicated by the fact that the message set is evolving, and we aren't sure yet of the dimensions of the story.  Nor are we sure of its timing.  It might be a race to the media to prevent the story from leaking.  Or, we might have time to tailor information precisely for target groups.  We might find when we have message sets laid against target groups that there are few variations, and it is a simple story to tell.  But, we won't know until we have completed the initial exercise.

To lay data out systematically, I am constructing a matrix of target audiences and messages.  I suspect I'll be working on it for a large part of today.  I hope I understand the problem once I get through the tedium of parceling everything out.