global discussion. local perspectives.
“A goal is a dream with a deadline” Recently I was in a meeting where this quote was featured on a wall and I quite liked it, with my first reflections related to personal and professional goals. But soon the aptness of the quote had my thoughts turning to an exceptional person in my life, my 15-year-old niece, Sarah D. You see this niece of mine has a really big goal (and dream) in mind,...
“A goal is a dream with a deadline” Update (March 4, 2009): Thanks to community support from a number of areas, Sarah’s Dream received enough votes (more than 100) to qualify. This means her project has a financial base on Give Meaning. I’m sure my niece will take as much delight in the note accompanying the donation from James McNally (whom neither of us know personally): “Happy to kick things off, hopefully you’ll reach and...
1. The perspective of this new-year note on ‘the business of business is responsible business’ is that the current economic crisis is only one of the consequences of a historic discontinuity (see here) in which we all find ourselves immersed since the end of the twentieth century. A discontinuity originated by the radical subversion of the way we think of space and time induced by communication technologies and their impact on the acceleration of the...
On the doorstep to Christmas, I thought I would mention my favourite game this year. ‘Spore’ lets you evolve from a tiny cell into a creature that you nurture over time. In order to play you must move from cell to creature stage to form a tribal group, then on to determine your own brand of ‘civilisation’, before finally evolving into a sentient intergalactic space being (only one of my sons has managed this so...
1. Please discourage my colleagues from offering, arguing, pushing individual as well as organizational visibility as a ‘strategic’ and desirable objective. Peeing in the pot is more strategic and less polluting. If it makes sense to expect a substantial reduction in organizational advertising investments, it also makes sense to anticipate a reduction of editorial pages which, in turn, reduces media relations activities. Subsequently many of my colleagues will find time to think about many other...
Bear with me and please visit www.lucasossellaeditore.it . Mind you, the sound is in Italian so it might be better to move quickly along the few minutes to get a grasp of what the contents, but more importantly the format, are like. Basically these few minutes are an excerpt of a good twelve hours (!) of videobook (3 dvd’s of four hours each) to which Joao Duarte referred to in his post here a few...
Just when you think an issue is sorted, done, dusted and settled – up it comes again. The issue on my mind today is gender and its impact on public relations. I have attended three different events in roughly as many weeks and at each one, the issue of ‘feminisation of the public relations profession’ has taken centre stage.
In January 2009, King Report III will appear in South Africa, having been written by a committee of 90 members. One of them is Estelle de Beer from the University of Pretoria. If you are wondering what a PR academic is doing on this Committee, it might just be because Estelle is doing her doctoral thesis on Corporate Governance, Sustainability and Strategy.
I got a bit over-excited with all the talk of spaces and what we do with them, so I have created a virtual world for PR Conversations if you want to grab your avatar and come on over to play.
At least that’s what members of the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS) were told on July 8, 2008, in an e-mail blast (presumably) provided by US-based publisher director, Julia Hood, which announced the new PRWeek Canada newsletter. Although I certainly welcome the addition of Canadian-specific information (“news and features, trend stories, profiles, and Q & As with leaders in the industry”), the tone of the announcement did come across as somewhat condescending.