Dear American Democracy: This week you will be exposed to vile falsehoods. Politicians who have taken oaths to uphold the constitution, will lie and lie and try to harm you only for their own gain. Hoping to pick up future votes of a population who has been lied to and…
No Matter What the Rippling Impact, Communications Ethics Come First It is time to republish this post written in 2016. Communications professionals know that ethics and integrity are critically important components to our work. But applying ethical guidelines can be very difficult. At times, as we grapple with specific circumstances, we…
As a lawyer and communications professional words are one the tools we use to persuade, convince and resolve. We rely on court opinions and written statutory law enacted by legislative process. We rely on words from prior court cases and prior generations that might use words we find offensive or…
We have had to adjust to many unprecedented changes these past two years. Changes to the way we see our family and friends, the way our children learn, the way our teachers teach, the way we worship or don’t worship in our sacred places, the clothes we wear and the…
These days, branding is pervasive in just about all aspects of our lives. We see the way celebrities take advantage of self-branding. They get a lot of help from companies that want to leverage their products with celebrity branding equities. We all know that an endorsement from someone like Oprah…
The way a company manages crisis can be as important as the way it manages success. Over the years, communications professionals have learned from the wisdom of hindsight, that crisis management is the key to a company’s future health. Some very well known brand crises provide guidance. The 1982 Tylenol murders and…
A while back, I read a great piece by Christine Riordin in the HBR on what she says we inaccurately call work-life balance. Apparently, researchers have found that when we are on the job believing that we don’t have enough family or personal time, that itself drains and distracts us.…
This week there has been lots of press on the Apple Samsung case, particularly in the Bay Area. The discussion is not limited to SV insiders, because the case deals with issues many of us have confronted in our professional lives: how to deal with a company or person taking…
If you are a professional, you have had tough ethical decisions to make in your career. This is an inescapable aspect of being in the business world. If this has not happened to you, you are new to your profession. And if it has, you are doing well because you…
Recent interesting reading in the Harvard Business Review supports the sound advice — choose your words carefully — if you can. Say what? In computer-assisted research over the past couple of decades, Professor James Pennebacker, author of the The Secret Life of Pronouns, What Our Words Say About Us, has…