Global Emergence: A Davos RoundTable E-book

Global DAVOS ROUNDTABLE

emergence

All photos by andrea fischman

The World Economic Forum took place from January 23-27 in Davos, Switzerland. In this MSLGroup-hosted roundtable, senior leaders joined PRWeek senior editor Bernadette Casey in New York to discuss some of the key communications takeaways from this year’s annual gathering

From left: Ken Makovsky, president, Makovsky & Company; Britt Zarling, director of global strategic comms and thought leadership, ManpowerGroup; Paul Fox, director of corporate comms, P&G; Olivier Fleurot, CEO, MSLGroup; Michael Petruzzello, managing partner, Qorvis; Gerard Meuchner, VP and chief global comms officer, Henry Schein; Andrew Katell, SVP of comms, GE Energy Financial Services

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE

Resilient dynamism

Bernadette Casey (PRWeek): The theme of this year’s

event was resilient dynamism. What does this concept mean to today’s communicators?

Gerard Meuchner (Henry Schein): When I think

of resilience, I think of stamina. In our 24/7 world, we need more stamina than ever to do our work because it’s nonstop. That notion of resilience speaks directly to our responsibilities.

In terms of dynamism, look at how much the media landscape has changed in the short time we’ve all been in this profession. We’ve gone from the days of a handful of major media to folks approaching us constantly from all sorts of media outlets. As such, we need to think at a higher and faster level to keep up with volume and demand.

Resilient dynamism is not only about needing the stamina to do the work we do, but also having a nimble mind to manage the very different audiences in this new world.

Paul Fox (P&G): Business has always been accelerating, but it’s doing so at even greater speed now. As communicators, perhaps change is the only constant we deal with today. In that respect, our ability to stay intimately in touch with the audiences we’re trying to serve has become absolutely crucial.

Ken Makovsky (Makovsky & Company): Our business

has always required resilient dynamism, but today you have to be quickly resilient. You have to manage change more rapidly because we’re so hyper-connected today.

There’s an old saying about having PR whether you want it or not. That particular point is more relevant than ever because it doesn’t matter today whether you’re a CEO or a small business manager. In either case, you’re public. You really cannot wait for the opposition to frame an argument without you and basically wait for the problem to go away because it’s not going to happen.

“for a very long time, the industry has been completely decentralized. this can’t last“

– Olivier Fleurot, MSLGroup

almost too late because it can escalate out of control very rapidly. That reality requires much greater anticipation of issues and preparation of contingency plans.

In the world I work in, we now have a regulator we didn’t have before and we must be much more careful about how we communicate, as well as operate overall as a business. Regulators are a fairly new external audience that we have to consider.

Britt Zarling (ManpowerGroup): In thinking about stamina, durability comes to mind. You need durability to deal with the compressed economic cycles that will continue. There’s also constant change to which you must adjust. That’s the whole agility notion.

What does that mean for communications? You need opposing skill sets. More than ever, you have to be strategic and tactical. You must be collaborative, yet entrepreneurial. You need to understand concepts, but then be able to translate them into simple speak.

The ability to adjust to that is something today’s communications people do not all have. Leaders such as us who consider ourselves experts in communications have to be better coaches on this because that’s what will make a difference. Those are the types of communications people we need today.

Michael Petruzzello (Qorvis): At Davos, it seems they were trying to address the crisis in leadership that we’ve been facing over the last couple of years, which was an unfortunate result of the economic downturn and a lot of events in recent years.

One thing leaders must look at is that global economic recovery is largely driven by perception and confidence.

Do we perceive things are getting better? Are we confident in our ability to invest and buy? To have that confidence, we must first have confidence in our political and economic leaders, our business leaders. That’s where communications plays a very important role. It will help restore confidence in global leadership. It will help restore confidence not only in where our individual economies are headed, but where the global economy is going.

Andrew Katell (GE): Among the other balancing acts a communicator must perform is reactive versus active.

With the speed at which the world is moving, by the time a comment is made or a news story or blog post comes out about one of our businesses, products, or services, it’s

Olivier Fleurot (MSLGroup): Resilience is necessary because we are in a much more complex world. When I was a journalist with a French business newspaper, the world was simple. We were writing about the US, Western Europe, and Japan, nothing else. We never www.prweekus.com/2

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE wrote a line about India or China because we didn’t know about companies there.

The first element is complexity – and a lot of CEOs are struggling to understand those crucial markets. The second one is speed. People are posting and tweeting about everything. You need to figure out very quickly who these people are and engage with them.

All this requires a lot of resilience and I see it when I try to advise clients. First of all, you need to be available all the time. You must have a good understanding of a certain number of countries and cultures.

The global economy

Casey (PRWeek): Between traditional markets and emerging regions, the global economy is a huge issue – and communications plays a key role in shaping those stories. Could you identify a couple of areas where there is either great opportunity or tremendous challenge for business?

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): Emerging markets are leapfrogging. They need to because they must compete globally now. What does that do for businesses? It creates challenges and opportunities, but, for the most part, it’s compressing value chains. It’s compressing pricing.

It’s compressing costs and expenses. Companies have to operate in a much more agile way and that gets back to the resilient dynamism.

As communications people, we can no longer approach our roles with the mindset of just needing to understand our own company’s platform. We must have a refined understanding of what’s going on globally, politically, socially, and economically, and then take that into account and connect it to our company’s platform and vice versa.

up focusing only on a domestic market in whichever country it is because, overall, it feeds into the key characteristics needed for all communicators – perspective and context.

Petruzzello (Qorvis): One thing we hear from

clients is that global communications is no longer just looking simply for global strategies that can be executed locally. They demand more adaptability. They want to take global strategies and adapt and implement those market by market while simultaneously allowing those to bubble up so that when you go from emerging markets to mid-level markets to more mature markets, you can develop strategies that really work for all of them, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.

Fox (P&G): One of the big takeaways for me from this year’s event was a tangible sense of optimism, an optimism we haven’t seen out of Davos since probably 2008, before the recession set in.

Yes, there were clearly areas of continued concern, particularly in regions such as the Middle East. There are issues from an economic point of view in Western Europe. However, there was a general sense of optimism, particularly from business leaders, that we were seeing the end of the tunnel and not yet another train heading our way. People are a lot more encouraged here in the US. For the first time, Africa had a huge presence at Davos. In fact, as communicators, we must begin to think about Africa and its growth potential.

As communicators, we also need to be where the business is. We need to intimately understand it. For us, it’s not just understanding the business. It’s understanding the consumer.

Meuchner (Henry Schein): Five percent of the world’s population is in the US, so most of the world is outside the country. Multinationals must start thinking about how to deploy communications assets because the average US multinational probably has an overweighting of communications assets in the US and underweighting in all of those other regions of the world. It is those regions that are growing faster than the US and have much more economic promise, China and India most notably.

In the years ahead, you’ll see a shifting of the deployment of these assets to the emerging markets because you can’t effectively communicate in another part of the world from the US. It’s more than just communications, obviously, when you’re competing in markets such as China and India.

There are also government relations aspects. That’s vitally important and can only be developed in a real way by having people in those locations.

Katell (GE): GE has had a major business and communications focus on decentralizing and deploying more of our talent outside the US where the growth is. Putting it another way, communicators need to chase growth – economic and business – and there’s no substitute for being on the ground in a country.

I’ve spent years in Russia. I covered the UN as a journalist.

That kind of world-view is very valuable even if you wind

“For CSR to be sustainable, it has to be intrinsically linked with a business. It cannot be episodic“

– Paul Fox, Procter & Gamble www.prweekus.com/3

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE Another key factor when looking at the global economy is the fact we have massive moving populations. More than ever, people are leaving their places of birth and moving to very different regions. This is a dynamic aspect we’re only beginning to understand.

Right now, it’s the equivalent of France’s and the UK’s population moving. It won’t be many years before it ’s the equivalent of the US population moving. That has a dramatic impact upon culture, too, not just the economy.

Petruzzello (Qorvis): When we think about the emerging markets, the fascinating element is the demographics. When you look at Latin America, the Middle East, China, and India, 40% to 60% of those populations are under the age of 20. You have enormous numbers of people who have yet to come of age as consumers, but that is something we’re going to have to deal with in the next five to 10 years.

These youthful populations are different than their parents. They grew up with a mobile phone and Facebook. Not only are they moving physically, they’re clearly moving every day with information.

Fleurot (MSLGroup): PR and communications didn’t

exist in those countries 20 years ago, so the maturity of those markets, in terms of communication, is very different from what it is here.

Of course, our clients are very eager to find exactly the same kind of processes, but it doesn’t work that way.

For instance, we just produced a white paper on the PR industry in India because we think we have a role to play to make sure this industry makes progress and develops.

In Africa, the population is going to double in the next generation. Double. It’s 1 billion today. It will be 2 billion by 2045 or around that. What’s going to happen there?

We are at a very beginning moment in Africa. My clients are asking me how can we help them there. My issue is finding people who simultaneously understand how we want to work and the local culture. That’s a big challenge, but I believe Africa is the next frontier.

I was struck by the fact that in all the Davos sessions I attended before, the person who was talking about Africa was Bono on stage with Sharon Stone raising money for bed nets. It was all about how can we help them because it’s all about disease and issues.

This year, the sessions were talking about growth, economic growth. There has been a 5% growth in the last few years in Africa. We don’t notice it because we only talk about China and India, but it’s 5%. It can be 7% or 8% in the next decade.

Petruzzello (Qorvis): I also noticed something different about the discussions on the emerging markets, particularly Africa and some of the others. In the past, as we thought about those markets and as they thought about themselves, they looked at us and said, “We simply need to dovetail or attach ourselves to what’s happening in the Western economies and we’ll shape a draft to success in that manner.”

mindful of davos’ relevance Arianna Huffington, chair, president, and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group, spoke with PRWeek senior editor Bernadette Casey prior to the roundtable about her views on some key topics that emerged during this year’s World Economic Forum.

Bernadette Casey (PRWeek): Women in leadership was a key topic at Davos. What caught your attention among the many conversations about this subject?

Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post): Just the recognition that this is where the world is going was noteworthy. There was a zeitgeist apparent. Part of it was that women will play a bigger role.

My biggest obsession is that women do not have to lead the same way men do. We need to identify the ways that haven’t worked in how men have done leadership. We can do it differently.

Casey (PRWeek): It seems more business leaders are making that body, mind, and spirit connection and directly linking that to how they handle a crisis and run their business. You talked about looking inwards. How might these concepts relate to PR professionals?

Huffington (Huffington Post): It’s very much at the heart of communications because communications professionals are all about building connections.

When we are enjoying what we do, we build better connections.

Ironically, as digital connections are becoming more widespread, people are craving the live connection. That’s why we see an explosion in interest in live events.

When digital became king, there were many people saying, “Oh, this is going to destroy live events.”

But it’s actually far from it.

There is something in our DNA that still craves the human connection and wants us to be with each other, rather than just having these webcasts. And that’s not going to change. In that sense, we have to learn how to handle technology so it doesn’t enslave us.

Casey (PRWeek): Please highlight some of the more interesting discussions that took place at Davos around social media.

Huffington (Huffington Post): Ubiquity is the new exclusivity. It’s no longer about doing something exclusively. Whatever you have, what matters most is getting as wide distribution as possible. That’s why I love that The Huffington Post, in addition to being a journalistic enterprise, is a platform.

Increasingly, the more you can be a platform or be attached to platforms, the more you can get your or your client’s message out.

Casey (PRWeek): How has Davos evolved or expanded over the many years you’ve attended?

Huffington (Huffington Post): I remember 2001. It was the first time Davos took place in New York.

That program put a tremendous emphasis on the global leaders of tomorrow, who were all young.

Last year, the Global Shapers program was introduced. They are under 30 and all doing amazing things to make the world better.

The fact Davos was able to capture this trend and invite these people to be a part of it is why the event is still relevant and why it will be resilient for many years. l

www.prweekus.com/4

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE Today, they don’t seem to be doing that. They look at the US and Europe and say, “That is not the total solution to our problems or the only path to our success.

We’re going to have to do more on our own and in our own way.” You start to see some development of independence in identity of these markets that you really didn’t see before.

Philanthropy and finance

Casey (PRWeek): “Catalyzing Markets Through Philan-

thropy” was a key session at Davos this year. CSR has long been a major communications focus for in-house teams and agencies alike and the discussion at Davos accentuates that. How is this element of your jobs evolving?

Fox (P&G): P&G has always believed that for CSR to be

sustainable, it has to be intrinsically linked with a business. It cannot be episodic.

“Relationships are at the heart of PR. To me, that’s the magic of Davos“

– Gerard Meuchner, Henry Schein

Let’s take Africa, for example. We’ve done a lot of work there. One of the many things we have noticed was how few girls were actually in school there. And this was in a number of African countries, particularly sub-Sahara.

Logically, you might attribute this to the fact they have some sort of duties back in their villages. However, the truth is they didn’t go to school or they dropped out of school because they were girls. Every month, they menstruated and they had no protection at all, so when they did have their period, they would stay at home.

They would stay in their villages until it was finished and then they would pick up school again.

Well, if you do that for several months on end, you suddenly realize you are a month or two behind the boys in class. The distance expanded to such an extent that, eventually, they gave up. It’s not good for that com-

munity’s economy to take out large numbers of females who had completely dropped out of the education system.

P&G has a feminine protection business. We can do something about that, which we did. We called it Protecting Futures. That’s just one example.

Katell (GE): We do traditional philanthropy through our GE Foundation. In addition, we are very focused on some of the key problem areas in the world, especially in developing nations, such as healthcare, energy, transportation, and water.

From a communications standpoint, we have latched onto those in a campaign called GE Works. It works well externally, but internally, our employees, which total more than 300,000 worldwide, get very excited about it because it is precisely business driven and, therefore, sustainable. These are not giveaways. These are economically viable deployments of our technology and capital.

GE is big in renewable energy – wind and solar. It’s been our fastest-growing business for the past five years or so on the investing side. Our recruitment drives for employees, as well as the feelings of our current employees, has revealed this to be a very exciting area. They believe it is personally rewarding and satisfying to be a part of this every day when they come to work.

Meuchner (Henry Schein): There’s an evolution occurring in CSR that is moving away from the simple disbursement of cash to what Henry Schein calls “participatory philanthropy,” where companies are taking advantage of the things they do well to improve the communities in which they operate.

We are the world’s largest provider of healthcare products, primarily to offices of doctors, dentists, and veterinarians. We have a lot of product that we give away to NGOs before a crisis hits. We have a program whereby the NGOs receive product from us that is perhaps unsalable or no longer usable to us for whatever reason.

It’s not that money is unimportant, but it’s much more meaningful to employees that they’re directly involved in helping promote the social good because the very work they do is being applied to these issues.

Makovsky (Makovsky): I’ve had clients involved in

those kinds of programs and an issue that often comes up is whether or not they should promote their CSR efforts versus just doing it.

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): If CSR efforts are not helping further the mission of your company, the organization will not be there any more to give the cash. As such, the sustainability conversation must come from the business’ perspective, as well as the social perspective.

The GRI [Global Reporting Initiative, which is a nonprofit that provides all organizations with a comprehensive sustainability reporting framework] Index is among many tools we now have to report on this kind of activity. Communications plays a big role in making sure the message is connected that way. Otherwise, it can sound disingenuous, look disingenuous, and look like checking the box – and that’s not intended. www.prweekus.com/5

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE Fleurot (MSLGroup): That’s why we have this ex-

pression “greenwashing.” The majority of companies still don’t think about this the right way. CSR must completely be part of your strategy. You have to work on a purpose. And this purpose must be created and cocreated by your people, the staff, and even other stakeholders, such as suppliers. You must involve and engage a lot of stakeholders to make sure the purpose will work and will deliver performance.

We have developed processes that we call Purple.

Purple is made of purpose and people, and we think it must come from the bottom of the organization as much as from the top.

The new generation will look at your company and ask about what good you do beyond making a profit. They want to know how they will be engaged every day with a purpose that is a bit broader than just making a profit.

That generation requires it, so if you want to hire the right talent in the next 10 years, you need to have that.

Women in leadership

Casey (PRWeek): Another prevailing topic at Davos was the growing role women have in economic decisionmaking and, more broadly, leadership. In PR, women hold three out four jobs, but eight out of 10 C-suite posts are occupied by men. It is changing, however, as more firms have women in the top roles. Have we reached a tipping point to where this momentum will really take hold?

Fleurot (MSLGroup): There was that session [“Women

in Economic Decision-Making”] where five women were on stage and it was not a sideshow. It was the main plenary session. You had the head of the International Monetary Fund Christine Legarde, the president of Harvard Drew Faust, and Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

As far as I am concerned, for the first time, I felt this topic was really very visible. They spoke quite well and

Fox (P&G): There have always been three very distinct

categories in this space. There is a group that really doesn’t care about CSR and sustainability. Then there are those who are deeply passionate and run their lives against CSR and sustainability principles. Then you have a very large category that sits right between them. They believe it’s important, but they won’t trade off performance for sustainability reasons.

It’s that latter group that is beginning to get, for want of a better description, more enlightened. They are becoming more aware that they have a power. They have a power either to group, to collect on social media, or they have a power through their spending to affect change.

As communicators, we absolutely need to ensure the authenticity of these programs. That’s a job both internally and externally because, to Olivier’s point of greenwashing, too much of it still occurs. It’s misleading to consumers. As communicators, we have a role to play in ensuring that particular practice dies out forever.

Katell (GE): There’s great variation in what we’re talking about in different parts of the world as far as development and awareness of CSR and who’s driving it.

In Russia, for example, it’s a fairly new phenomenon for big corporations and wealthy individuals to latch onto this. At the moment, they are doing so under encouragement from the state, as opposed to perhaps grassroots, which is probably more the case in countries such the US. It’s quite fascinating to watch how emerging markets are developing in the area of CSR, including in how they communicate about it, and whether, frankly, they are doing it purely for PR reasons.

Makovsky (Makovsky): Having been on the boards

of a number of industry organizations, many of them are tackling research standards, but no one has done anything about industry standards on CSR. It would really be an advance for PR if we could get one of the industry organizations to undertake those kinds of standards because they are critical.

“structures must be more inclusive to break down barriers to women getting into leadership roles“

– Britt Zarling, ManpowerGroup

challenged what is still a very immature environment in Davos when it comes to this area. There is still a lot to do.

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): In Legarde’s plenary,

she’s rattling off these statistics about how 70% of global spending is done by women. She spoke about how when women do better, economies do better because there’s more control over GDP. Basically, she spoke about how women aren’t the specialty market. They are the market.

Women are making progress in the business world, but there’s still a fundamental problem because what companies offer women is clearly not what women want.

You have women entering the workforce at the same rate as men. You have women graduating and in very capable roles. However, something happens that is creating a barrier. It might be structural, cultural, individual, www.prweekus.com/6

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE or social, but this is where companies have to really think about how they structure work differently.

I just had a baby. When you think about what that means from a work-structure perspective, it’s very different for women. It’s not because I don’t want to keep working and move up, but I need more flexibility. Women are more driven than men to have control of their schedule because a huge majority of that population still serves as either caregivers or they have other responsibilities other than just being the primary financial-income bearer.

Structures need to be looked at differently and they must be more inclusive to break down those barriers to women getting into leadership roles. As an industry, retail has a little easier go at it because women have access to P&L experience in a faster way. For the majority of women in the workplace, however, they usually come up in staff roles. In those industries, there needs to be more access and exposure to the P&L experience.

Fox (P&G): The concept of diversity and inclusion and

the role women play at P&G is part of our fabric. When we talk about consumers, we tend to talk about “she.”

We’ve always recognized the role women play. We articulated it publicly for the first time with the “Thank You, Mom” campaign.

Many women have risen to the senior ranks at P&G. If you look at the board composition right now, out of 12 independent directors, five are women. I struggle to think of any other corporate board in the world that has that sort of representation.

We recognize that if you create heterogeneous organizations, they are far more innovative and productive than homogeneous ones.

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): And this can’t be about doing

something for the sake of doing it. It must start with the outcome in mind. You want diversity of thought, which creates innovation and inspires different ideas. You can’t get that with all the same types of people in the room.

If you start there, you can then create the work models and the structures. That’s where you then address the flexibility issue to create more inclusion.

Makovsky (Makovsky): I got into this field in the early

‘70s and PR was dominated by women. Based on statistics, it still is heavily dominated by women. However, based on recent surveys, such as those conducted by the PRSA, while women dominate the business, 80% of the leadership is male. Moreover, there’s a great disparity between the average salary for women and men. It is changing, but it remains an issue we have to wrestle with.

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): This is more of a structural

issue. It’s not a lack of interest on women’s part. It’s that they tend to reach a certain point and then leave. Most leave to start their own business. They are fueled by a desire to create the structure they want, which includes more flexibility and control of their schedule.

Meuchner (Henry Schein): I’m the chair this year of The Seminar, the annual forum of CCOs, primarily

“when you have an issue that’s by definition controversial, the process must involve listening“

– Andrew Katell, GE Energy Financial Services

from the Fortune 500. Three of the last five chairs have been female and next year’s chair will be female. That’s a good sign of progress on this front.

Fleurot (MSLGroup): MSLGroup organizes an interna-

tional women’s forum every year. We have 1,200 women from 70 different countries meeting and talking about various topics. It’s not only about women in business and politics, but their views about business issues. We’re going to do it in Brazil this year.

A lot of women say they hate quotas, but if this is the kind of thing we have to do to kick start the process, so be it.

An emerging challenge

Casey (PRWeek): Another Davos session focused on emerging technologies – genetically modified foods, fracking, and such.

There’s a communications challenge in defining new technologies, educating consumers about them, and getting a consistent communications message out. How do you tackle that?

Katell (GE): It really speaks to a very fundamental

issue, certainly in the US, but I suspect globally about the way discourse is handled on issues such as fracking or any other number of things that are in the news and lighting up the blogosphere and social media.

Whatever the issue, it’s about civil discourse and the lack of it. It’s this impulsiveness that’s enabled by some of the social media technology that people don’t think much before hitting the “send” or “post” button. Related to that, there is also a broad unwillingness or inability to be a good listener. And these are key communications skills – discourse and listening. www.prweekus.com/7

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE When you have an issue that’s by definition controversial, there are multiple viewpoints. To reach some kind of solution, the process must involve listening, respecting each other’s opinions, and trying to keep it under control, positive, and constructive.

As communications leaders, we must help manage that whole process and do it in a way that’s not heavy handed.

We’re not meant to censor the debate, but rather guide it in a positive, constructive way.

Petruzzello (Qorvis): I’ve spent most of my career in

Washington and the environment has never been more polarized than it is today. It is so difficult to find common ground on policy issues, whether it’s fracking and other forms of energy, the environment, or health.

It seems that more and more, we’re just a nation divided from right and left and with not a lot of effort to try and find a common middle. As a result, the vast majority of people who can shape those debates and, ultimately, come up with the solutions are walking away from that discourse because it’s too polarized. It’s too divided. We must figure out how to bring that back together.

Fleurot (MSLGroup): I’m part of a steering committee within the World Economic Forum that tries to help various stakeholders establish new norms and values in the digital world. It’s interesting because technology creates new potential issues about privacy, IP protection, even national security. However, as per the values we have, it’s not as if I’m divided between being an off-line or an on-line guy. In terms of values, I’m the same on both.

Of course, the lawyers and the parliaments in the world must establish laws to regulate this new world, but in terms of values and ethics, they should be the same.

IP protection is an emerging issue, a very big one for our industry. You have companies that would love to use any data they can find and, of course, individuals who would like to choose and manage how personal data will be used.

To me, that’s one of the big issues of the next few years.

tion. We’re in a transitionary period where the notions of privacy and IP protection are being interchanged.

We’ll be creating new models going forward. You know it’s coming. As communicators, we must begin to think about what that means and be ready for it.

Katell (GE): What governs the ability to express views?

Prior to the Internet era, and even perhaps at the beginning of it, the governor for that was economics. You needed to be able to get your information or viewpoint in a newspaper, on TV, some sort of physical asset. Now, the cost of expressing or distributing your view is zero, or very close to zero. Therefore, there’s no barrier of economics to that.

In fact, I don’t know what the barrier is or will be.

Fox (P&G): If you think about the principle of trying to drive change, we’ve always gathered to create change. Live events are a great thing. We used to do them physically because we had to. What we’re seeing now is a migration of that principle online. You’re seeing large groups of like-minded people gather together virtually and still create change.

Makovsky (Makovsky): It’s not necessarily an either-or.

Think of some of the recent revolutions – Arab Spring, for example. The online component of that was huge, but it was precipitated by a physical event.

Fleurot (MSLGroup): We’ve had big demonstrations recently in France. It’s all about the mariage pour tous, wedding for all. It wasn’t triggered specifically by social media.

People just wanted to make a point in the streets. We’ve had huge demonstrations, pro and anti. Very interesting.

Makovsky (Makovsky): A lot of companies have these

values, but how do they translate that into action? How do you operationalize these kinds of values?

My firm has developed a system where role models who demonstrate values get rewarded. It’s working well, but at companies with thousands of employees this becomes a major challenge.

There’s also the transparency issue, particularly in our own business that uses spokespersons. In terms of employees communicating outwardly and all kinds of external communications, we not only need to be concerned about transparency, but, in a sense, operationalize that.

Fox (P&G): Transparency is critical, but where do you find balance with the current proliferation of communications channels and the abundance of polarized opinion?

As communicators, it’s our job to define that. That will be a huge challenge for us moving forward.

We’re also dealing with a generation today that thinks about privacy in a very different way than the generation before, and light years differently than the prior genera-

“Our business always required resilient dynamism. today you have to be quickly resilient“

– Ken Makovsky, Makovsky & Company www.prweekus.com/8

DAVOS ROUNDTABLE Zarling (ManpowerGroup): There’s increased access, no doubt, but for what purpose? As communicators, we still have to come back to what is the purpose for which we want to use certain platforms. We need to be very clear about that because, otherwise, everything is out of control and you can’t focus on the outcome we’re trying to achieve. Let’s be purposeful about the channels we want to influence. That can help at least give some more sanity and clarity around the objective.

What’s in store?

Casey (PRWeek): In light of the issues highlighted at Davos, what major communications themes do you see evolving in the next 12 months or so?

Fox (P&G): When I look at what’s happening around the

world today, the potential that lies in front of the communications field today is greater than it’s been at any point during my 30-plus years in the field.

Petruzzello (Qorvis): There was a heightened sense of

optimism coming out of the conference. Everything needs to move forward to make that sense of optimism more pervasive. To turn that optimism into reality, business and government are going to have to do more through good policy and good financial decisions.

Probably even more important, we’ll need to have good communications, individually and in partnership. Leaders of business and government will have to figure out how to come together and make that happen.

Fleurot (MSLGroup): Actually, I’m suggesting a theme

for next year’s event in Davos – leveraging diversity, be it cultural, global, or gender.

As far as communications’ role, we have to raise our game day after day because it’s a more complex world. Issues are more complex, so we have to recruit even better people all the time. It’s also about build-

Zarling (ManpowerGroup): Leaders such as us have a responsibility to ensure that we’re coaching and really helping those individuals entering the industry understand how to navigate what’s going on and then build the right kind of skills because there’s still a gap. There’s a lot of potential out there in the incoming talent, but there’s a responsibility to effectively coach that potential so that it can be unleashed.

Makovsky (Makovsky): I’ve seen a real change over the years in how our business has moved into integrated communications and using a lot of the same kinds of tools people in marketing and advertising have used.

In a recent survey we did with CCOs and CMOs, there was a tremendous understanding of the different roles and the need to come together, but the one area where there was the least collaboration was on social media.

My hope would be to see a greater coming together of the various sectors within marketing because, ultimately, the client doesn’t care about where the best idea comes from. The chances of getting it are going to be better through collaboration.

Katell (GE): The best communicators now and in the

future will always be well grounded in some basics that will never change. They must be good listeners. Before you act, listen well, particularly to your target audiences.

Good storytelling skills are crucial, too. Good writing comes into play here.

Of course, while keeping all those basics in mind, you also must execute the new tools and channels that will continue to involve both live and virtual connections.

Meuchner (Henry Schein): Relationships are at the heart of PR. To me, that’s the magic of Davos. You can meet people and make relationships in a way that is increasingly rare in this world. That continues to be the appeal that Davos holds for those of us who attend. It is serendipity to go there and meet people you couldn’t imagine meeting. From that, relationships are formed and connections are made. It’s just a wonderful experience.

“In Washington, the environment has never been more polarized.

It is so difficult to find common ground“

– Michael Petruzzello, Qorvis

ing those very strong relationships with our clients and making sure the trust is there.

There is clearly a convergence of disciplines because of digital and social, though a lot of companies are still organized for the 20th century, not the 21st. Many still work in silos. For a very long time, the industry has been completely decentralized. We work for companies, big American companies that have very decentralized communications and PR organizations. They don’t even know we work for them in China, it is so decentralized.

Because of digital and social, this can’t last very long.

Anything can start on a social media platform in, for example, Myanmar and then become a global issue in one hour. It’s a fascinating time, and a great time for all of us in communications. l www.prweekus.com/9