Addressing the crisis in trust: Why PR is not the answer

We'll talk about some of the big challenges for the communication business. We're going to listen to an author, a consultant who has declared PR for dead. His new book is called Trust Me, PR is Dead. He'll talk about that issue. Please give a very warm welcome to Robert Phillips, who is the co-founder of the Jericho Chambers Consultancy firm. Welcome to you. Thank you very much and good afternoon. My name is Robert Phillips. My Twitter handle is Citizen Robert, so feel free to tweet any thoughts or comments as we go along. My apologies, first of all, for delivering this in English. Although I have worked in Denmark on and off for the past 20 years, my Danish is a little weak, to say the least. So please bear with me. I don't think any talk on trust can start without considering the recent events at Volkswagen. The gentleman here is Martin Vinterkorn, who's the former chief executive. And Martin is the latest entrant into the Trust Hall of Shame. He joins a global cast from Enron to the Royal Bank of Scotland to BP to De Sheba. And I'm sure there will be more. Now, the cost of VW's criminal breach of trust is currently not even calculable. It may exceed 20 billion dollars. That's the amount they've set aside for fines. It will probably exceed more than 40 percent of the value that was wiped off the company's stock price before they managed to tell the truth. So every breach of trust clearly comes at a price. Volkswagen thought that it could beat the system on its own terms, but it cheated, it lied. And I would say that any organisation that forgets to tell the truth does so at its peril. Now, there's no reason that you should trust me. I used to work in public relations. According to Management Today magazine, I am a repentant spinner. PRs, like politicians, have never really been trusted. So this idea that trust is itself in permanent decline is actually wrong. Trust in politicians, trust in PR people, trust in estate agents is not in decline, it's always low. But my firm belief, and it's one of the reasons that I quit my job at Edelman, is that for decades now, public relations has in fact been part of the trust problem. And I don't think it is part of the trust solution. Clever communications is absolutely not the way to earn genuine customer or stakeholder trust. I think spinning to success died with the last century. I quit as European Chief Executive of Edelman for one reason, which I've just said, but also because I felt that the large consultancy model was in fact broken. I'll come on to look at what I think the new model looks like later. But I also believe that there are a number of existential threats to the PR industry that were not being addressed by Edelman and by others, not least around data and around talent. But it was actually the boss of one of Europe's largest energy companies who inspired me to write a book about trust and communications. I heard this man here, Vincent de Rivaz, France's CEO of France's EDF Energy, give what I think is probably the worst speech on trust I've ever heard. It was a couple of years ago, it was in the middle of winter, and there was a debate raging in the UK about pricing policy. It was felt that the energy companies were forcing old people particularly to choose between eating and heating. And the chances are, and we've all been in this situation before, that Vincent, the CEO, didn't even write his own material. Instead, he stepped onto stage, he had a prepared script, he stumbled through the usual banalities about how important it was for EDF to trust the customer, how important it was for the customer to trust EDF. At no point did he acknowledge the crisis that was going on around him, and actually he didn't even seem to believe his own script. What was interesting about Vincent's talk and what inspired me to write the book was that unintentionally he exposed three myths, I think, about trust. The first myth is that leaders can demand, command, or assume trust. They can't. Trust is not a message, it is an outcome, it is deeply behavioural. So however many times Vincent spoke the T-word, I don't think anyone actually believed him. The point is, you cannot tell someone to trust you. The second myth that Vincent exposed is that somehow you can wave a magic wand and you can restore broken trust. You can't. Magic wands don't work. In a chaotic and complex world, there's no single action that can restore, build, or maintain trust. And the reason is that trust is now forever fragile. And globalisation, and many of you who work for global companies, only intensifies this. Trust has to be hard fought, hard earned, hard won every day, and it's what makes all of our jobs so much more difficult. The fragility that I've just mentioned helps us understand the third myth, that somehow we can return to old trust, trust as it maybe was 20, 30, 40 years ago. But we can't, because disruption is permanent. And we have to come to terms with the world as it is now, and not the world as it once was. We have to accept that change is never going to be the same again. We act with integrity. We maintain the highest ethical standards and transparency in our work, and in our dealings with customers, partners, stakeholders, and fellow employees. We keep our commitments. We are honest, fair, and trustworthy. Now, many of you will recognise value statements such as this. They are all over all sorts of different companies' websites. Many companies have a version of the same. What I've just read out could be Voxfile, and in fact it was not. It was Thomas Cook. Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with this case. It was a core celeb in the UK earlier this year. But Thomas Cook is a UK tour operator. And earlier this year, they were exposed for failing to apologise to a family who tragically lost two of their children through death at one of Thomas Cook's hotels. Worse still, not only did Thomas Cook fail to apologise, but they took five million euros in compensation that would have belonged to the family, and they used it for themselves. The company said that they followed the due legal process. Maybe they did, but they fundamentally failed to do what is right. Now, some commentators in my home market in the UK have described what happened at Thomas Cook as a PR disaster. But what we saw was not a failure in communications. It was a substantive failure, an epic failure, a failure in meeting the moral and ethical standards that all of us as citizens and as consumers should demand from modern corporations. Now, I've spent the best part of 10 years now thinking and writing about trust. And actually, I'm pretty convinced, more convinced than ever before, that most trust scores are actually irrelevant. And that includes the Edelman Trust Barometer on which I worked for a number of years. Trust in major institutions, not just trust in corporations, is in permanent flux. And today's crisis of trust, as some people like to call it, is in fact a crisis of leadership. And this crisis of leadership is rooted in a failure to make the right judgments and to put it very simply, to do the right thing. So I would argue that the trustworthy organisation needs to add an ethical dimension to what is legal, because compliance alone is not enough. But the problem is we have become obsessed about compliance. And in doing so, we confuse management with leadership. And that's why this picture up here is of Professor John Cotter from Harvard University, who very famously wrote an excellent blog post, said, management is still not leadership. But too many organisations, and I think this applies to both the private and the public sectors, are trapped within a managerial compliance culture that appears permanently risk averse, terrified of litigation, and propped up not just by PR people, but more importantly by lawyers. And this is probably how organisations like Thomas Cook end up where they do. They think they can spin their way out of trouble, they think they can manage the message, they think they can avoid saying they are sorry. Now I guess nobody in this room will know who this man is. He looks a bit like he might be selling Range Rovers. In fact, he was Her Majesty's ambassador to Lebanon until earlier this year. His name is Tom Fletcher, and Tom blogs as the naked diplomat. And he draws some great comparisons between the worlds of diplomacy, the issue of trust, and the worlds of communications and PR. He wrote one blog post in which he said, diplomacy has detached itself from public debate through meaningless platitudes. Much of its form, summits, communiques, was designed in an age of monarchies and great states, as far back as 1815. It has been slow to adjust to the next wave of disruption. And let's face it, after Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and everybody else, we are all much less trusted than we were. Tom continues, we need to embrace a more insurgent, a more activist, a more citizen style of diplomacy if we are to survive. So here is Tom, a pillar of the British establishment, talking about the new normal as being activist, insurgent, and citizen centric. He recognises, I think, how we all, even in a diplomatic service, have to find new ways to communicate, and what it will really take to be more trusted. But contrast Tom's comments with what we see in most organisations today. Most leaders, business leaders, politicians, do not think in terms of insurgency or activism, but instead they try and impose managerial hierarchies. They attempt to command and control. They organise themselves through the equivalent of summits and communiques. They spew their meaningless platitudes, which Tom mentioned, and which someone like Vincent seemed to celebrate. And the truth is, I think we all know, that Edward Snowden symbolises the new normal in which we operate, in business and as communicators. But in contrast, modern public relations was dreaded up by the man on the right here, by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who a hundred years ago or so, in the United States came up with the idea of public relations or propaganda. Why? Because he did not trust the democratic will of the people, and PR was to be used as a way of suppressing that. And Bernays' legacy, although maybe he's held too much to blame, but Bernays' legacy is just one reason why the old normal version of PR is no longer workable, and why the old version of PR is not the answer to the trust problem. No one, as Edward Snowden has proved, is in control any longer. And anyone who thinks they're in control, or that they can impose rather than negotiate trusty relationships, is living in the wrong century. Now, further context to this is provided by what is called the megatrend of individual empowerment. And this megatrend is about a power shift. We all recognise it. The power shift from state to citizen, from employer to employee, from corporation to citizen consumer. And this power shift is accelerated, it's fuelled by technology, by costless communications, by the rise of networks. And it's why so many old institutions, from the United Nations, the European Union, from trade associations to political parties, the medical profession, struggled to be as trusted as they once were. In this age of Edward Snowden, the result is chaos. And trusted leaders embrace chaos. Our new world is incredibly complex. Not complicated, but complex in terms of interdependent. Networks are interdependent, they're global, and we may trust others within our own network, but we're not going to trust those who try and impose external control upon us. So trusted leaders not only embrace chaos, but they understand complexity. Three years ago, I was in Berlin, and I was addressing the European round table. That's the CEOs, the 50 largest manufacturing companies in Europe. 44 of them were there, and I guess it said it all, of the 44 CEOs present, only one was a woman. Anyway, at the end of my talk, which was titled, You Are No Longer in Control, there was complete silence. And then one of the CEOs spoke, and he looked at me, and he wagged his finger, and he said, what you don't understand, Robert, is that I pay people like you to keep me in control. And I was a bit gobsmacked, I wasn't sure what to say. But before I could answer, another CEO jumped in, one of the CEOs of big tech companies. You can pay Robert as much as you like, he said, but the truth is that we are no longer in control, and the game is up. Now, as we know, many businesses use corporate social responsibility, CSR, to flaunt their company values. What I'm about to tell you is a true story. In the wake of the first tragic factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed over 100 women workers, the chairman of one global brand asked me not what his company should be doing to help the victims, but instead, how could we use CSR to better showcase their credentials, effectively to distract from the issue at hand. Bullshit CSR is not the answer to earning genuine customer or stakeholder trust. There are some more stories. The CEO of FTSE 100, a major organisation who I interviewed for the book, used to open his board meetings every time with one simple line, who do we fuck today? And the banks and the financial services institutions wonder why no one trusts them. One company director who I also interviewed, and I said, what do you do about ethics and values in your organisation? And they said, I don't have to worry about ethics and values. We have a subcommittee that deals with that. A bank CEO asked me to advise him on what it would take for the bank to become good, trusted and ethical. So I offered him 10 principles and 10 behaviours, and quite frankly, none of them were rocket science. So the first principle I went to him with was transparency. I love transparencies. I believe in transparency, he said. He agreed with transparency. Great. So I said, let's abolish free banking. And he said, why? I said, it's not free. Someone pays somewhere, and therefore it's not transparent. So if you believe in transparency, abolish free banking. We can't do that, he said. Why not? We make too much money from it. The second principle was about proportionality. There's been debate raging for many years now about the size of bankers' bonuses. The CEO said, I agree. The principle of proportionality is very important. I said, great. Let's cap bankers' bonuses. One of his most admired organisations was Sweden's Handelsbanker. No, no. We can't cap bankers' bonuses, he said. Flight of talent and all that. Second principle agreed. Second behaviour denied. The third one was mutuality. He dismissed that as well. I said that we should encourage more share ownership for all employees, if he believed in mutuality. He said that wasn't possible. Yet here was a man whose other most admired organisation was the John Lewis Partnership, which is associate based. So in the end, we agreed on 10 principles. And he refused to accept a single behaviour. And as only some CEOs are capable of doing, he said, I love this presentation, Robert. I'm so thrilled we're going to be working together. And I said, we're not going to be working together. And I walked away. The point is this. There is no point in adopting principles if you are not willing to implement the behaviours. If you do that, it is just PR nonsense. It has to be about what we do, not what we say. Now, the management guru, Charles Handy, shares some fabulous statistics, some of which you may have heard and some of which might worry you. 80% of employees within a company are not engaged and they don't care. 80%, eight zero percent. 25% of employees would actively sabotage the company for which they work. So the revolution that I've been talking about is happening in the workplace. Technology, networks, activism mean that old corporate hierarchies and elites are being flattened. Whistle blowers, social media campaigns, citizen journalists, any of those, if not all of them, can get you. The days of controlling anything, especially media, as we know, are receding fast. In a world that they see what we see, quite frankly, resistance is increasingly futile. But most organisations somehow manage to keep their heads still firmly in the sand. Maybe they think they can ignore this shift, this paradigm shift, or maybe they think that their PR people can somehow make it go away. But that said, some are looking to change in tune with revolutionary times. And the more successful, trusted organisations of the future will therefore be open, they'll be empathetic, they'll be relational. In an interconnected world where all of us together are smarter than any one of us, I think the organisations that embrace these beliefs will be more resilient, more adaptive, and in fact, more creative. They will attract the most talent and they will keep the best talent. And author Margaret Heffernan, one of my colleagues, articulates this very, very well. The bigger prize, she says, lies in collaboration, not competition. I believe that in replacing the old broken model of public relations, and I think this runs to the heart of my book, we need a new model of public leadership. Public leadership respects the mega trends that we've been discussing. It draws on some of the themes that Tom Fletcher drew in his blog. Public leadership is activist, it's co-produced, it is citizen centric, and it puts society first. Public leadership recognises purpose, not profit, at the heart of the organisation. It puts on us a responsibility to ask bigger questions, not just about the people for whom we work, but about what we are doing, about the nature of society, and about the importance of common good, as originally defined by Aristotle and codified by St. Thomas Aquinas. Public leadership speaks to words like courage and wisdom, tolerance and justice. And I think that within this construct, the more trusted organisation of the future looks much more like a social movement than it does a traditional hierarchy. So just as diplomats need to think like insurgents, so CEOs and business leaders need to think like social activists. They can't go on behaving like command and control managers in their boardroom bunkers. And their communication strategies, our communication strategies need to be in tune with this. So communications leaders need to think about themselves as chief community organisers alongside the chief social activists. Now I mentioned that public leadership is citizen centric and society first, and it's based on the simple principle of doing the right thing. And that also involves going back to what I was saying about the banking sector, about understanding the difference between profit optimisation and profit maximisation. Profit optimisation speaks to the long term interests of citizens and society and to the common good. Profit maximisation, as we saw from the Hedius successes before the financial crash or even more recently from Volkswagen, speaks instead to that business culture of who do we fuck today. Now in understanding who can we trust, we do need to focus on accountability. And I don't think we should obsess, as the PR industry across the world has obsessed for decades, about measurement. If we think about accountability, we therefore then need to take a much more radical approach to honesty and transparency. So the public leadership model is measured through something that I've called public value, and that is rooted in the common good. And every organisation will have its own unique version of public value. Maybe you could see it as its own manifesto. And why is that? Because public value is better co-produced with real people, where those real people are employees, where they're customers, where they're stakeholders. And if you co-produce your manifesto with real people, you become accountable to the many, not the few, the 99%. So a bank that would think in terms of public value outcomes, for example, would immediately address this challenge of whether or not it was socially useless. And I think organisations in the public sector have an immediate understanding of what public value really means. I would urge you to think therefore not in terms of sterile measurement metrics, but in terms of manifestos and crowds, not focus groups. Better decisions are made by wise crowds of real people, employees, customers, stakeholders, they better understand what the common good really looks like. So I think the public value thinking and public value accountability provides better frameworks for ethical and trusted decision making. Now it's not all bad news. Some corporations really are stepping up to the plate, rising to the challenge and answering these core questions around trust. They're the usual suspects. I'm sure most people are familiar with the Patagonia case study for the United States, Ben and Jerry's, the other B corporations, John Lewis Partnership in the UK, Unilever with its sustainable living plan and celebrity CEO, Paul Polman almost everywhere. But there are many good global examples. HCL Technologies in India co-produces its business strategies with its employees. Porto Alegre, which is Brazil's second largest municipal authority, has enjoyed participatory budgeting with citizens for many years. Tata of India must wonder how on earth CSR became this sort of crazy bureaucratic discipline and detached itself from real business behaviour and purpose. The Workers' Councils of Spain's Mondragon are that partnership model writ large and very successful. And from the UK's John Lewis Partnership, one comment from Patrick Lewis, the real heart of business's purpose, which is about much more than making money or creating financial value. Patrick Lewis is the chief financial officer of the organisation. A recent research from Harvard University in the London Business School compared 90 American companies that took sustainability seriously with 90 who didn't. And over two decades, the committed 90 delivered annual financial returns that were nearly 5% higher than the uncommitted 90. And that's just one proof point statistic among many others. But 99% of business and business leaders are still haunted by the ghost of that man. That's Milton Friedman, the Chicago economist who famously said that the social purpose of the social responsibility of business was to make profit. And Friedman and still worse his disciples are the unspoken challenges of common good. And my message to you is this, unless we come to terms with better profit, we may never come to terms with better trust. But as I mentioned in my opening comments, more trust may be the wrong aim anywhere. The aim to have more trust is in fact a stupid aim, argued O'Neill O'Neill. She is a moral philosopher and she said that in 2013 in her TED talk. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust should be the proper aim. Actually, trustworthiness and therefore better judgment matters more to O'Neill than trust. And better judgment is based on a combination of three things, competence, honesty, and reliability. And actually O'Neill points out that you'll never expect or want even more trust from the likes of someone like Bernie Madoff. Nor would you even want more trust or would you trust a dear friend to post a letter if you knew that friend was unreliable and had a history of forgetfulness. So trustworthiness is personal and reciprocal. It's not in the domain of brands, corporations, CEOs, or communications people. Reciprocal vulnerability, and I accept those are two very long words, reciprocal vulnerability makes accountability neutral. And reciprocal vulnerability means that organizations are as exposed to their employees and their customers as their employees and their customers have traditionally been exposed to them. And I think the genuinely trustworthy organization in the future is one that recognizes this and creates safe spaces for those relationships to flourish. And in those safe spaces invites in dissenting voices. It allows challenging conversations to flourish. And where it accepts that actually, you know what, there's no single correct answer. The genuinely trusted organization is where, metaphorically at least, the leadership stands naked before those that it serves. But this sets alarm bells ringing for PR traditionists. PR traditionists have always set out to know all the answers. That's why we have things called FAQs. They're there to ensure that organizations, brands, and companies only ever have happy endings. PR traditionists really don't like their leaders standing naked. And their leaders are rarely comfortable standing naked anyway. But this process is already happening and sometimes in places we might least expect. Tax, yes, tax of all issues is being debated and agreed among crowds. KPMG, disclosure, one of my clients, under the courageous leadership of the woman on my left, Jane McCormack, who's a European head of tax, has convened an open and very public debate on responsible tax and the common good. KPMG has created a safe space for a wide range of voices to be heard. And we've brought together KPMG clients, global corporations, NGOs, activists, members of parliaments, faith leaders, industry groups, regulators, administrators, governments, and even the UK Public Accounts Committee. And its leader, Margaret Hodge, who is one of those vocal critics of the corporate sector, global corporates and the big accounting firms. They've all been completely transparently involved in the conversation, which is available for all to see on the web. And a couple of months ago, we brought together 120 participants in what we called the Responsible Tax Big Tent. There we had distinctive, contrasting voices across the spectrum. And they spent five hours discussing and agreeing and disagreeing on various aspects of tax. It was a remarkable unconvention. And what we've done in this sort of new model, if you like, of stakeholder engagement, a new model of communications, is to deliberately create something that the client cannot control. And actually, it would be pointless if KPMG tried to control it anyway. Instead, what we've created is a space where everyone holds everyone else to account, however scary that will be. And Jane will tell you, stepping into this program, it was very scary indeed. But the principle is simple, which is that no one can learn and no one can progress if they don't listen. So this Jericho model is now being developed in other critical issue areas. We're looking at fossil fuels, divestment, life skills, affordability, the housing crisis. And many of these issues suffer huge and it often ill-informed not only regulatory pressures, but historically low trust, great fragility, and some antagonism. But to encounter, to take on that antagonism, I believe that better trustworthiness can be found by embracing this idea of vulnerability, and by everyone being honest and transparent together. And as part of the KPMG project, I was very privileged to spend time with Rowan Williams. Some of you may recognize him. He's the former Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Church. And Rowan spoke very wisely about apology. We're all very familiar with how we feel, he said, when someone says only, terribly sorry that you feel like that, rather than apologizing outright. And I think we all know what Rowan means, because sometimes only a proper sorry will do. And when it comes to how brands and corporations can communicate honestly and genuinely earn better trust, the ability to say a proper sorry is possibly the most important insight of all. So in wrapping up, I believe that seven strategies can actually help us better frame communication in this new normal. We have to accept chaos as reality. We have to radicalize our approach to honesty and transparency. We have to build coalitions, even as we saw from the KPMG and other examples, unlikely coalitions. We have to take to the social dance floor. We have to be social and networked in all its dimensions. This is not just about what we might do on Twitter, what we might do on Facebook, or what we might do on Instagram. This is about understanding how to live in a social world. We can be the media. We don't need to disintermediate anymore. We don't need agencies. We don't need to go through media themselves. We ourselves can write, we can film, we can blog, we can publish, we can share. We can socialize. Red Bull, GE are two ends of the corporate spectrum, one very consuming, the other very corporate, that do this very well. But we have to love citizen crowds. And at heart, we have to communicate through actions, not words. So we want to address, and that is if we do want to address, the crisis in trust and the crisis in leadership. The answer, I don't think, can lie with the old PR that many people still seek to practice, crafting narratives, managing messages, spinning meaningless platitudes. To earn genuine trust means reciprocal vulnerability alongside product and service excellence and public leadership. I think that making the right decisions and doing the right thing have never been more important as they are in the world today. You just have to ask the bankers or the energy companies or Thomas Cook or Vox Vagab. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much for a very interesting speech. You can find the slides on the web app with all the nice pictures. I really love your way of using pictures. Please go into the Jericho Chambers website. You can find all the employees have an alter ego, which is a famous person. I think yours is Bob Dylan, is that right? It is. That's Master Yoda also and everything. So, well, I have a couple of questions. I like your idea about that action speaks louder than words to gain real trust and honesty. I'm a little bit curious about you said that you don't like the emphasis on compliance. I mean, isn't compliance a way to ensure that you actually do act and not just say you act? I mean, I don't think imposing rule, I mean, yes, we have to have compliance around issues like safety and health and human rights. Yes, that's absolutely right. But trying to impose rules on people tends not to work. And past the problem, one of the reasons I think PR, old PR certainly is dead, is that it is actually a hierarchical discipline. It tries to impose solutions rather than negotiate solutions. And in doing so, you can look at it in terms of always having an adult to child relationship. That's what I mean by imposing rules. Do your homework, go to bed, eat your food, and what you do is you end up with rebellious children. I think proper communications needs to be about adult to adult, responsible, open, empathetic, intelligent conversations. And that's what I mean about moving beyond compliance. And past the problem with the compliance culture is that in being so terrified of doing the wrong thing, people forgot how to do the right thing. Next question. Let's take a company who actually do the right thing. Isn't it necessary for people to actually find out about it? Doesn't communication and that sort of PR still play a role in gaining the transparency, in communicating the actions, the results of a good guy company instead of a bad guy company? Yeah, I didn't write a book called Communications is Dead. I think communications is in many ways more important than ever before. And one of the things that my book has done is provoke a lot of debate in many countries about this relationship, in fact, in communications and public relations. But I think the example that I gave of the tragedy in Bangladesh is a very good one, which is that we can't use communications to cover up bad corporate practice in the same way that, in the exact same way that Thomas Cook tragedy was not a failure of communications. So yes, we should communicate, but the authenticity and the legitimacy of our communications is much stronger if we lead through our actions, not our words. And those actions, I know it's a bit of a cliche, will speak for themselves. And I do think in this new construct, a couple of thoughts. One, I don't think that the traditional big professional services firm agency model will survive. I think that's a problem not just for public relations, but lots of other sectors. What I do think is that you'll see, because of the war on talent, a lot more of that talent moving into the corporations themselves, and the corporations themselves learning how to communicate. And that may not be through people who are traditionally schooled in communications. It's just people who can bring to life those actions, not the words. But at the same time, we see, at least from a Danish perspective, the agency's getting bigger and bigger, and also more and more people working as consultants and agencies. So it's not a death to agencies either. So do you see these agencies transforming their services, or should they transform their services to fit the need of the companies? It's a great question. One of the stories I tell at the start of my book, and it's not really a business book, it's more of a sort of story. And it's actually, hopefully, quite readable. But one of the stories I tell is meeting a very famous British entrepreneur, a guy called Luke Johnson, who's made many hundreds of millions through selling many very successful companies. And Luke said, Robert, you have to understand, the PR industry is not dead. Because where there's a buyer, there's a market. And as long as people keep on buying PR services, there'll be people who want to create PR services to sell. And Luke is exactly right. So I'm very careful, again, just as I say communications is not dead. I also want to draw a distinction between the profession of PR and the industry. So I think the industry of PR will continue for quite some time yet. Because people are buying, people are selling, agencies are coming up with all sorts of different ideas. And rebranding themselves as storytellers, social experts, whatever it happens to be. And they will continue making money. But that doesn't mean that it's fit for purpose. And if you then go back to your question about communications versus PR, we then have all this endless conversation that's been going on for as long as I've worked in the sector about does PR belong in the boardroom? Strategy, strategic advice, strategic insight, great counsel belongs in the boardroom. Well, that's PR and I don't know. But if it's just stuff that people sell in order to make money out of stuff that people want to buy, that probably doesn't belong in the boardroom. And therefore, that's why I don't think that old PR is properly fit for purpose. You mentioned some companies who are doing it wrong and also so we kind of get the idea of what not to do. But can you point at some companies that are doing the right thing that we can get inspiration from? Well, that's why I gave the example there of Patagonia. I gave the example of the B corporations, which actually to your compliance point, have enshrined public value and purpose within their constitutions. People often say Unilever is a great example of it. I think I spoke two days ago at a conference of local government communicators, I think a lot of people who are trying to support and defend front line public services to citizens every day are getting a lot of stuff really right in very, very challenging circumstances. And this is a case across Europe where austerity measures are in place. So I think a lot of people have the right sentiment. What I often find is that really good people are trapped by very bad organizations and very bad systems. The other thing I would say is that when I was researching the case studies for my book, it's terrifying how you do come back to the usual suspects. So you do come back to Unilever and you do come back to organizations like the John Lewis Partnership or Handels Bank and it is a worry that we're not getting more people. So some people are doing it right, but quite frankly, not enough of them. Just a tiny question to one of your case stories, the KPMG. Yeah. Sounded very interesting, getting all kinds of stakeholders together, discussing tax policies. But going back to your own points about actions, at the same time, there's probably like hundreds of accountants in KPMG planning tax evasion for hundreds of companies. So in a tent, we discuss tax policy and in our business line, we do a lot of consultancy about tax evasion or what? Well, I fundamentally challenge your assumption. So I think, basically you're wrong and you're wrong for a couple of reasons. First of all, you said planning tax evasion, that would be illegal. No one plans tax evasion because it's against the law. What was in the KPMG program, the Responsible Tax of Common Good Project, started with a series of crowds of KPMG partners. So the definition of responsible tax and the definition of common good came from them, so it wasn't imposed from above. Secondly, what then came out of that were a series of principles that KPMG will abide by and want to abide by. So while this whole conversation goes around the dimensions of responsible tax and in that sense, tax is actually about compliance, but the KPMG and my position would be there is a moral dimension to tax. Everything is rooted in the principles. And if you were to ask, Jay McCormack, who I put on my slide, as actually certain journalists did over dinner, I was at in London last night, would you sack a client or even a partner that didn't abide by or work within the principles that KPMG is talking about? The answer is yes, she would. Yes, they would. So I think your assumptions are wrong. I think it's very difficult. Tax is a very, very difficult issue. But I think actually, from having spent two years working on tax projects, a lot of corporations really just want better answers to how they navigate the landscape of tax. I don't think they deliberately set out to... But you mentioned the banks in your own... I mentioned the accountants. I mean, same, same, almost, not quite, I hear. But what I want to ask you is, don't we have these huge global corporations like Volkswagen, like maybe KPMG, like many of the big banks who on a president CEO level, they have all the kind of values, they hire people like you, they do all the right stuff, and then hundreds of people do a lot of other Volkswagen mixing kind of stuff. Well, I mean, it depends on whether you're a cynic or an optimist. What are you? I'm an optimist. So I believe fundamentally that people want to do good. I feel that most people want to do good things. And again, through the course of writing the book and researching and talking, we actually crowdfunded the book, interestingly, and brought the voices of the crowd into the book. And that's partly because a traditional publisher wanted to publish it, but that felt very old school and very hierarchical. And what I learned from that, we bring those real voices in. And yes, there were people who were skeptical, cynical. But most people really have a thirst, have an appetite for doing good and want to change. We have that in our private lives. We have it in our professional lives, too. What they can't understand is how many of the organizations for whom they work don't let them do that. So yes, you're right. There's often a lot of meaningless platitudes spoken at the top and a lot of good will at the bottom. And what I'm trying to do is, that's my point about negotiating the future, not imposing it and bringing together those voices so you can reach a new settlement. I think you're right. We all want to do good. And I like your optimism. Maybe we should turn to the front. I think we should open up for questions. If anyone wants to ask a question, please raise your hand and have a microphone in your direction. We'll stare at you until you ask questions. We'll just... I have another... Yeah, we have one down here. Yeah, we'll take that. Just wait for the microphone. I always wait for the microphone. Who are you? Just please say your name. You know it, but I tell you, I'm Karl Heinz from Copenhagen Business School. I like to talk very, very much because what you were talking about actually is that communication is that you cannot manage communication. You might be able to navigate in communication or negotiate in a discourse and not anything else. But here comes my question. We are talking a lot about public-private partnerships in those days. And this is between the market and the state. We are talking a lot about smart cities. This again is either the state or the private sector. In Copenhagen it's Hitachi or it's a partnership between them. Where in the heck are the citizens? Where is the civil society? Two great points and that wasn't a set up. I do a lot of work in human cities. I've worked with Axel Nobel on a human cities program and I'm involved heavily in the regeneration of West London. So I can answer with some degree of knowledge. But your first point is exactly right. You can't manage PR. You can't manage communications. As an academic, I guess if you're at Copenhagen Business School you are an academic, but the answer is that we have lived in a world of distributive dialogue for too long. We've been telling people what to do. We've been telling people what to believe. The future for me lies in generative dialogue, in bringing together these voices and getting people to talk together and to find best solutions. And the public-private partnerships is absolutely right. It is the future of cities. You see it with any number of future cities programs from Siemens to IBM, Smarter Planet to Hitachi, whoever it is. And yes, they do rely on public-private partnerships. And part of the problem is then actually, there's a bigger problem, which is communications within the political elite that doesn't allow those public-private partnerships to flourish. But actually, I think the organizations, private sector organizations and public sector organizations are missing something if they don't bring the voice of civil society into the equation. The UK had a slightly failed experiment with its big society a few years ago. But there's no reason why you can't bring civil society into the equation. That's why I gave the example of Porto Alegre in Brazil, which for the best part, 20 years now, has set its budgets with its local people. You can take the case of Freiburg in Germany, where they've been building new schemes, new housing, safer schemes, multi-generational units, low-energy cost houses. How have they done that? Because they've asked the people who live in them. So that's my point about not only is it about being activist and society first and citizen-centric, it's about co-production. So I think maybe part of the problem is that if you're, and I don't know because I don't know the guys at Siemens or Hitachi well enough, but maybe it's just their thinking that it's too top-down. Maybe it's too engineering-led and it's not enough citizen-thinking-led. And that's the change that we need to have. But my message to them would be, involve citizens in the project, you'll get a much better result. You also talked about collaboration and competition. You said it's better to collaborate than compete with each other. But if you take, I mean, it's very sympathetic and I would love, being an optimist myself, I would love that to be true. But then you look at like Apple versus Microsoft, you look at China versus Europe, and so on. Both on a company and on a state level, the world seems to be driven by competition. So in all respect, who are you to claim that that's not working? Well, I'm not saying the competition doesn't work. It's just I don't think it's a particularly attractive style of leadership. Especially I mentioned, it wasn't a joke, 44 CEOs among the top 50 in Europe in one room, one woman. And then if you think about the language that they use, I'm going to take them out, I'm going to wipe out the competition. It's usually Americans, macho style. I'm going to lay waste to everything in front of me. Yeah, chest beating. This is bullshit, right? The world doesn't have to be like this. And I think that what you raise there is an important point. And there is a political and economic fault line that runs through my work, which is that on the one hand, you might have Friedman, on the other hand, you might have John Maynard Keynes, you might have Marx on the left and Hayek on the right. And there are some people who are very, very attuned to certain beliefs. And you raise the thing about tax. And there are some people who, you know, you go to America and you talk about tax. And, you know, and they think that their heroic duty is to pay as little tax as possible. And the local government conference I was speaking at earlier in the week, they said the problem with Britain is that you want Scandinavian social welfare on American taxes. You know, so at some point, we have to find a way of reconciling these competing interests. But the point I was trying to make is that you can find a richer discourse in collaboration. You can find better answers in collaboration. And I think that macho, you know, beating everybody else up is not necessarily the answer. You talked about the new kind of public leadership you wanted and you gave some good examples of collaborations going into that. What about the government? Do you see the same trends in government, the same problems? Is the analysis the same? The government problems are this writ large. So you know, you see it from politicians every day. One of the stories I recount in my book is of a government minister in the UK who used to walk into his department every morning, sit down, and instead of saying, as the business leader said, who do we fuck today, he said, what's the headline in the Daily Mail? For those of you who don't know, the Daily Mail is the paper of Middle England. It's one of the largest circulation newspapers. It is quite right-wing and it's quite polarizing in its opinions. So he was actually developing policy based on a response to a headline. So in a way, there was no policy substance. It was all about the message. What's the headline? What can I counter with? And how many times do we see politicians say, OK, I've got to land this. I've got to land this. I've got 20 seconds. I've got a sound bite. What's my sound bite? Where's my spin doctor? What do I say? And then politicians wonder why they're not trusted. It's because everyone can see through their bullshit, you know. And the phrase that I'd like to use is that we see what they see. So why do they think that we don't? I just don't understand that. And unfortunately, you see it reach its apogee, if you like, with the current refugee crisis where you see politicians who you know believe one thing but will say another because they think it's a vote winner. I was at a conference in London a month ago, a behavioral exchange, where I served Jeremy Hayworth. Corbyn? No, Hayworth, I think. The cabinet secretary, John Fray. Yeah, Hayworth. He talked for, he led a discussion for two hours about behavioral change and engaging citizens to do their own change. I mean, it sounded very good. So do you see any development in the government or do you just see what's the daily... There are people, certainly, funny enough, I was talking to one of the senior civil servants who's organized the HR function in the UK civil service, and they are looking at ways of flattening hierarchies and changing stuff. I did a TED talk a few weeks ago for the police, and they're doing some deep thinking about how to get rid of everything driven by compliance, everything driven by rules, everything driven by hierarchy. So there's another organization that's really thinking about it. But on the other hand, I was speaking in a debate, and there was one civil servant who said, well, I'm 50 years old, I can't be bothered with all the social network rubbish. So it's like, when it's not down to you, mate, it's down to the people that you're meant to serve. And I think part of the problem is that institutions exist to serve citizens, not the other way around. And there will always be people in government, especially in bureaucracies in government, who think the citizens are there to serve the institution. So just before I take the last question for you, Robert, just by a show of hands, how many of you work on a daily basis, weekly basis, with PR, would say you work somewhat with PR? Some more. You're thinking, OK, so maybe a third, almost half of the people here today. You're not saying they're going to be out of a job, but what I would like you to give advice on is how do you start the morning? Because also being a former PR consultant myself, you start looking at what's in the papers. Should you instead look at what's being said on Facebook, Twitter, or where should you start in the morning or end in the evening for that sake? Well, if you're working for Volkswagen or one of the bad banks, you're probably going to look in the mirror and ask, should I be doing my job? One of the stories I tell in the book, I came across a blog written by a 20-something, and it was the best title of a blog I've ever read. And the title was very simple. I don't want to work for your shitty agency anymore. And this was the story of someone who loved communication, loved the news, loved the media, loved the zeitgeist, but didn't want to work within the nonsense of an organization that told her she had to be at her desk at 8 a.m. or earlier still to read the papers. She had to write a press release. She had to only say nice things to her client. When she ran out of things to say, she had to write a PowerPoint presentation that nobody would read in case that they thought they weren't doing something. So again, I'm not saying that the great communications people are dead. All I'm saying is the structures within which they operate. And one of the things that I've been really proud and privileged about in terms of the past year and a half this project has been running is the number of, I hesitate to use the word young people because it sounds terrible, but the number of young people who have written to me and said thank you. Thank you because we never believed that your generation could see what we see. And my answer to all of them, and there are a couple of stories of Roxanne and Dagmara both told in the book, is why would you not expect me to see that? I'm not blind to it. And one of my recommendations to the large consultancy industry is this. And I've said it several times, so I'll say it again, which is that skip two generations of leadership. Get rid of the mostly pale, male and stale leadership of large global consulting firms and drop it to bright 20 and 30 somethings to completely re-energize the communication sector. We've got some young people down here cheering, yay, the women win. The future doesn't belong to me nor can I even help decide it. And part of the problem is that people who run those large consultancy firms are a few years off retirement. And so they're just trying to get to the end of the place where they can pick up their paycheck and piss off, right? That's not the way it should be. Give it to the next generation, the generation after that, and take it from that. Thank you so much, Robert Williams. Just so, Robert Phillips, sorry. You call me Robbie Williams if you want. That was the alter ego thing. What you don't know is that right after your speech, we're actually going to have a presentation from the young people here. So I'm really glad that we made that bridge to the next generation. Let's give a big hand to Robert Phillips.