The Arthur W. Page Society concluded its 21 st Annual Conference with a close up view of the challenges America faces with its constituencies abroad.

Patricia Harrison, acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Torie Clarke, former Pentagon spokesperson, provided unique perspectives on what is happening in Iraq and how the U.S. is dealing with the situation there.

Harrison, who in addition to being acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy is also assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, talked about the efforts “to engage the people in the troubled areas of the Middle East. There are people of good will everywhere; it’s up to us to find them.”

After 9/11, she said, “We saw that we had to move away from serving the elite (in the Middle East) and start working with the undereducated and underemployed.” This led to the formation of “Partnerships for Learning” (P4L), a global initiative that includes programs such as high school exchanges with the Arab and Muslim world and the “CultureConnect” program that sends American performing artists to teach master classes and, as Harrison said, “talk to young people about what they can aspire to.”

Harrison was also instrumental in reviving the Fulbright Program in Afghanistan and Iraq. “There are now about 25 men and women from Iraq on Fulbrights,” she said. “By 2005, we should have well over a thousand in the program. We expect these young people to return to Iraq and Afghanistan with enthusiasm for what is possible.”

By reaching out to young people, teachers and journalists, Harrison said, “We are connecting in ways that don’t make the headlines.” By engaging in a dialogue and providing opportunities “to see America through their own eyes,” she said, “we are building relationships that will last a lifetime.”

But, Harrison said, “there is no magic short cut to make this happen. We have to commit to the long term in order to build and sustain these programs of public diplomacy.”

Torie Clarke has been at the center of some of the most historic events in the U.S. in recent years. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, she was at her desk in the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 11, 2001. She became one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s top aides and was instrumental in designing the program that embedded correspondents with military units at the start of the Iraqi War.

Although there were different points of view about how to cover the war, Clarke said, “We had to get the media involved in order to tell our story. It was important to military operations and it was important that the American people see conflict as they have never seen it before.”

When the reporters, including foreign correspondents, were embedded, Clarke said, there was a debate over what they might report. “Although we knew there may be scenes of death and injury,” she said, “I believed that, even in times of life or death, it is better to tell the truth and be honest.”

When information travels so fast, Clarke said, there is no way to hide from the truth. “And telling the truth includes admitting mistakes,” she said. “In Washington – and particularly at the Pentagon -that’s very hard to do.”

While she was the Pentagon spokesperson, Clarke said she always tried very hard to find out what was happening, something that was not easy to do when so much information was pouring in from Iraq. “But when we screwed up,” she said, “we admitted it and told the press what we were doing to fix it.”

The bottom line: “It’s all about listening,” Clarke said.

Listening was all about what Don Stacks, a noted expert on listening at the University of Miami, told the conferees in the first session of the final day. Quoting Dr. Warren Guthrie, who is considered the father of listening theory, Stacks noted that “Almost all of us hear, but nearly none of us listen.”

While business studies indicate that listening is a top skill for success, Stacks said, the cost of poor listening in business is estimated to be $1 billion a day. There are a number of reasons, he said, why listening has declined as a type of communication: we’re too busy, listening is not considered as important as it used to be, and we have too much information to work with. Some of the culprits in the decline of listening are email and voicemail which have become listening alternatives.

Because we are not especially good at listening, Stacks said, it costs us in terms of business, profits and relationships. “We need to learn to how to listen,” he said, “and how to utilize the discrepancy between speech and thought.” He added that distractions – both internal and external – disrupt the listening process.

“Listening is a two-way process,” Stacks said. “We need to involve all parties and keep them involved.”

Harvey Greisman, the Conference chair, wrapped up the meeting with an admonition and a challenge, saying he believes the public relations profession “is at a critical junction on the road to either greater success – or a loss of integrity and identity. I say this,” he continued, “because many of our basic communications tools are now available to anyone and everyone through the blessings of technology – and more are invented almost every week, it seems, which only complicates the listening process because there is so much more that we are hearing.”

But, Greisman went on, “we all know that simple access to the Web does not a professional communicator make.”

Referring to the experiences of his own company, IBM, which has recognized the need to apply “deep industry insight” to the marketing of its technological tools, he said that the PR profession “is similarly situated at the intersection of technology and business insight. It is no longer enough to simply apply the basic tools to generate activity,” he said. “We need to wrap them in business insight, in values, and in the best strategic thinking we can offer in order to drive real business results.”

Similarly, the business process transformations taking place across all industries require the underpinning of communications to effect changes. “If we can combine our business insight and ability to truly listen to our customers with the best tools of our trade, I believe we can evolve our profession from a staff competency to a business line solution – with the opportunity to be priced and valued accordingly.” The Arthur W. Page Society, Greisman said, is “the group to make that happen.”