Ron Rhody
1996

"Of Wooly Buggers, Managers, and Times to Come"

Rhody's long career in public relations included serving as executive vice president and director-corporate communications and external affairs at BankAmerica and corporate vice president and director of public relations and advertising for Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp.

To download a printable version of this speech, click here.

I was once invited to deliver a graduation address and asked my son, a teenager himself at the time, what should I talk about. He said, "Talk short."

I know that to be good advice and I'm going to follow it tonight.

First let me say how flattered and honored am. To be considered among the company of professionals who have received this recognition is a matter of high moment to me.

I remember when I first came up to New York from Ravenswood, West by-God Virginia, to run the Kaiser eastern operations I was about 28 or 29 suppose - sitting in the audience at the Waldorf as Ed Block received one of the many awards he's earned over the years, a little in awe at the things he'd done and the way he handled himself, and thinking, "That's what I want to be when I grow up."

And Larry Foster, watching the magic lie worked during the Tylenol crisis. In my day, as you were coming up, you walked respectfully in the presence of such figures. Once, being permitted to serve on a committee Larry chaired, meeting in New Orleans, flight delayed out of San Francisco, rushing to not be late, I raised up into an open luggage compartment door on the plane and split open the top of my head (which sported not much more hair that it does now). Ignoring it, I sped to the meeting. It was well underway when I entered the room. I guess blood was beginning to edge down my forehead because with a raised hand Larry stopped the meeting, called a bell-boy, sent him out for antiseptic and bandages, then proceeded to field dress my wound in the middle of the room while the meeting continued with all the god-like creatures looking on.

That always impressed me as true command presence under fire.

I was to later learn he was equally cool in other situations.

We were fly fishing on the Greenbrier River and somehow I managed to put a hook, all the way past the barb, clear through the lobe of my right ear.

So there I was, bleeding again, attached to the rod by a fly in my ear - a Woolly Bugger, I recall - and no way to pull it out. Larry waded over, assessed the situation, reached up and cut the fly loose with his clippers, patted me on the shoulder, and returned to fishing, leaving me standing there with the fly dangling from my ear and little drops of blood dripping slowly in the stream. It didn't hurt a lot, but it was sort of disconcerting you know. How was I going to get the damn thing out? Should I start fishing again or were hosts of germs already invading my system? Tetanus? River sickness? Lord, who knew out there in the wilds of West Virginia? Should I get to a doctor? Where would I find a doctor way out there?

Larry was unperturbed. He kept on fishing.

As it turned out, I lived, and although I thought I might have started a new fashion trend that year, Woolly Bugger earrings never caught on.

But the principles of men like Ed Block and Foster, Harold Burson and Chet Burger, Howard Chase and Jack Koten, and the others who have been honored with this award have caught on, though, and we are all the better for that.

When I asked Kurt Stocker what I should talk about tonight, he agreed with my son, reflecting the universal wisdom - "about 20 minutes."

I take these sorts of things seriously, so I went over the remarks of the last three speakers -Jack Koten, Larry Foster and Ed Block -to see what had already been talked about. I found they'd covered it all.

So what I'd like to do tonight, with your indulgence, is not talk to grand issues or great themes, but rather offer a few personal observations about this craft we practice and where it might be going. I may say a few things that not everyone agrees with, but I hope that's okay. These are my opinions only and differences of opinion, after all, are what make horse races.

I'll state my prejudice right up front: This is still the best game in town. The most challenging, demanding, rewarding (at least in terms of psychic income and increasingly in terms of the real stuff), and exciting game in town.

I think the game is going to get even better.

The savvy CEOs are realizing they stand no chance at all of reaching their goals unless they can create buy-in; the tool that creates buy-in is the one we own.

I think most senior management - sometimes nudged by their board of directors, but not always - are realizing they badly need the counsel and abilities and experience that only a first rate professional can provide.

And I think more and more they want it and are willing to pay top dollar for it ...if they can only figure out what it is and who can do it!

Two examples from within just the past month may help explain what I mean.

A certain company is at one of the most important junctures in its history. If it takes the right action, it will be a world beater. If it takes the wrong one, or worse, no action at all, it will be an also-ran. The key is whether management can gain the support of two clearly defined constituencies. Whether they can or not depends on how convincingly and persuasively they can make their case.

He needs help.

He knows he needs help.

But his public relations staff can't provide it. They can't because they consider themselves part of the marketing function, and as a consequence they are totally unequipped, by either mind-set, inclination, or experience, to handle major gut issues like this one on which, in the final analysis, the company's fate rests.

That the public relations staff is inadequate isn't wholly the CEO's fault. He'd been told, you see, that public relations is a marketing function and since he knew nothing about the function himself, he went along. It turns out, of course, that public relations isn't a marketing function. It is a reputation function - an "existence" function...a discipline involved with all the corporation's challenges and opportunities and capable of helping it get where it wants to go with maximum support and minimum interference. It can, of course, do an excellent job in supporting sales and marketing, but that is only a part, and not necessarily a major part, of the charter the public relations organization must carry in a successful corporation.

The CEO, presently up to his knees in alligators, now understands this. I think it will be okay. Pros have been brought in to help deal with the situation. And now that the CEO's attention is focused on the matter, I think the internal PR operation will get a different charter.

Recently, another major corporation turned over its entire public relations, governmental affairs and internal communications operations to a manager with absolutely no experience at all. This sort of thing isn't untypical. It happens with disturbing frequency. Why it does is a matter we'll get to later.

This manager, a friend, called me in to discuss what he should do. We talked about that. We talked about what the function is, what its objectives ought to be, the kind of people it ought to be staffed with.

This is a bright man -an attorney by training. Generally he knows what he doesn't know. Like almost everyone else, unfortunately, he thought he knew what public relations is and he was certain that any reasonably competent manager could manage the function quite well.

He doesn't think that now.

The only advice you can give someone in this circumstance is that they make sure they have the best professional staff that can be mustered ...then listen to them. Luckily, the staff in this case is first rate and the manager is smart enough to listen to them and let them do their job, as I think he will, he'll get by. But this won't be as effective as if a first-rate professional ran the program.

The lawyer is in the job because the CEO and other senior members of management know him and trust him. They feel comfortable with him. They say to themselves, "He's intelligent, he knows the company, he's got good judgment, what's the big deal? He can manage it; give it to him."

This is the situation most of the time when nonprofessionals are put into the top jobs. Senior management knows them, are comfortable with them, really don't know or have little faith in the incumbent head of PR, and don't understand the function. And they think any competent manager can manage it.

Sometimes that's right, the professional staff is strong enough. Some excellent programs are being run by non-professionals.

But often it's dead wrong. The "manager" doesn't have the experience, the knowledge, or the feel for what needs doing and how to do it.. doesn't have the almost intuitive understanding and the instinctive insights that come from having been there and done that. The staff knows this and they can't help but be a little resentful. More important, it's hard to muster confidence that the right decisions will be made in clutch circumstances and they get worried and frustrated. But if they are a good staff, they'll do all can to protect the "manager" and help make him successful. Still, the time will come when he'll have to make an important decision in a clutch situation on his own, because he's the one with the authority and responsibility. That's when it becomes apparent that experience and professional ability count. When barbarians are at the gate, a first-rate staff under leadership is absolutely necessary to the corporation's success and growth.

There are a number of reasons why senior management picks non-professionals to head the function.

The two more important, to my mind, are these:

First, we've succumbed to the manager myth. We've convinced ourselves that we have to be "managers." We think we'll get a seat at that table everyone seems so interested in sitting at if we walk and talk like "managers." "If it walks like one and talks like one it must be a manager. Bring that fellow to the party right away!"

So we get away from the hands-on activities that built our reputation and got us our promotions in the first place. We "delegate" and "supervise" and don't like to get our hands dirty writing speeches, or releases, or dealing face-to-face with the hostile media.

Don't get me wrong. Superior management skills are critical to running a successful public relations operation. But the CEO has managers running out his ears. The business schools churn them out by the tens of thousands each year.

The thing that has differentiating value for the CEO is the professional whose individual skills, experience and judgment he can count on when the chips are down and who can help him create the buy-in he needs all the time.

Our principal value isn't as managers it is as professionals.

When we stop plying our trade, we lose our edge and our value diminishes.

It has been my experience that when it really counts, the CEO wants to know that he or she has someone working with him who knows what to do, how to do it, and can do it themselves - whether it's handle the tough media, write the critical policy speech, fashion the persuasive strategy, talk with the Congressman, soothe the irate customer...but just get the job done.

Whether you actually do those things yourself is not as important as the CEO knowing you can and taking comfort in that fact.

The second major reason that non-professionals wind up in the CPRO chair is that we do such an awful job of marketing ourselves back to the people who pay the bills.

It is a mystery to me why people whose stock in trade is the creation, articulation, packaging and merchandising of ideas and concepts are so bad at selling themselves to the people who buy their services.

If there is as big a misunderstanding and lack of appreciation as there is said to be about what this function is and what value it brings to the table in corporate America, then that is our fault.

If we think performance will speak for itself, we're wrong.

If we think the value of what we've done is obvious, we're wrong.

If we think there will be automatic appreciation for our work, we're wrong.

And we know this to be true.

We know from our work on behalf of the corporation with the constituents important to it that all these statements are true. That's why we do many of the things we do - to gain support and understanding for our corporation.

Doing that same job inside, with the internal constituents important to our program's health and success, is no less important...and all the more crucial now with the stresses straining our business.

There is also a third and a fourth reason.

The real pros make the job look easy. They do it with such skill and seamlessness that it appears nothing much of note is going on. The press isn't on your back, employees aren't picketing, special interest groups aren't burning you in effigy, shareholders aren't yelling for management's hide, Congress and the regulators aren't panting at the door - what could be so demanding about managing the public relations function? What indeed.

The final reason may be simply incompetence - a job done so poorly that management figures it can't get any worse so give it to a manager and get on with it.

That doesn't apply to anyone in this room, of course. You've survived what has been perhaps the most traumatic decade this field has ever experienced. The takeovers and mergers and downsizings and rightsizings of the past 10 years or so produced a lot of casualties. Budgets were slashed, staffs were cut, in some cases whole departments disappeared. A lot of people got bloodied. There are still a lot of walking wounded out there, and a lot of apprehension still among the survivors.

So it has been a time of mixed blessings for you. Compensation packages have grown quite nicely, and in many cases you've wound up with not only increased responsibility - but with increased authority as well. But you've also been left with reduced staffs and the wounds associated with making those cuts, and with a personal workload that is sometimes murderous, with no prospect that it will ease soon.

During a much shorter time frame there has also been a significant change in the senior players of the game. To a very large extent these people, because of who they were and what they achieved, defined the function for the management they associated with in their companies and industries and for most in the profession.

This senior tier of professionals has been changing more rapidly than at any time I can remember. In the last three years or so Dick Mau of Rockwell, Dave Metz of Kodak, Grant Horne ofPG&E, Kurt Stocker of Continental, Carole Howard of Reader's Digest, Tom Flynn of Bechtel, Rod Hartung of Chevron, Tom Faye of United Technologies, Don Frenette of 3M, Ann Barkelew of Dayton-Hudson, Jack Felton of McCormick and others whose names you know have all moved out of the chief public relations officer chairs.

Over the next three to five years, easily as many more top positions will be vacated by pros who are ready to cash in their chips - because things have changed in their company and they don't enjoy the game anymore...because they want to try something else while there's still time...or simply because they can afford it and they are ready.

My point with this recitation of names is that we're seeing a more rapid turnover of the leadership of this profession than any time in my experience, removing, in a relatively short time frame, the experience and influence these players brought to the game.

I know whether this is good or bad. All I know is it makes a difference. Different players make a different game.

If my counting is right, and don't hold me to too tight a time margin, we've had roughly four generations of public relations leadership in this country ... some overlap, of course, but basically four.

First the Bernays and the Ivy Lees. Then the Pages and Hills and Chases. Then the generation just before mine - Harold Burson, Bill Shepard of Alcoa, Bob Sandberg of Kaiser, John Verstradte of 3M, Sandy Jones of Grumman, Marty McKim of Kraft, Ed Block of AT&T, Larry Foster of Johnson & Johnson, to mention just a few.

And now my generation is beginning to stand down, too.

Most of these people were in their jobs, my generation included 'top jobs' for 10 or 15 years, some longer.

There were reasons for that. They knew their company's business as well as the line managers, they were damn good at what they did, they delivered when it counted, but perhaps most important, they all had strong synergistic relationships with the top management of their firms. They were known. They were respected. They were trusted.

I'm not sure it is possible to build the same sort of relationships today with the way musical chairs are being played in corporate management. But it may be. In fact it may be easier. The new crop of senior managers, for the most part, are less media shy, much more sensitive to their constituents' expectations and standards, and far more understanding of the value of buy-in.

They are also very demanding. They demand people who are able to take responsibility, exercise authority, deliver results, and who are willing to live or die by that standard - daily.

That's you, of course. All of you in this room.

You've got the ball - you and your peers. How you handle yourselves and the results you achieve determine the value of the function now. Your ideas define the field.

Even so, the values remain constant. They are nowhere better expressed than in the principles of this organization. I commend them to your daily attention.

I have to say in closing that I envy you the fun and excitement you ought to have working through the challenges and opportunities ahead. You're going to be dealing with so much, of such importance, so fast, that there's actually no possibility of being bored. You ought to have a ball - if you're tough enough.

As for me, I left Bank of America a little over three years ago. My intention was to write the great American novel,or short of that, catch a lot of trout. I totaled up my stock options and the company's executive plan and figured that if Patsy and I didn't intend to live much past 100, we could get along just fine.

I even did a first draft of the book.

But then I got distracted by the challenges that were coming in to the consultancy I'd opened to give me something to do if I ran into writer's block. Almost right away, it became full-time.

Patsy accuses me of using the consultancy as an excuse. If I'm busy there, I'm too busy to write. Consequently I don't have to run the risk of finding out if I'm any good or not. She may be right.

So, to find out, in January upcoming, on the occasion of my 65th birthday and after some 44 years in the game, I am - finally - going to stand down. I have trouble uttering the word, but here it is: I'm going to retire ...and write the book and chase trout and steelhead.

On that occasion I will say, as I say now ... it's been a grand ride and a glorious time ...and I thank you one and all.