I finished reading Tough Calls by Dick Martin. Martin was the head of PR for AT&T during the tumultuous years when C. Michael Armstrong was CEO. He actually worked in PR for AT&T for several administrations before that, so he has an interesting historical perspective, but in particular he spends much of the book talking about PR during Armstrong's tenure as that was such a period of upheaval for the company and the industry (actually several industries) as a whole.
Martin uses the story of the period from the Telecoms Act (which attempted to force open local telephone service), through the dot-com boom and the decline of long-distance service as a cash-cow, to the second Big Breakup of AT&T, to discuss the lessons he has learned in doing PR over the years.
As an insider's chronicle of those years at AT&T, it's a terrible book. It jumps around all over the place, and it's nearly impossible to keep the players straight. But as a book about how hard it is to do PR right, and how easy it is to do it wrong, it's chock-full of important lessons.
As a couple of my colleagues at Microsoft have pointed out, there are many parallels between AT&T and Microsoft in the stories and the lessons. Through much of this period, it was fashionable to portray AT&T as a big, monolithic, fairly evil company And their efforts notwithstanding, they were unable to overcome that reputation. Some ofthat just comes from the fact that everyone likes David-and-Goliath stories. But another part is that there are simply some inherent weaknesses in large companies, like the inevitable leaks that force you to respond quickly without sufficient time to prepare.
Most chapters start with some piece of philospohy to help guide a PR person's thoughts and decisions. Those alone are worth the price of the book. I think there are a couple, though, that I will paraphrase here that have always guided my approach to PR for MSR.
1. PR is about helping people to understand your business, why it makes sense, why it's good for them, and why they want to be a part of it. But that means that you need to understand your own business, deeply. I've met many PR people who don't understand the business that they serve -- it's particularly common in technical fields, where the products are often arcane and the people who build them don't value marketing and PR enough to invest in them. But it doesn't matter: you still have to understand it, or you can't do the job. If you're responsible for PR for a business, find someone in the cleint team who can explain it to you and answer all of your questions -- and if the client won't do it, quit. If you have a PR team, make sure they are in the loop on the goals and operations -- and if the PR folks refuse to get up to speed on them, fire them.
2. Tell the truth. It's been said that you should always tell the truth, that way you don't have to remember your own lies. That's certainly true, but I think the real reason is deeper. Martin makes an effort in his book to point out exactly how important credibility is to people and to companies. Your credibility is everything: it's what your company's relationships with customers, partners, press, analysts, and shareholders are all based upon. Credibility is hard-earned, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to win back once lost. Telling the truth is the only way to build and preserve your credibility.
3. Every organization has values, and they need to be reflected in every aspect of the business, including PR. There are lots of ways to do PR; the ones that you pick need to be completely consistent with the values that you hold dear. Here's an example from Microsoft: employee blogging. Microsoft was built on a motto of "a computer on every desktop and in every home." That's a strong message about the value of personal empowerment. To that end, employee blogging is encouraged. To the best of my knowledge, the company doesn't have a formal employee blogging policy; if it did, I would expect that it would say two things:
1. Be thoughtful and careful about what you blog.
2. Remember that your employment agreement prohibits disclosing confidential information without authorization.
Which is just about the perfect balance between emplowering employees and protecting the interests of the company. One of the challenges of Microsoft is that just as there are separate businesses within the company, those businesses often have different cultures and balance their values differently. I can assure you that there are vastly different cultures in the XBox group and in the SQL Server group. That makes Corporate PR for MS an incredibly difficult job, as they have to craft a credible image for Microsoft that combines all of those businesses and cultures into one.
But I digress... the bottom line on Tough Calls is that the storytelling is weak but the wisdom is strong, and if you either work in PR or work with a PR team, this is worthwhile reading.
And now begins the summer reading season. I have a lovely stack of books waiting for me, and for lazy summer afternoons in Friday Harbor. Including (but not limited to):
This House Has Fallen, by Karl Maier
Galveston, by Sean Stewart
The Sinking Ark, by Norman Myers
Lost, by Gregory Maguire
Emotional Design, by Don Norman
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Dateworthy, by Dennie Hughes
It should be a GREAT summer of reading.
9:43:09 PM 
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