The CEO is an organisation’s best public relations tool

Devasis Chattopadhyay

Jeffrey E Garten, the dean of Yale School of Management and author of a new study of chief executive officers (CEO) described the role of a CEO in a 21st century organisation in his book The Mind of the CEO as “mission impossible”.

In a seminar during the Davos World Economic Forum, he said that a host of conflicting and ever-growing pressures from the media, shareholders, employees, government and various pressure groups were making the job of a CEO very difficult, and reducing the average tenure of a CEO.

Though the panel of CEOs with such illustrious participants as chairmen of Toshiba and Novartis, who had shared the stage with Mr Garten, hotly debated the issue, world-wide statistics indisputably showed that the CEO attrition rate had increased markedly during the last decade. At present, the average tenure of a CEO is anything between three-to-five years.

While concluding, Mr Garten said: “No CEO would want to agree that his (or her) mission is impossible. But, he (or she) has to keep in mind that the challenges for the 21st century are very complex and to handle those challenges the most important skill that a leader or a CEO should possess, or if necessary, acquire, is the communications skills”.

Well, thank you Mr Garten, I couldn’t have agreed more with you for providing people like me, who deal in communications, with the opportunity to step into the arena.

Sorry, if I appear immodest by talking in first person singular but I feel it will be better if I talk about my experiences and learning, and about my tiny cog-role in the huge communications wheel. Well, what I hope to achieve through this column is a lively debate. Because, in my 20-odd years of experience in the field, I found to my dismay that communications or public relations (PR) are oft quoted but the most misunderstood and least comprehended tool of the strategic decision-making process.

The question remains: Why should the CEO be the communicator when I claim to be an expert and get paid for it? Simply because organisations, like people, are not islands. They exist within the framework of society. Any organisation’s ability to function is directly affected by other organisations, who could also be its competitors and various other interested groups like shareholders, employees and government, who exist within the same social framework.

Organisations, unlike people, can’t speak. So the image projected by an individual associated with the organisation tends to become in the audience’s mind the image of the organisation. And, if the individual happens to be the CEO, the depth to which that image is impressed grows markedly. So the CEO’s public image is the organisation’s in the target audience’s mind.

Let’s consider some examples: What do you think of Shaw Wallace & Company? Or, say, Dunlop? Or, the chairmen of these companies? Have you tried to find out what you think of them? Another try, what you do think of Infosys? Or its head, Narayanamurthy? I know the answer — in all probability you like the company. But why? The answer could be Narayanamurthy. Though, the company’s products may be impressive but, in our minds, Narayanamurthy embodies and communicates what Infosys as an organisation stands for and believes in.

Jeffrey Garten is correct. I can safely lock his answer.

Let’s now think of another scenario. When in crisis, whom do the owners and CEOs seek out? Whom did the Hinduja brothers rely upon to communicate their side of the story during their recent fracas with the law? Or, for that matter, film financier Bharat Shah’s family? Well, in both the cases it’s neither the advertising nor marketing consultants, but PR practitioners. So that they can look, act, speak and communicate their side of the story effectively.

Professor Norman Cousins of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and erstwhile editor of the Saturday Review of the United States once said: “The most precious enterprise in the world is effective communication. It is the ultimate art”.

This is the game PR practitioners play. Of course, we play it behind the scene. Some call us corporate communicators or image managers, or image advisors. An essential part of a PR person’s job is to strategically help the organisational head to look, act and speak a part in public and private to enhance his/her as well the organisation’s reputation and image. And to do this effectively, the best public relations tool is none other than the CEO.

The writer is a PR practitioner