The Good, The Bad, The Spin

Read part 1.

Q: What happens if, as a public relations professional, you see communications disconnects in your senior leadership? For example, maybe your CEO is not a good communicator or is somebody who goes around and shoots him or herself in the foot all the time.

Jim Lukaszewski: The rest of the book, the discipline, has to do with the question: What do you have to know how to do to have the influence you want to have? The questions the book answers are: How do I get to the table? How do I get to the inner circle? How do I get next to the person to heed the advice I think I have to offer? What is the secret to doing that?

The first premise of the book is that every problem is a management problem before it’s anything else. The second premise of the book is that you are the table. If you want to have this role, then you need to learn how to do this to get there. There are things you need to know how to do to be able to get there to give the advice that’s necessary to change how managers manage and how leaders lead. (more…)

Jim Lukaszewski has been a crisis management strategist and strategic advisor for nearly 30 years. He runs the Lukaszewski Group and has been called one of the “28 experts to call when all hell breaks loose.” Jim’s new book, Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor, will be released mid-February.

Jim was interviewed in November exclusively for The Good, The Bad, The Spin.

* * *

What can you tell me about your book?

Jim Lukaszewski: The book is called Why Should the Boss Listen to You: The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor. In a nutshell, it’s really about how to be a number-one number two. It’s kind of a different book in that, typically, this is what good leaders would be interested in, but it’s more about the people who work with leaders and managers to help them do a better job.

It’s often talked about as if most organizations usually are divided into two parts—the operations part and the staff part, and the staff part’s job is to help those who actually run the company, business or organization do their jobs better. So this is a book for staff people, for people in communications, human resources, IT, security, strategic planning, finance—all those staff functions whose job it is to help those who actually run the place, do a better job. (more…)

• It’s no surprise that the hubbub around U.S. News & World Report college rankings is rearing its head. A PR issue is raised with such a report: Journalists, in this case, the media outlet known as the U.S. News & World Report, present themselves as the de facto spin doctors of misinformation. Re-framing journalists as spin doctors is, perhaps, a bold move, but the evidence is more than ample that PR ‘pros’ and ‘real’ journalists are more alike than dissimilar. Fortunately, NACUBO’s rankings still exist, only without the power of the printing press.
• My homies at Wise Bread recommend diplomacy when dealing with the dysfunctions and failures of complex organizations. Kudos for the niceties.
• The Wikipedia embarrassment reveals more examples of organizations setting their own records straight. It’s difficult to blame them, but the anonymity makes for amusing reading.