Guidelines, Codes and Principles-What’s the Point? CEO Richard Edelman delivered a speech entitled The Battle Ground is Trust , at the National Press Club on Wednesday October 18, 2017 where, he deplores the people’s loss of trust in industries, institutions and governments. He then calls for a new set of ethics principles for the PR industry. I find it very remarkable and encouraging that the CEO of the world’s largest PR firm addresses, head on, the issues of ethics in the practice of the profession. He says: “Every company and brand has the responsibility to behave ethically” and that “organization individual guide lines do not safeguard ethical behavior.” He is right. No guidelines, codes or principles will ever safeguard against wrongdoing. We’ve had the Ten Commandments for thousands of years, yet people still break those commandments systematically and universally. Should we abandon them completely? God forbid! Many PR firms and most
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Your Humble Servant, The CEO The term “leadership” is relatively new. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word can be traced only as far back as the 19 th century. Today, leadership has become a hot topic. Amazon offers 300,000 books with the word “leadership” in the title. It seems that most everyone wants to be a leader or at least be perceived as one. The leadership status carries panache and demands respect and undoubtedly satisfies one’s ego. The most frequent question asked when discussing leadership is whether leaders are born or made? The consensus today is that there are indeed some in-born characteristics that predisposes people to become leaders. A recent research by the University of Illinois suggests that leadership is 30 % genetic and 70 % lessons learned by life experiences. I was awakened to the possibility that I might have some leadership qualities by an incident in my teens. I was in the English Church in Lausanne, Switzerl