Archive for: Clark Judge

On August 25, the Securities and Exchange Commission, in a partisan three-to-two vote, approved its long-awaited access-to-the-proxy rule. The rule will allow any shareholder or group of shareholders representing three percent of outstanding shares and having held them for three years to nominate directors in board elections.

As a practical matter, this means that labor unions as well as major environmental organizations and other political activists will soon be organizing to win seats. At stake will be whether boards reflect the interests of shareholders as a whole or those political interests. Many corporate managements will feel compelled to run the equivalent of internal political campaigns in order to protect the integrity of their boards.

Last November I co-authored an article on this topic in The Wall Street Journal. You can find it here.

It is no news now, but on Tuesday last week, President Obama delivered the least effective Oval Office address since Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. Why?

It wasn’t just the awkward use of his hands, the hackneyed and inappropriate wartime metaphors, the equally banal “if we could land a man on the moon” drivel. All that was bad enough, but more devastating was the gulf between obvious fact and the speech’s fiction. Read

EconTalk (at www.econtalk.org) is among the most popular and respected podcasts on the web.  Voted Best Podcast in the 2008 Weblog Awards, it is hosted by Russ Roberts, Professor of Economics and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Posted weekly, the program usually features Roberts interviewing a distinguished economic thinker.  On February 8th, Roberts broke from this format to discuss his own thinking about why trade is good.  Drawing on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, 18th and 19th century respectively giants of economic thought, he explored how trade increases personal productivity by a factor of a hundred and more.  As he summed up, “Self-sufficiency [in a person, a tribe, or a country] equals poverty.” Read

Have you seen those new Toyota ads?  The ones in which the company apologizes for letting quality slip.  These are very unusual for a corporation facing product liability suits — and they are exactly the right thing to do.

Typically companies in Toyota’s position clam up.  Statements are defensive and evasive.  Maintaining such a posture during the long life of a litigation will leave a company’s reputation in badly compromise.

Yet public opinion studies have shown that companies that publicly speak to their problems — that defend themselves but also acknowledge faults and both pledge and work to fix them — build the trust of customers, suppliers, and potential jurors.

Toyota was slow to grasp its problem and engaged in denial for too long.  But now it has put corporate reputation first.  It is right to do so.  And it likely to do better in court as a result.

As I write, Mr. Obama has just finished delivering his first State of the Union Address.  We can debate the policies later, but for style, I felt he missed a key grace note of leadership.  Over and over he used the word “I”.  But the essential word of leadership is “we”.  Nothing is about me.  Everything is about us, the people, whom I, the leader, serve.

When considering communications strategy, most people think of television, radio, publications, and the Internet — this even though research has long found that face-to-face communications is often, perhaps always, the most effective.

When targeting elites, we at WHWG are big fans of policy dinners.  We gather between 10 and thirty of the kind of people our client wants to reach.  They may be D.C.-based journalists, or part of the Washington policy world (usually not current office holders but people office holders consult), or industry elites around the country (high tech or financial leaders for example), or even policy and political leaders in London or Brussels.  We hold the dinners at private clubs or fashionable homes or in the private dining areas of first-class restaurants.  We attract guests with a featured speaker (usually the client’s CEO or a globally acknowledged expert on the issue we want our guests to think about).  At least one member of the client’s staff is present, too. Read

Taking a new look at old assumptions is as difficult in the digital world as it is elsewhere — something Wikipedia is currently discovering.  The stewards of the open source site have started asking themselves if they can increase the accuracy of their entries.

As the Financial Times reports, the site’s stable of voluntary editors has not grown apace with its increasing volume of articles.  The result, says the FT, is that entries “will be harder to monitor quality — and vested interests will find it easier to make alterations that reflect their own views.”

Not that the site lacks for accuracy challenges now.  The FT notes that “even optimists… agree with the more skeptical observers on this: that in terms of reliability and service, Wikipedia still has along way to go.”  Yet attempts to “subject changes by newcomers [i.e., new contributors] to approval by more experienced editors and flagging any revisions” have run into intense resistance in the hyper-egalitarian Wiki-corps.

The communications problem here is a familiar one:  The world has changed.  The organization needs to adjust. But both members of the organization (those most involved with Wikipedia are volunteers, not employees) and many of those it serves see the adjustments as violating the values and standards that got the organization where it is today and that they believe in.  Part of leadership in a time of change is to communicate how fundamental values are being preserved, not thrown over, by recognizing that circumstances have changed.

Surveys have found that, for most people, fear of public speaking exceeds fear of death. How does one in its grip deal with this fear?  Former Microsoft executive and current professional speak Scott Berkum says just keep in mind that your audience dreads listening to you.  They expect to be bored silly, so they won’t be disappointed if they are. For a witty review of his new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, read this article.