PR for Humans

How business leaders tell powerful stories

Mike Sergeant

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788600569
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Pubbliche relazioni
• Index: Business

*SHORT-LISTED FOR THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2020!* "There is no strategy without a story. There is no story without the main character. The main character is you."
PR for Humans is for pure-of-heart storytellers who want to cut through the noise and the nonsense. It brings together the essential and timeless principles of effective leadership communication.
Belief. Clarity. Opinion. Energy. Context. Time. Humility. Imagery.
Why are these things so important? Why do most people in PR and 'communications' not even talk about them? Why is PR for Humans even more important in the age of A.I.? In this fresh and energetic guide, former BBC correspondent Mike Sergeant draws on twenty years of frontline experience to reveal the secrets that every CEO, partner, board member, PR director and business leader needs to know.
The principles and techniques he sets out in this book will help you deliver more powerful speeches, presentations, media interviews, videos, podcasts and blogs.
They are the rocket fuel for your business and your career.

PART 1

Finding Your Story

Principles

1. BELIEF

In this chapter, I introduce the first principle of PR for Humans: BELIEF. I emphasise the importance of passion and really understanding why your organisation does what it does.

Believe in Something

The most useful question to ask yourself in business is: what do I believe in? People who care about something are the ones who cut through the noise and enhance their reputation. They are the masters of PR for Humans.

Find something to believe in. And stick to it.

This is sometimes dressed up as the corporate ‘mission statement’ or the ‘purpose’ of a business, implying that there needs to be wider relevance and social benefit. Good for profit and good for the world! It might be, but it doesn’t have to be.

The problem with the word ‘purpose’ is that it’s been used to justify the way some organisations make huge sums of money. They’ve carried on with business as usual over here, while launching schemes over there to show they have a conscience and aren’t destroying humanity or the planet. Many seem to think business purpose means things like cutting carbon emissions, saving rainforests or fighting obesity.

I don’t want to be glib about this, because those who care about charity and have a real connection to the world are already the heroes of PR for Humans. But the focus on social responsibility has confused and muddled one of the most important principles of communication:

You must believe in what you are doing. It must have intense meaning for you.

It’s about passion. To be a convincing communicator, it’s got to matter to you. Not to your stakeholders or lobbyists or friends. To you.

You might be running a clean energy business. Or you might be looking after the wealth of the world’s billionaires. You might be making healthy salads or constructing high-speed rail lines. Some people may love what you do. Some may not. But only you can ascribe meaning and passion to your activities.

No clever argument or positioning or reasoning will win if the audience senses that the belief is missing. This is the first principle of PR for Humans.

Companies don’t care about anything. They are legal constructs, not living beings. Organisations don’t have emotions. It’s the people within those organisations who feel things. And the customers who buy their products.

In business, you need to show the world what you care about.

Here’s an example from my PR for Humans podcast. Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne is the founder of Genius, the gluten-free bread and baking products company. She set the company up 10 years ago after discovering that her son was severely gluten intolerant. He was three years old and tiny. He’d been feeling sick off and on since he’d been weaned.

Once the diagnosis came through and gluten was removed, he was a changed child. Within two months he was running around. But Lucinda couldn’t find a decent loaf of gluten-free bread to make him a sandwich. She was a trained chef and a food expert, so she set about solving the problem herself, like a woman possessed. Obsessively blending ingredients in her kitchen. Baking 14 loaves a day. Working night shifts in a bread factory nearby to try and scale the recipes. Looking after the kids during the day. Desperately trying to get the formula right for a viable business to scale up.

“I was on a mission,” she told me. “I don’t think I could have got as passionate about a chocolate cake. I was driven by the need to sort the problem out. My primary motivation was my family. My secondary motivation was I knew I’d spotted a gap in the market. I could see this was a way of making a huge difference to people.”

The drive. The passion. As Lucinda told me this, her eyes were shining with the authentic belief. She was someone who knew exactly what she’d done and why she’d done it. The story rang true.

Today, Genius exports to 10 countries, employs 300 people and has a turnover of £30 million.

Just to emphasise, this is about your belief. What you care about. Not adopting somebody else’s values and expectations.

Your belief might be in gluten-free, healthy products or fantastic takeaway pizza. It could be electric cars or powerful 4x4s. Other people will make their judgements. But from a communications perspective, it’s what you believe that matters.

In another example, the CEO of McDonalds, Steve Easterbrook, did an interview with the Sunday Times. Of course, he was asked about obesity and healthy eating. He told the reporter not to “hold your breath” that the fast food company would be “building the menu” around kale and salads.

“If you can have a hotter, fresher and tastier burger and hot fries, that’s how you’re going to satisfy the majority of people,” said Easterbrook.²

Hotter. Fresher. Tastier. Burgers and fries. That is what Easterbrook was passionate about delivering for his customers. You may disagree with the statement. You may think McDonalds should be doing something else. But it struck me as being very authentic. After reading it, I have personally visited McDonalds more frequently. When I do, I think, the CEO of this place cares about hot, fresh, tasty food.

I can’t tell you what to care about. You’ve got to figure that out for yourself. I’ll give you one clue, though – it can’t just be money. You need to believe in something else. Once you do, your speeches, media interviews and articles will be a lot more powerful and convincing.

Passion is also contagious. If you really feel it – and indulge it – others will too.

As the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.”

Be a Hedgehog

Your beliefs and passions don’t have to be dazzling. They can be routine. Some may even consider them boring. That doesn’t matter. If they drive you, they will be effective.

In business, as in life, natural talent is delightful. But it’s nothing compared to relentless determination. That is the quality I’ve seen in all the great leaders I’ve interviewed and worked with.

Excellence is a habit, as Aristotle taught. If you can demonstrate personal consistency across your professional life, you will send the most powerful reputational signals. If there is a secret sauce for leadership communication, this is it. Consistency wins trust, and trust brings respect.

This is how Hazel Moore OBE, the chair of international investment bank FirstCapital, put it in the conversation we had on the PR for Humans podcast:

[As an entrepreneur] there’s definitely that element of drive and passion and resilience because there are always knock-backs. But it’s also vital to be able to communicate an idea and a vision. Because you are always selling. You are selling to potential employees. You are selling to investors. You are selling to customers. And you may not yet even have a product. That ability to communicate is very important for entrepreneurs.

In his celebrated management book Good to Great, Jim Collins identifies the central quality that turns a good company into a great company: having a ‘hedgehog’ approach. The foxes of business may be darting after every new fad and commercial possibility, but hedgehogs slow things down. They keep moving. They simplify a complex world into a single unifying idea, a basic principle or concept that frames everything and guides progress. They keep going at it. In the long run, hedgehog companies are the ones that, according to Collins, make the leap to greatness and stay there.

Hedgehogs develop the habit of consistent excellence.

It turns out, having a jumpy, ‘commercial’ mindset is – aside from annoying – happily not the route to lasting success. It is a rather tense and nervy way to drive performance in the short term. Chasing cash, fighting for fees, gunning for growth, pushing for profit, running after revenue – these are all ways to build unhappy and ultimately unsuccessful companies. Managers will be disliked. Employees will burn out. Customers and clients will grow suspicious. Reputation will ultimately suffer. Journalists won’t like talking to you.

One of the biggest, most pleasurable surprises on crossing from the BBC into the private sector was discovering how helpful so many people are in the supposedly cutthroat world of the free market. In business, those who are overtly commercial at the expense of others quickly find they lose the most important commodity in the market: trust. Without it, you can’t operate.

The best way to be trusted is, I believe, to be completely clear about why you are doing what you are doing. If you can display your own sense of value and demonstrate what really matters to you, others will follow. At some level, this is usually about helping people, whether they are customers, clients, investors or employees. Helping them do something, or achieve something, or have something. It doesn’t have to be altruistic. It just means finding a way of using your skills and abilities to serve other human beings. The money may then follow.

Connect

In serving people, we need to find ways to connect with them. The old economic models based on price and information have been challenged in recent years by new models of influence and behaviour. The bonds with our audiences have never been more important. The aim for any business leader is not to sell to people but to connect with them. That’s where real economic power is now generated.

The need for companies and individuals to connect with audiences and to demonstrate the point of their existence is brought to life by former BP chief executive Lord Browne, in his book Connect. Browne is (rightly) dismissive of certain types of PR that promise to ‘manage’ reputation and spin elaborate, fictitious webs. He describes reputation as an outcome of everything that a business does. It’s a function of all the company’s products and activities. It is about connecting with people as you really are, not as you would like to be.

As Socrates said, to gain a good reputation you must endeavour to “be what you desire to appear”.

Reputation is, argues Browne, a reservoir of goodwill that must be filled up over time from many deep, authentic sources, not artificially engineered for short-term gain or quick recovery from a crisis. Listening to the former BP boss, you might believe there’s no role at all any more for the storytellers themselves. All a company should do is be authentic. Do everything as well as you possibly can, all the time, with a simple unifying idea, and reputation will be assured.

“But,” I asked Lord Browne, at an event I chaired at the Royal Institution, “when it comes to telling their stories in interesting ways, don’t even the best companies need a little advice? From time to time?”

Browne turned to me with a broad smile. “Only… from certain individuals!” he said, patting me on the shoulder with a sideways glance at the assembled crowd of corporate affairs and PR advisers, who had feared being written out of existence with a single answer. Laughter and relieved applause erupte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Author
• Table of Contents
• This Book
• Introduction
• Part 1: Finding Your Story – Principles
• Part 2: Telling Your Story – Techniques
• Conclusion
• Author’s Note
• Select Bibliography