March 20, 2011

PRSA: CEOs Need Better PR Skills to Navigate Modern Reputation Challenges — Financial Times Op-Ed

PRSA had an op-ed published March 21, 2011, in The Financial Times. The opinion piece, authored by Anthony D'Angelo, APR, Fellow PRSA, co-chair of PRSA's MBA/Business School Initiative, implores the world's top MBA programs to include dedicated public relations courses as part of the training and education they provide in order to better prepare business leaders for the reputational challenges they and their companies will face.
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Soapbox: A Telling Omission in the MBA Curriculum
Anthony W. D'Angelo, APR, Fellow PRSA
Financial Times
Published: March 21, 2011

I am so weary of having to teach and reteach organisational leaders the basics of reputation management that I can almost feel my hair greying. But I understand the inherent helplessness even the most successful chief executives seem to have in successfully managing a company’s reputation. Despite being their companies’ chief reputation officers, they commonly have almost no education in this critical responsibility.

Most MBA programmes are deficient in this regard. Consider a typical MBA curriculum. How much content is devoted to strategic communications/reputation management – the strategies needed to communicate effectively, build trust and enhance reputation? The weakness of most MBA programmes in this area is exposed nearly every week as business executives and their organisations make egregious communications errors and are rightly pilloried in the media (see BP, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, Tiger Woods, etc).

Getting bad press is not the problem; all large entities experience some. What is at risk from this deficiency in graduate business education is company reputation, stock price, product sales and various executives’ jobs.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Related:

MBA Students Lack Training in Managing Corporate Reputation (2005 PRSA MBA Study)

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