PRSA: B-Schools Need to Teach Better PR Skills — The Globe and Mail Op-Ed

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, GoldmanSachs, 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, stockprice, product sales and various executives’ jobs.

Read the rest of the op-ed here.