Archive for October 15th, 2008

My colleague Barb Iverson shared with me the recent comments of someone worth listening to….I thought I would feature it today. 

With seismic shifts every day in the financial services industry, we at Weber Shandwick thought it was a perfect time to get the perspective of someone with considerable perspective. That’s why we were one of the sponsors of a speech last week by Gary Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the central bank’s longest-serving policymaker. The New York Times references his speech in this article. Some interesting points emerged: 

·         Stern recommends looking back to the early 1990s as a reference point for the current credit situation. Economic factors including unemployment, interest rates and inflation were considerably worse in the early 1990s than they were when we entered the current economic downturn.  Stern reminded attendees that while the 1990s started off sluggishly, the U.S. economy performed extraordinarily well throughout the 1990s. 

·         The “too big to fail” problem is something that must be addressed. Safeguards should be put in place to ensure that the interconnectedness of large banks doesn’t bring down the whole system if one of them fails. Stern coauthored a book on this topic in 2004.

·         Communication is key. While Stern doesn’t believe regulation is necessarily the fix we need, he says regulators must be transparent and communicate details of their actions early and often.

·         Stern believes inflation will go down.

Feel free to contact Barb Iverson, head of our global Financial Services Industry Practice, with questions or comments about reputation and public relations in this unique and daunting time.

How to Seize the Storm: Tactics for guiding your company past this crisis–Jack Welch in BusinessWeek on communicating during a crisis. More reason to speak up and rescue your reputation. 

Don’t Stop Talking. The fact that crises call for constant, candid communication should go without saying, shouldn’t it? But too often managers react by locking themselves in their offices, where they panic themselves into paralysis in private or with a few close associates. What a morale killer. Your people are scared, and their imaginations are taking them into dark places. Now more than ever you need to alleviate that fear and uncertainty, not with rosy, unrealistic platitudes, but with facts. Tell them which plants or offices will be cut back or closed, for instance, and describe in vivid derail what the competition is up to. And tell them, again and as vividly as possible, what he future will look like if everybody hunkers down for the same goal: endurance and renewal. Then tell them again and again. It will never be enough.