Think job-related stress is a recent phenomenon? Not quite. The remains of Britain’s King Richard III were found last year. Turns out the guy was pretty stressed out. Analysis of his teeth showed that they worn smooth from teeth grinding and clenching—a common accompaniment to a stressful life. With late hours and client deadlines, some…

We know our success depends on our ability to maintain a continuous flow of bright, motivated professionals into our industry. But with rapid change now a constant in the communications business, how can we assure that recent college graduates have the required skills and competencies? And how can we can communicate to them the many…

We’re all struggling to manage the torrent of information out there today, to get information to work for us. One basic scenario runs like this: To get ahead, you need to come up with that next brilliant, account-winning, boss-pleasing insight. To come up with that account-winning, boss-pleasing insight, you have to bounce yourself up against…

If you’ve purchased lululemon’s yoga pants lately, then watch out: the brand has recalled 17% of its yoga pants after an apparent defect rendered them too revealing. The company blamed one of its suppliers—a screw up that could lower lululemon’s revenues by millions of dollars. Supply chain issues pose a constant threat to brands. Pet…

Not a message this week, but a musing: What does today’s short communication mean for the public relations business? It’s a commonplace to note the speed of communication in the digital age. But you hear a lot less about the small size of communications. Tweets. SMS. Facebook posts. Even blogs (gargantuan messages by today’s standards)….

Is your firm up on the latest FTC guidelines governing online advertising and the proper consumer disclosures required by law? It better be! In 2000, the FTC issued its “Dot Com Disclosures,” disclosures interpreting advertising law for the online world. At that time, the guidelines focused mostly on display advertising.  Nearly thirteen years have passed,…

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting at her company has been criticized by many as a backward step in the evolution of the more flexible, modern workplace. Yet the controversy over what Time magazine has called the “Memo Read Round the World” obscures another trend: The extent to which offices themselves are rapidly…

Most communications firms do quantitative research. But what would a firm look like that not merely specialized in research, but organized itself around it top to bottom? Very much like the public affairs firm Global Strategy Group (GSG). Founded in 1995, the firm began as a political research company, doing nothing but qualitative and quantitative…

Talk of “best practices” is seemingly ubiquitous among business leaders today. You can’t have a conversation without hearing executives mention a process or procedure that has been found to work in other companies, and that they have appropriated for their own. Yet an article I read in last week’s Wall Street Journal got me wondering…

The New York Times recently ran a story by Arthur C. Brooks entitled, “My Valuable, Cheap College Degree,” about the $10,000 undergraduate degree. The author, the president of the American Enterprise Institute and a former college professor, decided that instead of going into debt for a degree from an average college, he would pay $10K…