Here We Go Again

This blog has noted that without a dollop of humility, leaders are at risk of humiliation.

Also that most crises are self-inflicted, and that the timeliness and quality of the response are more predictive of reputational harm than the severity of the underlying event.

We see all three of these principles at play in the John Edwards scandal.

Former senator John Edwards, 55, was a contender for the Democratic Party nomination until the Spring, and has been on the whisper list as a possible vice presidential nominee or attorney general in an Obama administration.

No more. He won’t even have a role at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

Denying the National Enquirer Stories

For months Senator Edwards denied having an affair with Rielle Hunter, a videographer who did a series of web films about Edwards in 2006.

In October, 2007, The National Enquirer reported about the affair, and in December claimed that Edwards was the father of Hunter’s child.

When the first story appeared Edwards said, “The story is false, it’s completely untrue, it’s ridiculous.”

Coming Clean on ABC Nightline

On Friday Edwards confessed to Bob Woodruff of ABC News Nightline that he had in fact had an affair:

“In 2006 2 years ago, I made a very serious mistake. A mistake that I am responsible for and no one else. In 2006 I told Elizabeth about the mistake, asked her for her forgiveness, asked God for his forgiveness. And we have kept this within our family since that time. All of my family knows about this and just to be absolutely clear, none of them are responsible for it. I am responsible for it. I alone am responsible for it.”

What makes the crisis worse for Edwards is that throughout the campaign he lied about the affair, and had his staff deny the affair to the news media.

There are also many unanswered questions that will keep the story alive.

Unfinished Business

As this blog has noted, rumors thrive on ambiguity. And there’s ambiguity aplenty here:

• Edwards says that he’s not the child’s father, and is willing to take a paternity test to prove it. But Hunter refuses to allow a paternity test.
• Edwards aide Andrew Young (not the former UN Ambassador) says he’s the child’s father, but no father was listed on the child’s birth certificate.
• Fred Baron, Edwards’ former finance chairman, made payments to Hunter. Edwards told ABC that he neither knew about the payments nor asked that they be made.
• Edwards admits that he visited Hunter last month in a California hotel, but chooses not to give details about why.

The fact that Edwards lied about the affair makes his denials about the paternity and the payments somewhat unreliable.

What Was He Thinking?

The bigger question, of course, is how he could have chosen to run for president after having the affair, and think that it would not become known. He addressed this on Nightline:

“It’s what happened with me and I think happens unfortunately more often sometimes with other people.… Ego. Self-focus, self-importance….All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You’re invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.

WOODRUFF: So your assumption was that you’d just never be caught?

EDWARDS: It was a huge judgment, mistake in judgment. But yeah, I didn’t think anyone would ever know about it. I didn’t. And the important thing is, how could I ever get to the place, to that place and allow myself to let that happen?…

WOODRUFF: Why did you continue to deny it [publicly] and not tell the truth?

EDWARDS: Because I did not want the public to know what I had done. Fair and simple. And there’s also a lot of these you know supermarket tabloid allegations are just lies, they’re complete lies. But this, this mistake, is the truth.”

What Might Have Been

Edwards’ owning up to his alpha-male arrogance may be admirable after the fact, but the consequences of his lack of humility are potentially significant.

What if Edwards had prevailed in the primaries, and was poised to become the Democratic nominee? The revelations, especially now, weeks before the Convention, could have dramatically changed the political landscape.

And some argue that Edwards’ behavior already has. Former Clinton communication director Howard Wolfson argues that if Edwards hadn’t run, Senator Clinton would have won Iowa and would have prevailed in the primaries. We’ll never know.

What’s Next

So what will happen to Edwards?

He told Nightline that he expects his career in politics to be over. We’ll see. The punditocracy is populated with pols who have survived scandals, ranging from Ed Rollins to Dick Morris. Even President Clinton recovered from the Monica Lewinsky affair and his lies about it.

There may be second acts in American politics. But don’t expect Edwards to serve in any role that requires Senate confirmation or public support in an Obama Administration’s first term.

Edwards will need to keep a low profile for now; to focus his immediate attention on resolving lingering questions, making things right at home, and then staying out of the limelight for a while.

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Words matter.

Words shape world views. Words provoke action and reaction, which in turn provoke more words. Getting the words right is critically important. Getting the action right is also critically important. And aligning the words and actions is even more important.

Much public diplomacy and other national and international discourse of the U.S. government in recent years has gotten it wrong.

A new policy paper by a Dr. Amy Zalman, published by the EastWest Institute, highlights the mis-steps of the recent past and prescribes solutions for future public discourse.

Dr. Zalman is a senior strategist at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where she focuses on trans-culturally astute research for U.S. government clients. She also writes the “About Terrorism” reference website for New York Times online division About.com. She has a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from NYU and is highly proficient in Arabic. I met her when we were NYU faculty colleagues.

In reading Dr. Zalman’s assessment of and prescriptions for future public diplomacy I was struck by how much her underlying philosophy aligns deeply with Logos Institute’s own philosophy about communication as an instrument of strategy. And also how her assessment provides valuable insights not only on ways to counter extremism, but also on best practices in strategic communication across a range of disciplines.

Communication Isn’t About Pushing Messages at Audiences

Logos Institute has long affirmed that many leaders, much of the time, fundamentally misunderstand communication. This misunderstanding has consequences: corporations lose competitive advantage; not-for-profits find it harder to fulfill their mission; nations diminish their ability to protect citizens and achieve national security goals.

Logos Institute holds that effective communication isn’t about pushing information to an audience. It isn’t about facts, or data. It isn’t about what sounds good in the moment. It isn’t about spin. And it certainly isn’t what makes the speaker feel good. Rather, to paraphrase the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz,

Communication is an act of will directed toward a living entity that reacts.

Let’s parse this definition:

Communication is an act of will…

Effective communication is intentional. It is goal-oriented. It is strategic. Unlike ineffective communication, effective communication isn’t impulsive or top-of-mind. It isn’t self-indulgent. And communication isn’t just about what one says. It’s about anything one does or is observed to do. It’s about any engagement with a stakeholder, including silence, inaction, and action.

…directed toward a living entity….

Stakeholders aren’t passive vessels that simply absorb messages. Rather, they are living, breathing human beings and groups of human beings. They have their own opinions, ideas, hopes, dreams, fears, prejudices, attention spans, and appetites for listening. Most important, it is a mistake to assume that audiences think and behave just as we do. Most don’t. Understanding an audience and its preconceptions, and the barriers for that audience to accept what one is saying, is a key part of effective communication.

…that reacts.

This is the element most lost on many leaders. The only reason to engage an audience is to provoke a reaction. Effective communication provokes the desired reaction; ineffective communication doesn’t. Ineffective communication either isn’t noticed, or it confuses, or it causes a different reaction than the one desired.

And whatever the words one uses, we can count on audiences to compare the words to the speaker’s own actions. The words set expectations; the actions fulfill or betray those expectations.

So effective communication is hard. It requires understanding the desired reaction among the groups to which one communicates, which in turn requires knowing all one can about that group. And then it requires saying and doing all and only what is necessary to provoke that desired reaction. And it also requires understanding the absolutely predictable intended and unintended consequences of words, silence, inaction, and action.

U.S. Public Diplomacy

Dr. Zalman takes this approach and applies it to an impasse she says policymakers, journalists, and community leaders have reached in crafting a common understanding of ways to describe the link between religion and violent extremism.

She says that the impasse exists both factually and in terms of what might be effective in undermining the appeal of extremist movements.

She notes:

“Good communicators reveal, in speech and action, that they understand the motivations and aspirations of their audiences—and it is via this understanding that they gain their sympathies.”

Logos Institute holds that it’s impossible to move stakeholders unless you meet them where they are: physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, ideologically, etc. The bigger the gulf between “us and them,” the less likely effective communication will take place.

Dr. Zalman observes that in its communication with Muslim communities around the world, the U.S. government didn’t bridge this gulf, but made it wider. She concludes:

“A review of U.S. official rhetoric shows an all too persistent absence of this understanding, an oversight which in turn can fan rather than dampen extremist sentiment.”

Understanding Our Audiences

Effective public diplomacy, according to Dr. Zalman,

“Begins with deep attention to how others think about themselves and their communities. Recent U.S. discourse is characterized by a lack of attention to precisely these issues. It has produced faulty assumptions that have alienated global audiences and clouded debate on violent extremism.”

She gives the example of the first U.S. government public diplomacy campaign directed toward Muslims outside the U.S., the Shared Values Initiative that was launched in the Fall of 2002. It was based on an assumption, given voice by President George W. Bush, that the terrorists “hate America because of our freedoms.” An entire campaign was built around this assumption. Says Dr. Zalman:

“This first official U.S. communication campaign emerged from the view that al-Qaeda hated, above all, Americans’ freedom of religious practice. The advertising campaign—designed to win hearts and minds in Muslim countries—showed American Muslims living happily in the United States. In doing so, it sought to differentiate the United States from autocratic states such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, and to reveal the virtues of a U.S. war against terrorism, and for religious freedom of practice. Most countries perceived the advertisements as propaganda and refused to air them, but even if they had, Shared Values would have been [an] irrelevant diversion. As poll after poll of Muslim populations has revealed, no mainstream populations contest either the value of civil liberties in the United States or the value of freedom of worship and they do not need convincing of their virtues.”

While it didn’t do affirmative harm, the Shared Values Initiative consumed significant resources, attention, and time.

Worse, it gave policymakers and the U.S. public the false impression that the U.S. was making inroads in perceptions among Muslim communities around the world. Greater than the financial and other cost, though, was the opportunity cost. While Shared Values was underway, we were not effectively winning hearts and minds.

And then we invaded Iraq.

It Isn’t About What We Say; It’s About What They Hear

The Shared Values Initiative was merely the first major attempt to win hearts and minds. It was not the last. Says Dr. Zalman:

“Eager to “tell our story,” regardless of whether anyone is listening, U.S. communicators have plunged into a ongoing search for the right word to describe actions, actors, groups, and belief systems. These efforts have met with failure.”

In other words, communication isn’t about telling our story. That’s self-indulgent and often illusory. It’s about getting audiences to listen – and to care.

Dr. Zalman conducts a detailed review of U.S. rhetoric and calls forth evidence of persistent failure to demonstrate understanding of the audiences to whom the U.S. was purportedly communicating.

For example, for years the U.S. government, at the highest levels, used the word “jihadist” to describe our enemies. But in March of this year the State Department advised: “In Arabic, jihad means “striving in the path of God” and is used in many contexts beyond warfare. Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad unintentionally legitimizes their actions.”

Of course, by then the U.S. government had been using that vocabulary for 6 years.

Recommendations for Policymakers: Holistic Communication Practice

Dr. Zalman closes with a set of recommendations for U.S. policymakers. Those recommendations apply with equal force to leaders of all enterprises, corporations, not-for-profits, and governments:

“1. Actions speak as loudly as words

Speakers will be judged by their deeds and policies as well as by their rhetoric. Communications must be crafted in which actions, policies, and rhetoric are mutually reinforcing activities.

Speakers who appear to say one thing while doing another will not be viewed as credible. Speakers whose actions, policies, and words embody a coherent intention have a greater chance of being viewed as credible. Those whose communications understand both the medium and the intended recipient of the message have a greater chance of being heard and understood. And those whose communications engage their listeners as stakeholders in their shared circumstances have the best chance of being accepted.

A holistic communication strategy will be context based and will strategically, and reflectively, assess the entire environment in which communication takes place: who speaks, their medium, what they say, how they act, and who is listening.

2. Take the politics out of personal faith

When religion is addressed, policymakers, opinion leaders, and other stakeholders must speak with the awareness that no religious community is a monolith.

There are internal variations in belief and practice that extend beyond sect. The normative claims of any religion (what should be done) are not the same as what is and has been done by real people in different circumstances. [Policymakers] must be aware that religious beliefs, practices, and claims are generally not separable from other beliefs, practices, and claims. Credibility will be enhanced by addressing people and communities as complex and variegated in their motivations and actions.

3. Ideological archaeology is not the answer

Avoid engaging in debate on any particular religious claims or specific religious doctrines.

Leaders of multi-faith, pluralistic communities will be most credible by speaking and demonstrating their promotion of religion in general and removing themselves as far as possible from engaging in ecumenical discussions.

Policymakers should limit statements on any particular religion from a theological perspective. Instead, they should speak to the values of communities who value religion and address the behaviors—including speech—that democratic societies accept. And they should model these behaviors in public addresses.

4. There is no “Them” or “Us”

Use communication strategies that recognize the potential for all communities to eradicate or contain extremist tendencies.

Policymakers can have no expectation that what they say to one audience will not be heard by others. Their credibility in this environment will flow from the transparency of their statements and their ability to articulate common global principles in the context of violent extremism.

Speakers who can illustrate what we—we Americans, we who are for extremism-free communities—are for, will stand on a stronger platform than those who can only reiterate what we are against. In this vein, policymakers can state not only their commitment to liberty and pluralism but describe how communities that live these values behave; how healthy communities deal with their marginalized and disenfranchised; which behaviors moderate people everywhere, and of every faith, embrace, and which they reject.

5. Specifics speak louder than over-generalizations

Draw connections and comparisons between groups, actors, ideologies, and conflicts with care, emphasizing simple, situation- specific interpretations over claims about historical or social trends.

Just because two movements or groups or acts [e.g. an assassination in Lebanon and an assassination in Pakistan] share some characteristics does not automatically mean their comparison serves the larger communication intended.

6. Work with—not against—global media realities

Acknowledge the multiple, dynamic, and contextual meanings of terms and language related to violent extremism. Where possible, identify the variety of interpretations for events.

The Internet ensures that there are always many different interpretations of both words and events circulating at once and that no single media outlet or speaker can establish authoritative versions. Policymakers and media should avoid the insoluble question of which word is the right word by seeking to use the most appropriate terms for a particular context.”

All of this is good advice. I hope the two presidential campaigns have an opportunity to review and digest Dr. Zalman’s work.

Regardless of one’s area of responsibility — business, social service, religion, government, etc. — Dr. Zalman’s lessons have applicability beyond questions of extremism, public diplomacy, and national security.

Note to current, former, and future communication strategy students: this policy paper is now required reading.

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Senator Barack Obama yesterday announced an effort to deal with rumors in a timely way, to prevent them from taking hold and throwing his campaign off balance.

He’s right to be so concerned. Rumors can throw a presidential campaign off its game, and provide adversaries, critics, and opponents with a first-mover advantage that’s hard to beat. The last 20 years teach a great deal about the importance of effective rumor control.

The Secret of Quick Response

In 1992 George Stephanopoulos joined the presidential campaign of Governor Bill Clinton as head of quick response, a position he had also held in the notoriously slow-to-respond 1988 campaign of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis had been a micro-manager, who insisted on participating in all major decisions of his campaign, including rumor control. But the realities of a presidential candidate’s schedule meant that rumors were left unaddressed for days, and even longer. Vice President George H.W. Bush and his allies capitalized on the paralysis in the Dukakis campaign. When a racist attack ad about a released convict named Willie Horton appeared, Dukakis’ feeble response allowed the ad to define him as soft on crime.

Asked by a reporter in 1992 what lessons he learned about quick response from his experience in the 1988 Dukakis campaign, Stephanopoulos noted, “I learned the secret of quick response: It’s that you need to respond, and to do it quickly.”

Respond Quickly

That insight became the basis of one of the most effective rumor control operations in the history of presidential politics. Along with his colleague James Carville, Stephanopoulos created Clinton’s rapid response war room, which was immortalized in the 1993 documentary film The War Room.

The 1992 Clinton war room dominated the thrust-and-parry of the campaign, exercising rumor control discipline the likes of which have not been seen since. Every rumor was addressed, most within 45 minutes of surfacing, so that few of the rumors that were briefly in play – and they were legion – stuck to Governor Clinton.

Referring to Carville and Stephanopoulos, The War Room declared: They Changed the Way Campaigns Are Won.

Changing The Way Campaigns Are Won

The rapid-response capability of President Clinton’s re-election campaign in 1996 wasn’t as effective. Senator Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign was marginally more effective at timely rumor control than the 1996 Clinton re-election effort, but it didn’t match the 1992 war room.

And in 2004, Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign was kept off balance and unable to deal with the swirl of rumors around it, including a concerted effort by a group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (sic), who were tenacious in challenging Senator Kerry’s Vietnam war record. Kerry didn’t actively manage the rumors and lost the advantage of his military service record.

Avoiding the Next Swift Boat Attack

Senator Obama is learning both from the prior campaigns and from his recent experience in the primary and in the first phases of the general election campaign. On Thursday he launched Fight the Smears, a section of his campaign website that deals with rumors.

On the first day alone the site addressed and refuted five rumors:

1. That a video exists with Mrs. Michele Obama referring to whites as “whitey.”
2. That Barack Obama was not born in the US and is therefore not eligible to run for president, and refuses to disclose his birth certificate.
3. That Obama is a Muslim.
4. That Obama uses racially-incendiary language in his book.
5. That Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance or to put his hand over his heart.

How Rumors Work

The 1992 Clinton War Room pre-dated the Internet as a common communication tool, so it required Stephanopoulos or Carville to call reporters and provide them with material or commentary that refuted any given rumor.

Today the blogosphere makes everything available to everyone simultaneously. Although Obama’s and Governor Clinton’s methods were different, they were both true to the principles of effective rumor control.

Our firm specializes in rumor control, and through our Logos Institute for Crisis Management & Executive Leadership we’ve done significant academic and practical research on rumor dynamics.

The seminal work in rumors was begun in the 1940s by two Harvard University social psychologists, Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman. (The pair was best known for researching the “telephone” phenomenon where one person tells something to another, who passes it on, etc. until the final person in a chain hears something dramatically different from what the first person said.)

In their 1948 book The Psychology of Rumor, Allport and Postman define a rumor as:

“A proposition for belief submitted in the absence of secure standards of evidence.”

They also note that unguided by objective evidence, people make judgments based on their subjective preferences, prejudices, and fears.

Allport and Postman developed a mathematical formula that describes rumor dynamics:

R ~ I x A, where

R = the Rumor
I = the Importance one assigns to the rumor, if true, and
A= the level of ambiguity surrounding the rumor and its denial.

So the key to eliminating a rumor is to demonstrate unambiguously that it’s false. Or to reduce the importance of the rumor.

Allport and Postman note that silence is subjectively ambiguous.

So if we assume a scale of 0 to 10, we can project how a rumor might circulate.

Assume a rumor that is high in interest, say 10. And assume silence on the part of the subject of the rumor, 10.

Here’s the math:

R ~ I x A
R ~ 10 x 10
100 ~ 10 x 10

That’s what happened to Dukakis when he remained silent about the Willie Horton ad, and to Kerry when he remained silent in the wake of the Swift Boat attack.

But a definitive refutation of the rumor would yield a dramatically different result:

R ~ I x A
R ~ 10 x 0
0 ~ 10 x 0

The rumor would disappear.

As important as the rumor dyamics formula is when the formula is applied. In rumors as in many other spheres of influence, there’s a first mover advantage. Crisis management experts speak of the Golden Hour of Crisis Response.

The Golden Hour refers not to a particular number of minutes, but to the observation that incremental delays in responding effectively to rumors (as with the R ˜ I X A formula) lead to greater-than-incremental changes in the outcome. In other words, what is sufficient to put a rumor to rest in the earliest phases may be quite insufficient later.

The longer it takes to refute a rumor, the more intense it becomes, the more people are invested in it, the more harm it causes, and the harder it is to eventually refute. Or, as Mark Twain supposedly said,

“A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on.”

Quick response is key. Having the truth’s boots on before the rumor gets going is how to prevent its spread.

That’s what Obama is hoping for.

So far he’s succeeding. Let’s look at one of the five rumors he addressed just on the day he launched Fight the Smears: that Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance or to put his hand over his heart. That rumor had spread through the blogosphere and was repeated in the media.

How can Obama refute this rumor? It’s easy. His site now shows a video of Obama in the U.S. Senate chamber leading his colleagues in the Pledge of Allegiance, hand over his heart.

Or a second rumor: that Obama was born outside the U.S. and is therefore ineligible to run for president, and that he’s hiding his birth certificate. This is also easy to refute: Obama simply put his birth certificate online.

Following the principle of R ~ I x A, the definitive demonstration that Obama was born in the U.S. (Honolulu) and the public posting of the birth certificate reduces ambiguity to zero:
R ~ 10 x 0

And anything multiplied by zero is zero.

0 ~ 10 x 0

So the rumor dies.

Changing the Game

In addition to using the Fight the Smears site to refute rumors, Obama is also adding a viral dimension: a “spread the word” link for each rumor that allows anyone on the site to automatically send an e-mail message to friends informing them both of the rumor and its refutation. In this way, Obama is spreading the refutation, providing allies with a quick response to anyone who might raise the rumor with them. In other words, he’s deputizing an army of rumor-control officers.

Obama’s aggressive engagement on the rumor front is likely to make it much harder for adversaries and critics to get traction with rumors, especially the more egregious kinds that have been circulating recently.

My own sense is that Obama’s strategy will change the game; will force adversaries to seek different ways to discredit him. So rumors will decline in significance. Just as the right used the blogosphere effectively to spread rumors about John Kerry, Obama is using the blogosphere effectively to contain rumors about him.

If the 1992 war room changed the way campaigns are won, Obama’s Fight the Smears site will likely change the way campaigns are run.

For more on rumors and how they work, see our article in the Summer 2007 Crisis Management issue of PR Strategist magazine, or our Best Practices Guide Preventing and Overcoming Rumors.

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Almost 20 years ago I was head of communication at a major company, and I spent much of every day speaking with reporters. The deal I had with the CEO was straightforward: “I won’t lie to you; I won’t lie for you; you can’t lie to me.”

At one point my boss lied to me, hoping I would pass the lie on to the press. I called him on it, and he promised not to do it again. Then he did it again. I unknowingly passed the lie on to reporters. They found out, and called me on it. So I quit.

Leaving my job wasn’t a hard decision, even though it was a painful one. Among other things, my wife was pregnant with our first child. And I didn’t have another job to go to. But it was one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Then as now I taught communication ethics in a graduate program at NYU. And one of the perennial questions of communication ethics is: When is it necessary to quit? I don’t suggest that there are easy answers. Every circumstance is a bit different. And it’s a highly personal choice. But there are consequences to making the wrong choice. And we all have to own the consequences of our choices.

Comes now Scott McClellan, in a tell-all book about his time as press secretary for President George W. Bush, that will be published next week.

I don’t need to re-hash all that’s in the book, which has been excerpted in major media and the subject of endless commentary on television.

But here are some salient points.

Referring to the outing of CIA spy Valerie Plame, McClellan says, according to excerpts on the publisher’s website:

“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.”

I sympathize with his plight. And McClellan further says that he didn’t realize he had been lied to until years later, after he left the White House. OK.

But the signs that his bosses were untrustworthy were already visible back then. He either missed them or didn’t care at the time. But he seems to care now.

A Culture of Deception

In excerpts published by Politico.com, McClellan diagnoses what went wrong with the Bush administration, in its lack of honesty before and after the invasion of Iraq and in its failed attempt to deal with Hurricane Katrina:

“[President Bush] and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war. … In this regard, he was terribly ill-served by his top advisers, especially those involved directly in national security.”

I have less sympathy with this. It seems outright disingenuous.

While I agree with the point about confusing propaganda with candor, the paragraph seems to be a propaganda-like maneuver.

First, it doesn’t hold the president accountable for his own and his administration’s actions, just the president’s advisors.

Second, there’s no suggestion in the excerpts published so far that McClellan tried to change the culture, to introduce the high level of candor and honesty that he now admits was necessary to sustain public support.

Third, unlike the closely-held lie about Plame’s outing, the case against Iraq was the subject of much public discussion throughout 2002 and 2003, and continuing to the present. Someone concerned about honesty and acting in good faith would at least have expressed curiosity about the other points of view in play at the time.

The UN weapons inspectors, right up to the month the US invaded, continued to affirm that there was no evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And throughout that period knowledgeable commentators questioned the president’s, vice president’s, the secretary of defense’s rationales for going to war. Indeed, those rationales kept changing.

Even as debates raged in the US, other nations’ intelligence services were keenly aware of the propaganda campaign that the administration was conducting.

In July, 2002, fully nine months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service briefed the Prime Minister and other senior British government ministers on the US run-up to war.

According to minutes of that meeting published by the Times of London in 2005:

“C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

But the senior-most levels of US government refused even to acknowledge that the case was anything but –- to quote the then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenant — a “slam dunk.”

McClellan parroted the party line, including calling into question the patriotism of those who criticized the president’s arguments or motives. He could have – perhaps even should have – known better.

The key is in the very word McClellan now uses to describe the president’s approach: propaganda. It is all too easy to confuse what propaganda means. Propaganda is often understood to mean falsehoods. But that’s too narrow a definition.

The Essence of Propaganda Isn’t That A Statement Is False

In fact, the essence of propaganda isn’t that a statement is false. Propaganda is far more insidious.

Rather, the essence of propaganda is that the speaker doesn’t care whether the statement is true or false. An effective propagandist simply uses whatever works in the moment. If it happens to be true, so be it. But if it happens to be false, tough. The propagandist is unconcerned with the truthfulness of the statement.

Why is this distinction important? Because telling the truth, by itself, isn’t necessarily praiseworthy. It certainly isn’t praiseworthy if the speaker doesn’t care whether it’s true.

But also because trust can erode just as quickly in the presence of propaganda – which often includes a mixture of true and false statements – as in the presence of outright lies. And then just because something happens to be true doesn’t mean it will be – or even that it should be – believed.

A climate of propaganda makes it harder for truth-tellers to be believed. This is the challenge President Bush has faced for years. And, to a certain degree, it is the central challenge McClellan now faces in his book.

In McClellan’s case, there are two further challenges:

The first is that his own behavior is contradicted by his official statements about other insiders who published books critical of the president. It’s hard not to judge him by the standards by which he asked us to judge others.

His Own Petard

For example, when former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke published his account of the Bush White House in 2004, Against All Enemies, McClellan said in a White House press briefing:

“Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book…
Q: Scott, the whole point of his book is he says that he did raise these concerns and he was not listened to by his superiors.
McCLELLAN: Yes, and that’s just flat-out wrong. …When someone uses such charged rhetoric that is just not matched by the facts, it’s important that we set the record straight. And that’s what we’re doing. If you look back at his past comments and his past actions, they contradict his current rhetoric. I talked to you all a little bit about that earlier today. Go back and look at exactly what he has said in the past and compare that with what he is saying today.”

Indeed. Compare what McClellan said then against what he says now. It’s pretty hard to reconcile.

McClellan says that he’s speaking out now because he feels betrayed in the Plame affair. Perhaps.

But the second challenge is this: Why the delay? Why not speak out at the time? Or when he discovered that he’d been lied to about the Plame affair?

McClellan certainly didn’t speak out about what he now calls the culture of deception, about the president’s and senior advisors’ default to propaganda, when he had the most powerful pulpit available. And he didn’t quit either.

Owning The Consequences of His Choices

McClellan enabled the very culture of deception he now condemns. His self-disclosure today may help him with his own healing, but it isn’t necessarily praiseworthy. It may absolve him of a private sense of sin or shame. But it doesn’t absolve him of his ethical lapses in office.

In fact, McClellan was a willing propagandist.

Coming clean now is a public event, not a private one. And the consequences of his behavior are with us still.

McClellan was a willing participant in propaganda right up to the moment he left his job under the best of terms – at the time the president said he looked forward to reminiscing with McClellan on the back porch in years to come.

We’ve had two more years – a quarter of the Bush presidency – with no change in approach; with the continuation of propaganda as a first resort.

And now the White House is turning on its former spokesperson. For many, that inspires sympathy. But McClellan is a consenting adult, who obviously expected such a backlash from an administration that values blind loyalty over honesty.

I’ve here only touched briefly on what will certainly be a rich trove of ethics case studies and discussion for months to come. The issues raised in McClellan’s book will likely become grist for my and others’ communication ethics courses.

And as the book gets into general circulation next week and we have more than excerpts to respond to, there are likely to be even more revelations and reactions.

I welcome your reactions and discussion.

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Harvard professor John G. Ruggie has submitted his third and final report to the United Nations Human Rights Council in his role as Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations.

The Ruggie Report is an important benchmark that captures current mainstream thinking on key business and human rights challenges. Ruggie’s recommendations are likely to influence businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations working to improve corporate human rights performance. Companies seeking to meet stakeholder expectations for corporate responsibility should become familiar with Ruggie’s work.

The critical context for Ruggie’s appointment was the contentious debate surrounding a set of Draft Norms on the Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations considered and ultimately tabled by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2003. The Draft Norms catalogue a wide range of rights affected by corporate activity and propose mandatory reporting by companies, and periodic UN monitoring and verification of corporate compliance. While many human rights advocates support the legally binding “treaty” approach of the Draft Norms, the text of the Norms was opposed as insufficiently precise and unenforceable by governments and corporate interests. Opponents of the treaty approach are also reluctant to extend to private actors the same human rights responsibilities that bind governments under orthodox international law.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Professor Ruggie in 2005 to clarify key legal and policy dimensions of the international business and human rights agenda, and to make recommendations to the United Nations for the best way forward. As Annan’s Chief Advisor for strategic planning, Ruggie had been instrumental in the conception and launch of the UN Global Compact - the voluntary corporate responsibility initiative that asks companies to follow ten core principles on human rights, labor standards, the environment and anti-corruption.

The Ruggie Report seeks to reframe the polarizing issues that scuttled the Draft Norms by proposing a conceptual and policy framework that can generate concrete progress on business and human rights issues outside of a formal treaty process.

Ruggie calls for greater efforts by all actors in three areas: 1) government efforts to protect against human rights abuses by businesses; 2) the corporate responsibility to respect human rights; and 3) the need for more effective access to remedies for human rights abuses by victims of corporate abuses.

The Ruggie Report’s “protect, respect and remedy” framework provides a number of insights for companies that view human rights compliance as a key element of corporate responsibility:

• Corporate human rights responsibilities go beyond legal compliance. While Ruggie emphasizes the negative duties of companies to do no harm and to avoid complicity in human rights abuses by others, he also reinforces the notion that companies must go beyond legal compliance to meet their human rights responsibilities. The “baseline responsibility of companies” to respect human rights is defined by law as well as by societal expectations. And corporate philanthropy never relieves a company of its human rights responsibilities: “A company cannot compensate for human rights harm by performing good deeds elsewhere.”

• Invest in human rights due diligence. Companies must understand the human rights risks posed by their operations in order to meet their human rights responsibilities. Ruggie appropriately highlights the value of obtaining accurate information so that companies can “become aware of, prevent and address” human rights issues. Human rights impact assessments, like those undertaken by a few leading companies, will become an increasingly important and widespread corporate tool. Understanding a company’s “sphere of influence,” its activities, and its relationships can help determine the necessary scope of corporate human rights due diligence.
• Ensure that corporate human rights initiatives contain effective grievance mechanisms. Ruggie calls on both governments and companies to establish non-judicial grievance mechanisms so that alleged corporate human rights abuses can be addressed. Grievance mechanisms should be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, consistent with international human rights standards, and transparent. Any non-judicial grievance procedures must not foreclose legal remedies to hold companies accountable for human rights violations.
• Consider the full range of human rights. Ruggie declined to define a narrow list of rights for which companies are responsible, arguing that corporate conduct potentially affects the full range of human rights and that companies should focus on the scope of their responsibilities with respect to any right affected by their operations. The Report nevertheless cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ; the two International Covenants, on Civil and Political Rights, and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the core ILO Conventions as the international instruments containing the human rights standards all companies must consider in order to adequately manage their human rights responsibilities.
• More governments are likely to align business and human rights policies. Just as companies that take corporate responsibility seriously are integrating corporate responsibility efforts across business functions, governments that take corporate human rights accountability seriously will increasingly align national policies. Ruggie offers two examples: 1) the frequent tension in host nations between investor protections and human rights protections; and 2) the lack of mandatory human rights impact assessments for companies that receive export credit support from their home governments.

Both companies and advocates have sought greater clarity on the human rights responsibilities of companies under international law. While the Ruggie Report sidesteps the issue of binding corporate accountability by emphasizing the primary legal responsibilities of national governments and proposing no new legal obligations for companies, the Report accurately reflects the state of the field and points to the most likely areas of future business and human rights initiatives.

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Pope Benedict XVI dazzled New York and Washington this week, both with the majesty of his office and with his personal humility. The latter confounded expectations.

I have not been a particular fan of the man who is now Pope. When he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was considered by many to be the then-Pope’s enforcer. In November, 2002, some six months after the Boston Globe broke the story of systemic problems of child sexual abuse in the US Church, Cardinal Ratzinger said, according to the New York Times:

“’In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type,’ he said in November 2002 during a visit to Spain. ’Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated - that there is a desire to discredit the church.’”

A Church-sponsored review board (see below) later concluded that the number was closer to 4 percent. Any organization where 4 percent, or even 1 percent, of its employees commit such a felony would rightly be in a heap of trouble. And the fact that some may have wanted to discredit the Church doesn’t mean that it is in the clear. Most organizations have critics, and even enemies. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t also have legitimate problems.

The insensitivity of Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2002 remarks reminded many of Cardinal Bernard Law, who headed the Boston Archdiocese when the abuse scandal first hit. Cardinal Law refused to apologize for six months; he refused even to meet with the victims or their representatives. He resigned in disgrace at year-end.

In July, 2003, a report by the Massachusetts attorney general concluded that at least 237 priests in the Boston Archdiocese had been accused of abusing children; 48 of the priests served during Cardinal Law’s tenure. The report concluded:

“There was no evidence that the Archdiocese at any time took a comprehensive analysis of possible systematic causes of the abuse.”

In 2004, a report by The National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Bishops, concluded that

“There were credible allegations that several thousand priests, comprising four percent of priests in ministry over the last half-century, committed acts of sexual abuse of minors.”

In all, it cited evidence that 10,667 children had been abused by 4,392 priests. But it found further that:

“Perhaps even more troubling than the criminal and sinful acts of priests who engaged in abuse of minors was the failure of some bishops to respond to the abuse in an effective manner, consistent with their positions as leaders of the flock with a duty to protect the most vulnerable among us from possible predators.”

The report found that the Vatican shared some of the blame:

“It appears that the seriousness of this issue and the magnitude of the problem were not appreciated fully in Rome. Many attribute the Vatican’s inaction prior to the current crisis to a general reluctance to interfere with bishops. Others attribute it to a view in Rome that the sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy was uniquely an American problem.”

It was against this backdrop that Pope Benedict was viewed by some, including me, with skepticism. Any claim to moral authority had to be viewed against the Vatican’s, and his personal, initial response.

All that changed with his visit last week.

Overcoming the Perception of Indifference

One of the principles of crisis management is that the perception of indifference is the single most powerful determinant of reputational harm. Organizations and their leaders are forgiven every day when bad things happen; even when very, very bad things happen. But they won’t be forgiven if they don’t seem to care that something bad happened. In the early days of the scandal, the Church didn’t seem to care.

Although later than it could have been, Pope Benedict’s comments and his actions demonstrated that he does care.

His US trip began with an interview on board his plane in which the Pope chose to answer a previously-submitted question on the scandal. He said he was “deeply ashamed” about the behavior of priests and the Church’s response. This admission dominated the front pages of newspapers when he arrived. In his outdoor mass in Washington he said:

“No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving and pastoral attention.”

He also agreed to meet privately with some of the abuse victims from Boston. In this unannounced meeting the Pope spoke individually with victims, and treated them with the dignity they were denied when Cardinal Law refused to meet with them. The Boston Globe described the meeting, as recounted by one of the victims:

“And then, one by one, the victims rose to speak with the pope, as he clasped their hands. ‘I actually kept my head down; I couldn’t believe it until I saw his little red shoes,’ Olan Horne of Lowell said. ‘I looked up, and I had the eyes of somebody’s grandfather looking at me. He was a very sincere, humble man.’”

The Globe called the visit a “defining moment” in the Pope’s visit to the US.

The New York Times quoted Catholic journalist and author David Gibson as saying:

“’It wasn’t even visual. Just the very fact of it was as powerful as his words,’ he said. ‘They didn’t want it to be the story line. But it has been the story line. The irony is that this story line — the sexual abuse scandal — has done more than anything else could have to help us see the Pope Benedict that the Vatican wanted us to see.”

Humility as a Necessary Leadership Attribute

This blog has noted that effective crisis management requires a dollop of humility. Humility tempers other attributes, and makes a leader even stronger. Humility helps a leader to recognize that maybe - just maybe - he or she might be wrong; that there may be other valid perspectives; that he or she doesn’t have to be the smartest person in every room, at every meeting.

Humility also helps leaders to connect with others up, down, and across the chain of command; to build organizations and cultures that more likely thrive; to understand the perspectives of other stakeholders. Humility recognizes that there’s a big difference between responsibility and blame; that taking responsibility regardless of where the blame may lay down the organization is the first step in getting people to focus on a solution rather than simply point fingers.

Pope Benedict has demonstrated just this quality.

And it was noticed. Time magazine recounted the reaction of a radio reporter covering the Pope’s visit to Ground Zero in New York:

“As photographers and cameramen put away their equipment, a local radio reporter was giving an instant report from his cell phone: ‘There’s a humility about this man,’ he said, ‘that is quite something.’ he said.

In 2005 The New York Times described the changes in Cardinal Ratzinger as he dealt with the duties of handling the abuse issue for the Vatican.

“For the past four years, the man who is now Pope Benedict XVI had more responsibility than any other cardinal for deciding whether and how to discipline Roman Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse.

On Friday mornings, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sat in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith poring over dossiers detailing allegations of abuse sent in by bishops from around the world, according to two top officials in his office. He found the cases so disturbing that he called the work ‘our Friday penance.’

The scandal changed the church in the United States, and it may have changed the new pope as well.”

One of the key forces in the healing that has taken place in Boston and beyond (and the person most credited with persuading the Pope to meet with the Boston victims) is Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who succeeded Cardinal Law as head of the Boston Archdiocese.

The Boston Globe noted that Cardinal O’Malley had a track record of cleaning up the abuse messes left by prior bishops:

“The [meeting between the Pope and the Boston victims] has become a defining moment of O’Malley’s career, which has been permanently entwined with the abuse crisis. O’Malley had headed two dioceses - Fall River and Palm Beach, Fla., - wracked by abuse scandals when he was tapped in 2003 to take over the crisis-torn Archdiocese of Boston, still reeling from the revelations of widespread abuse and coverup that led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law.

Now, not only did O’Malley arrange this week’s historic meeting between victims and the pope, but he included victims who had left the Catholic Church and had been critical of its leaders. And O’Malley made sure the pope knew exactly what had happened in Boston - he handed the pontiff a handmade book listing the names of nearly 1,500 alleged victims of clergy sexual abuse from the Archdiocese of Boston, and as the pope slowly turned the pages, the cardinal mentioned that some of the victims died from suicide or drug abuse.

When the pope saw the book of names, ‘there was an audible intake of breath,’ said the Rev. John J. Connolly, who is a special assistant to the cardinal for abuse issues.

Cardinal O’Malley’s role is completely consistent with his actions as Boston Archbishop. To me Cardinal O’Malley became the hero of the abuse scandal on his first day in office, July 30, 2003, when he delivered a homily that addressed the abuse issue head on:

“The whole Catholic community is ashamed and anguished because of the pain and the damage inflicted on so many young people, and because of our inability or unwillingness to deal with the crime of sexual abuse of minors. To those victims and their families, we beg forgiveness.”

He clearly cared. Better yet, he took steps to make that caring manifest. He persevered and was instrumental in persuading Pope Benedict that the Pope should do so as well.

Unfinished Business

Not everyone is satisfied that the Pope’s recent actions go far enough. The New York Times quoted two activists in particular who wish more would be done:

“Anne Burke, an Illinois Supreme Court justice and a member of a National Review Board appointed by the bishops to help the church recover from the scandal, is among three board members who met in 2004 with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict a year later.

‘We named names, told him how cardinals and certain bishops were so uncooperative,’ she said. ‘When we left the meeting, he said, Thank you very much, I appreciate all the information. And he took copious notes.’

She says she is moved to see Benedict now responding to the victims, but not surprised that he had not punished bishops. ‘This is an Enron crisis in the Catholic Church,’ she said. ‘The only difference is that the shareholders in Enron were able to get rid of their board of directors.’

David Clohessy, an abuse victim and an organizer of the largest nationwide support group, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said on Friday, ‘If the pope would clearly, publicly and severely discipline even a handful of complicit bishops, bishops who knew or suspected abuse and ignored it or concealed it, that’s the easiest and most effective step.

Mr. Clohessy acknowledged that victims might sound bitter and thankless just when the pope himself is finally taking their side. He began to cry, as he said: ‘We’re not interested in punishment for punishment’s sake. We’re interested in consequences because that deters more recklessness, secrecy and deceit.’”

But the tide has clearly turned. The Church as an institution takes its direction from its leaders, and the senior-most leader has spoken. Although it came late and there may be more to do, it is a start.

Taking crises seriously is one of the burdens of leadership. And humility is one of the attributes that allows the leader to take crises seriously; to think and feel as a stakeholder would, and to act accordingly.

The Church and all who care about it are better because this pope has led with humility.

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Many leading corporate responsibility efforts are the result of stakeholder pressure on companies to improve labor conditions in their global supply chains. Since the 1990s, industries ranging from apparel, sporting goods and toys, to food, manufacturing and technology, have sought to demonstrate responsibility through supply chain compliance programs. Supply chain best practices – codes of conduct, independent monitoring, public reporting, and collaboration with nongovernmental organizations – have shaped stakeholder expectations of corporate responsibility initiatives generally, often setting the bar for other companies and industries.

Supply chain best practices continue to emerge. Key challenges for today’s leading companies include:

• Moving beyond monitoring to focus on supplier training and education;
• Addressing “code and monitoring fatigue” by consolidating brand, industry and multistakeholder compliance efforts; and
• Finding ways to demonstrate (and reward) improved social and environmental performance al all levels of global supply chains.

Current issues in the sourcing world were the focus of Intertek’s Ethical Sourcing Forum North America earlier this month. Intertek provides auditing, testing, quality assurance and certification services for multinational companies, so the conference had a decidedly corporate perspective, emphasizing current corporate compliance efforts and attracting attendees responsible for supply chain management.

The opening panel provided a valuable survey of current trends by three experts on the challenges of responsible sourcing.

Marcela Manubens, Senior Vice President, Global Human Rights & Social Responsibility at Phillips-Van Heusen, noted that:

• Leading compliance efforts continue to move beyond monitoring to emphasize training and education that seeks to create a culture of human rights compliance at all levels of the supply chain;
• Collaborative social compliance efforts are triggering antitrust concerns; and
• Committed consumers are the missing piece of the sustainability puzzle. In industries like apparel that compete intensely on price, will consumers reward the companies that take compliance seriously?

Auret van Heerden, President and CEO of the Fair Labor Association (FLA), from his perspective leading a multi-stakeholder effort to end sweatshop conditions in factories worldwide, pointed out that:

• Multinationals are still the sole source of regulation in most sourcing markets. Auret expands on this point in his FLA blog.
• Supply chain monitors in the field need to ask more than “what is happening?” and start asking “why?” Companies need diagnostic tools, metrics and key performance indicators that can identify the root causes of labor abuses, and accurately measure performance improvements over time.
• Less “top-down” control of supply chain monitoring can lead to greater compliance. Locally sustainable compliance solutions, such as local bodies that prioritize compliance issues, should be a goal of responsible sourcing efforts.

Finally, Doug Cahn, a consultant and former head of human rights programs at Reebok, emphasized the challenge for companies of managing monitoring data and highlighted two technology-driven compliance tools:

• The Fair Factories Clearinghouse; and
• The recently launched Clear Voice Hotline, an alternative to factory-controlled grievance procedures.

The growing use of technology as a compliance tool is an emerging theme:

• Craig Moss, Director of Corporate Programs and Training, at Social Accountability International noted that the development and acceptance of key performance indicators is being driven to a large extent by their adoption by corporate IT departments. The implication for corporate responsibility managers: make sure your social compliance indicators can be measured and are included in data management efforts.
• Web-based platforms are accelerating collaborative compliance efforts. The Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, for example, are developing a joint supply chain risk management tool. The Fair Labor Association is also developing a web portal for sharing factory assessments, training and performance indicators.

If companies managing global supply chains continue to lead the way on matters of corporate responsibility, as they have over the past fifteen years, technology-driven solutions are likely to become more relevant for all companies seeking to meet stakeholder expectations for responsible management.

(Full disclosure: I presented an historical overview of working hour standards, commissioned by Intertek, at an Intertek conference in 2004.)

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One week ago Elliot Spitzer was governor of New York, working hard to overcome an admittedly rocky first year in office. Today he’s gone, felled by a prostitution scandal that has all the markings of Greek tragedy.

From the moment the news broke last week, I’ve received dozens of e-mails from students, clients, friends, and blog readers asking whether/when I would post about the governor. I held back, for several reasons. First, what can one say in the moment that isn’t in very bad taste or already said? Second, I didn’t want to seem to be piling on. And third, I felt sympathy for the human beings affected by his behavior: certainly for his family; even for Mr. Spitzer; also for the then-unidentified woman, whose photo has now been splashed all over the papers, including the online versions of those sensationalist tabloids the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

But from a modest distance, some lessons now begin to emerge. One of them is this: Absent a dollop of humility, there’s a substantial likelihood of humiliation.

Lack of Humility Leads to Humiliation

One of the themes of this blog – and a fundamental principle of crisis management – is that most harm in a crisis is self-inflicted. The other is that lack of humility – arrogance, entitlement, bullying, etc. – is a predictor of self-inflicted harm.

One of the wisest pieces of advice on this subject – which I’ve used with impunity for the last 10 years – comes from the Wall Street Journal Business World columnist Holman Jenkins. He noted in 1998:

“Organizations need defenses against their charismatic leaders. Otherwise such individuals can too readily bully or seduce others into supporting their vainglorious illusions.” (Holman Jenkins, Business World Column, The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 1998, page A19. No free link available.)

Needed: Defenses Against Charismatic Leaders

Governor Spitzer is hardly unique in being such a leader driven by vainglorious illusions and the arrogance to assume that he’s always right, and that being right is all that matters. This is a common failing in leaders of all stripes: in business, in religion, in politics – in short, in life.

This week also marks the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. As we enter the sixth year of the war, we hearken back to the words of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who before the invasion told a CBS radio audience: “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

Or Vice President Richard Cheney, who exactly five years ago this weekend had this exchange with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, in which he wouldn’t even consider the possibility that his assumptions might be mistaken:

MR. RUSSERT: “If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?”

VICE PRES. CHENEY: “Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.”

Memento Mori

So what are the defenses that work to keep charismatic leaders from bullying and seducing others into supporting their vainglorious illusions?

In the Roman Empire a triumphant general parading through the streets was followed by a slave whose job was to persistently remind the general that although he may be at the top of the world today, tomorrow is another day, and anything can happen. Memento mori: Remember, you are mortal!

In medieval times this role was assumed by a jester, the only person who could speak freely in the presence of the monarch without risk of immediate and severe punishment. The pretext of “in jest” was seen to immunize the speaker because a joke was understood to be different from a challenge to authority.

President Lyndon B. Johnson surrounded himself with the “Wise Men,” a group of luminaries who initially were yes-men but who in March, 1968 had a tough-love discussion that forced the president to recognize that the war in Vietnam was unwinable.

Today organizations are ever-more in need of such defenses. Stakeholder expectations are higher than ever. The velocity of communication – and of criticism – is faster than ever. And, as Governor Spitzer learned, there are no more secrets.

How can a leader build in such protection? To start, the leader can find someone he or she trusts completely, and make a point of regularly seeking honest and candid input. Or formalize a relationship with a mentor – but the mentor needs to be someone with a sufficiently different perspective that he or she won’t be in lockstep with the leader. Or the leader can hire someone to be a thought partner – a role our firm often assumes. In these relationships, the leader needs to persistently ask: “This is what I’m considering; what am I missing?”

The trusted advisor, in turn, needs to use a combination of empathy and tough love, and persistently admonish the leader in much the same way that Oliver Cromwell admonished the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

Of course, even seeking the input of a trusted advisor requires a dollop of humility in the first place: a recognition that maybe - just maybe - the leader might be wrong; that there may be other valid perspectives. To paraphrase a very old and not-very-good joke,

How many trusted advisors does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one, but the bulb has to really want to change.

Absent a willingness to change, absent a dollop of humility, the risk for the leader is humiliation. And in the case of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Cheney, there’s the added risk of further serious unintended consequence with meaningful national policy implications.

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While many of us feel comfortable with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, something like Pay Per Post (PPP) and Pay Per Vote blogging would probably make us feel quite uncomfortable and could disturb our sense of social media authenticity. Most of us have a blogroll we trust and turn to for wisdom on a regular basis. Could we still trust blog posts if Pay Per Post blogging could potentially corrupt social media?

Because blogs and social media web sites generate a lot of traffic, adopting social media tools has become a magic pill for increasing online rankings and amping up revenues.

But is adopting social media tools a magic pill or a red herring? And is a company that seeks lucrative deals in the black market of social media jeopardizing its reputation and creating mistrust among its stakeholders?

A recent article in Wired magazine about Digg.com and StumbleUpon, two popular community-based news sites, has raised questions about the legitimacy and transparency of social media content. Up to now, the top 10 most popular stories/blog posts on such sites achieve that distinction based on user votes. The new Pay Per Vote online services described in the article allow paying for votes, and so could guarantee any story/blog post a spot on the front page in no time. As we have already seen on some sites, the result is often a disappointing one, “…a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary…,” which triggers a number of angry comments from community members who question the legitimacy of the story. Since social websites like Digg and StumbleUpon currently succeed because members and their stories can be trusted, the Pay Per Vote strategy could cause reputational damage to any author in the long run.

The success of any story, according to Pay Per Vote algorithms depends on the number of votes/clicks that an author is ready to pay for. Click metrics may be considered one of the key measures of online success, but most of the time they can be a major source of distortion for a company as it figures out the right business strategy on line.

A study on online advertising has shown that click performance is the wrong measure of the effectiveness of a brand-building campaign in the long run. According to the study, 6% of the heavy clickers called “Natural Born Clickers” account for 50% of all display ad clicks and cannot represent the total U.S. online population.

Another popular way to influence online rankings of blogs is to apply various keyword research tools. Keyword research, like any other market research, provides information on the words and language people are using on line to refer to a particular topic and helps bloggers target their posts by using the right keywords. Designed to organically improve the process of blog search and generate online collaboration and genuine conversation, keyword research tools are often promoted as a way of manipulating search engines and generating more traffic. And here is why it works. According to Copyblogger, “… targeting a post at the right keywords can bring you 10,000 visitors, where one that you write off the top of your head might bring you 100. How much is each visitor worth? Or each subscriber? If only 1% subscribe to your blog, that’s an extra 99 subscribers a month.”

But if a blog makes it to the top 10 with a little help from keyword research, it could still quickly drop from readers’ radars if its content has no value. When a blog lacks authenticity and a strong foundation, it can create more reputational harm than positive exposure.

Social media is still in its infancy. And the current ethics guidelines for setting up blogs aren’t mandatory and allow for many interpretations. More often the value of blogs is measured by their return on investment and seldom by their return on reputation. On top of that, in system as open and expansive as the World Wide Web, the possibilities for gaming the system are boundless, especially for people who are pursuing self-serving short-term outcomes. Unfortunately, short-term outcomes based on sophisticated new algorithms could be a red herring for those who think seriously about establishing a long-term online presence and building a strong brand name. And for those of us who are interested in fostering genuine and open communications, the new online gaming possibilities could create disturbance and compromise the integrity of blogs and their authors.

We will undoubtedly hear more about notions of Pay Per Post and Pay Per Vote blogging, black market media and social media corruption in the future and it will be interesting to watch how social media communities will respond to these issues.

But still I’d like to think that the recent stories about the negative impact of black market media will discourage bloggers from pursuing short-term results and prompt them to engage their moral compass to sell themselves from a more genuine and holistic position. After all, a genuine and holistic position is what will increase brand awareness, strengthen online reputation and contribute to a more meaningful future for online communications.

Photo credit: A big red fish by Dukal

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And TV also changed the way Americans experienced the world. Suddenly, TV was the medium of social cohesion.

We watched as Walter Cronkite wiped a tear and announced to a stunned nation that President Kennedy had died.

We watched as Cronkite provided live commentary on the moon landing. And we watched as he pronounced the war in Vietnam unwinable. Vietnam became the first “living room war,” playing out on our TVs.

I believe that history will look back at the 2008 election and declare that it too represents a turning point. Just as 1960 is the moment in which politics, social cohesion, and how we understand the world changed because television came of age, 2008 represents a similar tectonic shift. Social media is just coming of age, and its effect on the body politic is unexpectedly becoming decisive. It has already begun to change commerce. It is now changing journalism, politics, and our relationships with the rest of society and with each other.

I am indebted to Joe Trippi for giving voice to this idea, with which I’ve been struggling uncomfortably for some months.

Joe, with characteristic clarity, helped me see the change as it’s happening. Joe and I have the good fortune to serve on the advisory board of Brodeur. Joe is fresh from being a senior advisor to the Edwards for President campaign. In 2004 he was national campaign manager for the Howard Dean campaign.

At the Brodeur advisory board meeting last week Joe described the difference between social media in the 2004 and 2008 campaigns. Joe described the Dean campaign – seen as breakthrough in the use of what we now call social media – as the Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk test, that proved that a new technology is viable.

Four short years later we’re seeing the political equivalent of the moon launch.

According to Trippi, one reason Senator Barack Obama’s momentum is seemingly unstoppable is that his support is viral: it is voter-generated, and not dictated solely by some central authority.

Senator Hillary Clinton’s support, on the other hand, is still in the TV paradigm: radiating from a central authority, who provides command and control.

The two paradigms couldn’t be more different.

In the TV age, the cult of the leader prevailed. Walter Cronkite, Uncle Walter, as he was known, provided comfort when he told us, “That’s the way it is.”

As my colleague Laurel Hart has blogged on this site, journalism today is morphing with the blogosphere, creating user-generated news where increasingly journalists collaborate with readers, offering: “This is what I know; this is what I don’t know; what do you know?”

In commerce customers are designing their own products, in their own ways. They’re even reprogramming electronic gadgets. Social media is also changing how we relate to each other, and to society in general.

Any change of this magnitude is hard to see up close. We miss the contours of the change. Distance is often necessary to fully understand the change and its implications.

Just as in 1960 it took a while for the TV paradigm to be recognized widely, it will take some time for the new paradigm to become part of the public consciousness, even to get a catchy name. For now, though, it is enough to be attentive to the changes going on around us. These aren’t changes of degree. They are changes in kind. The game is changing in fundamental ways.

Business as usual will continue to exist, but business the new way will quickly overtake it.

We need to be ready.

I, for one, will pay even closer attention. I invite you to as well.

We’ll blog more about leading indicators that the change is taking place.

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