As the year wraps up, I want to give all my readers an early late Christmas/Hanukkah present – 46 ethics words of wisdom from the interviews I conducted over the past year.
Mark McClennan, APR, Fellow PRSA
Mark W. McClennan, APR, Fellow PRSA, is the general manager of C+C's Boston office. C+C is a communications agency all about the good and purpose-driven brands. He has more than 20 years of tech and fintech agency experience, served as the 2016 National Chair of PRSA, drove the creation of the PRSA Ethics App and is the host of EthicalVoices.com
Being an Effective Counselor During Difficult and Heart-Wrenching Ethical Situations – Michelle Egan
Michelle Egan, the chief communications officer of the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company discusses a number of key ethical issues including:
• Who owns the work you create at a company? And what do you do when a former co-worker asks for it?
• What to do when your company’s equipment causes the death a Middle schooler?
• Fighting the attack on the free flow of information
• How do you balance privacy with transparency?
Melanie Ensign the head of security, privacy, and engineering communications for Uber discusses:
1) Why the best PR pros focus on stopping fires before they begin, rather than responding to a crisis
2) The ethical and cognitive challenges of marketing with FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)
3) Why SCUBA diving is a great guide for change management
4) Common ethical mistakes with measurement – and why we need to stop confusing coverage with action
Loring Barnes, APR, Fellow, PRSA, an independent practitioner and Chair of her town’s Selectboard, discusses a number of key ethical issues including:
• Tough ethical decisions during product recalls
• How communicators should approach ethical issues around cannabis
• The quickest path to redemption after making an ethical lapse
Every week, the students and I start my public relations ethics class at Boston University discussing ethics issues of the week. Rather than keeping it to ourselves, following are 25 recent ethics issues and incidents for your reading pleasure. Some of these are sure to liven up the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Tim O’Brien, the founder of O’Brien Communications and host of the Shaping Opinion podcast discusses the ethical dangers of deplatforming and relative ethics.
Marisa Vallbona, the founder and president of CIM, Inc PR and co-founder of the PR Consultants Group, discusses:
• Going beyond “that’s unethical” to understand the issues and better guide those you are advising
• What to do when people steal your ideas
• The challenges the lack of enforcement of PRSA’s Code of Ethics creates for the public relations industry
EthicalVoices is one year old. Thank you. It is just beginning.
Jim Lukaszewski, one of America’s most respected crisis and ethics counselors for the C-Suite at global brands, discusses:
• How to most effectively counsel senior executives around ethics issues
• How to speak up and be heard when you notice an ethical lapse
• How all ethics lapses are intentional and what it means
Today is Halloween. I was going through some old files and found an infographic I created back in 2014 – The Nine Circles of PR Hell. Since it is also a throwback Thursday, I decided to share it here as a bonus post.