Transparency & Crisis Prevention -- Advice from Eric Schmidt

After writing about crisis management lessons from recent events (PR Lessons from BP, Toyota & Goldman Sachs), I came across a column by Google CEO Eric Schmidt that ran in Forbes.

Schmidt's point: thanks to a 24- hours news cycle, secrecy isn't so easy to come by. (Most people talk about a 24-hour news cycle, but to be clear, we're not saying it takes 24 hours for news to hit; news hits hourly, if not faster.) That's not necessarily a bad thing.

According to Schmidt, the real question is:

"What are our choices when we, whether as individuals or businesses, get it wrong--sometimes badly wrong? We can try to conceal our blunders, as so many people have done for so many centuries. But in a world where everything is recorded and stored, that is not a realistic option.

"Nor should it be. For a company that aspires to true significance or an individual who wants to rise to prominence, the question is, "How should we behave?" The answer must be, "We did the best we could and did so transparently." In time this should move from a defense to an expected standard."

I think it's good that a business leader like Schmidt endorses transparency, and that it will help pursuade other companies of the need to embrace a new way to operate.

But I sometimes I wonder if the idea of business transparency is just another business fad. Perhaps social media's significant contribution will be to make transparency part of the standard operating proceedure for business.

You can read Schmidt's column here.

What's Wrong with Newspapers?

In the June issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows writes an interesting essay, 'How to Save the News," which starts at an unexpected place: Google.

Noting that people assume that Google is one of the reasons newspapers are suffering, Fallows makes the point that Google is actually trying to help save newspapers, based on the premise that people are searching for compelling content, and that if they don't have interesting content -- like that from newspapers -- they won't need search engines.

What I think is interesting is a point I've made before but one that's validated by Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO (and a former client, when he was CEO of Novell):

"I observe that as print circulation falls, the growth of the online audience is dramatic. Newspapers don't have a demand problem; they have a business model problem."

Google's perspective, Fallows reports, is that people will of course pay for online content, even if they haven't done so up until now. The key is to find the right subscription solution for each publication -- it may not be the same answer for every paper.