Command and Control PR: Sathnam Sanghera, writing in today’s Financial Times (hat tip to reader Mark Pinsent in London, who sent me the link even before I received my news alert from the FT) suggests that the growing power of PR people might be the reason CEOs are less willing to talk to him than they used to be. And since he writes with his usual good humor and fairness (“As with journalists, I have found that some PRs are excellent, while others have the charm and wherewithal of baboons”) it is probably worth paying attention.

I’m in Athens right now, speaking at a conference on Homo Consumerus, and on the flights here I managed to read most of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations, in which much is made of the “command and control” school of public relations, which the authors insist is being rendered redundant by the transparency of the Internet.

I was planning to offer a mild rebuke in my eventual review, to the effect that good PR people have always understood the importance of transparency and that any PR that attempts to exercise “command and control” is and always has been just bad PR. But Sanghera’s piece made me realize that my idealized view of this business ignores the fact that many (perhaps most) PR people do try to control access to the CEOs, often to an absurdly trivial level: “Last year, for a pretty inconsequential piece on executive cars, I called around the offices of eight leading chief executives to find out what vehicles they were driven in. All but two declined to comment.”

In most cases, I guess, the PR folks are just doing what their CEOs want, but the result is that in the cause of avoiding controversy they strip away any sense that the company is a collection of (flawed) human beings and reinforce the notion that it’s a huge, faceless, emotionless collective: the Borg. This does the company no favors. And those who practice PR this way are going to find it very difficult to adapt over the next few years.