How to Be More Strategic: I heard a story at lunch that speaks volumes about the way corporate America works.

My companion had once met with the head of communications for a major corporation, which had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a management consulting firm to analyze where it was going one. The consultants’ conclusion: the company was not strategic enough. The company’s response: it changed everyone’s title, so that the director of communications, for example, was not the director of strategic communications.

Problem solved.

I’m fond of telling people that public relations is used to only a fraction of its potential by most companies, and this story illustrates one reason why. Many companies would rather make superficial changes—designed to fool their constituents and sometimes, I suspect, even themselves—than do the hard work needed to really change not just what you say but who you are.

This particular company, of course, was taking that tendency to an absurd extreme.