I have been lucky enough to be in PR for more years than I care to discuss. During those years technologies, products, concepts, people and politics have waxed and waned with crushing regularity. Some cycles have been amazingly fast moving, others would put a glacier to shame, but all have moved with a sense of panic, impending doom and gut wrenching immediacy based on what could be lost to whoever could be the winner. The final analysis is that no matter what the product, what the question and who is on the griddle, the PR reaction remains the same. There is a basic, almost generic, quality that infuses all PR activities.

This blog is dedicated to uncovering the Generic Lessons of PR.

Remember the Japanese peril when they, the shifty Nippon businessmen of yore, were buying up Manhattan? In those days we were all urged to learn Japanese, transfer our allegiance to the Far East and sit back and wait for those ravening hordes to override Pearl Harbor and land in San Francisco. Books were written of Cracking the Japanese Market, well-heeled children were sent to Tokyo on week long field trips and memory chips were the symbolic equivalent to the rape of Nanking. Today it's China and India that have become the havens of rampant capitalism, and Japan is just another country with a big-haired Premier.

During Three Mile Island, I was privileged to be working for a Canadian nuclear power consortium. On my desk came the daily stream of requests for interviews, worried calls for debates and an unending succession of information and misinformation. Crisis control is media management at its finest; it's where reality looks bullshit in the eye and tells it to bug off! Because of the intense scrutiny generated by a truly dangerous situation, my advice was always to tell the truth and deny knowledge when knowledge is unavailable. That has never changed no matter what the crisis.

Basics are the hardest to implement today because we are a society obsessed with fine definitions in a meaningless charade of sameness. Case in point, the whole concept of adequate technology has never been addressed because we need to promote the latest technology in the face of mounting costs and increased dependencies. Working in Africa taught me that answers to problems can be jury rigged in a manner that OSHA would never approve, it also taught me that a 486 PC running Windows 98 powered by a car battery is just as efficient and useful as the latest Intel dual core on a laptop with a dead battery. The first is adequate technology, the second superfluous implementation.