The Business of Persuasion

Harold Burson on Public Relations

Harold Burson

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780795350443
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

"A wonderfully personal account of the thoughts behind a lifelong focus on the reputation of corporations around the world. Candid and straightforward."— Huffington Post Harold Burson, described by PRWeek as "the [20th] century's most influential PR figure, " is perhaps the most recognized name in the industry today. The founder of PR giant Burson-Marsteller had an incredible 70-year career, in which he built a global enterprise from a one-man consulting firm. In this illuminating and engaging business memoir, Burson traces his career from studying at Ole Miss to serving in World War II, reporting on the Nuremburg trials, and joining with Bill Marsteller. Together, he and Marsteller made history in a new venture that would grow to be one of the biggest public relations companies in the world, with over 60 offices on six continents. By way of personal and professional examples, Burson shows readers what public relations really entails—its challenges, methodologies, and impacts. His anecdotes on PR challenges like the "Tylenol crisis, " the removal of confederate flags from Ole Miss, and the introduction of "New Coke" illustrate Burson's time-tested tenets of great PR and crisis management. He interweaves iconic moments from the history of public relations into his story, making this "a must-read for any PR professional" (Jack Welch, executive chairman, Jack Welch Management Institute). "Every detail of Harold's professional life is brought alive through an interesting narrative of the highs and lows... There is loads of inspiration hidden in every page for everyone. Be it a reader with no interest in Public Relations or a veteran who wants to understand more about the profession."— Reputation Today

1.
Defining Dream, Defining Moments

As I reflect on the past ten decades, I marvel at how a series of events prepared me for public relations, the centerpiece of my working life. Each stage of my life—childhood, public school, college, my first job, the US Army, my start-up, the merger with Bill Marsteller—has positioned me for the next. For many years, I thought this progression was happenstance; perhaps chance did have a hand in keeping me on track. But looking through the long prism of time, I can see my part: I knew what I wanted to do with my life when I entered my teens, and this self-knowledge moved me in a targeted direction.

My hope was to work on a newspaper, and I sought opportunities to do so as early as junior high school. Eventually I wanted to go to New York and work as a reporter for the New York Times. I had this recurrent notion that at some point in my young life, someone would discover me and offer me a job in New York. I had no idea how this would come about or when, but I was certain it would happen.

While still in my teens, I seized the opportunity to report for a major southern newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, the Commercial Appeal. That experience is what I call a “defining moment”—one of many that governed my destiny. Drawing on my ninety-plus years, I have developed a theory, which applies to individuals above a certain minimum socioeconomic level. People with modest means come face-to-face with opportunities that can significantly change their lives for better or worse. All too many individuals facing potentially positive opportunities either fail to recognize them or are ill equipped to respond appropriately.

The Right Parents, the Right Time

During my early years, the horse-drawn wagon or cart was still a popular mode of transport. Commercial aviation was in its infancy; Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic alone in 1927. The iceman delivered ice; the milkman delivered milk. In the 1930s, well-to-do individuals shopped in department stores or attended movies for a respite from the heat; residential air-conditioning was a decade or two in the future. Most people took streetcars; the fare in my hometown, Memphis, was seven cents a ride. Buck Rogers and science fiction were the rage. Typewriters and adding machines were the high-tech business tools of the day.

The values and decency of my parents shaped my life from a very early age. I am eternally grateful they immigrated to America from England a year before my birth. I say this without disrespect to other countries. The United States, despite its faults and inconsistencies, provided an environment best suited for me.

My family’s economic status was not far from the poverty line. As a soldier in the British Army in World War I, my father had been gassed, and he suffered health problems for the rest of his life. His first job in Memphis was delivering the morning newspaper. It provided barely enough to pay the rent and put food on the table for me and my two younger sisters, Rita and Bettye. We never missed a meal and always had a roof over our heads.

Neither of my parents was a strict disciplinarian. Though poor, they were protective of the family’s good name. They expected my sisters and me to conduct ourselves in a manner that would not bring shame to the family. Each of my parents spoke often of the importance of keeping the right company. As her firstborn and a male, I was my mother’s most favored child. Though not overtly demanding, she set high goals for me: there was no lesson I couldn’t learn, no mountain I couldn’t climb. She instilled in me a sense of security that has served me well through the years. One of my goals was to earn enough so that my parents could enjoy more of what life had to offer. Less than two years after my college graduation, they shared in my earnings—a monthly check until my mother died at age ninety.

My introduction to business—my first exposure to corporate restructuring—came in elementary school. My father’s newspaper delivery job ended when high school students replaced newspaper deliverymen. With the support of a local hardware wholesaler, my father opened a small hardware store that also stocked feed for horses, cows, and chickens—not unusual for households on the outskirts of cities like Memphis in the mid-1920s. For several years, the store provided a modest living. I spent most Saturdays shelving merchandise, wrapping packages, and making change. In the Great Depression, the business failed.

My mother took over as the family breadwinner. In many parts of the South, African Americans often felt uncomfortable shopping in department stores. My mother had the idea to start a door-to-door business selling goods and apparel in what people referred to then as “colored neighborhoods.” She convinced a wholesale dry goods firm to give her a small line of credit. She took orders from customers, bought the merchandise from the wholesaler, and delivered it to her customers. I’ve likened her to the first Avon lady. Had she been able to get her hands on $10,000, she would have been the first Sam Walton. She was on the go four or five days a week. Her commitment to her job influenced my work ethic throughout my life.

My father loved children. He had tremendous patience with youngsters, his own and others in the neighborhood. Before I reached the age of four, he began teaching me to read. His text was the Memphis newspaper, first the large-type advertisements and then the headlines. That accounts for my starting school at the third-grade level. Back then, Memphis public schools had no kindergarten. After my first two days of first grade, my teacher escorted me to second grade, where I remained for less than a week. Then I found myself in the third grade, where I quickly recognized I had a big, big problem. My father had taught me to write block letters but not cursive. I still have unpleasant memories of catching up with my fellow third graders.

During the Great Depression, my family moved to north Memphis, where I went to the combination middle school/high school known as Humes High, made famous when Elvis Presley attended. I preceded him by thirteen years, and we are both in the Humes High School Hall of Fame.

On my first day of seventh grade, an announcement on the school’s public address system (a new invention at the time) called for volunteers for the school newspaper. I responded. Miss Jenny, the teacher who supervised the paper, informed me that the paper’s staff consisted only of high school students. Noting my disappointment, she said, “There’s no reason a middle school pupil cannot participate.” That was the start of my career in journalism, with Miss Jenny as my first mentor outside my family. Her putting me on the newspaper staff set me on a course that led me to where I am today. I threw myself into it and became the teacher’s pet who got favorable assignments and after-school coaching on writing news articles.

When I was a fourteen-year-old junior, Miss Jenny appointed me student reporter for the school page in the Commercial Appeal’s Sunday edition. It called for a weekly column of non-sports school news, and I hand-carried my article to the school page editor. After a few weeks, he sat me down and edited my copy in my presence. He explained the changes he made and offered suggestions that remain with me even today. As the school year neared its end, he asked whether I’d like to work as a summer fill-in copy boy. By that time, I had decided to be a newspaper reporter, and my goal was to go to New York and work for the New York Times.

My byline in the local newspaper every week made me a mini public figure. Others sought me out, usually for recognition of an accomplishment such as being elected officer of one of the many high school extracurricular organizations. At age fourteen, I was determining which items to include in my column and which to exclude. My column had a fixed amount of space, and I learned to allocate it according to the news value of each event I covered.

I loved my summer job as a copy boy, a messenger who took copy from the press association Teletype machines to the appropriate editor. Before the end of summer, I was writing brief obituaries and updating baseball league standings. Most of all, I enjoyed hanging out in the composing room with the news editor as he positioned articles throughout the pages of the newspaper. The rattling Linotype machines, the smell of hot lead and cigarette smoke, and the green eye shades—it was as close to heaven as I had ever been!

As my high school graduation neared, I decided to attend Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi) because I had to pay for my college education, which Gus Robinson, one of the editors at the Commercial Appeal and the first person I ever met who regularly read the New Yorker, took seriously. As tristate editor, Robinson controlled the vast network of stringers who reported news from small towns in north Mississippi, east Arkansas, and west Tennessee. The stringer for Ole Miss was nearing graduation, and the job paid enough to cover tuition and other expenses, about $700 a year. He gave me the job, which not only solved my financial problem but put me, the youngest student on the campus, in a powerful position as stringer for the largest newspaper covering that part of Mississippi.

The seventy-eight-mile trip from the Memphis Greyhound terminal to Oxford, Mississippi, called for a change of buses in Holly Springs, about twenty miles distant from my final Ole Miss campus destination. After an hour ride on a two-lane gravel road that remained unpaved for two more years, I reached Brady Hall and met my roommate, Cleve Burk, a fellow Tennessean from Dyersburg about eighty miles north of Memphis.

It was the beginning of a new life, my first time away from home and on my own. I was responsible for the remainder of my life. I had confidence that I could make it.

“In the Know”

My father was an omnivorous reader, especially of history and current events. He always wanted to be in the know—that is, aware of and able to discuss any topical subject likely to arise in conversation. Before I started grade school, he admonished me to follow his example: “Being in the know will serve you well, son.” Those words still ring in my ears almost a century later.

How fortunate I am that I followed his example. Reading has been as much a routine for me as eating and sleeping. For many years, I have read myself to sleep—sixty to ninety minutes every night with a well-written book, fiction and nonfiction, or one of three daily newspapers—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times—that I couldn’t get to earlier in the day. On Tuesday evenings, I read the New Yorker, which arrived earlier that day.

Like my father, I strove to be in the know, to have knowledge of events of significance the world over. It has worked well for me on every continent, in business, and with friends—so much so that those three words encapsulate the long life I have enjoyed and cherished beyond measure.

“Call Me Ron.” “Yes, Mr. President.”

Some forty years after the founding of Burson-Marsteller, in March 1989, my dream of dreams happened in real life. It symbolized and encapsulated my life story to the extent that I am eager to violate chronological order and tell it now as a lead-in to what I perceive my career to be all about.

It started during a visit to my widowed eighty-two-year-old mother in Memphis, when the recently retired director of the US Information Agency, Charles Wick, called me on behalf of Ronald Reagan, who had recently left the presidency.

President Reagan had signed a contract to deliver a speech in Japan in exchange for a stipend of $2 million. The New York Times was onto the story. Its reporter was questioning whether the large fee for a single speech was an abuse of the office of the president. President Reagan sought my counsel on responding to this situation. I told Charlie I would be in California the next day.

This wasn’t my first time interacting with President Reagan. I worked with Charlie on the USIA’s public relations private sector advisory committee for eight years, four years as chairman. I hosted Charlie’s going-away party: my wife, Bette, and I stood in the reception line with President and Mrs. Reagan, close friends of the Wicks. As host, I seated myself next to the president at dinner in the Pan American Building. I was well-known to his senior staff, including Michael Deaver, press secretary Larry Speakes, and his chiefs of staff Don Regan, Senator Howard Baker, and Ken Duberstein.

That evening, I asked President Reagan, “What is bothering you most as you contemplate adjustment to your new life as a former president?”

His quick response: “Giving up that ...