PR for Humans: How business leaders tell powerful stories

by Mike Sergeant

Overview

*SHORT-LISTED FOR THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2020!*

“There is no strategy without a story. There is no story without the main character. The main character is you.”
PR for Humans is for pure-of-heart storytellers who want to cut through the noise and the nonsense. It brings together the essential and timeless principles of effective leadership communication.
Belief. Clarity. Opinion. Energy. Context. Time. Humility. Imagery.
Why are these things so important? Why do most people in PR and ‘communications’ not even talk about them? Why is PR for Humans even more important in the age of A.I.? In this fresh and energetic guide, former BBC correspondent Mike Sergeant draws on twenty years of frontline experience to reveal the secrets that every CEO, partner, board member, PR director and business leader needs to know.
The principles and techniques he sets out in this book will help you deliver more powerful speeches, presentations, media interviews, videos, podcasts and blogs.
They are the rocket fuel for your business and your career.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788600569
Publisher:	Practical Inspiration Publishing
Publication date:	04/18/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mike Sergeant is an international communications coach and PR adviser to CEOs and business leaders. Through his company www.sergeantleaders.com he delivers media training, public speaking coaching and reputation advice. Mike began his career at CNN in 1996 before moving to Reuters, Sky News and the BBC – where he spent 13 years as a TV and radio correspondent covering business, politics and the Middle East. He lives in North London with his wife and two sons.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BELIEF

In this chapter, I introduce the first principle of PR for Humans: BELIEF. I emphasise the importance of passion and really understanding why your organisation does what it does.

Believe in Something

The most useful question to ask yourself in business is: what do I believe in? People who care about something are the ones who cut through the noise and enhance their reputation. They are the masters of PR for Humans.

Find something to believe in. And stick to it.

This is sometimes dressed up as the corporate 'mission statement' or the 'purpose' of a business, implying that there needs to be wider relevance and social benefit. Good for profit and good for the world! It might be, but it doesn't have to be.

The problem with the word 'purpose' is that it's been used to justify the way some organisations make huge sums of money. They've carried on with business as usual over here, while launching schemes over there to show they have a conscience and aren't destroying humanity or the planet. Many seem to think business purpose means things like cutting carbon emissions, saving rainforests or fighting obesity.

I don't want to be glib about this, because those who care about charity and have a real connection to the world are already the heroes of PR for Humans. But the focus on social responsibility has confused and muddled one of the most important principles of communication:

You must believe in what you are doing. It must have intense meaning for you.

It's about passion. To be a convincing communicator, it's got to matter to you. Not to your stakeholders or lobbyists or friends. To you.

You might be running a clean energy business. Or you might be looking after the wealth of the world's billionaires. You might be making healthy salads or constructing high-speed rail lines. Some people may love what you do. Some may not. But only you can ascribe meaning and passion to your activities.

No clever argument or positioning or reasoning will win if the audience senses that the belief is missing. This is the first principle of PR for Humans.

Companies don't care about anything. They are legal constructs, not living beings. Organisations don't have emotions. It's the people within those organisations who feel things. And the customers who buy their products.

In business, you need to show the world what you care about.

Here's an example from my PR for Humans podcast. Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne is the founder of Genius, the gluten-free bread and baking products company. She set the company up 10 years ago after discovering that her son was severely gluten intolerant. He was three years old and tiny. He'd been feeling sick off and on since he'd been weaned.

Once the diagnosis came through and gluten was removed, he was a changed child. Within two months he was running around. But Lucinda couldn't find a decent loaf of gluten-free bread to make him a sandwich. She was a trained chef and a food expert, so she set about solving the problem herself, like a woman possessed. Obsessively blending ingredients in her kitchen. Baking 14 loaves a day. Working night shifts in a bread factory nearby to try and scale the recipes. Looking after the kids during the day. Desperately trying to get the formula right for a viable business to scale up.

"I was on a mission," she told me. "I don't think I could have got as passionate about a chocolate cake. I was driven by the need to sort the problem out. My primary motivation was my family. My secondary motivation was I knew I'd spotted a gap in the market. I could see this was a way of making a huge difference to people."

The drive. The passion. As Lucinda told me this, her eyes were shining with the authentic belief. She was someone who knew exactly what she'd done and why she'd done it. The story rang true.

Today, Genius exports to 10 countries, employs 300 people and has a turnover of £30 million.

Just to emphasise, this is about your belief. What you care about. Not adopting somebody else's values and expectations.

Your belief might be in gluten-free, healthy products or fantastic takeaway pizza. It could be electric cars or powerful 4x4s. Other people will make their judgements. But from a communications perspective, it's what you believe that matters.

In another example, the CEO of McDonalds, Steve Easterbrook, did an interview with the Sunday Times. Of course, he was asked about obesity and healthy eating. He told the reporter not to "hold your breath" that the fast food company would be "building the menu" around kale and salads.

"If you can have a hotter, fresher and tastier burger and hot fries, that's how you're going to satisfy the majority of people," said Easterbrook.

Hotter. Fresher. Tastier. Burgers and fries. That is what Easterbrook was passionate about delivering for his customers. You may disagree with the statement. You may think McDonalds should be doing something else. But it struck me as being very authentic. After reading it, I have personally visited McDonalds more frequently. When I do, I think, the CEO of this place cares about hot, fresh, tasty food.

I can't tell you what to care about. You've got to figure that out for yourself. I'll give you one clue, though – it can't just be money. You need to believe in something else. Once you do, your speeches, media interviews and articles will be a lot more powerful and convincing.

Passion is also contagious. If you really feel it – and indulge it – others will too.

As the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, "Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm."

Be a Hedgehog

Your beliefs and passions don't have to be dazzling. They can be routine. Some may even consider them boring. That doesn't matter. If they drive you, they will be effective.

In business, as in life, natural talent is delightful. But it's nothing compared to relentless determination. That is the quality I've seen in all the great leaders I've interviewed and worked with.

Excellence is a habit, as Aristotle taught. If you can demonstrate personal consistency across your professional life, you will send the most powerful reputational signals. If there is a secret sauce for leadership communication, this is it. Consistency wins trust, and trust brings respect.

This is how Hazel Moore OBE, the chair of international investment bank FirstCapital, put it in the conversation we had on the PR for Humans podcast:

[As an entrepreneur] there's definitely that element of drive and passion and resilience because there are always knock-backs. But it's also vital to be able to communicate an idea and a vision. Because you are always selling. You are selling to potential employees. You are selling to investors. You are selling to customers. And you may not yet even have a product. That ability to communicate is very important for entrepreneurs.

In his celebrated management book Good to Great, Jim Collins identifies the central quality that turns a good company into a great company: having a 'hedgehog' approach. The foxes of business may be darting after every new fad and commercial possibility, but hedgehogs slow things down. They keep moving. They simplify a complex world into a single unifying idea, a basic principle or concept that frames everything and guides progress. They keep going at it. In the long run, hedgehog companies are the ones that, according to Collins, make the leap to greatness and stay there.

Hedgehogs develop the habit of consistent excellence.

It turns out, having a jumpy, 'commercial' mindset is – aside from annoying – happily not the route to lasting success. It is a rather tense and nervy way to drive performance in the short term. Chasing cash, fighting for fees, gunning for growth, pushing for profit, running after revenue – these are all ways to build unhappy and ultimately unsuccessful companies. Managers will be disliked. Employees will burn out. Customers and clients will grow suspicious. Reputation will ultimately suffer. Journalists won't like talking to you.

One of the biggest, most pleasurable surprises on crossing from the BBC into the private sector was discovering how helpful so many people are in the supposedly cutthroat world of the free market. In business, those who are overtly commercial at the expense of others quickly find they lose the most important commodity in the market: trust. Without it, you can't operate.

The best way to be trusted is, I believe, to be completely clear about why you are doing what you are doing. If you can display your own sense of value and demonstrate what really matters to you, others will follow. At some level, this is usually about helping people, whether they are customers, clients, investors or employees. Helping them do something, or achieve something, or have something. It doesn't have to be altruistic. It just means finding a way of using your skills and abilities to serve other human beings. The money may then follow.

Connect

In serving people, we need to find ways to connect with them. The old economic models based on price and information have been challenged in recent years by new models of influence and behaviour. The bonds with our audiences have never been more important. The aim for any business leader is not to sell to people but to connect with them. That's where real economic power is now generated.

The need for companies and individuals to connect with audiences and to demonstrate the point of their existence is brought to life by former BP chief executive Lord Browne, in his book Connect. Browne is (rightly) dismissive of certain types of PR that promise to 'manage' reputation and spin elaborate, fictitious webs. He describes reputation as an outcome of everything that a business does. It's a function of all the company's products and activities. It is about connecting with people as you really are, not as you would like to be.

As Socrates said, to gain a good reputation you must endeavour to "be what you desire to appear".

Reputation is, argues Browne, a reservoir of goodwill that must be filled up over time from many deep, authentic sources, not artificially engineered for short-term gain or quick recovery from a crisis. Listening to the former BP boss, you might believe there's no role at all any more for the storytellers themselves. All a company should do is be authentic. Do everything as well as you possibly can, all the time, with a simple unifying idea, and reputation will be assured.

"But," I asked Lord Browne, at an event I chaired at the Royal Institution, "when it comes to telling their stories in interesting ways, don't even the best companies need a little advice? From time to time?"

Browne turned to me with a broad smile. "Only ... from certain individuals!" he said, patting me on the shoulder with a sideways glance at the assembled crowd of corporate affairs and PR advisers, who had feared being written out of existence with a single answer. Laughter and relieved applause erupted in the hall.

Your actions are important, for sure. But so too are your stories. Reputation requires both. To connect with its audiences and the world, every business leader needs to have a 'why'.

Apple is the company that is most often given as the defining example of a company with a clear 'why'. As Simon Sinek said in his blockbuster TED talk, Apple was wildly successful not because it set out to make great computers, but because Steve Jobs came up with a clear sense of why it existed. According to Sinek, Apple's mission was to challenge the status quo and make beautifully designed products that changed the world. That doesn't mean that Apple set out to 'do good', necessarily. But it had a clear and – for its users – very meaningful story. It had a 'why', and that meant it could connect.

Note also that Apple took over the world by getting other people to tell its stories. Famously, the company didn't often engage directly with journalists and media. Apple didn't do conventional PR. Apple didn't really do its own proactive social media at all, either. Instead, it built an energised base of fanatical tech fans who packed out every product launch and swamped the internet with Apple love at every opportunity. Apple was the near-perfect example of defining the story and getting other people to go out and tell it – to evangelise for the company day after day, month after month, year after year.

Arch-rival Microsoft was watching and learning (slowly) all the time. In his book Hit Refresh, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, describes how he had to redefine the culture within Microsoft, refresh everything after the long years of control by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Nadella says that Microsoft needed to rediscover its soul. Employees and customers didn't really understand why Microsoft existed any more. They needed a new, better story.

Nadella describes how he set about refreshing the culture and putting new meaning into Microsoft. Everyone in the company had become a bit of a know-it-all, out to prove they were the smartest in the business, score points and, unwittingly, stifle creativity. Ideas were getting lost in the hierarchy. The customers were 'outside' the business. They were just the people who eventually happened to buy the products. Nadella put customers back at the heart of Microsoft and made it clear that everything the company did had to be consistent with one big idea: helping people around the world to lead more productive lives. It was essential for the business to reflect the diversity of its millions of customers.

The story was now better. There was a central belief. The customers started to get it. The business was connecting again. And, yes, the share price rose.

There was much more CLARITY – and that is where we are heading next.

Summary

•Believe in something: As a leader, you need to show the world what you care the most about. Not money, but something else. A desire that makes you human.

•Have passion: You need to build your communication around the thing you're most passionate about. It may be good for society. But it doesn't have to be. The important thing is that it has intense meaning for you. That is PR for Humans.

•Be relentlessly excellent: Keep showing up. Become dogged in your pursuit of excellence. Be known for doing something superbly well for other people. That's how to connect.

•Understand why: Discover (or rediscover) why you do what you do, why it matters and to whom. 'Why' is the best human question.

CHAPTER 2

CLARITY

This chapter focuses on CLARITY and the importance of finding a single headline for each moment or event. I also discuss the need to 'soar and dive' between specific examples and the big picture.

Seek Clarity

The best communication is like the purest mountain stream. The water is loaded with nutrients and salts, and is perfectly clear. Poor communication is the polluted and muddy, slow-moving river. The water is toxic and impossible to see through.

Clarity.

Clarity is what we seek in PR for Humans. In communication, clarity is one of the highest virtues.

Clarity is related to, but not identical to, another quality: simplicity. I was once taught that the two stages of putting together a broadcast news report are:

1. Decide what to leave out

2. Decide what else to leave out

With each iteration, we get to a simpler version of the story. But as time has gone by, I've started to question this a little. Stripping away layers usually gets you to a better place in communication, but now I think simplicity can't be the destination. The final goal must be clarity.

Clarity is beautiful and flawless. Simplicity can lack sophistication. If we keep taking things away, we may ultimately arrive at something facile. This is the old problem of 'dumbing down'. Make it simpler and simpler and simpler ... until it is simply vapid.

If we start with 100 slides, each containing five bullet points, we can make things simpler by cutting back to 20 slides with three points on each. Sure, it's an easier watch, but we may still be a long way from having a clear story.

Seeking clarity is the act of purification and distillation. We are not always trying to make the complex simple, but to make it lucid. The issues, ideas and arguments we tackle can still be elaborate and intricate. With storytelling, there is beauty in clarity, even if some of the themes we speak about are the most challenging and complex subjects in the world.

To go back to our polluted river. We can remove millions of gallons of water until we are down to one last murky glass. This is a much simpler situation, but we still haven't achieved real clarity. The next time a CEO, business leader or politician comes on the TV or radio, ask yourself: is this a glass of mountain water or a mug of indigestible sludge?

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "PR for Humans"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Mike Sergeant.
Excerpted by permission of Practical Inspiration Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

This Book INTRODUCTION The Awakening. The Billionaire. Stories Begin. Stories Accelerate.My Stories. What Even Is PR? On Reputation. PR for Humans.PART 1: FINDING YOUR STORY – PRINCIPLES1. BeliefBelieve in Something. Be a Hedgehog. Connect.2. ClaritySeek Clarity. Fire One Arrow. Soar and Dive.3. OpinionTake a View. Stop Being the Accountant. Watch YourPersonal Space.4. EnergyEnergise. Seek Influence. Fear the Dark Side.5. ContextGet off Your Island. Draw Concentric Circles. Put theCustomer in the Middle. Find Allies.6. Time Root Yourself. Reach Back for Your Company Story.Be Present. Lead Your Company’s Action. Be the Future.Describe Your Company’s Future. Past, Present, Future.Control Time.7. HumilityBe Humble. Understand the Storyteller’s Paradox. SolveSomeone’s Problem. Want Something. Be Funny.Be the Coach. Listen. Pause.
8. ImageryUse Metaphor. Use Words, but Think in Pictures.Use Numbers Imaginatively. Create Moments.PART 2: TELLING YOUR STORY – TECHNIQUES 1. Speeches Make It Personal. Find an Argument. Put TED to Bed.Start Strong. Finish Stronger. Pitch It. Know Your Audience.Be a Proper Chair. Own the Panel.2. PerformanceClench. (Try Not To) Use Slides. Use Props (Sometimes).Find Your Voice. Dress the Best. Memorise (Occasionally).Rehearse Seriously. Crush Nerves.3. Media Talk to Journalists. Have a Goal for PR. Find CommonGround. Feel Newsworthy. Write Your Headlines. FindSoundbites. Use a Story Tree. Broadcast Happy.4. Danger Stay on the Record. Watch Your Red Lines. Cut Downthe Bridge. Lean into Crisis.5. Content Get Video. Podcast Around the Campfi re. Find PhotoBeauty. Get Human on Social.6. WordsWrite Clearly. Rewrite Everything. Write from the Gut.CONCLUSIONThe People’s Princess. There’s Power in Love. Human PR.Author’s NoteSelect Bibliography 

Editorial Reviews

'A blast of fresh air. Mike cuts through the nonsense and delivers powerful storytelling lessons in a calm and fluent style. Essential reading.’ - Vahe Vartanian, Founder And CEO, Global Family Office Community

‘Mike Sergeant is a PR guru. Brilliant advice on getting your message to the people who need to hear it.’ - Jeremy Bowen, Middle East Editor, BBC News

‘In this age of fake news and failing trust, honest, open PR, with the customer at the heart of every message is the only way to progress. Mike’s observations and guidance throughout his book are sensitive and thought provoking.’ - Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, Founder, Genius

‘A small fortune worth of PR guidance, media and presentation training for the price of a book. And a good read as well’. - Chris Roberts, CEO, Invision Comms

‘Mike masterfully cuts through corporate smoke and mirrors to provide a wonderfully scripted and hugely credible common sense guide to public relations, drawing on his wealth of journalistic and PR experience. It nails what is so often overlooked – the power of compelling storytelling and that people are always at the heart of a good story. I’d recommend it to anyone joining the industry’. - Nicola Pearson, Head Of Corporate PR, British Airways

‘Fascinating, fun and full of useful advice.’ - Simon Lancaster, Speechwriter

‘Mike Sergeant’s brilliant manifesto for PR will help you find the human beings in your world and connect with them through stories they can relate to.’ - Tim Dunford, Senior PR Manager, Uswitch.Com

From the Publisher