The Sixth Annual Grunig Lecture last week proved to be very rewarding for aspiring PR students looking for tips and pointers from 15 professionals from around the D.C. Metro area. Advice ranged from how to incorporate youth into PR campaigns to how to successfully enter the PR world on the junior level. The final piece of advice came from FleishmanHillard President and CEO Dave Senay’s lecture, “Ethics as Culture,” where he made it very clear that “Being in PR is not a spectator sport.”
Senay’s lecture touched on smear campaigns and “The Lord’s Speech” and quickly debunked the theories that ignoring smear campaigns and assuming that there cannot be a global ethical standard are okay.
“Our morality is innate,” said Senay. He then went to show that the top ten religions in the world all hold relatively similar definitions of what is right and what is wrong.
So how does this affect the PR world?
Senay reasoned that because we know what is right and what is wrong, at no point ever should we idle as a company spirals down into corruption. By engaging actively with our publics and maintaining both our brand and character, we can effectively protect our company’s right to exist through the permission of our publics.
Senay’s lecture rang true and without questions from me. Of course corruption should not be tolerated within businesses. A company can not expect to maintain a healthy image if it thrives on bad ethics—it has no where to go but down. There are too many people at the mercy of unethical decisions and its time for us to stand up for the under dog.
TJ Digital Creative 