Trouble the Water

Please go see the documentary titled, “Trouble the Water”, a film which tells the story of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of its survivors. We attended a New York City premiere on Friday, where Producer Danny Glover made an appearance and described breaking into tears when he first saw the footage. A relatively small distributor has released the film, currently being shown only in New York and Los Angeles, but with enough consumer demand let’s hope it goes national. If you don’t live near these two cities, maybe you can make noise in your own hometown about the desire to see the film.

This is a human drama but for those of us who specialize in crisis communications, it’s also the painful display of our industry’s failings. For those who think of crisis PR people being mainly about celebrity divorce and airplanes stuck on the tarmac for eleven hours, reliving Katrina in this film sheds a sobering light on the true consequence of politicizing the high stakes work of risk communications.

The film spends only a few seconds on Michael Brown who headed up FEMA’s disaster response to Katrina and was later driven out of this position for his role in the deadly bungling of the crisis. One of President Bush’s legacies will be his statement in the midst of the crisis, “Brownie, you’re doing a a heck of a job.” If the Tylenol scare of 1982 is symbolic of good crisis PR, “Brownie’s” role in FEMA is its antithesis. I hadn’t kept up with Brownie after he left the government payroll, but “Trouble the Water” informed me that he is now a crisis communications consultant.

Even as I remained riveted by the human drama of the movie a small part of my brain got stuck on this fleeting revelation. Who is paying Brownie for advice about crisis communications? As it turns out he moved somewhat seamlessly from the team that was supposed to manage crisis to those who profit from crisis. His clients have been the military and military contractors like Lockheed. He has helped firms like “Cotton Companies”, which specializes in cleaning up after disasters. They claim to have “cut our teeth on water damage from hurricanes and floods of the Gulf Coast and they don’t get any bigger than that.”

When asked about his post-government life, Brown says, “I probably, at any one time, have a half-dozen clients involved in different things having to do with homeland security or government in general.”

It helps to have powerful friends. Joe Allbaugh appointed Brown to his FEMA position, despite Brown’s thin resume. Allbaugh managed Bush’s campaign for Texas governor and vetted Dick Cheney for Vice President. In the immediate aftermath of the Bush-Gore election Allbaugh was dispatched to Florida to head the Republican fight to get Bush into the White House. After leaving government Allbaugh made money by helping firms profit from “business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq.”

There are heroes in “Trouble the Water”. They are also engaged in cleaning up after disaster, only for something closer to minimum wage. They stood on stage with Glover on Friday and beamed at their standing ovation. You can watch this movie as a parallel study in crisis management: the bureaucratic priorities and vision of government (Bush, Nagel, and so on) and the waterlogged maneuvers of the disenfranchised. The two stories are often parallel but it is where they intersect that the revelation of our “two America’s” crystallizes.

John Edwards, a character I am loath to quote these days, popularized the phrase “two America’s” with a particular focus on the Hurricane Katrina experience. Mitt Romney, rumored to be on McCain’s short list for VP candidates, said, “every time I hear someone like John Edwards get on TV and say there are two Americans, I just wanna throw something at the TV.”

You must see this movie, even if you already know and experience every day the disjuncture between our countries veneer and its social infrastructure. For risk communications specialists it is perhaps the most significant awareness we can bring to the seriousness of catastrophe.

For the heroes in the movie there is life after Katrina – literally. They stood on stage with their new baby, her hair dotted with ribbons and smiling whenever the audience clapped.
There is a lucrative life for Brown after Katrina. He lives in a spacious home in Aurora Colorado. He says bitterly, “There is life after government…even after you have been run through the wringer, even after you have been thrown under the bus by the leader of the free world.”

Glover spoke about the movie not just inspiring the people of Louisiana but also as a revelation that massages the hope of disenfranchised everywhere, from Harlem to East Oakland. The same population who were rich before the movie remain rich; the same population who were poor remain poor. But there is something spiritual about the crisis management of the film’s central characters that bends the American dream away from the excesses of profiteers like Brown and Allbaugh and toward the grace of those who build, and re-build, community.

Arugula Wars

“In terms of who’s an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy-headed-professor type based on his life story.”
- McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers

Brian Rogers is on a crisis PR rollercoaster, but anytime you use the term “friggin” (as in yesterday’s quip, “[Obama] lives in a friggin mansion!”) you’re probably not at the top of your game. Yesterday Rogers also accused Obama of eating arugula, a lettuce that apparently McCain does not endorse. The reference dates back to a comment Obama made at the Rural Issues Forum in Iowa, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Granted, Obama was off his game when he implied that people worried about the price of food were shopping at Whole Foods. But turning the Whole Foods gaffe into an arugula war I’m certain came not from carefully polled analysis but rather from a gut feeling about middle America’s disdain for fancy salad.

Crisis public relations is a lot about following a few simple rules. But great crisis management is about intuition.

There are massive scientific advances attributed to intuition, including discoveries related to sickle cell anemia and the polio vaccine. Some leading intuition scholars predicted in the early 1990’s that “intuition” would define the business climate of the 90’s, proving in retrospect that efforts at intuition aren’t always, well, intuitive. Although a crop of business writers explored the potential of intuition with headlines like the Guardian’s, “In your guts doesn’t mean it’s nut’s,” the packaging of intuition for business purposes hasn’t really take hold in the United States.

Last month the New Yorker took up the subject in an exploration of the science of intuition. A cognitive neuroscientist named Mark Jung-Beeman has tested his hypothesis that intuition occurs in the mysterious right hemisphere of the brain. The New Yorker explains the relevance of his findings this way: “If the left hemisphere excelled at denotation – storing the primary meaning of a word – Jung-Beeman suspected that the right hemisphere dealt with connotation, everything that gets left out of the dictionary definition, such as the emotional charge in a sentence or a metaphor.” In Jung-Beeman’s words, “Language is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time. It needs to see the forest and the trees.”

In difficult public relations moments, most people are focused on the trees. What happened? Why? What does it mean? The trees are important, but the trees are only building blocks of the big picture, the forest.

My resume will always be awkward because some of my best public relations advocacy resulted in news stories that never happened, which of course cannot be revealed in my bio. I examined each case in detail in an attempt to isolate the key that led to the successful confidential outcome. While a few cases have similar circumstances, the single most glaring strategy for success was intuition.

One of the most crystal moments of intuition for me was on a day that my young daughter became very ill. I was walking toward the building that housed her day care center when an ambulance crossed in front of me, sirens blaring. The ambulance could have been heading anywhere, but I knew. I didn’t suspect, I didn’t fear, I just knew and I immediately began to run at full speed. Intuition experts would tell you that some pieces of data in my brain had picked up signals that the left hemisphere didn’t make sense of but that the right hemisphere resolved. Most intuition is absolutely certain and often sudden.

Scientists who study intuition know that turning it on and off is a complex endeavor. What distinguishes true insight from bad guessing or just plain luck? Jung-Berman’s studies show that a specific subset of the cortical areas of the brain must be activated for insight to kick in. In reality, that part of the brain is working on a solving a problem secretly, while the left hemisphere is working consciously. That’s why insight sometimes seems to appear mysteriously or suddenly.

Intuition is linked to concrete things, like experience, confidence, creativity, open-minded attitudes and the like. It’s also linked to relaxation of the cortex, which the New Yorker describes as the “more remote association with the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight”. Moments of relaxation, like in the first moments of wakefulness or in the shower, can facilitate insight. Insight is a tricky business – letting the mind wander can sometimes spark insight, but staying clenched and overly focused on a problem can sometimes block the creative breakthrough.

Years ago an employee of mine complained that he had become so overloaded with tasks that his brain didn’t have time to think creatively. He was right about the value of fostering creative thought in the workplace. This happens in places like ad agencies but not often in places where jobs are not specifically tied to artistic expression.

In the Camino PR offices we’ve got exercise equipment and a lounge and a guitar and a collection of poetry, but I’m thinking we may need to make even more investments in right hemisphere stimulation. I’m thinking of a ping-pong table that can double as a conference table, or an ipod speaker. We’ll see if Loretta agrees at our next staff meeting, given that it would be nice to instead buy office equipment like file cabinets. While I know that time spent playing ping pong is not billable, I bet our most recent client, who has legitimate and important reasons for internal organizational information to not be aired worldwide by the Associated Press, is fully appreciative of our investments in intuition.

Art for Free

Every morning I put my name in the lottery of people who would like tickets to the free performance of HAIR in Central Park, and every afternoon I am rejected. I line up each morning in the “virtual line”, because I cannot imagine joining those who arrive in Central Park at 6 AM and wait until 1 PM to get their two tickets. Even if I could pay the $165 per ticket that it would cost to avoid both lines I suspect I will only love the performance if I am experiencing it as public art – as it is intended, for free.

I am despondent, I know I won’t be picked and I am curiously insulted every afternoon when I am rejected. My good friend came to dinner Sunday night and revealed that she’d been on the same daily emotional HAIR roller coaster. Scores of New Yorkers have stopped feeling hopeful and encouraged by free theatre, and instead have a daily dose of humility. We try to think of some way to beat the system (should we log on at midnight and be the first ones in the virtual line? Does a more artistic email moniker matter?). I know corporate sponsors get free tickets but I suspect they distribute them in the executive corners of their high-rises. Freddie Mac donated more than $50,000 and one can only hope they are giving their free tickets to public servants as a thank you for their inevitable bail out.

The treacherous lining up is a part of the mission of the Central Park endeavor, which seeks to “develop an American theatre that is accessible and relevant to all people”. I too am a supporter of the arts because I believe that if we fostered more creativity we would be better at all sorts of things, like making sure that Hurricane Katrina victims could be housed again years after the storm.

Last year I tried my hand at arts patronage when I volunteered to write a grant so that my daughter’s middle school could expand their arts program. I knew my proposal would prevail in the hotly contested process because I had typed it, prompting several people to blurt out “wow!” even before they had read any of the proposed ideas.

My star status as a parent volunteer was short-lived, however, when the person who had planned to actually do the proposed work was forced, by personal circumstance, to bow out. I thought, how hard could it be to plan a few art programs? So I assured the principal that I’d just do the work myself.

My first task was to take a group of middle school kids and their parents to meet the curator of a gallery. We gathered at a very trendy gallery in the meatpacking district. You could see the parents beaming – not at the art – but because they finally had a structured way to spend some quality time with otherwise moody pre-teens. The kids mostly tried not to make eye contact with each other so that later in school they could all pretend it had never happened.

The curator became increasingly delighted at exposing the underbelly of the gallery world to the public school crowd. He decided on the spot to take us to the secret back room where only the most well heeled patrons are invited. It is in these hidden gallery rooms where six and seven figure art hangs for sale. There in the middle of the room, suspended from the ceiling with a meat hook, was a massive sculpture made with wax flowers. The kids suddenly became intrigued and made a large circle around the figure.

At first glance it looked somewhat like a honeycomb hanging from the ceiling. But after studying the sculpture from all sides, it looked more like a giant flowered pita pocket, with flowers dripping out of its pocket and strewn carelessly on the floor below. A child finally said, “What is it?” The parents in the room shifted their weight and, like the kids previously, tried not to make eye contact with other adults. It really looked just like a giant vagina.

The people who gave me the funding to escort the middle school group to the very upscale vagina sculpture are trying to motivate an arts movement. Same as the people who inform me, every afternoon, that I do not have tickets to the free theatre in Central Park.

The curator exposed the opposite of what an arts movement aspires to create: he unveiled a hidden labyrinth of art that is for and about the elite. In the arts the movement has always been simultaneously about the practical need to create patronage and freeing society from the confines of patronage. That is why tonight someone like the CEO from Target will be sitting beside the person who has spent his or her day camped in line on a lawn in Central Park, watching a brilliant production of HAIR. Equalizing the power of the two – the CEO and the line sitter – is the struggle of movement leaders.

My Tata was a public arts pioneer. On many Sundays he would walk his gaggle of grandchildren to Armory Park, where he met up with his elderly friends to play a mariachi-style concert for anyone who happened to be sitting on the park benches. My Tata played the trumpet. I remember that Armory Park was viciously hot with too few trees and a large concrete square where my brothers and sisters and I sometimes played shuffleboard with the retirees. When my Tata died and the cemetery service ended and the mourners began to drift away from the gravesite, his Armory Park musician friends gathered next to the lowered casket and began their concert, only in a slower, deliberate tempo that paid tribute to the missing notes of a trumpet.

I would have liked to be chosen to see theatre in Central Park this summer. Though maybe all that I am seeking is that calm abandon that art inspires when some right part of the brain gets stimulated. Maybe all I really need is art unleashed from its complicated roots. Something, perhaps, like sitting on the park bench and hoping for a group of elderly trumpet players to gather in friendship and harmony.

Balancing the Checkbook

“With all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”
- Mark Gilmore from the Congressional Budget Office on $19 billion in unaccounted for spending on Iraq contractors.

A Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released Tuesday shows that about $100 billion is being spent on contractors in the Iraq war. To be fair, the report never used the term “Iraq war”, that’s my description. Instead they reported on the “current military, reconstruction, and diplomatic efforts” related to the “Iraq Theatre.”

But when Mark Gilmore from the CBO appeared on C-SPAN yesterday it wasn’t the price tag or the historic numbers of U.S private vendors during a war that most irked viewers. What rattled many viewers was the revelation – underscored by C-SPAN Washington Journal host Greta Brawner – that the CBO could not account for nearly $20 billion in spending.

It’s not exactly breaking news. In May the BBC and others reported that $8 billion worth of payments to Iraq-war related contractors “failed to comply with US laws aimed at preventing fraud”. The May news coverage even pointed as evidence to a $5.6 million check paid by the U.S. to an Iraqi contractor with zero records to show what had been purchased.

Oddly, the CBO seemed unprepared for questions about the mysterious money. They hadn’t included mention of the mysterious money in their press alerts, and the Associated Press declined to mention that part of the story (the BBC picked it up). Gilmore offered a variety of answers, ranging from its not his job to pointing at difficulties in simultaneously managing fiscal control and dealing with the violence in Iraq. Though, isn’t violence what the Pentagon would have planned for in wartime? Here’s the C-SPAN exchange:

Brawner: “Why is there $20 billion where we don’t know where it’s going and who its going to?”

Gilmore: “Well, actually, we don’t know, that would be more of an auditing function and something that the Government Accountability Office among others, for example the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, they would be looking into that kind of issue I would assume, um, it’s hard to collect some of these data, not to excuse this or offer excuses for the Department of Defense but sometimes its hard to collect the data on exactly what’s being done, um, and, the databases are only as good as the people who are supplying the information, so with all human activities there are errors that are made and, uh, this is no different.”

In response to viewer questions he offers up other explanations, including “not our expertise,” and “the legal status of contractors is ambiguous,” and “…it’s not necessarily fair to say its not accounted for….we cannot say exactly what the $20 billion was spent for,” and “yes indeed there are a number of problems that have been noted…” and “the Department of Defense [doesn’t] have sufficient manpower to perform oversight of its financial transactions,” and finally, “Iraq [is] even more difficult because of the insurgency that is going on there and the violence which thankfully is recently declined.”

This is a man without a message. Callers on all three lines – Republican, Democrat, and Independent – ranged from frustrated to hostile. They started out concerned about money management and ended up focused on his apparent lack of concern for the issue.

Finally a caller said, “You made the statement earlier that we are all human and we make mistakes. Granted. But [we] have a judicial system and prisons that take care of people that make certain types of mistakes. My question to you again is how would you characterize this type of financial mgmt were it regard to your personal finances, and what would you expect to happen to those money managers of your personal finances?”

Quite aside from the seriousness of the subject matter, from a public relations perspective this interview is a classic example of bungled communications. A bureaucrat treated the subject with dispassionate fact sharing and the public needed to experience authentic regard for their concern. After all, when faced with a mysterious $20 billion expenditure, the core concern really can’t be whether Mark Gilmore expresses personal alarm. But for many of the viewers, Gilmore wasn’t just speaking on behalf of a non-partisan auditing wing of the government; he was speaking on behalf of the government. And they wanted their government to be outraged.

The questions continued to get personal until finally one caller demanded to know how much Gilmore was being paid to report to the public that he had no idea how our money was being spent. Gilmore declined to answer. But his performance tracks the tone of the report. Even the letter of introduction in the CBO report reveals a dispassionate attitude about the enormous emotional impact of bloated government spending in the midst of an economic meltdown. The report cover memo acknowledges the 14 people who researched, analyzed and wrote the findings and also informs Congress members that Maureen pasted the map on the cover, Lenny made copies, Linda mailed the copies, and Simone saved the document as a PDF.

The Brawl

There was a brawl at the pharmacy counter at Duane Reade on the Upper West Side of Manhattan recently. The tedium of waiting in a long snaking line down the cold and flu aisle was suddenly interrupted by two patients locked in a middle school fist fight, complete with pulling hair and schoolyard epithets.

Tension runs thick in our nation about health care.

Four years ago the principal pollster for the Bush campaign, John Van Lohulzen, predicted that health care would be the dominant issue in the 2008 race. The Bush camp was fully aware four years ago that health care would skid into such demise that frustrated patients would be coming to blows at the pharmacy counter. Van Lohulzen saw that patients were blaming other patients for the crisis – “overuse, unnecessarily expensive use, misuse of emergency rooms, fraud in the system, etc.”

Winnie had been kind enough to stand in line and drop off my prescription. It was a frustrating task not only because the lines are always long but also because verifying insurance coverage for domestic partners is an ordeal. The last time around the cashier could not make the computer find my name in the system causing Winnie to patiently explain our family configuration and our insurance coverage several times. “It’s not a gay thing,” she assured Winnie, “we don’t care if you’re gay. I’m gay.” She pointed to another cashier. “She’s gay.” She pointed to a pharmacist. “And her Mama’s gay!” But after outing half the staff she couldn’t make the computer understand how to find a patient who received her insurance through a domestic partnership.

On the day of the brawl, Winnie had finally made it to the front of the line when the customer tension broke apart. One customer had been arguing with the pharmacist, who is perched high above patients and peers at them over a wall of antacids and laxatives. She was shouting up at him that she needed her pills right now and he was insisting that she get a valid refill authorization from a physician. Her kids were playing loudly behind her, prompting the customer at the nearby drop-off counter to declare to no one in particular, “Some people really don’t know how to take care of their children.” The shouting woman stopped mid-sentence, turned her head slowly, and said “whose children are you talking about?”

And then the woman needing a valid refill prescription flew like crouching tiger over at the woman needing to drop off her prescription. That is how Winnie, wearing her clerical collar and clutching my prescription, came to help break up her first fist fight. After the screaming and punching and hair pulling, causing disarray among the magazines, tissues and condoms that had been neatly displayed at the drop off counter, the fight ended and all the customers dutifully got back in line in the right order.

Jan Van Lohulzen was not a prescient policy analyst – in fact he wrongly predicted that the “conflict” in Iraq would “subside” and that the economic “recovery” would “continue” by this election season. But his polls showed him without a doubt that frustration with the health care crisis would boil over by the 2008 elections.

A few days ago the Democrats approved party platform language that declared, “All Americans should have the coverage they can afford,” and stated that the party is, “united behind a commitment that every American man, woman and child be guaranteed to have affordable, comprehensive health care.”

We’ll see.

Pixie Scandal

“Everyone should understand this in this way,” Mr. Chen said. “This is in the national interest. It is the image of our national music, national culture, especially during the entrance of our national flag. This is an extremely important, extremely serious matter.”

What pressure on the shoulders of a 7 year old, to have your crooked teeth cause such national concern.

As the world now knows, it was an extremely serious matter that Chinese officials did not find Yang Peiyi to be cute.  She was deemed good enough to be heard but not seen, thereby prompting officials to use Peiyi’s recorded voice and Lin Miaoke’s lip synch performance during the opening ceremony.  Peiyi is described in media accounts worldwide as the girl with “crooked baby teeth” and a “chubby face”. The Associate Press begins its story by treating Peiyi’s deemed lack of cuteness as fact: “one little girl had the looks.  The other had the voice.”

Miaoke, on the other hand, is ready for America’s Next Top Model.  She is described as a “smiling angel” with a “pixie smile.”

Worldwide outrage has ensued in support of both girls. Hill & Knowlton is the PR firm that works with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics.  In fact Hill & Knowlton’s CEO, Paul Taaffee, carried the torch in Beijing last week, wearing shoes donated by Adidas.   The firm is one of the largest in the world and gives counsel to Walmart, Enron, and the Church of Scientology.  Their long history includes helping the tobacco industry counteract scientific findings about the link between cigarettes and cancer.

It’s not clear if Hill & Knowlton is helping Chinese officials wade through the pixie scandal, or if all parties are simply waiting for the competition to drown out the story.  To date the only voice counteracting the judgment of the Chinese officials is Peiyi’s father who said, “In my opinion, she’s not ugly.  She looks cute.”

The bigger issue is the underlying bias that drove officials to reject Peiyi.  Blogger Ran Yunfei described the ceremony as “nationalist clothing over authoritarian underwear”.  As the medal ceremonies crowd this story off the front page, it may be the bloggers that give Hill & Knowlton reason to face the dissonance between the message of authorities (“This is in the national interest”) and the gut reaction of viewers worldwide when they see Peiyi’s precious photo.

The Veep

“Seriously,” Loretta said, “if Obama chooses an anti for a running mate I’m not going to vote.” Rumors have been swirling that anti-choice candidates like Bob Casey from Pennsylvania are on the Obama short list. Loretta started flailing her arms at the idea of the insult, pointing her finger metaphorically at the patriarchal establishment that seems to surround and conquer any hopeful progressive leader that assumes too much power. She warned me that her head was going to explode with pent up feminist frustration. “We should start our own country,” she finally blurted.

“OK,” I said. After having started a business with her that’s going pretty well I am open to most of her ambitious ideas. All of her big ideas go pretty well. One time she suggested we organize a national march and almost a million people showed up. “But if we do start our own country,” I said, “I insist that we participate in the Olympics.”

Loretta steadfastly avoids the Olympics because they are nationalistic. I, on the other hand, am recording every minute and am suddenly finding myself playing beach volleyball and tennis in Riverside Park. Loretta pondered the complications of our new country and its inherent nationalism. I could sense an opening on the Olympics front. “It’s about the opening ceremony,” I argued. “It’s a terrific message moment. The world is watching, even if it’s just for a few seconds while the two of us march in.”

That seemed to get her. It is simply too much of a message moment to pass up. But what message? Impactful protest imagery is hard. At every major women’s rights march in the past three decades, organizers have seriously considered the idea that everyone wear white in solidarity with the early suffragists. It was an idea that never carried the day for many reasons, including that the image could subtly perpetuate the “whiteness” of the feminist movement. An alternate idea was to toss tennis balls etched with the word “equality” onto the white house lawn as we marched by, but even in the pre-9/11 days it seemed like a terrible idea to give the snipers on the rooftop reason to worry.

There is little to no possibility of sign-holding or banner furling in Olympic ceremonies like this one. We practiced flashing synchronized peace symbols but even that might get us kicked out of line or bleeped out of our three seconds of NBC coverage. Finally Loretta and I settled on subtlety. We will not dress in uniform. There will be no matching berets and blazers. Each of us will be individualistic in our dress while unified in our cause. In an age of public discourse that lacks any degree of finesse or discernment (“Drill! Drill! Drill!”), we will use an understated strategy.

Surely the public can still appreciate symbolism in our info-tainment news age. It may not be symbolic protest on the level of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Games. But gestures, however small, should never be underestimated. Like voting, which is perhaps the smallest and most powerful gesture we get. I suspect that even Loretta on election day will cast her vote for the candidate that draws us closest to justice, regardless of what Veep emerges. Though, really, why not just choose a second in command that buoys our feminist aspirations? Is it too much to hope that we will enjoy our moment behind the curtain, pulling the lever for good and not for the least of all evils?