Some days ago, a correspondent asked, not unadmiringly, how it was we 'got away with' so much, not only in the postings in this blog but in the open and radical arguments made elsewhere on the internet by our public personae.
It made us think about this for two reasons - first, because we have never done otherwise or been anything but ourselves and, second, because it is about time we considered why our style seems to be a winning formula at this particular point in history.
Regular readers will know that we take a hyper-realist view of international relations. Our watchword is 'sentiment is not analysis'. We look at national and international politics with a clinical, almost alien eye, not as engaged participants (although we do participate) but as observers.
They will also know that we are not afraid to adopt this approach in covering hitherto taboo subjects in the professional advisory world such as antisemitism, national mythologising or sexuality if we think that this has relevance to political or business decision-making.
If you seek any of us out on the web beyond the blog, you will find yet more radical and contentious material, designed to provoke, elicit debate or criticise the 'idees fixes' and assumptions of our culture. We do it because it is fun but also because it works for us.
We know about the authoritarian right or the libertarian left because we engage directly with them. We disagree with but respect the positions of people who have been neglected by the traditional political adviser but who are giving us important clues to the future direction of politics.
By analogy with ecology, you might say that in the political and cultural ecosphere are species of thought that might prove more adaptive to radical change than the grazers who seem to dominate the grasslands today. Our assumption in politics as in evolution is 'punctuated equilibrium'.
For example, twenty years ago, 'Greens' were nutters on the fringe. Now they are not only a small but significant force in the politics of Europe but their attitudes inform much policy-making on the Western centre-left - and the European centre-right as well.
All this 'engagement' seems to go against the grain of the 'professional' approach of many consultancies where the consultant acts as a discreet hired gun separating their private views from their public persona, working within the system and its expectations rather than as gadfly in its borderlands.
When the day ends, they switch off and go yachting. We don't - our engagement is our life or rather we let life into our business.
This clearly works because once we start with a client, we tend to remain with them for a long while - if not on retainer then for repeat business. The interventionist, participative, risk-taking gadfly approach gets us serious information and it puts us, more often than not, ahead of the game.
We have had our ups and downs but no-one has ever questioned our integrity (so far) nor have we ever been in a position where our private stances and corporate positions have created a conflict of interest. There is a cohesion and consistency to our game play in the world.
We have taken all this for granted until now - initially as a discreet operator in unfavourable circumstances and then as an open operator in favourable circumstances. But what is going on here? Are we just lucky or is our style an indicator of other changes in our business and political culture?
After some thought, we incline to the latter - but also that we are lucky to be around, just as thinking about how to solve business and political problems is beginning to change.
There is a new awareness that sticking to the rules is only useful if the rules represent all that there is. In the three key areas of international affairs, politics and international business, game players have assumed until recently that the rules were all clear and were sufficient.
A series of shocks - the collapse of public trust in the political process at home, the break-down of American hegemony as mere assertion of power and the credit crisis and its associated economic correction - have shown that man cannot live by Davos alone.
The world exposed to scrutiny between 2003 and 2008 has resulted in a hunger for change (represented by the election of President Obama but still delayed in the UK by the clinging to power of New Labour) and in a world of smart diplomacy and (on its way) negotiated international regulation.
New rules are in formation. As things settle down, the traditional finance and professional services community (lawyers, accountants, management consultants, bankers and new breeds such as compliance and security consultants) will adapt and create a new order.
Yet there is a recognition that ideological 'group-think' got us into the mess in the first place. Within a framework of new rules, the necessity for order needs to be tempered with a commitment to flexibility and to the wise use of legitimate executive power if the new order is not to become sclerotic.
The age of Gramscian top-down manipulation is coming to an end in favour of direct dialogue and direct and open use of power. Talk of 'nudge' philosophy and the arrival of cognitive science in politics will not last too long because such techniques cannot be effective at our current level of knowledge.
This means that the arts of politics and of free-form diplomacy and the management of the struggle both between companies and between business and discontented populations is back on the agenda.
These are arts not sciences, played within the law but ones where judgement and real time analysis are more important than knowledge of the rules themselves.
Three years ago, our analyses were often regarded as so radical as to be embarrassing. This summer, a presentation to senior overseas bankers on political risk which we had considered radical resulted in amusing exchanges in which our audience proved to be more radical than us (too far so, we think)!
It is as if their perception of the world had been so changed that they were now liberated to think not merely the 'unthinkable' but to consider thoughts that, bluntly, questioned their own possible future existence as a means of ensuring that continued existence. Denial is no longer an option.
The point here is that, so long as certain boundaries are maintained, managing reputational risk now requires a very different approach to communications than hitherto - defensiveness based on 'who you know' in a closed network of media outlets operating to shared and cosy rules is not sufficient.
The new media have transformed the way information is issued to the public while the old media no longer has quite the power to make or break people or businesses. The consultancy of 'what is being said at dinner parties' still has its role but it is not, in itself, enough.
A defiant ethical stance to reputational attack, based on the facts and good practice, can be used to stand up to the self-regarding claims made against clients by journalists, politicians and bureaucrats. No one need crumble before the Fourth Estate. No one need cut deals if they are sure of their ground.
Above all, reputation management is moving from that phase in history where it was centred on emotional responses (the 'Diana effect'), in a world dominated by tabloids and earnest 'trust me' Prime Ministers, to one where each 'hit' can be countered with an ethical factual counter-strike.
Just as the best defence against a viral disease is often inoculation with a weak form of the virus, so defence against criticism is self-criticism that pushes the client on to the high ground from whence he can exploit the internal moral contradictions found amongst all self-regarding NGO and media critics.
Perhaps a turning point in the UK was Max Mosley's determination to fight (on privacy grounds) the attempt to damage him for a somewhat louche private life that was nobody's business but his family's.
Perhaps another has been the repeated defeat of political attempts to use dossiers to damage private interests as a means of creating political momentum amongst weak legislators rather than open a proper debate within strengthened legislatures on the facts of the case.
But privacy and dossier journalism are now on the agenda for reform. The way that we conduct our politics, and so the issues surrounding reputation management, will be very different in the next great thirty-year economic cycle than they were in the last.
We will continue to engage directly (albeit in a non-partisan way) with the political process (though never as lobbyists ourselves) and in international affairs.
We will continue to take an assertive stance with the media on behalf of our clients and we will continue to tell it like it is - especially when the message might not be what they want to hear.
Wednesday 23 September 2009 at 08:26