PR and the Fundamentals

What we are going through these days, deeply concerned over the possible impact on us of the current financial turmoil in the U.S.-- the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the rush acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, the uncertain fate of AIG, and now the huge bailout plan by the Bush administration -- puts into focus a number of fundamentals that we in PR need to be constantly reminded of:

1. Things are seldom what they seem; bigness and power do not always stand  on  stable fundamentals. Stay with reason and sound thinking; take the broad view, think not only of yourself, but of others as well. 
2. We always have to be mindful of what is right and what is wrong; moderate vs. excessive, caution vs. frenetic speed. Never forget the customer. How will your exploits affect the taxpayer?
3. We need communication strategies and fluidity and impact in delivering messages, but above all communication must be based on commitment to truth.
4. All the time, we must be conscious of, and try to serve, not only our Clients, but also the public interest. In most cases, we do this  by faithfully performing our daily tasks, but reinforced by knowing that PR helps make a difference far beyond the walls of our offices.
5. What happens in one place affects the rest of us, and this is no platitude. Hours after Lehman declared bankruptcy, officers of at least one bank here were on the line to its Clients, assuring them. A day or two later, the bank sent them a letter, stating the bank's position vis-a-vis the U.S. crisis, and repeating the assurance it had given earlier.
6. Let us be ready for anything "bad" that might happen. Review our strategies and PR/communication plans, in case we need to come out publicly. Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke sounded at times uncertain when they were answering questions during their Senate appearance last night (over Bloomberg), but they had a basic plan they believe in, and were firm in their message--let us please do this now.  

Let us stay cool and consolidated in facing whatever the U.S. difficulties may bring us.  Let us see how  those in charge of the situation, there and here,  discharge their responsibilities. There will be lessons galore for all of us.

What Makes a PR Professional?

Over many years of practice, I have learned that one needs the following, among others,  for successful professional work in PR:

1. Command of the issues and the environment that affect the business of your Firm, or your Client. The Firm/Client exists in a society and  an environment that are affected by laws, issues and competition.  We need a firm grasp of these and of what your Firm/Client needs  to plan for and deal with issues and factors in its environment that may affect its mission and long-term performsnce.

2.  Love for analyzing, reflecting and communicating. PR  requires  ideas that are alive, relevant, fresh, and meaningful. We  have to develop a taste, in fact a passion, for the process of thinking ideas through and communicating these--on paper, on the computer, online, on the stage, in meetings big or small, here or in other countries. We used to say, be good in English. Now we say, be good in Tagalog, and acquire a knowledge  of at least the major  dialects as well. 

3. A sense of  right and wrong, of what is fair and just, and also of what is  proper and decent. I mean right and wrong in substance and in form, and then committing yourself to it. Try to be right especially in family and social relationships, and your attitude and commitment will easily slide to your business life. 

4. Have a broad view of PR. PR is not a list of 100 ways to promote, and  market a product or organization or manage  reputation and attract new investments. PR is  the business of developing strategies  and helping promote the performance, long-term viability and relevance to society of a business or organization.  It is doing the 100 things but also keeping the essentials: what is the vision and the basic strategy...what are we really up to?  Broadening your view of PR will challenge  you to keep  enhancing  your skills and level of commitment. 

5. A sharp business sense. Help your principal and yourself succeed financially and keep on doing so, from year to year. Keep attuned to prevailing market rates and position yourself competitively according to market conditions.  Be aggressive in saving part of your earnings, and  in pegging  costs to a minimum. And yet...keeping  service standards consistently  high.

6. Knowing that your  PR market  is no longer the Philippines alone.  Ideas, products, technology,  lifestyles, and Clients  keep coming.  But these will never be enough. PR  professionals need to keep an eye on  foreign markets.  With the swelling  number of PR agencies, including those from abroad, competing for a comparatively small and low-growth market,   we need to take  an export-oriented view.  

7. Humility and willingness to share what we have and what we know. The PR business, like other businesses, must thrive on the strength of a professional,  and service-oriented and ethically committed community of practitioners. Those who have attained more, in terms of experience and knowhow, must share these with those who have just started out. 

8. Willingness to take technology on, on our  terms, to improve the quality of service and attain efficiencies.  

8. Commitment to calculated change and innovation.   Keep reexamining your business concept,  organization, processes and standards to insure that you can adjust to and thrive in a continually changing environment. Keep yourself posted on the state and directions of the competition.

9. Networking, catering especially to the younger sector of  our industry, the students and the developing leadership in other sectors.

10. Staying true to what we  believe in. Success in PR is very important, but happiness earned from keeping faith with your essential beliefs is to be valued even more highly.

Graciano

Anyone who would care to write the history of public relations in the Philippines will have to check out that gritty, wild, noble, outrageous, heroic group of fin-de-siecle Filipinos that fashioned what we know now as the Propaganda Movement.

That fecund decade-and-a-half culminating in 1986 gave our people that sense of being one, of having come from the same roots, that they needed to break free and come alive. That group had a superstar cast: Rizal, the scholar, del Pilar, the politician and political analyst, Naning Ponce, Galicano Apacible, the brothers Luna, Julio Llorente, Pepe Panganiban, Gregorio Sancianco, Jose Alejandrino and many others, including its most remarkable member, a dropout from the Seminario de Jaro in Iloilo, Graciano Lopez-Jaena. Graciano, as we know, was the founder and first editor of the La Solidaridad and also prime orator of the Movement. Rizal was the superior scholar, del Pilar the deadlier satirist, but in oratory - even in plain harangue - everyone deferred to Graciano. 

Gen. Pepe Alejandrino, one of the very few of that generation who lived to tell its story, recalls Graciano as "an impulsive and fanatic orator of liberty who held his audience spellbound with his eloquence and natural talents." As a campaigner for reforms (the movement, we are constantly reminded, was not secessionist), Graciano was prolific (he antedated del Pilar in Spain by some eight years, Rizal by two) and outspoken.

In 1889, he would speak bitterly against the conduct of the Philippine participation in the First Universal Exposition held in Barcelona the previous year in which four Filipinos - who were being exhibited - had died, one of pneumonia. He would also denounce the poor state of education in the Philippines, the tribute and compulsory labor. But for all his great talent (even Rizal conceded that Graciano was the most gifted Filipino he had known even superior to himself) and precious contribution to the cause, Graciano was a complex flawed personality. His life, in fact, should be rich material for a fine melodrama of that era of our history. As his picture will suggest he was frail and, according to a fellow expatriate, he dressed slovenly. Gen. Alejandrino believed that Graciano was "the most original and picturesque type among the Filipino reformer in Europe. He was a true Bohemian in the manner of Verlaine and others who have left eternal pain in a dreaming and carefree world."

Graciano was what we would nowadays a character. Even among that terribly gifted and sanguine band, he was a standout. He outargued, outwrote and outcaroused most of them. According to historian and biographer Carlos Quirino, Graciano was, in fact, our first certified hippie. He was by nature a rather disorganized person. At one time, Rizal, a triple exasperated, told him, "I wish you would apply yourself to cultivating your God - given talents for the greater glory of our country."

Whereupon, Graciano said, "You need not put a doctor's cape on a slave's shoulders." (Graciano had quit medical school at the University of Valencia).

We know now, largely through Dr. Guadalupe Fores-Ganzon's English translation of La Solidaridad - what passion, what love, went into the making of that journal. But do we know the kind of drama that had to be played to bring out in it the ringing rhetoric of Graciano Lopez-Jaena? 

Again, Gen. Alejandrino tells story. "He was the editor of La Solidaridad, receiving for his compensation free house, meals, clothing and a little money for his minor expenses, but in order to make him write, most of the time they literally had to starve him out. He had the custom of going to a cafŽ upon waking up and remain there as long as he had money to spend for him. There they had to look for him and promise to pay his expenses provided that he would write his articles. Between cups and cups of drinks, they placed before him sheets of paper which he filled up with surprising ease."

Pretty soon the tragic flaw would catch up with Graciano. From time to time, he would go sulking at some imagined wrong and remain inconsolable for days. He would flare up at what he believed to be the moderate stance (he was after all, according to Jaime C. de Veyra, el luchador) of his colleagues. In 1891 he wrote Rizal a letter complaining against del Pilar and Ponce. Later on, he would plan on running for the Cortes. He also thought of going to the U.S. and then to Cuba. The remaining years of his life would be devoted to activities more relevant to Spanish politics than the Filipino reformist cause. Penniless, Graciano died in Barcelona in 1896.

I first wrote this piece for the Economic Monitor  in the late 1970s.
--

Gilda's Book

A LIFE OF LIGHT AND CHEER

Book Review : THE LAST FULL MOON
LESSONS ON MY LIFE
by Gilda Cordero Fernando
University of the Philippines Press
GCF Books, 2005


by Romeo P. Virtusio

The only thing we should ever need from a writer is her writing well. Anna Akhmatova led a tragic messy life, but when we read her Requiem, we more clearly understand that the writer--not that we should even try to efface the color and skeins of her life-- stands and lives on the strength of her writing, not much else. No one, no matter how beautiful she is, or how patrician her lineage or blessed her kinships, can outmatch life. Few are those who escape being bruised and wounded, but that seldom makes for good writing.

This book, The Last Full Moon, Lessons on My Life, by Gilda Cordero Fernando, is beautiful, happy, witty, writing. She recalls people, and what makes them what they are, in the tradition of her original genre, fiction, with details that capture the humanity of the subject, and the realness of the time. Her recollections of her mother, for instance, fully engage the reader with what we know of how a relationship between a mother and daughter, both strong and opinionated, can be--stormy and corrosive. The mother, however, a Batanguena beauty queen resides in the memory: beautiful and imperious, fragile and flawed, who earned on her own, from her home, and raised the likes of Gilda. The short chapter on her father- in- law, Dr. Tony, is an affectionate, wonderfully unadorned villanelle to a good simple man. I like the way she recalls the patricians, her father and grandfather and those of her husband's, highly educated, propertied and principled men from the provinces who represented the vitality, and love of country of their generation. Pagsanjan and the costumbres of the people dance in the reader's imagination; I wish there were more entries on Gilda's Batangas side. As a young lady, she enrolled in a dance course of Leonor Orosa (Goquinco); wasn't Leonor a Luna as well?

This book is a touching homage to family. The grace of this book comes largely from the quiet and loving descriptions of the members of their family, how they regard and interact with each other, on occasion misunderstand and even annoy each other. The author tends to make much of her marriage's early sorrows, an artist's temperament clashing with a lawyer's cold cerebralness and his own breeding, and yet the whole book is a love letter to Elo. ("Maybe one of the purposes of marriage is not to make you lesser than you are but to make you realize you can be more than you are.") The author is a gatherer of friends and nurturer of their own vision visions; she mentions some of them in her living will. She devotes a whole Christmas morning to an exclusive party for household help, those who once were and still are. From her mother Gilda inherited the knack for creative enterprise; her mom dabbled in cakes and pastries. The daughter did quite well in small but original trend-setting ventures in folk art, publishing (some of the most outstanding titles in Philippine publishing ever came from her GCF books) and later in big cultural stage productions.

Trudge along with the family up to the hills of their farm in Antipolo, after the war, and two generations later, take lunch in the restaurant that the author's children have built on the property. Tag along with Gilda as she attends the dances of the early post-war, and later on group dates with Elo and the Sigma Rhoans. Gilda's father was a professor in the U.P. College of Medicine, who was the first Filipino who motorcycled around Europe in the 1920s.
Relive with Elo and Gilda their 50th wedding anniversary; they are now deep into what she calls their grace years (grasya ng Diyos). There are episodes in this book that perhaps suggest times of boredom and angst; even horror as in the war, but as you go along this is a story of a life that is being lived triumphantly, and with sweet light and cheer.

The best memoirist is one who has soldiered on , which Gilda, now in her mid seventies, has, and is a writer as well. She is an authentic and abiding Filipino: see how she puts writers from U.P. in their place. She put out her first collection of short stories, Butcher Baker and Candlestick Maker when she was in her early 30s, and then she wrote Wilderness of Sweets. All her fiction rang true, because she knew the language she was writing in, and her emotions were neat and in the right places, and her stories were beautiful and honest. It's sad that she stopped writing fiction a long time ago, and the reader is hardly comforted by even her own assurance that she writes her true stories the way she wrote her fiction.

Anne Applebaum opens her own new book on the Gulag with something from Anna Akhmatova. Anna is in a crowd of women huddled up in the bitter cold to visit their imprisoned menfolk, husbands or sons, in Leningrad. Somebody calls Anna by name, and then another woman asks her: "Can you describe this?" and Anna says, "I can." Merrily, tenderly, Gilda Cordero Fernando does.

World PR Congress in Beijing

Those of us in PR who missed the recent Olympics have another chance to do Beijing. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) is holding its XVII World Congress in Beijing, Nov. 13-15, 2008.  

Theme of the Congress will be "Using Public Relations to Build Harmonious Relationships in the Era of Globalization."

Among items on the agenda will be a review of how PR and communication played a key role in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, PR in brand globalization, PR trends in Asia and emerging markets, communicating with the young, PR and public diplomacy, PR and the new media,  and measuring the value of PR.  IPRA President Robert W. Grupp (U.S.) and China International Public Relations Association (CIPRA) President Ambassador Li Daoyu will lead a good number of PR practitioners worldwide who will be attending the PR Congress.

Members of the Philippine Chapter of IPRA, led by Joy Buensalido, are planning to attend the Congress (that is, if they can get  their visas). 

Beautiful Bohol

 Chocolate Hills in Bohol take your breathe away. They awe with their quiet grace,  and evoke a sense of permanence.  Under a blue sky and in  their lace of green, Chocolate Hills are hard to beat as a vista to marvel at. Bohol is lucky to have them, and the sea and its fish and marine life.  

Panglao Island is beautiful and busy; its old houses and  towering trees  give the visitor a unique kind of welcome. Bohol is a place to be visited again and again; its charms need to be dwelt upon for a while to be amply appreciated.  

Prinsesa ng Kumintang

Back in 1989, I published a collection of short stories in Pilipino. It was not until just a month ago that I came across this review of my book  in Philippine Studies, v. 39, no. 2, (1991). I would like to share it with you here.  

P R I N S E S A  NG  K U M I N T A N G AT I B A P A N G KUWENTONG
PILIP I NO. By Romeo P. Virtusio. Manila: Cacho Publishing House, Inc.,
1989. 150 pages.

Prinsesa ng Kumintang, Romeo Virtusio's collection of short fiction, treats the
variousness of university intellectuals, public relations executives, the
banqucting principalia of the old Commonwealth period, nightclub crooners,
social climbing society columnists, sad bachelors, and ruminant nuns in the
light of social significance and consciousness. His fiction probes deeply int
the lives of the bourgeoisie, into the compromises to which they are seduced,
and their painful and private struggling to unbind themselves from all the
confused entrapments. And always, action suggests a simmering discontent,
the pulse and throb on the tap presaging a violent eruption already underway.
His characters always reach the edge of privacy as they are challenged
to cross the border leading to a social reawakening, sometimes gifted with
the knowledge that marks them differently, as when in the title story, the
beautiful and mythical princess favors the farmers' lawyer among her titled
and rich suitors. The banquets of old Batangas are recalled with graceful
elaboration. The whirl of voices in flippant conversation, witty retorts, and
small talk that sparks attraction capture painstakingly the manners of the
Tagalog as they feast on lechon and assorted duke, and drink Inmbanog.
The love story takes place the year before the Commonwealth is inaugurated.
History inflicts the protagonists with a strange fear which suggests that
even love is blessed by the tides of history. Marriages ride the same turbulent
historical waves that could just possibly crash ashore. These muted fears silence
the humble lawyer from proposing; the woman passes her time in hopeful
waiting as she convinces herself:
Ngunit ano ang maaaring idulot ng darating na komonwelt kundi ang
bagong liwanag? At ang anak ng gobernador, busilak na baguntaong kakatawan
sa mga pag-asang maluwalhating nagluluntian, hindi ba't siya'y dadalawin
nit0 sa Maynila? At ang abugadong ito? (p. 72)
The intimations of the unknown are ignored. History is relegated to the
background as the more personal "stories" of the lovers gain the foreground.
Comfort and security become the more traditional thesis of the story instead
of the more revolutionary thesis that love can actually embolden individuals
to face historical unknowns and grapple with them. By privileging individualism
over integration with society, the story becomes something of an antihistorical
narrative defeating its initial motion toward social consciousness.

Virtusio's fiction suffers in that its social vision and the program it constructs
and proposes exist predominantly in the patriarchal world. It is
ideologically slanted to relegate the women of his fiction to secondary and
passive positions in the power structure, constantly ruled and subjugated by
his male characters. His fiction represents women in the conventional and
stereotypical molds-desperate prostitutes, light-minded journalists, passive
and excitable colegiaas, and meek and virginal nuns.
In "Ang Pasipista," an aging courtesan wakes up one day aching and
strained with her endless hawking. Avelina, war-widow-turned-prostitute
contemplates a quiet and comfortable retirement. In its range of discourses,
this story extends even further to involve the problematic of motherhood.
Avelina prostitutes herself only because she is left with a son to raise. Shc
drags herself into this bodily perversion to provide Teddy the comfortable
life, bourgeois breeding and education that she has been denied.

The morning stretches on as she schemes to persuade Henry, her Chinese
businessman lover, to provide her ten thousand to send Teddy to either Atenm
or La Salle. But the outlawed negotiator momentarily disappoints her.
Meanwhile, Teddy becomes a well-regarded leader in the student movement,
and from the way he reasons, Avelina suspects him to be an activist. When
one night Henry arrives halfdrunk and hissing with insults for a group of
local politicians protesting his business, Teddy assaults him unexpectedly.
Teddy tramples him on the chest, over and over.

With this violent surprise, Teddy brings Avelina to her unexpected liberation.
The familial matrix seemingly justifies the resolution, but when one
considers the specificities of gender, the same resolution hardly endures.
Earlier on, Avelina muses:
,
. . . ngayon ko nga lamang naman naiisip, ang mga walanghiya, sabay pala
kaming ginagahasa . . . ng aking bayan, ang mga estrangherong mandarambong,
. . . mga Amerkano at Intsik;kailan, kailan pa kayo magbabayad
ng inyong mga utang? (p.123)

Where the story initially proposes that prostitution and motherhood are
keen experiences precipitating a consciousness of struggle, it ends by downplaying
the very possibility. The will to revolt is reserved for the man in the
family. The illumined journey to the dark rooms of "womanly" experiences
does little compared to Teddy's formal political awakening in effecting the
sort of individual subversion which the narrative foregrounds. Here, the old
chivalric motifs recur.

In the reading process, this is symptomatic of the perpetuation of oppressive
images and representations of woman in society that remain lodged and
unchallenged in the consciousness of contemporary readers of literature. Helene
Cixous, in 'The Laugh of the Medusa" sees literature as
a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and
over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that is frightening since
it is often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction. (p. 311)
In the light of political and pro-feminist readings, his fiction selfdestructs
in its very attempt to foreground radical discourses privileging social transformation.
In both acts of reading and writing, women can only be recognized as force
in and part of social revisioning. Revisioning must take place in as concrete
a ficld as gender, where the most basic and most ignored of oppressions take
placc. Good fiction necessarily tasks itself to liberate women, and all persons
at that, from convcntional and limiting representations constructed by society.
Danilo Francisco M. Reyes
Department of Filipino
Ateneo de Manila University

Link:www.philippinestudies.net

Remembering Virgilio

Remembering Virgilio


I read this Monday, September 8, 2008, 8 p.m., at the "Parangal-Paalam" for the late Virgilio Q. Pantaleon, by the Philippine Chapter, International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Christ the King Church, Quezon City.



Virgilio Q. Pantaleon, noted PR practitioner, former newsman and Press Undersecretary in the Philippines, passed away 6th September. He will be missed by many for his leadership, learning and great kindness. This is how I remember him.

I will miss Virgilio because he was a good man. I could say Virgilio was brilliant, which he was, but so what, PR is awash with brilliant men! A good man makes you feel good in his presence. A good man glows, he looks you in the eye, and without a word, he tells you he is there for you. Years ago, I came to Virgilio-- somebody was giving me a bit of trouble, and if I was not able to do anything about it. I and a lot of other people were going to be in a state of embarrassment. Virgilio said, don't worry. In 24 hours, he fixed my problem. Once he came to my office, and said, come on let's talk, and he gave me and my wife a beautiful rosary, from one of his travels. Virgilio glowed; when he smiled, he beamed with that gentle but upright spirit. In this business that we are in, he once said to me, you meet people who are not so good--actually he used a stronger word-- but don't mind them-- always stand for what you believe in.

During his last months, when he was still able to go to work, twice or thrice, he called- Oh, I just wanted to tell you... He would always say thank you, okay, ang galing nu'n... And I would wonder, would I be able to do that, think of others when you are sick? Virgilio was a cultured man. He loved Beethoven, and the opera. He said, look up Gustav Mahler. Virgilio had a friend in Jakarta, who knew him from Caltex days, and he would always ask about Virgilio. Now he will be saddened to know that his friend has passed on. Joy asked me to say something about the PR book. I'll tell you something-- we did it for PR, but we did it for Virgilio. He had begun to ail when we thought of that book, and we said, let them tell their stories.

The Ecclesiastes tells us something about a faithful friend, which Virgilio was. "

A faithful friend is something beyond price,
there is no measuring his worth
A faithful friend is the elixir of life
And those who fear the Lord will find one,
Whoever fears the Lord makes true friends
For as a man is, so is his friend."


What a joy it was to have a good man amongst us, and a true and faithful friend! Honored is the beautiful wife, Virginia, who loved him and cared for him, and blessed are the children on whom he lavished his labors and affections. Rest, gentle friend, in the embrace of our Lord, the Father Whom you trusted and loved.