Access Joins Ketchum
On November 1 we proudly announced the acquisition of Access Communications by Ketchum!
Learn more here

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New Client Showcase

I recently had the opportunity to spend time with Jim Collins, a genuine expert on corporate sustainability and growth, whose most recent wise words are about how greatness can be attained in environments characterized by immense turbulence. Jim has a lot of good things to say, beginning with the headline that true leaders are able to build something great even amid great turbulence. Jim is a true believer in the philosophy that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” and that the companies best positioned to thrive in the immediate aftermath of this downturn are those with a strong sense of values, people and process. Similar to Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare, Jim believes that strategic consistency, rather than the exuberant inconsistency exhibited by companies chasing steroid-type growth, determines a company’s long-term success. In Jim’s words, "a great company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starve from a lack of opportunity." Or put another way, if a company’s growth accelerates faster than its people’s ability to successfully execute across the longer term, it will fail.

Collins argues that it is senior management's ability to stay consistently focused on internal, controllable dynamics that becomes the cultural touchstone for a healthy company. It is the 20 mile marchers, disciplined about running their companies based on their own consistent metrics, who succeed. In contrast, those companies that enthusiastically draft behind the growth market end up building a reliance on external factors that they don’t control, ultimately sealing their fate. In the public relations industry we saw this with agencies that chased the dot com tidal wave and become a casualty when the wave crashed. More recently, a similar addiction to explosive but ultimately unsustainable growth expectations led to the fall-out we are all living with now. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been directly and negatively affected by the market exuberance hang-over.

So, what does strategic consistency mean for our industry? For Access it has always meant a fundamental USP built around high touch client service that is only possible by deeply valuing our staff and giving them opportunities to grow and prove themselves.

It means honoring the commitment of having senior people stay tightly involved with our clients instead of chasing new business. It means saying no to new business opportunities that aren’t right for us because we felt that we weren’t the best partner for their needs for a variety of different reasons. On the business side of the business, it means always hitting our key cultural and operational metrics even when hard decisions have to be made because staying focused on core benchmarks means we can react quickly when external dynamics shift.

Much has changed across the business landscape in the last six months.  What hasn’t changed is our focus on maintaining strategic consistency. In this issue of Inside Access, we showcase work for clients that relies on good old fashioned block and tackle media relations, work that requires fluency in social media to establish 2.0 credibility and engage influencers, and the adoption and execution of new skill sets that meet the adapting and rapidly changing needs of clients who engage with their own constituencies with increasing frequency through the blogosphere.

And speaking of blogs, I invite you to visit our Access Point blog, where I’ve recounted in full the insights and learnings I took away from engaging with Jim Collins.

Susan G. Butenhoff, President & CEO
susan@accesspr.com