The New York Post has come down hard on the board of Citigroup, blasting it for saddling the U.S. with a $351 billion bailout and calling for the resignation of the entire board.
The inept board, which “snoozed through the massive buildup of bad debt,” richly deserves this attack by the NYP, which details the many millions paid to the directors including Robert Rubin, who got $107M from 1999 to August 2008.
We’d call for the resignation of the PR Society board, which similarly has “snoozed” through massive stonewalling and trampling of member rights, but more than half of its members will be gone by Jan. 1 when nine new directors arrive.
The 2008 board was overpaid—not in money but in titles.
For the rest of their careers they will brag about being on the board of the “world’s largest PR association” although they did little to earn this title.
The board has ceded too much power to the staff which is doing most of the stonewalling and making too many big decisions.
Board/Staff Withhold Transcript
The latest communications atrocity is the attempt by staff to bury the 136-page transcript of the 2008 Assembly.
Members have e-mailed and written PRS leaders for the transcript but all the answers come back from COO Bill Murray and VP-PR Arthur Yann.
Their answers are all “No” to anyone seeking the transcript. Chair Jeff Julin is the one who should be responding.
Logic is so trampled in this matter that we’re reminded of Andrew Cohen’s remark that what PR people do is try to turn “turkeys into eagles.”
Supposedly, the only purpose for the transcript is to make the minutes.
But if anyone examines these minutes (see left for download), it will be obvious that anyone with a pencil and notepad at the Assembly could have made them.
They’re only a record of motions, names of the new directors and officers, and procedural minutiae.
Why spend thousands of dollars recording the Assembly and making a 136-page transcript of every word when the intention was to produce a barebones report with no dialogue whatsoever?
False Picture of Assembly Given
Not only are the minutes skimpy almost to the point of being useless, but they give a blatantly false impression of what went on.
Nowhere is there any indication that Tecker consultant Jean Frankel occupied about two full hours of the meeting, causing it to be one hour behind schedule as of 3:30 p.m.
The minutes say that “At 2:30 p.m. EDT, out of a possible 329 delegates, 300 were present, including 41 proxies.”
However, our notes say this announcement was made at 3:30 p.m. after Frankel had spent another hour instructing delegates in a “strategic dialogue.” She had already been given about an hour in the morning to distract the delegates (from 11:26 a.m. to 12:20 p.m.).
The minutes do not live up to the PRS Code promise of “the highest standards of accuracy and truth.”
As we know, the Frankel session and another two hours of presentations by leaders erased any hope of a “town hall” for the second straight year. Complacent delegates, enthralled with their PRS titles, made no effort to stop this waste of their time and chapter funds.
New Board Should Step In
We’re calling on the nine new board members to learn from Barack Obama and step in now to release the transcript.
PR Society directors, clockwise from top left, Catherine Huggins, Gail Liebl, Lynn Appelbaum, Gary McCormick, Kathy Barbour, Deborah Silverman, Steven Grant, and Donald Kirchoffner.
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The new directors are Gary McCormick, Don Kirchoffner, Lynn Appelbaum, Kathy Barbour, Catherine Huggins, Steven Grant, Deborah Silverman, Gail Liebl, and Gail Winslow-Pine.
Veteran PRS members who are fed up with h.q. stonewalling are also taking their case to the New York City Supreme Court, which handles pleas of members seeking information from their trade associations under Section 621 of New York State non-profit law.
PRS Bans Student Contact with O'Dwyer's
Stonewalling Assembly delegates, members and the press is bad enough but when PRS extends this tactic to PR students we think the board and staff have hit a new low.
Attempts to dialogue with the ten members of the national committee of the PR Student Society have been blocked under orders from national h.q.
The national leaders of PRSS have informed us that if we have any “questions” we must “go through” PRS h.q. to do this.
This is a conscious mis-statement of e-mails that we sent to the leaders. We don’t want to ask them any questions, we want them to sample the five O’Dwyer information products which would help them in job-seeking and in understanding PR.
PRSSA National Committee, L-R: Rebecca Timms, VP, member services; Courtney Taylor Olson, VP, advocacy; Tyler Page, VP, professional development; Cindy Badger, FORUM editor-in-chief; president Brandi Boatner; Melissa Csuhran, immediate past president; Cecilia Hughes, VP, internships/job services ; VP, regional activities; Courtney Meyers, VP of PR, and Tiffany Riggs, VP of chapter development.
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They have obviously been told by h.q. to have nothing to do with us or the O’Dwyer products.
Copies of the 2008 O’Dwyer’s Directory of PR Firms were sent to most of the ten along with Postal forms that if filled out would bring PR students a free one-year subscription to O’Dwyer’s PR Report, the monthly that focuses on the PR specialties such as healthcare, tech, financial, travel, etc.
This was several weeks ago and not one filled-out form came back. Obviously, the forms were simply pocketed by the recipients and not passed on to the chapter members.
Student Boycott Violates FTC Agreement
The bar against PRSS members dealing with us is an anti-competition tactic that is in violation of the agreement that the Society was forced to sign in 1977 by the Federal Trade Commission.
PRS promised never again to indulge in anti-competitive behavior after the FTC made it remove two such articles from its “Ethics Code”—barring members from pitching each other’s accounts and barring contingency fees.
PRS, whose Assembly in 1976 had turned down the FTC suggestion to amend the code, resulting in the formal order, was forced to publish nationwide a letter admitting its wrongful practices and promising never again to engage in such practices.
Student Turns Cool
Disappointing to us was the behavior of a member of PRSS from a New York area college who happened to sit next to us on the flight back to New York from Detroit.
We talked about the conference and told our job-seeking advice to PR grads. We recommended she read Always Live Better than Your Clients, which details the success of Ben Sonnenberg, who cultivated businesspeople and celebrities and helped them with personal and business problems.
We gave her jobseeking and career tips that she had never heard of and she was anxious to pass them on to her fellow chapter members.
We also promised her a free Directory of PR Firms and subscriptions to O’Dwyer’s PR Report for her and her chapter members. This delighted her no end and we gave her copies of the O’Dwyer Newsletter and our contact info.
But to our surprise, although we sort of expected it, we didn’t hear from her. We then contacted her but got a cool response. No doubt either someone from the school, perhaps the PRSA chapter adviser (who has not returned calls or e-mails) or someone from national h.q. put the “hex” on us.