I was in at the Bangalore’s Forum Mall when I got the first call about the bomb blasts behind it in Madiwala. Having grown up during the time when Punjab insurgency was at its height and traveling through Delhi was a hurdle race through checkposts, the Bangaloreans (is there such an entity?) response to the Friday happenings was interesting. There was not even a controlled aggression visible on the faces of the security staff of the Mall. I actually walked back into the Mall a second time to put up a ticket I left in the PVR vending machine and voila this time I dint even pass through the metal detector because the Security Staff was checking with the public on where the next blast had been reported by ?? (TV or radio). The next blast was somewhere near Adugodi, a close by area.

By telling you all this my intention is not to eulogize how I proverbially escaped etc etc or lament the internal security situation in India (homeland security as the Americans call it), Im building up to a point which for all of us in Communications is a gold mine to debate - Does India have a Crisis Communications Policy? Isnt it time we did?

Worldwide and in India, the Industry has by far been quick to grasp that while management of a crisis is critical, the advance alerts or post crisis response has communication at its core making it one of the key factor of “to what extent” the crisis impacts the stakeholders. When we speak of National or state level crisis, these stakeholders are us – the common wo/man.

I spent years in newspapers and amongst other beats buried my nose into the power sector to understand why all the MW produced did not reach the consumers and YET s/he paid for the entire power production and WHY therefore the power company was answerable to the people for its process management. Part of this process was T& D losses and some of this was attributable to those next to the consumers house who hooked onto power lines to steal it without paying! This consumer when told so could be galvanised to protect and report power theft!

This experience has come really handy in understanding the skill of mass communications and I now believe that the credibility of the source of Communication is a subject worth a study - be it a corporate or a country. Even after hours of whatever was happening over the past weekend whether you were in Ahmedabad, Bangalore or Surat, the main source of information was the media / journalists and some tidbits here and there on Crisis Management by local authorities. What and where was the citizens credible / believable / actionable source of information? Till today some TV channels in Karnataka continue to insist that the blasts left 2 dead and most others put the number at 1.

A few months back, the Computer Society of India, was doing an issue on ICTs and asked me to author one of the articles. In writing that my attempt was to extrapolate learnings in the Industry and investigate if the corporate processes can be juxtaposed to how a country and its management communicates with its stakeholders, specifically during a crisis. In this article I alluded to a model that can be implemented by the top management of the Business House (India) and its Strategic Business Units (States). I just got to know that the magazine was published and therefore feel at liberty to discuss that idea in this forum as well.

At the heart of such a model are the same few questions that chief communication officers in companies ask their managements when penning crisis communication manuals.

Scenario build up - Kinds of Crisis experienced in the past and feared for the future (both for India & SBUs)
Designated Spokespersons and Chief spokesperson who are credible and their call to action is heeded to by stakeholders

Types of stakeholders in each crisis

Channels of communication to reach the stakeholders

Human Networks to use when ICTs (Information Communication technologies) fail as they almost always do in a natural disaster

Understand the holding statement concept

Who prepares and who contributes to the holding statement

Practice runs at frequent intervals of the crisis scenarios …

A potential draft of such a policy lies in the answers to the above questions and in the article I answered each head assuming that the Corporate in question is India, the Strategic Business Units were the States and the chief communication officer was myself. All answers were based on the assumption that Ive not been debriefed yet by the nation’s CEO or the SBU units but I’m building answers to the questions through intelligent hypothesis.

I can’t reproduce the article here but I hope I’m able to convey that such a model can be built for India – more efficiently if bigger brains than yours or mine go to work on it. In fact quite possible that this is being done somewhere but as a citizen if I look at what communication reached me over the weekend, its obviously not yet in place. Take for example the city of my current domicile, Bangalore, I as a citizen don’t know who to believe when reasons are enlisted on what happened to my mobiles on Friday at 3 PM - when the somebody tells me that mobile phone operators jammed the signals post the blasts so that people couldn’t spread rumors, I believe it. When others say the cell phone were jammed because Police wanted to stop miscreants from triggering live bombs using mobiles as possible detonators, I nod and almost believe it. The easy answer we all know as citizens is that the cell network was jammed because panicky citizens were trying to check on each others safety but then that’s “so obvious” an answer that you would say nahhhh! Quite possible its the Crisis Management Standard Operating Procedure given out to service providers but do I know this ? No. Maybe its top secret confidential modus operandi that a citizen needn’t know about but do I know that or have heard about it? No.

Take another example of credible spokesperson . Lets assume that the Chief Minister of Karnataka is the chief spokesperson whom the citizens of the SBU believe in as its head of management (please don’t drag us into the mindless debate that state chief secretary should be the chief spokesperson since bureaucracy are the real managers!) . What information was coming out from the CMs office at the time – the anchor sitting in Mumbai was asking the Bangalore correspondent about updates and all he had was this - a meeting at 5pm had been convened to take stock of the situation. That’s it. Any advisory for the citizens ? Hmmm..Oh yeah I did hear somebody say that the CM said, “Nothing to worry”. Of course the next day a live bomb was found outside a mall in a flower pot, left by a man in red T shit, which was defused by a bomb squad. Later the media wrote that a cobblers wife clipped the wires which hung by its sides the day before which could possibly have been the reason for it going dead.! I’d love to explain this in detail but its as funny as its sad..all this in India’s IT capital no less

So to cut a long story short, we really need a Crisis Communication Policy in India as we are surely and quickly becoming the eye of the storm..and a crisis hits only once and effects directly or indirectly – after that there is pin drop silence or a deafening noise made by those alive to take stock of what could have been done instead. If the lines between crisis management and crisis communications seem to blur, then they should as the latter is the core of the former and its time we gave it some thought.

It was 1:45 PM and waiting in the school hall was making me very antsy. I watched with steadily rising blood pressure as couples leisurely trooped in for a school session and cursed dad for my on-time fetish and son for his ban on skipping the session option. The session eventually started an hour late and the headmaster thanked the busy parents of high school for attending. Some time later the counselor introduced the concept of the fish philosophy. I had read the book and was all ears but a co-parent nudged my shoulder..”hi! you are working right? must be so busy how come you came for a mid-day meeting?” My “no not really” smile in fact encouraged her to continue “my husband’s sooooo busy,I didn’t even insist he come.”

This time I let out a hmmm so she deflected to the parent on the other side saying, “really how can the school call meetings at 1 PM, it’s the time I’m so busy to which the other lady agreed vigorously adding “Such a problem”. The counselor meanwhile was saying, ” I know you are busy and held up Outlook current issue on do you connect with your child and said “I know we have busy lives but you all must read this article”. By now I was fuming….my friends know me to never use the word and find that I meticulously wean the habitual “busy” people out of my life…but then you would say that’s my problem. It sure is but the purpose of writing this piece is that we all should unravel this Business of being Busy .

In his book Semantic Antics , How and Why words change meaning , Sel Steinmetz says “business” used to refer to being busy, but it gradually broadened to encompass many kinds of occupations. Now it’s fair to ask why don’t take the word at face value. Busy means just that..busy …occupied , not available right now…It’s because of what the word has become…Some use it as a polite brush off, some as a shield as a not available to you to and others just to pay back in the same coin. The most intelligent, creative and busy (dictionary sense) people I know are never ever busy ! They always take calls, they always return calls they can’t take, they always revert on time and almost always have a really good reason to being “busy”, a reason you can empathize with and thus begin to respect their time next time you approach them.

The fish philosophy session was meanwhile on the 3rd value “Play” and the counselor asked “So when did you all have fun last? I whispered to myself 2.20 PM ! ..the parent sitting next to me checked her watch (it was 2:22 PM) and looked at me enquiringly…I just shrugged. Later in the one on one sessions the counselor said, ” I heard what you said.. Did you really have fun ten minutes back?..Yes of course, you were speaking of one of good books I had read..my sms showed a friend trying to frantically reach me and sending vague smileys..the ladies sitting close to me were discussing how busy they were and I found it fun to be ‘free” enough to adsorb all that was happening around despite knowing all the jobs that waited for me back on my desk. ! The counselor gave me such a warm smile I skipped on my way out..

The business of being “BUSY” has occupied my mind forever. On the company Intranet I recently started a discussion string “Volunteering needs free time or a free mind ?” and the sum total was that Busy is a mindset not a state of being..or a mental state a job (or even personal life) keeps you in. For a very long time and even now sometimes I wonder what happens to us that we managers begin throwing “busy” around. Its more important in the context of Communications and Organizational Culture that the word become an anathema. Like Mark Twain said… Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover…And those people who do this i.e explore, dream, discover don’t do so on annual holidays. they do it everyday! Inspiration is all around us , in people ..with whom we are just too busy to interact with.

In the business of public relations, the media often tells us that when they have a query they need answers, we are busy but when we have a plug then we are free to pursue this single point agenda with them for days on end. There is more evidence of the misuse of the word in middle level managers. Last year I was on a compaign to get it off as many people’s daily verbal list as possible and it reflected in one of the articles on HOD skill sets where I then foolish enough to say bluntly. ” Busy is a four letter word! It keeps you away from experiencing people and events which have the capacity to make a positive impact on your professional and personal life. So don’t use it to defend your bad time management. Don’t replace “busy” with “I don’t have the bandwidth”, “I’m snowed under”. Tough job you have so stop whining - you are paid more, so you have more pressure to handle and thus more accountability too.” (you can read full article here)  That was last year. This year I’m more diplomatic primarily because habitually “busy” have very methodically been downgraded from Friends to Acquaintances to a Do I know you at all list. I have all the time in the world to do all the things I want to do…with all those who want to do it with me..

Now the epitabh (sic English) my previous blog entry received too much TRP I would say for a first one in fact led me to think maybe I should have written on a more non controversial topic instead. All that goes in the name of “breaking news” , especially nowadays when the end of life becomes the country’s soap opera, “journalism” generates some very strong emotions which showed up in the feedback.

But that apart most of the feedback tackled different portions of the blog and was generally in agreement, some comments were truly kickstarters to a thought process and Im going to tackle them in some later blogs. One colleague actually equated me in my journalist avatar to a much much senior colleague who truly was …for want of a better term …aweful kind of egoist. It is therefore correct what he said later “what hurts is to see that most of them (journos) make the generic mistake of clubbing all corporate communication professionals in one mould. Like you said there are different types of journos, similarly there are variants in CC professionals too.” Another colleague however says the exact opposite because her mentor used to say the same thing about working with journalists. A very astute colleague is pretty much agreeable with Line function bit and says she is currently heading an experimental pilot communications position which is bogged down by none of the previous process driven parts of the function anymore. Our friend Palin on the other hand is also saying the same thing but not exactly that. The point which I think is worth talking about is the scope of Corporate Communications? What pricesly are the Key Result Areas. What pricesly is the mindset..Lets talk about this in the coming days based on how many people post their curiosity on it

After years and years as a career finance journalist I shifted into a industry operations unit and quickly realised that:

Creating is tougher than commenting (…on the creation).
Creating is more enriching than profiling (…the creation or the creator).
Creating is much more powerful than criticism (…of the creation or the creator)

Comments, Profiles and Critique remain nevertheless essential tools of reaching the creation out to the public . Therefore we in Public Relations of a brand, a technology, a service use these tools a lot to create “stories” in the media to reach out to our respective TGs and for brand building. But despite the high decibel almost unbelievable level of PR and coverage created through these tools , they are not what journalism is about

Best to stay on uncontroversial ground and quote a personal example: as a journalist I got pleasure from and specialised in creating ’stories’ through investigation and discovery of information hitherto unknown for the benefit of the common man. As idealist as it may sound being the instrument of positive change was reason of entering journalism and giving up on my IAS studies on the day I was to give Interview. I had a strong aversion to commenting or profiling. The editors would rarely if ever put me to these tasks. I reckon any journalist worth his weight today has not made a career out of commenting, profiing or criticising.

Therefore its important that people in Corporate Communications, Corporate PR functions or PR Agencies use different yardsticks when dealing with the press. The yardsticks are completely dependent on the kind of orientation each category of journalists bring to their work.

This is easier said than achieved. Picture this – a journalist is writing a story on a brand. He has the entire story and needs nothing from the PR agency / Corporate communicator – Is it so impossible for us to digest that we mean nothing to him in the “story chain”. For instance corporate communications heads and the public relations agency of my beats disliked me with a vengeance. They disliked me for one simple reason - I took no cognizance of their existence. Furiously well networked I remained oblivious of their presence or even their sheer requirement in a story chain. So basically I was the dreaded kind of press – who bypasses the corp com people and creates a lot of internal problems for the department head including loss of credibility internally. They then struck back by entertaining the other category of my beat colleagues who commented and profiled and gave out so called “exclusives” to competing newspapers.

Today on the other side of the table as a corporate communications head, I find my kind of journalists quite a tiresome breed indeed. But lets give these thinking devils their due. One can respect them only if we know what drives them. An example of one thinking devil I knew who literally was dreaming up a rough draft of history for an industry segment :- In the mid 90s those investing into the mobile businesses were visionaries (…just like the owners of IPL franchises today will be hailed as five years from now) . The entry block was the handset cost of 30,000 and biggest irritant was all incoming calls were charged. A senior editor wrote a note to all us beat reporters covering telecom ..the note said and I quote since Ive kept it for all these years, ” Sunil Mittal is trying to buy a Modi Telstra (or was it Command) in Kolkata. Spice is getting out of the business down south, Vodafone is the biggest international player and has stake in Z company but its not yet flexing muscle. Reliance is busy setting up a backbone and has made no attempt to launch services…these are threads that I see now . These threads lie in your respective cities. In pretty short time these threads will be pulled together to become a braid that runs through India. We want to be the first one to pull these threads together.”

Today, You have a Vodafone as the biggest force along with Sunil’s Airtel!

So if I look back we beat reporters were also particpants to this rough draft of history because of the type of journalists we were. I was leading the pack from Kolkata writing on who was buying out whom in the mobile business and who was stalking whom and what would happen if things went this way or that. I had no clue who the corporate communications heads were. Sunil Mittal was just a phone call away and in the quickly written well researched “stories” was the pleasure of being a journo.

For this kind of journo a corporate communicator is really a coordinating clerk and a PR agency is one notch lower in this coordination chain for one simple reason – they know more about your industry and brand than you do, they can get to the “spokesperson” quicker than you can..and that’s the Achilles’ heel for PR professionals. This is relevant now, and for times to come. Mind you Im quite aware of reporter profiling and risk assessment done by PR agencies as part of strategy for clients. All things remaining equal corporate communicators need to respect the journalist’s profession slightly more than they do…maybe not all but some of them.

To my mind, seven things we can do to strike up a rapport with a good reporter who will then loop you in whether they need your assistance or not.

1. Never hardsell the brand you work for.
2. Own up to the mistakes and don’t demand / expect positive stories inspite of them
3. Have information about your company/industry on your fingertips
4. Be strongly networked within your management ranks so that you can quickly get the feedback – No. Yes. No comments – whatever it be.
5. Respect that the journo’s product goes to bed at a certain time so speed up reverts.
6. Ensure your internal corporate stakeholders take the press and your job seriously.
7. Ensure that your internal stakeholders have standing instruction to always loop you in when contacted by the press directly. Be upfront, confess to them that you lose credibility if they respond directly. This stakeholder could be the CEO therefore this could get really tricky!

As I said before, true there is high decibel PR but if you look carefully there is high level of disbelief on what is written, why it is written, whether its an advertorial or not. All about the press and journalists is not good just as all is not good with brands, technologies or services. They however remain invaluable. When they do their jobs well, our jobs get done well too..most of the time i.e.