Schools offer PR tips to future CEOs

Associated Press

HARTFORD, Conn.

Whether it’s corporate fraud, the Gulf oil spill, shoddy products or even the recession and weak recovery, capitalism’s reputation is taking a beating, but public relations executives hope they have a fix for America’s future CEOs.

The Public Relations Society of America has launched a pilot project at five business schools to teach MBA students how to handle crises and preserve corporate reputations.

“CEOs have made egregious mistakes in transparency and governance,” said Gerard Corbett, chairman and CEO of the public relations group. “This initiative is to get executives at the beginning of their careers and understand the nature and purpose of good reputation management.”

Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Quinnipiac University’s School of Business and the University of Texas at El Paso’s College of Business Administration are participating in the pilot project.

The schools will offer a public relations course in their MBA programs in the 2012-13 school year and document what works best in subject matter and teaching methods. Teaching corporate communications is not new, but the pilot program intends to develop a model course offering lessons on establishing a brand, social responsibility, using the media and other subjects that will be part of a course adopted by business schools across the U.S.

Paul Argenti, who teaches corporate responsibility and corporate communications at Dartmouth’s Tuck School, said company executives need to know how to communicate to staff, communities, investors, regulators and others about a range of issues.

“If you’re downsizing, don’t try to make it look better than what it is, but communicate what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” he said.

Matt O’Connor, dean of the business school at Quinnipiac University, said MBA programs are stepping up public-relations training to give future business officials a new skill.

Kathy Fitzpatrick, a professor of public relations in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University, said the business-school courses will reflect that the field has moved from communications to counseling executives on how to manage problems.

The courses will be electives, but because 80 percent of MBA programs have no public relations course, just offering the course as an elective “is a critical first step,” said Joe Cohen, a board member of the public relations society.

The drive to improve PR education in business schools coincides with a projected 21 percent increase in the number of public relations jobs from 2010 to 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s faster than average job growth and is a response to businesses and government agencies responding quickly to news and information that move fast on the Internet and social media, the labor agency said.

O’Connor said business schools typically use case studies such as BP’s handling of the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, deaths in Chicago caused by Tylenol tampering in 1982 and Union Carbide’s lethal gas leak in Bhopal, India, in 1984. The new course will teach MBA students how to use public relations to respond to everyday issues, he said.