Gilded and Gelded: Hard-Won Lessons from the PR Wars

Reprint: R0310B

A golden statue of a winged youth once perched on the roof of AT&T’s old headquarters. But when AT&T lowered the 24-foot-high statue for regilding so that it could be placed in the company’s new headquarters, the chairman was shocked to discover that the figure was anatomically correct. So he decreed that it also be gelded. The altered “Golden Boy” thus became a metaphor for AT&T’s recent embattled history, and it serves as a cautionary symbol for all companies operating in today’s brutal business environment, where perception can be as important as reality. While image consultants and executives work to gild a company’s image, special interest groups and the media can geld a company with countless little cuts.

The author, a former executive vice president of public relations for AT&T, provides an insider’s view of some of the company’s most painful public-relations scrapes. They include the collapse of two apparent CEO succession plans, AT&T’s inability to meet heightened expectations after Mike Armstrong was appointed CEO, and the racially charged furor over a cartoon in an employee publication. The author offers four lessons: Don’t become hypnotized by your own buzz; understand the way the business media think; address the needs of all your stakeholders; and be sensitive to the possible emotional resonance of what appear to be straightforward facts.

To illustrate the final point, the author mentions AT&T’s elimination of 40,000 jobs in 1996. Wall Street was impressed, but NBC’s Tom Brokaw said the workforce reduction might signal “another long, anxious year for the American middle class.” No rational argument from AT&T could overcome the layoffs’ symbolic impact. Wounded but wiser after numerous public-relations battles, the company eventually learned to stop aggregating job-reduction information for the media.