PR By Self-Flagellation

This is a company talking about itself a while back: “We’ve worked hard to instil a culture of speaking up and transparently bringing forward any issue, no matter the size, so that we can get things right for a bright future. As a result, we’re finding items that we need to resolve.”

Here’s more: “Company insiders said the discovery last year of instances of the wrongly drilled holes and loose rudder bolts was evidence that the system was working. ‘The expectation is that you will find stuff and by finding stuff the system is working because you are working to address them’.”

Uh-huh. Since the doors keep falling off Boeing’s planes, these words look weak.

As a pilot put it, when it comes to planes crashing, processes are not the main thing.

“It doesn’t matter what system you put in place. We’re measuring it on the outcome.”

The outcome being: we all get to stay alive.

The outcome for Boeing and its passengers has lately been, well, concerning.

Boeing says it has always had strong risk management, presumably for everything other than the actual planes.

Since the accidents, Boeing has been in full apology mode – PR as self-flagellation.

I’m not sure that is working out either.

The Sunday Times reports that Wall Street greed led to the firm’s 737 Max crisis.

It’s a fine piece, but surely the job of the good CEO and her PR woman is to tell Wall Street when its desire for money is putting lives at risk, if only because that is very bad for business.

From the outside all this looks like the difference between the hack and flak trades writ large.

Journalism is almost entirely about outcomes. You can still, just about, be a scumbag that scares the life out of the HR department so long as you deliver the knock-out scoops.

In PR, following the process is what matters, even if that process leads you to building plane doors that explode mid-flight.

Perhaps each industry could learn a bit from the other.