Shear madness

Back in the early 1900s my great grandfather sailed from Portsmouth to Argentina. He left with no qualifications and returned four months later with a certificate, ‘ready’ to practise dentistry. There were no barriers to entry.

This 'on the job' approach to the learning curve still applies to many trades. If you wanted to, you could set up as a barber or hairdresser tomorrow. You might want to take out a bit of public liability insurance and make sure that your home number is ex-directory, but beyond that, all you need is a comb, scissors, water and a fair bit of chutzpah. Some years ago, I was sitting in the barber’s chair, looking out the window and watching a few kids with misshapen barnets walk up the road carrying small toys. “They’ve been to that new place round the corner”, the barber said. “They’re offering toys with haircuts for kids. The kids will be in here with their parents tomorrow for remedials. The place won’t last. They’ll be gone in a month.”

I’ve cut my own hair once during lockdown. It’s OK from one angle, but yesterday I bumped into someone I know in the road and they asked with head-tilted compassion whether I was OK. It was only later that I twigged that the question was linked to my autodefoliation.

Public relations falls into the same pot. It’s that the means of doing it are so straightforward. We’ve all got laptops or phones, we can google announcements to get a bit of an idea of how they read, and we can all have a go at sending them out to journalists. 

For the most part, there’s no harm done and I guess those who choose this route think, ‘ah well, that's that accomplished.'

But it’s a missed opportunity. If you feel motivated enough to make an announcement, there must be something great to shout about. The trouble is - and this is where the skill comes in - there are 10,000 other announcements, many of them drafted by professionals and in various forms that are being delivered to exactly the right person at the right time. Crafted properly (ie, as something truly noteworthy, and minus the myriad of available buzzwords that sentence most announcements to death), it’ll probably work. If not, it’ll just be a triumph of activity over outcome. 

Worse still, this sense that it’s doable, combined with no evident return, can sour many organisations to PR’s potential. Over the years, I’ve sat in countless boardrooms listening to counter-arguments of the ‘bad cop’ in the pitch. “We’ve tried that. It never works”, they say. At one pitch, I took out one of my great grandfather’s dental instruments and told the story. We won the work.

We’re awash today with examples of the ‘willing to have a go’ culture. The TV show, The Apprentice, is the cauldron in which this souped up autodidacticism is currently stewing. Everything, it tells us, is easy. The truth is, it isn’t. You can't commoditise brilliance. You can't have a facial, wear a flashy suit and suddenly be great at something. You can't reconcile a ratings chase with proper, hard learning. The means to do everything might be available to us, but it doesn't guarantee a satisfactory end. Instincts and expertise and creativity are the things that really matter. 

Think of it this way: Each of us has better special effects tech and video cameras in our pockets than Speilberg or Lucas had in the mid-seventies. Do I need to even finish the point? Similarly, blogging platforms and podcast equipment are available to us all, and yet most have a readership or listenership of one.

Some people are naturals, I’ll give you that, but for the most part, being able to do something well is long, hard graft. Economise at your peril.