By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to manage how customers feel about your company. Reading time: 3:02

No matter what business you’re in, you’re in the Public Relations business.

All leaders are as President Abraham Lincoln so eloquently observed at the initial Lincoln-Douglas debate in Ottawa, Illinois in 1858 .Lincoln said :

“In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

Arthur Page, the first public relations director at AT&T, reinforced the power of public sentiment from a business perspective when he said more than 80 years ago:

“All business in a
democratic society begins with
public permission and
exists by public approval.”

Business begins with public permission and survives on public approval.

That should be the mantra of every business leader. After all it’s too easy to get too comfortable in our fish bowls of a business and forget that others are looking in – from all sides, at all times Continue reading →