Authur Page and Corporate Public Relations (jan 1, 1927 – jan 1, 2020)

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After World War II, as the 20th century rolled on, the perceptual problems of corporations and their leaders diminished. Opinion polls ranked business as high in public esteem. People were back at work, and business was back in style. Smart companies—General Electric, General Motors (GM), and American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), for example—worked hard to preserve their good names through both words and actions. Arthur W. Page became AT&T’s first public relations vice president in 1927. Page was a legendary public relations figure memorialized in today’s Arthur Page Society of leading corporate and agency public relations executives helping to maintain AT&T’s reputation as a prudent and proper corporate citizen. Page also was one of the few public relations executives to serve on prestigious corporate boards of directors, including Chase Manhattan Bank, Kennecott Copper, Prudential Insurance, and Westinghouse Electric.
Page’s five principles of successful corporate public relations are: 1. To make sure management thoughtfully analyzes its overall relation to the public 2. To create a system for informing all employees about the firm’s general policies and practices 3. To create a system giving contact employees (those having direct dealings with the public) the knowledge needed to be reasonable and polite to the public 4. To create a system drawing employee and public questions and criticism back up through the organization to management 5. To ensure frankness in telling the public about the company’s actions.
Another early corporate public relations luminary was Paul Garrett. A former news reporter, in 1931 he became the first director of public relations for mighty GM, working directly for GM’s legendary CEO Alfred Sloan. Garrett once reportedly explained that the essence of his job was to convince the public that the powerful auto company deserved trust, that is, “to make a billion-dollar company seem small.” Ironically, as good as Garrett was, according to the late maestro of management Peter Drucker, he nevertheless reflected the universal public relations complaint, still common today, of “never feeling like an insider” within his organization. Drucker, who counseled CEO Sloan, said that because Garrett was a “communications professional” and not a “car man,” GM executives often treated him with wariness. As the corporate financial scandals in the first 20 years of the 21st century that torpedoed entrenched firms such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and the Weinstein Companies and laid low respected names such as Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, Merrill Lynch, Mylan Pharmaceuticals, Sony Corporation, and Wynn Resorts show. Corporate leaders need to seek out the counsel of trained public relations professionals in dealing with their key constituent publics.

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