Article posted on commpro.biz.
Editor’s Note: Patrice Tanaka, CRT/tanaka Co-Chair, Chief Creative Officer and whatcanbe Ambassador, spoke about “Collaboration. Community. Creativity.” in her keynote speech at Saturday’s PRSA Leadership Rally attended by incoming PRSA Chapter Presidents and Section and District Chairs. She discussed these three themes as central to her PR career and life, and urged these PR industry leaders to embrace collaboration as key to creating thriving communities and producing creative breakthroughs.
By Patrice Tanaka, Co-Chair, Chief Creative Officer, whatcanbe Ambassador and Author “Becoming Ginger Rogers”
(Keynote speech excerpts)
PRSA Leadership Rally for Incoming PRSA Chapter Presidents, and Section and District Chairs, New York City, June 15, 2013
“Collaboration,” “community” and “creativity” are three of the “central themes” of my PR career and life. Let me start by acknowledging that many of my proudest and most important accomplishments are the result of “collaboration” with others on everything…
- From selling more Girl Scout cookies than any other troop in Hawaii, where I was born and raised;
- To co-founding my first PR agency, Patrice Tanaka & Company, Inc., with 12 other colleagues after leading them in a management buyback from Chiat/Day Advertising;
- To celebrating Valentine’s Day with “Acts of Love & Kindness” along with 50 other NYC PR agencies under the auspices of PRSA-NY ;
- To co-founding my second PR agency, CRT/tanaka, with Rich., Va.-based Carter Ryley Thomas to create a bigger, mid-size, national agency focused on “whatcanbe”;
- To establishing the Asian Pacific American Women’s Leadership Institute with 17 other APA women leaders from across the country and putting 100 emerging, young APA women leaders through a year-long leadership development program;
- To creating, along with my talented colleagues, Liz Claiborne’s “Love Is Not Abuse” campaign, which, at 22 years, is now the longest-running corporate campaign addressing the issue of domestic violence;
- To raising funds, as part of the American Friends of the Phelophepa Train, for a second 18-car train to deliver primary health care services to under-served villagers in remote areas of South Africa;
- And, last, but not least, learning how to ballroom dance with the help of two wonderful teachers, who inspired me to write the book, “Becoming Ginger Rogers…How Ballroom Dancing Made Me a Happier Woman, Better Partner and Smarter CEO.”
Frank de Falco, a dear friend and co-founder of my first agency, once astutely observed that if I hadn’t experienced the value of “close partnering” through ballroom dance that I probably could NEVER have sold my agency to Carter Ryley Thomas and NOT been the CEO of the new agency we create. He was so right!
Through ballroom dancing I really learned the vital importance of “close partnering” and “collaboration,” especially when it comes to winning a ballroom competition. A couple in which only one partner dances well cannot win a ballroom competition. Both partners must perform well, dancing as one unit. Only then, do they have a hope of winning. As someone who’s always had a health ego, perhaps, too healthy, at times, I often thought my ideas were the best and that my approach was the right one. Well, I’ve learned through painful experience that the “going it alone” approach, and “doing it my way,” is totally disenfranchising to colleagues and collaborators.
I learned that if you really want to accomplish great things and really make a difference – that it really does “take a village.” We often say this when reporting some success to our entire agency: “Once again it took a CRT/tanaka village” to accomplish this feat.” Over the years, I’ve come to truly believe in the “power” of collaboration to get things done – especially BIG things. And, I’m sure, your goal, like mine, is to get BIG things done that really matter and that make a difference.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of three blog posts for PR Week on “Collaboration,” “Community” and “Creativity,” the need for which, I think, has only increased in relevance.
My first blog post on “Collaboration” was inspired by the DOW dropping more than 500 points, triggered in large part by the fractious debate between Congress and The President over raising the debt ceiling, which brought America to the brink of default. I wrote: “That a group of 535 elected officials ended up jeopardizing our economy and future because of their failure to work together is unacceptable and unconscionable. Hopefully, this is the watershed moment that gets Americans to rise up and demand that their polarizing political leaders do their jobs and collaborate for the public good.”
Later in the same blog post I wrote: “As PR practitioners today, our role must evolve to serve the expanding needs of the organizations and clients we represent. It’s no longer enough for us to merely “manage” stakeholder communications. The openness and transparency required for organizations to operate successfully today demands that PR practitioners take a greater leadership role in “actively fostering” collaboration and community
with a focus on the greater good.”
My second blog post on “Community” referenced my previous post on “Collaboration” and I wrote: “An important byproduct of great collaboration is the creation of thriving communities. Pre-historic hunters were only able to hunt bigger game like mastodons when they banded together. And, hunting bigger game enabled tribes to feed themselves, settle in an area, and grow crops. From agriculture came the first cities, and then empires with all the trappings of civilization, including the alphabet and printing press – the first major technological advance in communications.” I wrote: “With the Internet and the explosion of social media and mobile telecomm, we’re in the midst of another major evolution in communications, which is giving even greater saliency to Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy of the future being one “global village.” But it’s not just enhanced communications that reinforces the concept of the world as one global village, it’s that every country’s economy is now inter-connected.
“Today, we truly live in a global village where the actions of any one person or organization have the potential to negatively or positively affect lives around the world.
“As PR practitioners, our evolving role must include helping our organizations and clients understand and become increasingly mindful of the global community in which they operate.” Moreover, I wrote, “We must serve as “community builders,” helping them not only create a marketplace for their goods and services, but going beyond that to guide them in contributing as global citizens to the community in which we all live.”
My third and final blog post on “Creativity” focused on the role of collaboration in producing breakthrough creative solutions: “In studying business innovation and success, it appears that collaboration is key to producing breakthrough creativity. A failure to collaborate brought the economy to its current sorry state, but renewed cooperation will generate the innovative ideas that can jumpstart and drive economic growth.
I wrote: “In a society as complex and technologically sophisticated as ours, major projects require the coordinated contributions of many talented people. Groups of people collaborating together have accomplished monumental tasks that they could not have done on their own, dating back to cavemen banding together to kill a mastodon, or Leonardo da Vinci painting the Sistine Chapel with the support of 13 other artists, or the thousands of developers working on iPhone apps around the world and helping to double Apple’s share of the global handset market in the last quarter.”
“In today’s Darwinian economy, only organizations that find ways to tap the creativity of their members are likely to survive. America’s ability to survive and thrive,” I said, “is directly tied to our leaders’ willingness to collaborate in developing creative solutions to our country’s most pressing economic and social problems.
“As PR counselors, we must take a leadership role in encouraging our organizations and clients to collaborate with all parties involved in brainstorming the best solutions to problems. Working together is the cornerstone of producing breakthrough innovations that can be game-changers, whether in the for-profit, non-profit, or public sector.”
And for all of you incoming PRSA Chapter Presidents and Section and District Chairs, I hope that you truly “embrace” the idea that collaboration is the cornerstone of producing breakthrough innovations that can be game-changers for our profession, our local communities and for the community-at-large.
I know that, at the end of the day, we all want to feel that we’ve made a difference in the world. A positive difference. That we didn’t just take up space and consume resources during the all-too brief time we were here. That we left the world a somewhat better place for our having been here. As PR industry leaders, you have tremendous influence over how the PR industry can contribute to creating healthy, sustainable communities while, importantly, creating greater credibility for our profession. I urge you to think about how each of your PRSA Chapters, Sections and Districts can make a strong, clear, positive contribution to your communities. What kind of programming can you and your members create to “foster community” within and beyond your PRSA chapter? The impact in your communities could be tremendous! However, If all of your PRSA chapters collectively collaborated on some initiative, the impact could be exponentially greater for our profession and the community-at-large.
So, please THINK BIG! As anthropologist Margaret Meade so eloquently once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Best wishes to all of you amazing PR industry leaders! I know you will burnish the reputation of the PR industry even more brightly and reinforce the role of PR professionals as “collaborators,” as “community builders” and as “creative problem solvers” – exactly the type of people that PRSA and our society-at-large sorely needs today.