Rick Murray
Executive Vice-President
Let’s face it. Most of us don’t wake up in the morning hoping that our world will be turned upside down (again) at work. We like our jobs. We know our jobs. And we know how to do them just fine thank you very much.
Some people however do wake up in the morning looking for ways to challenge and disrupt the status quo because they know that’s where the growth is. They don’t have any silver bullet solution, and they don’t have a blueprint, but they live to try.
We all have both types of people in our organizations; hence, one of the biggest challenges of leadership today: how to inspire and enable the changes required to re-think and re-invent your business in real time without alienating the core.
Push too hard for change, and you’ll lose good people and quite likely, good customers as well who – like your core – aren’t as ready to move to new places as quickly as your disruptors want them to.
Don’t push hard enough, and your organization will go through a slow and painful atrophy. New competitors and other macro forces beyond your control will drive margins down. New technologies will eat entire revenue streams away. Your disruptors will leave because they see you falling behind, leaving you with both staff and clientele that are increasingly ill-equipped to compete in a radically changed environment.
There are entire industries being Uber-ized today, and with it, incumbents blind-sided by the swiftness and severity of the changes befalling their previously safe space.
The practice of PR isn’t immune to these forces; indeed, we were a driver of change in the past decade by investing well ahead of other agency-types in social media. Whatever edge we had in social is long gone. Indeed, we now have new competitors for that and all PR spend in the form of other agencies, professional services firms, the news media and a host of technology companies.
What’s next? Who knows. But I for one, am looking forward to waking up tomorrow with no set agenda other than to keep pushing NATIONAL, our people and our clients into things and places that make us all a little uncomfortable. That’s not just where the growth is; that’s where the fun is.
How about you?
——— Rick Murray, former Managing Partner and Chief Digital Strategist at NATIONAL Public Relations, and now Managing Partner at SHIFT Communications, sister company of NATIONAL
