1980 - 1999 : How Far Have We Come?

In 1980 IABC videotaped 21 prominent leaders and their predictions for the future. That future is today. How did their predictions hold up?

Back in May 1980, IABC produced one of the early multinational global videoconferences. It featured interviews with 21 noted men and women. The object was to capture their thoughts about what the next decade or two might hold for communicators. As is almost always the case, factors most affecting the world's future no one predicted, such as the end of the cold war or the advent of the Internet.

To set the scene, the world had just been through an epic and unprecedented oil shortage, the U.S. was still stinging from the Vietnam war, inflation was rampant and U.S. worker productivity was low.

Against that backdrop, David Freeman, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a U.S. public utility said: "The energy issue is at the heart of the world's problems today. Rather than enough of everything, there is a shortage. Most people don't want to believe it -- or don't believe it.

"Until we pound that fact home. I don't think there is going to be the kind of fundamental change in attitudes and policies necessary. And we've got a time bomb on our hands. It could explode any minute. It might not wait until 1984."

Our policies and attitudes toward energy conservation and pollution control did change, and communicators deserve much of the credit. Those topics were covered extensively -- and still are -- in organizational media.

The oil shortage became an oil glut by the 1990s, so predictions based on continued shortage didn't come to pass -- at least not yet. Other predictions, however, came close to reality. For example, this by Canadian columnist David Scott-Atkinson: "I see a really intense demand for well-trained communicators. I certainly see a blending of public relations people with advertising and marketing people, much the way that it's been done in the United Kingdom.

PR Has Sold Out

The predicted blending of advertising, public relations and marketing people has 20 years later become known as Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC). Some, like publisher/pundit Jack O'Dwyer, New York City, don't think much of the idea: "PR has sold out to advertising people -- 12 of the 13 biggest PR firms are owned by ad agencies. They are uncommunicative and use PR solely to support advertising."

On the more positive side, communication (both internal and external) has made great strides in supporting the strategic goals of the organization, and in measuring those contributions. As Vancouver-based consultant and past IABC chairman Jean Cormier, APR, puts it when asked what was the most crucial lesson he learned over the past 20 years: "Definitely the ability to learn about the corporation or association you wo0rk for -- its objectives. To identify with and participate in the goals of that organization. And understand that communication is just one part of that whole effort."

As corporate staffs shrank in the '80s and '90s because of downsizing and various types of streamlining, the internal communication function took on the key role of helping explain deep staff cuts and motivate employees to get on board the many programs designed to prevent serious drop in customer service.

PR consultant and past PRSA president, Betsy Ann Plank, saw this change coming. She said during the 1980 interview. "I have a conviction ... that today's work force in any business or institution can no longer be considered an internal constituency. You can no longer take loyalties for granted.

"Therefore, in communicating or in assessing their attitudes, one must look upon them with the same respect that one looks upon an external audience. And then all of our communication must deal with them in that forthright way and take nothing for granted about their loyalty to a firm, their belief in its policies or procedures.

"They are just as eager to question today -- to want straight answers -- as any external public that we have experienced in the past....

"Internal communication is a tremendous growth area for the professional."

Integration with marketing, advertising, HR and more recently IT became necessary not only to achieve corporate objectives more effectively, but also because communication staffs were cut along with others and there simply was too little staff to do the job in many cases. Another phenomenon of the past 20 years helped fill the gap -- outsourcing.

Twenty years of staff cuts, reorganizations and mergers, plus vast investments in new technology, all helped reverse the low productivity that loomed high in the minds of those interviewed for the 1980 videoconference.

And of Course, Technology...

Looking ahead from that interview in 1980, PR magnate Harold Burson, New York City, said the following about the profusion of messages the new technology would offer: "As we move into the future, you're not going to get fewer messages. You'll be getting more messages from more places. For example, here in New York we have, counting cable, less than 10 television channels... just a few years from now you'll be able to get 40 or 80 of them. And all of these are going to be sending out messages.

"I think there is a challenge that we who are sending those messages face. And that challenge is how do we distinguish our messages so ours is the one that gets through? How do we reach those people we have targeted (when they're receiving) so many different messages from so many places?"

Still Unanswered Questions

Some questions about communication technology that were relevant in 1980 are still unanswered, such as these by the late John Bell, who headed communication at Bank of America headquarters in San Francisco in 1980: "We have seen in recent years an interesting phenomenon. Some people refer to it as the high-tech high-touch phenomenon. That is, as we develop new forms of technology that take us a little further away from real life and contact with each other, we seem in our gregarious nature to want to get back in touch with each other.

"Another thing that comes to mind when you ask the question about technology is the cultural lag. Our technology...has advanced a great deal, but there is still a cultural lag. The question is will the two ever catch up with each other?"

One of the cultural consequences of technology that was on the mind of those interviewed back in 1980 was the computer's effect on unemployment. Edward Finn, Canadian labor leader, articulated that concern: "By 1984, of course, it may not be as much of a problem as it may be a little later on, but I think that even by 1984 we'll start to see a large number of jobs eliminated and taken over by the computer....

"There's a limit to how many jobs you can eliminate without having a very disastrous effect on the economy. For every job that the computer eliminates, there's a corresponding shrinkage in purchasing power in the economy. One obvious response I think has to be in the reduction of the work week -- perhaps to even as little as 25 hours a week so that the work that remains can be more equitably apportioned. And, of course, the income that goes with those jobs....

"I don't think we're going to see the Orwellian nightmare of 1984. I don't think the computer, or anything else, is going to produce the big brother society that Orwell foresaw in his book. But I think that probably, although we may not have that kind of social-political nightmare, we may have an economic nightmare that will certainly have serious social ramifications.

Happily, Finn's dire predictions did not come to pass except for the fact that many communicators fantasize about that 25-hour week. Despite rampant technological growth (some would say because of it), employment in the U.S. and Canada hit 20-year lows by the end of the 1990s, thanks to a continuing robust economy.

A number of the serious social ramifications Finn alluded to were examined in that 1980 videoconference. Here are a few:

On Diversity

"The fight over affirmative action is going to be fierce in the next 10 to 20 years, in my judgment, because of the fact that we have a recession that's growing, an economic cutback," said Benjamin Hooks, civil rights leader. "There'll be fewer jobs for more people, and as this pressure becomes more intense, people become mean and insular and self-centered. So we look for a long fight. A long, hard fight.

"The one bright spot might be in the top American corporate entities. Because these chief executive officers have to deal with this question day in and day out, there is a different opinion being formulated.

"It is my belief that these people carry tremendous clout. One of my jobs is to try to keep them convinced that they'd better make some special efforts to alleviate the wrongs that have so long been a part of our way of life in America...."

On Age

"I think that as the population grows older (as it is definitely doing) we're going to have to have a new valuation on some features of life we didn't have 10 and 15 years ago when we had a youth cult," said theologian Martin Marty.

"What are we going to think of people who need each other, and for whom the enemy is loneliness -- all of the aged people who are holed up in little apartments somewhere? I think it's going to become desperately urgent for us to find ways to link up anew."

As our baby boom generations around the world approach their golden years, these questions loom even closer than in the 1980s.

On Social Responsibility

"My own judgment is that, increasingly, chief executives of large corporations are going to have to spend a growing amount of their time dealing with problems that relate to social responsibility, to the relationship of the business to the society," said David Rockefeller, then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City, in the interview. "And, therefore, my guess is that business leaders, particularly the most senior of them, are going to have to delegate to their associates the day-to-day running of the business to a large extent, and spend more of their time on longer-range strategic planning and policies and external relations."

No question that this prediction has come to pass. Repeated surveys show that CEOs spend half their time and more on communication-related efforts reaching a wide variety of audiences and constituencies.

On the Future

Betsy Ann Plank back in 1980 offered a take on the future that will probably usher us into the new millennium as effectively as any other prophecy: "I think the sum is that the '80s will see many problems, and problems are what keep public relations people and lawyers in business. So we have a rosy future. If we're prepared to seize it."