PRSA Names Carpenter To Judge's Panel

Thank you PRSA for naming us to the national judge's panel for reviewing, judging and selecing the Silver Anvil Award... for the fifth consecutive year!

We are proud to serve once again this year and we look forward to our annual trip to New York City!

2010 Is A New Start; Thoughts From Buffett (Warren not Jimmy)

2010 is a new start of everyone. It's a time to turn the page, apply what was learned in 2009 and transform your marketing - or business - to higher levels in 2010. As our first post for the new decade, we thought we would start with some thoughts from Buffett... not our favorite entertainer Jimmy, but the business master himself, Warren. Below is a brief we found on http://www.leadershipnow.com/ about a new book on Buffett and his thoughts on business. Let's have a great 2010 everyone!

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Warren Buffett on Business

Here are a few business principles in Buffett’s own words:

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It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

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I think we have a very good culture virtually everyplace in Berkshire. I hope it’s everyplace. This is what we are looking for, and it’s more a question of culture than controls. If you have a good culture, I think you can make the rules pretty simple.

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An observer might conclude from our hiring practices that Charlie and I were traumatized early in life by an EEOC bulletin on age discrimination. The real explanation, however, is self-interest: It’s difficult to teach a new dog old tricks. The many Berkshire managers who are past 70 hit home runs today at the same pace that long ago gave them reputations as young slugging sensations. Therefore, to get a job with us, just employ the tactic of the 76-year-old who persuaded a dazzling beauty of 25 to marry him. “How did you ever get her to accept?” asked his envious contemporaries. The comeback: “I told her I was 86.”

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I’ve said many times that when a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. I just wish I hadn’t been so energetic in creating examples. My behavior has matched that admitted by Mae West: “I was Snow White, but I drifted.”

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My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unforeseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative.”… I thought…that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so….For example:

1. As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction
2. Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds
3. Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and
4. The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided.

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It’s no sin to miss a great opportunity outside one’s area of competence.