The New CCO

Every year, Page teams up with the Institute for Public Relations to hold a student case study competition and the winners are chosen by a panel of some of the most prolific communicators in the world. This year’s winning case study examined the controversial decision by Dick’s Sporting Goods to discontinue the sale of guns in many of their stores, and the outcomes that followed. 

Authentic Purpose goes beyond products, policies and public advocacy - it is the ethos that companies like Patagonia use to guide their business decisions, and as it turns out activism is good for business. In this episode, we speak with Corley Kenna, the Director of Global Communications and Public Relations at Patagonia, analyzing how the CCO role is well-positioned to connect different function...

In this episode, we bring you a conversation between Alan Murray, CEO of Fortune, and Page President Roger Bolton. Having known each other for decades, the two discuss the economic outlook in a pandemic crisis, the progress of stakeholder capitalism, employee mental health and the future of journalism. The discussion took place during our 2020 Page Spring Seminar.

Page Chair Charlene Wheeless has been convening conversations among our members recently to share ideas about the concrete steps that they can take to address systemic racism within their organizations and across business and society, an issue on which she has been a fierce advocate throughout her career. In this podcast she speaks about what's happening, what needs to be done about it and how CCO...

Carrying on our series on COVID-19 and its implications, in this episode we speak with Whitney Eichinger, Managing Director Culture & Engagement at Southwest Airlines. We explore how an essential business with a strong culture of employee inclusion can leverage that to support the company through this crisis.

Continuing our series on the COVID-19 crisis and its implications, many companies are now looking to the future, including when and how employees will return to workplaces. Bob Feldman, Vice Chair of ICF Next, explores the question of how we get back to work, from implementing policies and guidelines that ensure workplace safety to the broader, potentially lasting impact on corporate culture.

Continuing our focus on organizations’ response to this pandemic, Pablo Jimenez, Global Vice President, Reputation & Communications at AB InBev, shares the challenges and opportunities that come with a global business whose operations are deeply connected to local communities. Pablo reminds us that Comms is a two-way function that needs to balance speed, accuracy and responsiveness, be sensiti...

Given the enormous impact of Coronavirus on companies, we are shifting gears for the next few episodes. Page has been convening its members to share knowledge and best practices in these uncharted territories. We will be bringing you insights from a few of our members with a first-hand look at how they are helping their organizations grapple with these circumstances.  In our first episode in this...

History may not always repeat itself but it sure can rhyme. As the world grapples with populism, income inequality and a revolt by a disenfranchised working class, we can see now how the 1920s, with similar circumstances, brought about a progressive movement and spawned the field of public relations. On this episode, Rob Flaherty, chairman of Ketchum, shares his thoughts on how the world we live i...

Last week, Harold Burson passed away at age 98. Harold was a larger-than-life icon of public relations - he’s the Founding Chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a predecessor firm to Burson Cohn & Wolfe, he covered the Nuremberg Trials as a cub reporter after serving during WWII and he’s the author of one of the PR industry’s most seminal works, The Business of Persuasion .  To commemorate him, we ar...

As The New CCO wraps up 2019, we sit down with Mike Wing, the lead writer of Page’s most seminal research reports, to discuss the common threads of the CCO role from our first publication in 2007 to the present.  Mike’s been helping define Page’s perspective on the transformation of the CCO for over a decade. Most recently, he penned The CCO as Pacesetter , our report on the state of the CCO role...

Deepfakes are media that take a person in an existing image, video or audio and replace them with someone else's likeness using artificial neural networks. The nefarious application of this technology is wide-ranging, and worse, it’s spreading. More than ever, we must equip our enterprises with safeguards against malicious actors who seek to damage corporate reputation and tarnish trust among stak...

Purpose and values are often derided as corporate buzzwords or feel-good messaging. But for Franz Paasche, SVP of Corporate Affairs at PayPal, these foundational elements of corporate character are the lifeblood of the enterprise. They are what differentiates this financial disruptor from its peers.  On this episode of The New CCO, Paasche discusses PayPal’s purpose to democratize financial servic...

How do you build an entirely new global customer base for a business that has remained domestic throughout its entire existence? That’s the challenge that faced Mitsubishi Heavy Industries CCO Dan Lochmann when he was tasked with burnishing the company’s brand globally by CEO Seiji Izumisawa. MHI is a $40 billion B2B business that builds all kinds of large-scale heavy machinery from wind turbines...

KPN is looking to the future of mobile networks and the digital infrastructure on which they will run. Recent CEO Maximo Ibarra discusses how the company is preparing for what he calls a new world of “immersive connectivity.”  Ibarra discusses the future of interpersonal communication, starting with the next era of screens and the new features they will provide. He also dives into the emerging fie...

On this episode, we take you inside our new research report, The CCO as Pacesetter , with the research leaders: Roger Bolton, Aedhmar Hynes and Jon Iwata.  Together they visited nearly 30 countries, speaking to over 200 senior communications leaders. Those conversations shaped a new perspective on how and why the role of the CCO is at a pivotal moment. Above all, the CCO is a crucial leader in ent...

On this edition of The New CCO, we invite Bill Heyman, Founder & CEO of Heyman Associates, and Jennifer Doidge, Executive Search & Assessment Consultant with Russell Reynolds, to discuss hiring for the CCO role and how it is evolving.  The two leaders of premier executive search firms give us a window into the search process: what CEOs are looking for in a CCO and how the relationship diff...

Last week, Harold Burson announced he will return to his childhood home of Memphis, TN, after seven decades of living in New York while leading one of the world’s largest and most successful PR agencies. At 98 years young, Harold is a larger-than-life icon of public relations - he’s the Founding Chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a predecessor firm to Burson Cohn & Wolfe - and, to this day, impart...

On this edition of The New CCO, we bring you our conversation with General Motors CCO Tony Cervone from the 2019 Page Spring Seminar. Interviewed by former IBM Chief Brand Officer and SVP Jon Iwata, Tony discusses the brand transformation effort he’s leading at GM alongside CEO Mary Barra. Facing disruption from new players such as Lyft, Uber, and Tesla, GM has had to rethink everything from its b...

In the past, Communications was largely media relations and speechwriting. While technology has helped make our function more strategic and impactful, we are on the cusp of a major transformation of how it works - what our teams look like, the roles it includes, the skills it requires, and the ways it operates. On this edition of The New CCO, we discuss the emerging notion of CommTech with one of...

Enterprises face severe disruption, whether via technology, business model, new competition, etc. Indeed, in order to keep up, organizations must answer fundamental questions about the nature of their business, starting with their people. “What kind of culture do we need to compete in our industry? What does it look like, feel like, sound like? What are the base skills our people possess? Where do...

With AI & automation poised to change the very nature of work, we welcome Alan Marks, CCO at ServiceNow, to join us for a discussion on his vision of the 21st-century office. He describes the consumerization of work, what automation really means for the future economy, and why establishing meaningful purpose and culture within the enterprise is more important than ever.  Thank you for listenin...

At this year's Annual Conference, Page welcomed to the stage Paul Argenti, Professor of Corporate Communications at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. Paul led a session titled, "If, When, and How to Engage." The session strove to answer the basic question: What's the playbook for companies as they weight the risk & reward of engaging around social issues? Paul welcomed to the stage...

On this edition of The New CCO, we welcome Southwest Airlines SVP & CCO Linda Rutherford to tell the fateful story of Flight 1380 and April 17, 2018. She takes us through the minutiae of that day, from first learning the breathtaking circumstances surrounding the airline's lone passenger fatality in company history, to the heroic actions of the plane's crew. She details how her communications...

At this year's Annual Conference, Page welcomed to the stage Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev. Brito, one of the consensus most admired CEOs in the world, described how AB InBev transformed from a profit-driven company to a well-rounded, societally influential, and community-building organization. He discussed AB InBev's award-winning #NoExcuse campaign and its sustained push to conquer t...