The Art of Knowing When to Go

There is a particular kind of institutional theatre playing out across boardrooms and cabinet offices right now, and if you work in communications, you will recognize it immediately. 

Someone who should have left weeks, sometimes months, ago is still in the building. The lawyers have been consulted. The board has gone quiet. And somewhere in that organization, a PR adviser is sitting on information they cannot quite bring themselves to deliver in the way it needs to be heard. This week on When It Hits the Fan, my co-presenter David Yelland and I looked at three stories that together say something rather important about power, reputation, and the strange new world in which both are now managed.

The Water Boss Who Stayed Too Long

Dave Hinton, the CEO of South East Water, finally quit. For those who missed the slow-motion unravelling: his company left tens of thousands of customers in Kent and Sussex without running water for weeks, was fined £22 million by regulator Ofwat, was publicly eviscerated at two select committee appearances, and was described in a Defra parliamentary report as bringing “misery to the consumers it serves.” His chairman, Chris Train, has since gone too.

The question that interests me is not why Hinton eventually left. It is why it took so long.

We are living in an age where the information landscape has fractured into a thousand pieces, and that fragmentation is doing something counterintuitive: it is making it easier, not harder, for embattled leaders to stay put. In the old media era, two or three sustained front pages in the national press could end a career. A proprietor would make a call. Now the noise is everywhere and comes from all directions at once, and precisely because it is everywhere, it becomes surprisingly easy for communications advisers to dismiss it as just that: noise. Online anger, they tell themselves, is not the same as organized pressure. An anonymous post is not a select committee.

Except that it is, when it is coordinated. Campaign groups kept the South East Water story alive between news cycles, hammering executive pay against a backdrop of service failure, creating a constant drumbeat until the watchdogs and ultimately government had no choice but to act. That is not noise. That is an orchestra finally finding its conductor.

The harder truth is that PR advisers are sometimes the problem. In-house communications teams, working daily alongside a CEO rather than the board, can find it easier to encourage survival than to deliver the verdict. Presenting a “perception audit” whose findings say what you cannot quite bring yourself to say directly is sometimes the only honest move available. But honest counsel, the kind that says clearly: it is over, and delay will only cost you more, is rarer than the industry likes to admit. As Jack Nicholson memorably put it: they can’t handle the truth. That is often because no one has delivered it cleanly enough.

The $26 Million Question: Should a CEO Admit to Using AI?

Albert Bourla, chief executive of Pfizer and a man earning around $26 million a year, told CNN’s new CEO-to-CEO format that when he faces a major decision, he now consults AI alongside the trusted advisers he has always leaned on. His description was striking in its candor: he sets out his dilemma, explains his doubts, states what is at stake, and finds the process challenges assumptions he did not know he was carrying.

The reaction in some quarters has been predictable. Cognitive offloading. Abdication of judgment. A very expensive chief executive asking his phone for advice.

I think this misses the point. Bourla is not replacing his judgment; he is augmenting it. Imagine walking into the British Library and being able to address its entire collection directly. That is, more or less, what a well-deployed large language model offers. The skill is not in using it. The skill is in knowing what to do with what it gives you, which requires the experience, critical thinking and contextual judgment that no AI currently replicates.

What is genuinely interesting here is the PR dimension, and I do not mean Bourla’s PR. I mean AI’s PR. Pfizer is a serious, science-led multinational. When its chief executive describes AI as an executive-enhancing decision tool, used not for administrative tasks but for thinking through his most consequential judgments, that does more for AI’s reputation than any number of breathless Harvard Business Review features. It felt unguarded and real. That is what makes it land.

The honest caveat is this: bias, sycophancy, hallucination and the manipulation of AI outputs by bad actors are all live concerns, not theoretical ones. AI reads with an authoritative tone. That does not make it right. The leaders who will use it best are those who never forget the gap between confident and correct.

The Pope, a Call Centre, and the PR Power of Small Moments

Pope Leo has been in post for almost exactly a year, and his communications operation continues to offer lessons that no crisis manual quite captures.

This week a story went viral. Father Tom McCarthy recounted what happened when the newly elected Pontiff tried to change his address and phone number with his bank. The call center agent worked through the security questions methodically, then told him he would need to come in person. He pointed out this was unlikely to be possible. She remained firm. He mentioned, as a final throw, that he was Pope Leo. She hung up.

The story is funny. But it is also doing something more sophisticated. We consume the carefully constructed speeches, the prepared statements, the choreographed papal appearances. What we are hungry for are the signals outside those frameworks: the moments that show us the real person, unmediated and unmanaged. The same week this story circulated, the Vatican released a documentary marking the Pope’s first year, and the image that social media seized on was not the theological content. It was a casual shot of him walking in Nike trainers beneath his vestments. The internet responded accordingly.

What looks like an authentic breakaway moment is sometimes the work of communications teams who have studied authenticity closely enough to engineer it convincingly. The best PR has always understood that the small story often lands harder than the big statement. Whether the call center tale was spontaneous or seeded, it worked. Pope Leo has, in a year of extraordinary diplomatic and political complexity, managed to feel genuinely human in a role that historically buries its occupants beneath ceremony.

There is a thread connecting all three stories. Reputation, whether we are talking about a water company, a pharmaceutical giant, or the Vatican, is not managed only in the moments of deliberate communication. It is shaped by what you do when the pressure is on, by whether you leave when you should, by whether you are honest about how you make decisions, and by whether, occasionally, you can laugh at yourself when a bank employee hangs up on you. The PR industry exists to advise on all of this. The test is whether it has the courage to say what actually needs to be said.

(Farzana Baduel is co-presenter of When It Hits the Fan on BBC Radio 4.)

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.

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