I likely won’t be writing too many more of these blogs, but I thought I would take one of these final columns to share something that has made a huge difference in my life—that’s being a volunteer.

When I was a young man, I was active in the Boy Scouts and later at the district and national levels as a young adult.  The committee of one local Scout troop asked me if I would consult with them on a leadership challenge.  I had no idea at the time that they were looking for a new Scoutmaster to lead a group of inner city kids. 

I carefully thought about it and the night before I had to give my final decision I had a dream that convinced me I should take on this ragtag band of kids. 

Years later, one of those youngsters was looking for a college internship, which I was happy to oblige.  I helped him find his first job, his second job, and counseled him when he was temporarily out of work and on the way to his third job.  As the owner of a small start-up agency in the mid-90’s, I was appreciative of his business.  As he moved from job to job, we earned more of his business.  We retained the previous clients and added his new employers.  Over the years, working with him has had a major impact on our agency.

Similary, in the late 70’s, I volunteered to run the placement bureau for the Pittsburgh Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.  I met a lot of folks over the next five years.  As my term was up, I turned the job over to the head of a university PR department, with whom I had come to know through the association.  Just three months after starting the agency, I received an RFP for a start-up trade association.  The university PR head had been contacted for potential referrals, and he submitted our firm’s name.  We got the job, and that small association grew five-fold over the years to become our largest client; I considered it our bread-and-butter client.  That led to work with several other trade associations, for which we developed a specialty niche.

More recently, I joined a local community board and when we got no responses to a small RFP for communications work, our agency was asked to apply.  So we did, and got the work.

One of the reasons I can be retiring at age 59 is because I’ve had good investment opportunities as a result of starting the agency.  As I look back, I see literally millions of dollars that have come to the agency as a result of some simple volunteer work that led to future business engagements.  I would never have guessed at the time the impact volunteering would have on my life.  In some cases, it would take decades to realize.  But in the end, I can link early selfless volunteering with great financial success.  That was not the intent, but it clearly was the result.

So all of this is to say, when you’re asked to volunteer for a worthwhile project, to sit on a community board, or help with a professional association, jump right in.  You may be amazed decades later at how it has positively impacted your life—through increased professional connections, new and long-lasting friendships, and unexpected financial success.

Ralph Yearick is CEO of Yearick-Millea, a full-service marketing communications agency specializing in business-to-business clients.  He can be reached at ryearick@yearick-millea.com or ryearick@aol.com.

The CEO has had a stroke and will be incapacitated for at least six weeks.  Or maybe she won’t be coming back at all.

What does a company or nonprofit organization tell the many people who depend on it?  What you communicate in the days and weeks after the heart attack or other ailment will determine if important groups retain a high level of confidence in your organization.  Those groups include:

• Customers and clients
• Suppliers
• Employees
• Strategic partners
• The board of directors
• Investors, if a public company
• Regulatory and other governmental offices
• The general public
• The news media that serves all these groups.

The organization needs to tell all these groups that it is continuing to operate under competent leadership with a focused vision on fulfilling its mission. And it needs to say it quickly and to every group, giving no one the opportunity to begin to doubt.

The content of what you say should emphasize two messages:

• The interim leader is a competent professional who will lead the company.
• The company will continue to pursue its mission, which is …fill in the blank.

If the CEO is not coming back, or as soon as you know she/he is not coming back, you should add a third message: that the organization has a plan for identifying the next permanent leader.

During the CEO’s recovering, it is important that the interim CEO replace the CEO completely in the public eye, going to all community and industry functions, giving speeches, frequently communicating with employees in newsletters and emails. 

One of the most important roles of CEOs in contemporary American society is to be the face and the voice of the organization.  An organization that is squeamish about transferring these responsibilities out of some misplaced belief that it would be insensitive to the ailing CEO will only be crippling itself.  Whoever is the temporary CEO of a company for however long must be prepared to enthusiastically perform all tasks, and that includes the very public function of representing the organization.

If the interim CEO has not undergone spokesperson training, she/he should find time for a spokesperson seminar as soon as possible.  If she/he has had training, a refresher course still wouldn’t hurt.  Spokesperson training should focus on teaching the interim CEO techniques for persuasive speaking in three situations: 1) speeches; 2) other group situations; 3) the news media.

As soon as the CEO comes back from convalescence, or a permanent new leader is selected, the person in charge, old or new, should take charge just as aggressively and publicly as the temporary leader did. 

The key again is to communicate continuity.  The attitude should be that while our leader was and is important to us (and we miss her/him), as an organization we have a strong corporate culture: we know where we’re going and we know how to get there.

Knowing how the public is going to react is important when selling products, which is why companies do extensive product testing and test marketing.  And politicians and think tanks use surveys to test, and sometimes advocate, ideas.

But when it comes to certain ideas such as “this company is paying its unionized employees enough” or “that oil spill was not our fault,” it’s a bit more complicated than taking a survey to understand the cost of the loss of reputation versus the costs of making one move versus another, e.g., settling versus instigating a strike; the total cost of a spill versus the cost of using safer drilling techniques.

Of course, gross incompetence or obvious neglect will always be met by public reprobation, as the current BP oil spill and the reaction of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina. 

But what about events that are not so cut and dry, like the reaction to a strike, to an attack on a flotilla, or to an airplane full of people sitting on a tarmac for six hours?

There are in fact several principles we can infer from the thousands of cases of public reactions to events and actions over decades, and for the historically inclined, over centuries. The first and most important principle is that virtually all people and organizations, at least in our society dominated by the free market and the politics of selfishness, act in their own self interest.  Self interest explains why in strikes of food workers against supermarkets, sentiment is usually with the workers, but in strikes of transit workers against mass transit systems, sympathy is typically with management.  In the case of the food store, people can go elsewhere, whereas in the case of mass transit, people are just left high and dry if the strike cripples service. The transit strike profoundly hurts the public’s self-interest but the supermarket strike does not.

While self-interest or perceived self-interest typically shapes how the public will react to an event or action, other forces are also at play:

• The self-interest of more powerful groups, which often can get their voices heard more readily in the news media, which then shapes how everyone else thinks.
• How the public has reacted in the past.
• The news media’s lean on similar events.  To lean how the news media covers this issue, you have to study the media’s past reaction to similar cases, and not depend on existing myths.  For example, many corporations and individuals still believe that the mainstream news media has an anti-business bias, yet the studies my agency has made over the past 20 years to predict how the public would react to moves our clients were making all showed that the tendency of most mainstream news media is to present stories with a pro-business bias (except in cases like Enron’s egregious illegality). 
• The perception of completion, which means the public has grappled with this issue and thinks it’s been solved.  Perception of completion is why Jetblue got hammered two years ago for keeping people in a plane on the tarmac for hours.  There had recently been an uproar about lengthy tarmac delays and the public thought the industry had solved the problem, mainly because airlines said that they had.  Then Jetblue had to go and do it again.    

One part of our crisis planning for clients is to model the possible ways that important audiences such as customers, employees, stockholders and the general public will react to a corporate announcement that may be controversial or represents bad news.  Included in the model is a breakdown of how the action or event will affect each target audience and how the client benefits each.  Occasionally, this analysis reveals the hidden cost of the move in probable loss of reputation and business.  In these cases, the prudent client has modified the course of action to accommodate the likely public reaction.