Betsy Ann Plank by Karla K. Gower

Author:Karla K. Gower [Gower, Karla K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826274731
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Fig. 12: Plank in her office at Illinois Bell on the 30th floor of the company’s Chicago headquarters in 1978. Courtesy of the Plank Papers

Plank adapted quickly to her new team, and they to her. Appraising Plank’s performance as a supervisor, one female employee wrote, “I’ve been blessed with supervision in the past two years that has pressed for my best and accepted nothing less than that. I’ve been given great latitude of judgment, and I’ve never felt that I couldn’t get a hearing for a new idea no matter how unconventional or risky.”27

Handling her staff turned out to be the easy part of the job. Early in Plank’s tenure with Illinois Bell, she realized just how much she had to learn about the company when she climbed down a manhole at the intersection of 81st and Halsted Streets in Chicago to inspect how underground copper wire cable was installed to provide telephone service.28 That was her real initiation into the company and its business, and for as long as she was with Illinois Bell, she kept a lineman’s hard hat in her office as a constant reminder of how much of the company’s business one did not see. It also served as a reminder that practicing public relations in a company was different from being in an agency. Agency life revolved around public relations; it was the center of one’s universe. But in a corporation, public relations was just one department among many all working together to achieve a common business objective.

For many companies in the 1970s, achieving a business objective through public relations meant convincing the public of the “truth” via “large doses of facts.” That approach was not unlike “a fanatic who is convinced that the Good Lord would be on his side if only He understood the facts.” Instead, Plank believed that companies had to begin where the public was. It was like teaching. If you wanted someone to learn something, “you must relate to his experience, not force him to leap to yours.” Thus, her team developed a program called Customer Dialogue, in which officers of Illinois Bell met face-to-face with customers to listen to their concerns and answer their questions. Through such encounters, she hoped to “avoid the myth of manipulating opinion, engineering consent,” because after all, “the public, too, has a mind and will of its own—and the power to exercise it.”29

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.