The DaVinci Factor - How to Turn Your PR Job into a Career

The public relations/communications business is booming.  Revenues – last count at $2.7 billion – are going off the charts.  Yet to the overworked staffs, John Budd argues, it’s like being trapped in Disneyland, so busy taking tickets that few can enjoy the attractions.  Shortage of talent by both numbers and skills has predictably formularized activity, opting, for control, on structure and uniformity over flexibility and innovation.  Enmeshed in an environment...
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The public relations/communications business is booming.  Revenues – last count at $2.7 billion – are going off the charts.  Yet to the overworked staffs, John Budd argues, it’s like being trapped in Disneyland, so busy taking tickets that few can enjoy the attractions.  Shortage of talent by both numbers and skills has predictably formularized activity, opting, for control, on structure and uniformity over flexibility and innovation.  Enmeshed in an environment more bureaucratic than entrepreneurial where billable minutes control one’s day, there’s little time open for self-development, for dreaming, for tolerating personal ambition.  But even when doing communications by rote an aspiring staffer can play mind games that can ultimately enable him/her to break free of the treadmills common to the “white collar sweat shops” – or the tyranny of status quo dedicated corporate communications operations.  He borrows from three of Leonardo da Vinci’s principles to illustrate.  The curiosity to ask why such is so; the use of one’s right brain to see possibilities others are blind to and the capacity to tie unsorted events into a pattern, to perceive a connectedness, either to exploit or to prevent.  To those uncomfortable without the charts, tables and step-by-step instructions common to self-help manuals, Budd quotes Tolsoi who once noted that “there is no greatness where there is not simplicity.”  Applying this unique form of mental jujitsu, he argues that routine need not be smothering but can provide raw material for practical exercises testing out da Vinci’s personal concepts.  One can learn the fundamentals in 12 to 15 minutes; but daily practice to make them instinctive must be as consistent as brushing teeth.