A Word to Management

So you've decided to mark a company anniversary with a pub­lic celebration?
Fine.
But why?
Have you stopped to ask yourself exactly why you are willing to undertake the mass of involved and thankless detail represented by even a simple anniversary celebration?

Is it because some other organization in your area has held a celebration with more or less success, and anything they can do, you can do better?

Is it because you are a bit dazzled by the thought of the free newspaper space you're absolutely positive you'd receive?
Is it because your company's position in the community seems to make a celebration almost mandatory?

Is it because you want to please or impress your employees? Your Board of Directors? Your ego?
Is it just because?

These are not idle questions. The reason why an organization celebrates has a lot to do with how—and how appropriately—it celebrates.

A business, an industry, an organization will be supported by a community for a variety of reasons.

A university brings business and a high-grade personnel pool. A bank adds prestige. A department store fills needs. An industrial payroll bestows obvious economic benefits. But these reasons alone will not necessarily carry an establishment past the stage of mere tolerance in a community.

Knowing that, an alert businessman—whether concerned about
the immediate state of his public relations or not—might see in an anniversary observance an ideal opportunity to mend his local fences and do a good community public relations job. And if that has been your thinking, you are right. Such a festive time presents a rare opportunity to dig wide and deep for lasting community good will.

Fund raising is sometimes the reason behind the holding of a public birthday celebration. The fund-raising activity is either run in conjunction with the events of the observance period, or is activated along toward the end of the period after the "soften­ing up" process has, so to speak, been completed. At any rate, openly or covertly, there exists from the beginning the intent and purpose of cashing in financially on the good will created by a wisely handled, slickly mounted, smoothly presented anniversary observance. Actually, however, such fund raising is a separate and distinct project and should be kept apart from observance events.

Or perhaps you feel that, with your birthday at hand, such a celebration would be a sensible extension of your existing adver­tising program. What an opportunity to put your best foot for­ward locally and place your establishment dramatically on display in the best possible light! What a chance to make generally known the favorable facts about your corporate character, to form or solidify a public opinion you'd like to have accepted, to brag subtly (and maybe sometimes not so subtly), and get away with it!

Right again, on every count. If you'll give some time and thought to what you want to spotlight, and some care to the way you go about it, you can do a surpassing selling job through an anniversary celebration.

Or you may be enlightenedly aware that such a celebration offers a unique opportunity to experiment safely with some proj­ects which already interest you. Therë àre söme projects—generally involving portions of the community more or less directly—which, once begun, cannot easily be dropped without losing considerable face. Annual awards or scholarships bestowed by a company would be such a project. An annual party for handicapped chil­dren would be another. Establishment and promotion of a Speakers' Bureau would be another. Any program of a public service nature would be on the list. Entry into such projects, some of them loaded with emotional dynamite, must be conducted carefully. They cannot ever be undertaken casually, milked for their human interest and public relations values, and then, having received community approval and acceptance, be dropped at will without reason or explanation. Many a silent cash register has reflected community attitude toward such blunders.

But in a period of special celebration, experimentation is safe. You possess a perfect excuse if a project proves valueless for long-term commitment. "Well, we were just doing this as part of our anniversary celebration. We never intended to continue it as a permanent part of our community program." In short, here is a time when you can test safely new ideas and experiment with revolutionary (to your organization, anyway) new programs. If they work out as you hope, you may incorporate them into your over-all program. If they don't work out, you are free to drop them at the close of the celebration without fear of penalty.

Whatever your reason, begin your basic planning by getting it (or them) out into the open, pinning it down, recognizing it, and admitting it. Fix clearly in your mind exactly why you pro­pose to go to all the trouble, expense, and effort of a public celebration.

If you see in such a celebration an opportunity to establish closer and stronger ties with your community, excellent. If you quite frankly regard an observance as insurance against possible social or economic ill winds, fine. And if you simply want to show your competitor down the block how these things are done by a real outfit, good.

But such clarification of your thinking is important because soon there will be long-range anniversary goals to set up. The goals, the selection of concomitant activities, the emphasis and positioning of program events—all will be influenced by the un­derstanding you have of yourself and your motivation.

YOU NEED HELP

From the moment you nod your head and say "Yes, let's go ahead with this celebration idea/' life is festooned with question marks. Almost certainly you'll not satisfactorily have answered the questions in the above paragraphs before others will come swarming into your mind. Like:
"How do we organize this thing?"
"What are we working toward?1'
"How do we start?"
"How much help do we need?"
"Where will we get it?"
"How much time do we need?"

Such questions, and others of equal importance and capacity to puzzle, occur automatically as you attempt to organize your thinking about this project you have authorized. They will all be answered, one by one and step by step, as we proceed together to build your celebration.

FIRST THINGS FIRST

Any event as important and as complex as a major anniversary celebration can be brought successfully to maturity only by pains­taking preparation, planning, and organization.

Such a celebration is a period of time publicly dedicated to recognizing and acknowledging the rich endowment of the past, demonstrating a sensitive alertness to the tempo of the present, and dreaming dreams of an ideal future.

Any program of such ambitious scope inevitably must be a co-operative effort by a great many departments and a great many people within your company, and not a few outside your company.

There will be preliminary plans and advanced plans; there will be general plans and specific plans; there will be endless research and investigation and sifting and weighing and comparing and selecting and rejecting; there will be myriad conferences, contacts, meetings, projects, Schedules, details.

Obviously, then, to get anywhere with a minimum of over­lapping, duplication of effort, irritation, and confusion, there must be selected a strong General Chairman for the celebration. Ideally, he should be a senior representative of management— perhaps the President, the Board Chairman, the Executive Vice President, perhaps you who are reading these lines.

He (you?) will be administratively responsible for setting up the required machinery and for control of the machinery after it is set up. Therefore he (you?) must have the power to make and enforce all necessary final decisions.

The possession of power to make and enforce final decisions is imperative. Subordinate executives who are designated General Chairman of a project like this often find themselves with a quarter-of-a-million dollars worth of responsibility and ten-cents worth of authority. Whenever they want to buy a box of paper clips, everything grinds to a halt until clearance is obtained from the real General Chairman.

Who is the real General Chairman? He is the man in the executive suite who can stop a proposal in its tracks merely by saying, "I don't think much of it, but don't let that influence you." Or get one started by wondering out loud, "Would it maybe be a good idea to . . ."

Unfortunately this real General Chairman, as a senior officer of the company, will be unable to devote his time solely to anni­versary celebration problems. There are just simply too many competing demands on his time. So he must find a competent helper, a right-hand man, a worrier-in-chief, whose sole responsi­bility will be to deal with anniversary celebration problems.

NINE STEPS MANAGEMENT SHOULD TAKE

We therefore recommend that management, perhaps in the person of the "real" General Chairman (who has undoubtedly played a leading part in guiding celebration thinking up to the point where it got a green light from the Board of Directors), proceed with all possible speed to

1. Select a person(1) to take charge of anniversary preparations. And we don't mean in an advisory or supervisory capacity either. We mean shirt-sleeve charge. We recommend that this person have no duties or responsibilities other than those concerned with pulling the celebration program together quickly and efficiently.

This person may be given a title in the company, or none. Throughout this book we will refer to him as Co-ordinator (a)

(1) We may as well clear up this point before going any further: Although for purposes of convenience we speak only of "man" and "him" and "his" and so on, women do superb jobs in this sort of assignment. They seem to thrive on the hard work involved. Maybe it's because of the variety of duties. Maybe it has something to do with the creative instinct. We don't know. But there will be as many women as men reading this book and probably we should spend the next several hundred pages writing "he (or she)," "him (or her)," "man (or woman)." We won't, of course. But it's what we mean.

because it's handy and (b) because that title fits his multiple over-all responsibilities as well as anything we can think of at the moment.

This Co-ordinator should be chosen by the man to whom he will report, with the concurrence of whatever company officers that man deems advisable. For the purposes of this book, we will consider that he has been chosen by, and reports directly to, the senior company officer who is General Chairman of the anni­versary celebration.

2.Choose him from outside the company. This is our recommendation unless management is prepared to relieve the chosen company employee of all other duties. As indicated above, we believe this assignment to be a full-time job. We do not believe that superior results are likely when it is undertaken in addition to a daily load of routine duties. Hire your Co-ordinator from outside the company, and keep him "outside," so to speak. In other words, he punches no clock, worries over no politics, andfears no ax for the term of his contract.

3.Grant him authority comparable to the responsibility you
are assigning him. This man has been employed to use his time and skill on matters and in ways for which other staff members cannot be spared. In discharging his duties he will be on the move a great deal, and will frequently find it necessary to cross established lines of authority. Therefore, make it crystal clear to all persons of responsibility throughout your organization that he has permission to do everything necessary to complete his assignment. Have it understood that you expect him to receive full co-operation and support within the framework of the job he has been hired to do.

4.Give him your complete confidence. Because he will be on the move a great deal, your Co-ordinator will take on tinges of the "lone wolf and—whether he knows it or not—he is going to miss a sense of "belonging." Moreover, he is smart enough to know that he has two strikes on him the minute it is known he was hired by you and reports directly to you. So it will be a great source of pride and inspiration to him (and thereby of great benefit to you and to your company) to know that he has your complete confidence. He's sure that, professionally, you believe in him. What he wants most to know is that if your treasurer doesn't like his haircut, or i£ the personnel director considers him a half inch too tall (maybe because the hiring wasn't done strictly through channels), you wouldn't hesitate to straighten them out. He's going to complete a complex project for you. You picked him to do it and you believe he can deliver. Therefore, until he proves incompetent, you don't care if he has two heads and a striped tail. And if you can't give him that kind of backing why did you hire him?

5. Give him the personnel he needs, when he needs them. Management has—or should have—too many serious responsibili­ties to have much time left for the multitude of tasks which are an integral part of celebration planning. The Co-ordinator has been hired to shoulder these tasks. You may help him in any or all of these ways:
a.You may grant him the right to requisition personnel from departments inside the company. If you do this, make certain that his right so to requisition is known to all persons of authority in the organization. It is no help at all if you say, "Sure, sure, anything you want," and then leave for a six-month trip to Zanzi­ bar without telling anybody about the agreement.
b.You may allow him to "farm out" to existing divisions or departments celebration tasks they are equipped to handle. If you do this, make sure that supervisory personnel understand that the Co-ordinator turns such tasks over on a priority basis. The right to ask departmental assistance is an empty privilege if the department head retains authority to shunt a Co-ordinator's re­quest off to some tag end of unspecified future time.
c.You may permit him recourse to qualified outside commercial or free-lance help at his discretion.

Whichever method(s) you choose, be definite. Decide what per­sonnel help is to be available to the Co-ordinator, and on what basis, and then tell him.

It is your prerogative, as General Chairman, to determine the amount of outside assistance he gets. Or, so far as that goes, to prohibit such outside assistance entirely.

If you've chosen your Co-ordinator with care, he probably has the skills to do all by himself most of the things that will need doing, whether building props or writing a definitive company history. But if you intend to require a solo performance, he deserves to know. And he deserves to know that you know there'll be a price to pay in Time. Together you and your Co-ordinator can produce a splendid celebration. It's been done often. You simply can't do it as quickly as you can with additional help.

7.Hang out the "Welcome" sign for him at your office. The Co-ordinator should be able to obtain his General Chairman's attention and support without delay whenever necessary. Advice and consultation should be available to him on request. This is particularly important during the first months of his tenure if he is new to the organization. If you are required to be absent a great deal from your office or from the city, see that he is pro­
vided with an advisory group of two or three competent men to talk with.

8.Provide him with a work budget or an expense account.

9.Give early and earnest thought to selection of your goals.
Selection of the objective(s) toward which you want every activity and event of the celebration period (and the whole anniversary celebration as a unit) to contribute is a task you may not wisely long postpone. (See page 55 for a list of goals and objectives.)

10.Set up, at least tentatively, a chain of command. Getting on paper, however sketchily, some general breakdown of responsi­bilities clears the thinking, the air, and the path to success.

COMMITTEES, PRO AND CON

We favor early development of committees because (a) we be­lieve strongly in getting as many company people as possible involved in a project like this; because (b) it is the participation of everyone in the whole organization and their eagerness to make the affair a whopping success that produces a memorable celebration; and because (c) you will, if you are contemplating an observance of any consequence, arrive eventually at the need for committees anyway. Therefore the sooner you get them organ­ized and into the swing of things, the less they'll be stumbling over the scenery at a later point in planning when there's mighty little training time left.

And there is one time when committees are the only answer. That is when you are beginning late and have a time problem in addition to all the other problems. You'll find committees particularly valuable then, both for the inspirational sparks the members will strike in brain-picking sessions, and for the extra hands immediately available to nurse those sparks into substantial accomplishment.

At the end of this chapter there are presented a pair of sug­gested committee setups, either of which will get you off to a good start. Or you may elect to establish your own committees on the basis of your company's specialized requirements. A method for developing committees is outlined on page 179.

Of course, you may just plain dislike committees, and maybe with good reason. You may be starting early, have plenty of planning and organization time ahead, and prefer to handle the whole thing yourself, as General Chairman, with the help of your Co-ordinator.

Fine. There are no "musts" in this book.
As long as you realize that lack of committee help may add to your personal administrative load—though your Co-ordinator will absorb a large proportion of it—there can be no possible objection. Many a notable celebration has flourished extravagantly on little more than the attention of an interested General Chairman and a competent Co-ordinator.
Yours can, too.

SHALL WE BEGIN?

You may wonder if maybe there are some other ways of achiev­ing the results you want besides following the instructions in this book.

If by that you mean easier ways, the answer is, "There is no royal road. There are a number of ways to produce a celebration because almost any positive course of action will work if you will. However, if you produce a successful, memorable celebration, you almost certainly will employ the method outlined herein. Or some minor variation of it."

Out of the possible methods of procedure, it obviously has been necessary for us to select as a model one sound fundamental way. We chose the one which this book presents. It is based on the successful experiences of organizations and institutions of widely divergent character.

So go along with us. Do not be disturbed if we occasionally mention committee duties when you firmly intend to have noth ing to do with committees; if we avoid budget discussions for months while you know of a company that developed its budget in step with its program; if we express our conviction that a company's employees can be its best public relations department,

- 14 -

ORGANIZATION CHART #1

Fig* I· Organization Chart #1. Please review footnotes.
* This is the man some organizations call the General Chairman. Admittedly anyone can be named General Chairman and publicly announced as such. Perhaps your organization will select the Advertising Manager, the Sales Manager, or the Public Relations Director for the job. The only trouble is this: rarely is one of these persons, already saddled with departmental respon­sibility, given authority to perform like a General Chairman. Whenever there is a final decision to be made, everything has to stop until clearance is obtained from the real General Chairman. Therefore, in this book, while such persons may be Co-ordinator, they are not General Chairman.
†Do you want to get maximum value out of your anniversary and your observance of it? Then get every plant and department and section into the act as soon as possible. This may come first only through supervisory repre­sentation at management planning sessions. Actual participation of personnel as committee members should follow soon, however. Committees may be formed in the manner described on page 179.

Fig. 2. Organization Chart #2. This form of organization sometimes operates more successfully, at least in the beginning, without the Budget Committee. Once you've set up a Budget Committee you may find yourself working against a committee designed to say "No." while you lean toward a "treat 'em rough and tell 'em nothing" policy.

The trail that is glazed here for you and your Co-ordinator will bring you to your goal with at least no more grief than any other, and with considerably less than you'll get from any free­hand, hit-or-miss patchwork you might contrive on your own. Recommendations are made on the basis of experience and no suggestions are offered that haven't been proved through use. There is no guarantee that all of them will fit perfectly your own needs, but, with this book as a guide, you can make any necessary changes or adaptations with ease.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...