PR Masters Series Episode #88 - Jim Lukaszewski

Hello, everybody. Thanks for being loyal listeners of the PR Masters podcast series where you get to hear from the leaders in our public relations profession, people who have earned the accolades of their peers and who have made a difference in the contributions of public relations to contemporary life. I'm Art Stevens, your host, and believe me, I love being your host. I have the honor of talking with some truly great people, and today is no exception. And also as a footnote, today is episode 88. We have been interviewing 88 people and our guest today is number 88. And I have truly looked forward to being a host in this particular episode today because I have the pleasure and honor of talking to one of the leaders in our industry, somebody who has become known for being a guru, truly a guru, and focusing on ethics crisis and leadership. And he is Jim Lukaszewski. Jim is well known in the public relations industry, and if you don't know his background, he's a well known writer, author, teacher, scholar, ethicist, and a lecturer in public relations. And he's a Minnesota native whose PR career began in 1974 as a deputy press secretary in the office of former Minnesota Governor Wendell R. Anderson. And he joined prsa, the Public Relations Society of America, the same year. He joined IABC, the International association of Business Communicators, in 1999. He's a fellow of PRSA and accredited in both organizations. I've known Jim for many years, and I have always had the highest respect for him. I've seen him at PRC conferences, I've run into him at counselors, academy meetings. And he's always worked at senior levels, generally on the toughest ethical problems that organizations and their leaders face. And he's the author of 14 books, ebooks and manuals, and hundreds of articles. And he was an adjunct assistant professor of communication at New York University and a civilian advisor to the U.S. marine Corps for more than 20 years. And he served on the Public Relations Society of America's Board of Ethics and Professional Standards for more than 30 years. And in 2015, the PRSA board made him BEPS again for the Board of Ethics and Professional Standards. They made him BEPS Emeritus. Quite an honor for PRSA to bestow. Jim, I'd like to welcome you. You're an old friend, and we're going to have a really fascinating discussion today. How are you today, my friend?

Thank you. It's really great to be with you, Art. It's great to hear your voice.

Well, Jim, we're going to hear more of your voice today because that's what this is all about. You are a true PR master. And my first question to you, Jim, is how did you get into becoming a renowned guru to public relations and communications professionals?

A story that would last longer than your broadcast. But it was the culmination actually of a kind of a wandering academic life. I actually got that college degree in 1974. I was 32 years old. And it was a special university designed for people like me who had lots of academic experience and lots of credits, but nobody wanted to take them. So I entered their program. It was a two year program and I graduated in two years with a degree which they manufactured in political public relations. And it was largely done because of that internship that he did in the governor's office. So things really started there. I had a long internship at the governor's office and the press office and also worked for state government for a couple of years. And so I was. And I was already working with high level people, but from a government perspective. But I Left government in 1978 and started my own. My own start, my own. That was me bubbly. I left in 1978 to start my own company. And that's really how things began. The answer, really simplest answer to your question is the Public Relations Society of America. I mean, if they had not suddenly begun publishing my things the moment I sent them in, invited me to speak or allowed me to speak and present at many conferences and things, I don't think you'd have any idea who Jim Lukashewski was. So I really. It's been an amazing organization that I belong to for more than 40 years. I belong to ABC as well. That's another interesting story. But that's really how it all began and hung together all these years.

Well, Jim, you know, you have focused on specific leadership capabilities and direction, ethics, crisis leadership. Those are probably the three major words in your lexicon. How did you begin to focus on those three areas?

Actually, it started in government because I was working in the office of a governor, very popular governor. And I was involved with much of the traffic in that office because I was in the press area. And so I saw all of these important people. I listened to all the consultants talk and that sort of stuff. And quite often I was working with other really experienced people resolving the issues that were brought to that office. Almost nobody brought good news to the office. There were always problems. And so it started in that government service. I really like government service. It was just because every time you picked up the phone, you help someone. And I had a special case when I picked up the phone, I said, jim Lukashewski, Governor Anderson's office, how can I help you? And so I had an entrance to introduction to lots of people as an intern. Remember, I was a 32 year old intern, so everybody called me the old guy. And that really started out and gave me a platform to enter the business world at a higher level than just, you know, as somebody just out of school. So I was working for fairly big, big organizations right out of, right out of the state government. And that persisted. And then I was. It's a cool story, but in 1985, I was. We started our business and it was going pretty well in the Twin City area here in Minneapolis. But I had occasion to hire a man named Chester Berger, who was, in that time period was probably maybe the most famous PR person around, and to work on a problem my firm was handling. But ultimately, at the end of that service, he asked me to join him in New York. So I moved my company to New York. And this is a long story, but this is the end of it. Essentially, the move to New York made me be able to be a national figure. It makes a difference when you come from New York.

Well, you have focused obviously on the PR industry. You could have focused on other industries as well. How is it that you, you landed in the atmosphere of public relations?

Well, it's an interesting story because I, at the time that I was, when I decided to go back to school at this special university, I was working for a division of Bristol Myers called Bristol Laboratories. I was a pharmaceutical salesman. I called on doctors, hospitals and pharmacies. And that particular job was really an interesting sales job. And I was tasked to talk to people who never wanted to talk to me. It was doctors. And so I had a lot of free time. And my wife and I both were interested in the community we lived in at the time, small suburb of Minneapolis. And so she became a parks commissioner and I became a police civil service commissioner. And I was helping different organizations in the, in the city. And at one of these meetings, someone came up to me, who it was, and said, you know, you're really good at this PR stuff. And I looked at him, I'm 32 years old, and I said, what, what is PR? And by the way, can you, can you make a living at it? And he said, this is what you do. You're in the newspaper, you help these organizations on all this stuff. That's pr. And you, this is the best market almost in America to be in pr. So he introduced me, someone to a man who is still working at Padilla Spirit Beardsley, now coaches call it Padilla. But I went to have a cup of coffee with him just about the end, what this was. And the cup of coffee lasted four and a half hours. And at the end of the time, he said, oh, by the way, there's this new college for me, for people probably just like you. I went home, rehearsed my conversations with Barbara, mentioned the university, and said, you're going to sign up tomorrow morning. Which I did. But the idea, the whole concept of getting moving this direction really started at Metro, uh, because when I mentioned that I was interested in public affairs and public service, they didn't have classes for any of that, but they found people who could do the classwork. And more importantly, they found this internship for me, which was just an enormous experience. And so I was sort of driven in this direction just through events. That's what I say. People ask. Probably the most common question I get, Jim, what was your plan for doing this? What? Students ask, what was your plan to do this? And. And I have to admit, look, you're going to be disappointed. I was in the right place at the wrong time. The wrong place at the right time. I was early, I was late. I've had a lot of fortunate accidents in my career, and, you know, your life is going to mirror mine, but if you do some things I tell you about, you're going to have a much better life. And that's part of what my goal has been all along is. I like public relations because I learned a lot about it in government, but I wanted to change some of the things that. The way public relations was done. So I was a very intentional joiner of the business. My writings over the years have really all been related to the issues you mentioned. The most serious parts of our practice, crisis management, especially ethics, and naturally, leadership. And those are places where lots of things can go wrong. And so my career really has been to work, you might see, at the wrong end of the telescope. I looked in the large end instead of the small end because I was looking for what was going on that had to be fixed. The people that had to be changed, the behaviors that had to be modified, and the new styles of work that had to accompany an organization against individuals improving their services and their education and their professionalism in order to give advice.

Jim, you obviously have to learn these areas very, very, very carefully and then really dig deep into them. And, you know, obviously, ethics, crisis management, leadership are the things that you are best known for. You know, I mean, everyone in Our industry knows who you are and those of us who have taken your advice through your written documents, you know, your, your books, your, your mailings and your speaking platforms have always benefited, you know, and the ethics crisis and leadership are the three areas, you know, that of course, you are best known for. So how did you learn these areas so that you were able to, to teach them?

Well, I think basically I am a lifelong learner. I'm writing every day, I'm publishing every week. And I guess you might say I can't shut up, we'll get it one way, on the other way. I really have learned from the situations I've been involved in over the years. And I'm really in some respects the opposite of a public relations person. I'm sort of like a private relations person because the people I deal with are having problems, problems which they largely caused for themselves. And early in my career I really was learning this in government too, where I was also working with very important people, powerful people. And I really was drawn to why they made the decisions they made, good or bad or otherwise. And these were lessons that I carried into the field when I went to the public relations. And it did set me apart from other consultants in a couple of ways. I was always interested since my training, you might say, was in problem solving from the moment you picked the telephone. That's sort of how I did my business. When people called me, you know, I wasn't called for fun things. People called because they were in trouble and I had a system for doing, for dealing with that because I watched people handle problems of a major nature in these other environments. So in a sense it was a self teaching process. Hasn't been my entire life. Even though I've been to college, I'm in graduate school right now. At the age of 82, I'm still learning, still doing it. So that's really the answer to your question. I'm studying listening, but in my business I get to use what I learn almost immediately. And it helps you remember a lot of stuff.

Well, a lot of what you do, I would say probably most of what you do is in the category of strict confidentiality. And yet you're, you know, you've obviously learned a great deal from these. How do you manage to keep the confidentiality and at the same time learn from it and give advice to others?

Well, actually it's easy to keep things confidential because you're not looking for outlets to tell people stuff. And probably one of the most frequent calls I get from media, not so much these Days, but because I don't see clients anymore. But in the good old days, so to speak, I get calls every month from reporters asking me to. They'll say, jim, I know you're a trumpet. You can't talk about your clients, but, you know, can you name companies or can you give us examples of the right way to do things? And, you know, they said, you need to go to the Web and Look, I have 180,000 listings on the Web. Each one of them is related to how to do something the right way. But as far as naming companies and those sorts of things, they've earned the right to remain private. The media believes that falsely, that all this publication on how to do things and learn from others is effective and helpful. Much of it is, but on the stuff that matters. What I've learned over time is that people who do bad things do them on purpose, rather than waiting to see or looking for other people as examples of not to do things. I developed, actually, quite early in my career, a sort of set of beliefs about. About the work that I do. And the first belief is that all questionable, inappropriate, unethical, unconscionable, immoral, even criminal behaviors are intentional. Adults make these decisions. They even test the decisions before they take a bigger leap. And so long as no one is catching them, they keep doing it. So from an ethical perspective, the other part of this intentionality is that everything that is ethical is moral, is compassionate, is civil, is lawful, are also intentional. So these are decisions people make every single time that they get into trouble. There's no such thing as an accidental assault. There's no such thing as an accidental abysmal. There's no such thing. Just as you name the bad thing, they're all done intentionally by adults or older teenagers these days. So with that platform, I start with a different relationship with these people from the very beginning. It's a very straight, direct kind of approach.

So, Jim, you obviously work with a lot of CEOs, you know, which is obviously different from working from chief communications officer, you know, in the same corporate corporations. What is the essential difference when you work, you know, with a CEO directly and with a corporate communications officer?

I think the essential difference is that I really. I've been through all these circumstances so many times that, you know, I don't need a lot of teaching or learning even about the companies themselves. Quite often when I come, when I arrive on the scene, which scares people, because if I'm there, there's serious stuff happening. They want to be helpful and tell me how the company did comedy, did that. But I already know what's happening. Because trouble in organizations of all kinds does not start in the mail room. It starts at the top of the company. And so what I want to do and need to do is have access to and talk with the very senior people, the members of the board and the senior management team to begin to get at what the truth is. The first question I ask all these people is, what is the truth? What's going on here? And on the very beginning, they don't. Oh, I should really back up. I get clients really strictly through referral. I don't advertise. I publish all this stuff. But. And they usually get instructed to talk to me by somebody that they have to pay attention to, like their lawyer, oftentimes is other senior people. And they will tell them, you know, look, you've been screwing around with this problem for sometimes, for sometimes several years. Go to this guy, get his long last name. I can't pronounce him, Minneapolis. And just talk to him. Well, how's he going to help me? Well, he helped me. Oh, he did? Well, one needs to learn from them. And he said to do whatever he said and do it now. And that's exactly how I do it. If you don't do that, we don't work together. I actually have a sheet of paper that as soon as someone calls me with a problem, I send this. I did that. But rather email them a single sheet of paper which, which is called Seeking Forgiveness. I start where the truth begins. And that is that essentially the people who are in trouble are largely in trouble because of their own making. And the reason I'm there is because, not because they did something bad, but because there are victims as a result of what the decisions and actions were. It's victims that drive the crisis. I define a crisis, you know, as a people stopping show, stopping product, stopping reputationally redefining event that causes explosive visibility or often causes explosive visibility. That's pretty simple. There are lots of colorful explanations of crisis on their color systems. But what I said in those few words is exactly what's going on. And that's where my conversation starts. And I send this piece of paper, which, as I mentioned, is called seeking Forgiveness. And it's a list really of statements. And let's see here, there's nine parts to it. And what's interesting is when I mention this, them seeing it, they, Jim, they'll say to me, because these people in trouble, they say, jim, look, look, look, I got a crisis going on here. On my hands. I can't do nine things from a sheet of paper. I said, you can do all of these things. You can start all of these things today and things will be better by tomorrow afternoon. You want to not do these things. When you're ready to do them, call me back. They're thinking like they're really being single and being candid, being extremely empathetic, explaining things, acting affirmatively, declaring what's going on act, being capricious, consulting with those they've injured. Commit to public goals of not doing these things anymore truthfully, and pay some kind of restitution or do some kind of restitution. That's the list. This one single page contains absolutely everything people will have to do before it goes away. And they can do most of it started in the same day. Quite often I'll get a call from somebody who said, my name is Tom Harris, I work for so and so Corporation. You probably talked to William Thomas last year. Well, he's gone now, but I have this piece of paper on my desk and I was told to call you about it. And I said, happy to talk to you. Tell me, how are those nine things you're doing? And he'll say, well, you know, we really have a lot to do. It's very busy trying to solve this problem now. This is a year later. And, you know, some of these people call me three or four years along because they did around that long, ironically, hiring other public relations people to keep it. The things. Keep the things going. But I know how to stop it. And that's really what the goal is. Get it stopped as soon as possible.

Well, Jim, you obviously, you know, are a true guru. You are well known, you know, for obviously reflecting the importance and value of ethics and leadership and what have you. Do you feel that a number of CEOs out there, major corporations, are not as knowledgeable about these areas as they are, let's say, about manufacturing and marketing and other aspects of corporate management.

Well, I think, you know, we actually. Management is always interested in transition. And we're going through a tremendous transition because of COVID and other factors. And the management, senior management is getting a lot younger, much more quickly. Used to take the top job at a company as being more largely ceremonial. And because the person is going to be there for four or five years, turn 65 and, you know, be put out the pass through the big check. Nowadays, being a CEO of a company is rarely the last stop on someone's business career, even if they get fired for having problems. I actually know what all those problems are, but nonetheless, they have to be very, very knowledgeable and use experts for a lot of things. Because the difference between a CEO and almost any other person in the company is that they don't have to necessarily have the kind of expertise they took to get the job. They have to learn how to broaden their thinking and rely on others to help them understand things, answer questions, raise questions, and move the organizations ahead. So the job is in a sense really quite different, but the place that really matters. The issue you're addressing is this notion of leadership and behavior. I wrote a piece one time called the Ethical Expectations of Leaders. And what I talked about in that paper was really, what do your employees, what do your customers, what do others expect of you in leadership, especially in crisis? And I had a client one time, a really big pharmaceutical company had a really serious problem. And the problem, the problem was so serious that even the chairman was indicted. It was a criminal case and he had to leave the company. But the point was it was really good company. And the people who sort of flowed in behind those who left the company were really committed to finding out what happened. What did people think, what should we do in situations like this? This is a global company. So I was involved in a study of essentially ethics and morals in this company. And we actually came up with a platform of the kinds of things employees are looking for for those who aren't leaders. And I call it the Ethical Expectations of Leadership. It's very interesting. It's again, nine points. It's kind of a funny story there. I used all my articles, all used to be 23 points, 24 points. And a friend of mine, colleague wrote to me and said, Jim, for God's sake, there's only 10 commandments. So my list only nine or fewer. But just quickly, here's the ethical expectation. Find the truth as soon as possible. Promptly raise the tough questions and answer them thoughtfully. Teach by parable, focus on self evident truths, constructive lessons, blah blah, Vocalize core business values and ideals. Constantly walk the talk. Help, expect and enforce ethical leadership within the organization. Preserve, protect, defend and set pathways in place to the top that anyone can access to report situations that need to be reported. Be a cheerleader and a model and a teacher of ethical behavior. And here's the big one. Make values less equal. I'm sorry, make values equal to profits and personal gain as a tenant of the company. Because we still in this area with even nonprofits, they're really large companies, they just don't, they just do bookkeeping. Differently, but in the profit companies, it's always, you know, the shareholder is king. I'm sorry, the stakeholder stockholders came. That's really changing big time in the United States. But they use that effort to do, to not do things they had the money to do if they wanted to do them. So part of this, this list of leadership expectations which came from the people themselves, we didn't make this up. It's so practical. It is powerful because anybody who is anybody in the company can read this and understand perfectly what they should be doing. Doesn't take even more teaching than reading it over the phone.

Jim, at one point it was widely discussed that, that all companies should have a crisis management plan. What's your sense about that?

That part of the business has not changed. I would say about 25% of the Fortune 500 have formal crisis plans. It's still something that's not done as widely as it should. What companies do is they respond to regulations, laws and rules and develop specific plans for those specific circumstances. But very few companies proportionately have complete plans for the entire organization. And the bigger the organization, in a way, the harder that is. But the reality is that most of these organizations are less prepared than they could be and should be. One of the issues I talk about in this is this notion of crisis management, crisis management. When I started my career doing crisis management, it wasn't known as anything. It was just nothing. You did. A lot of my writings and other. My other colleagues of the times began to write about crisis management as a thing which public relations picked up on. And it became a dominant force within the kinds of work that we do. But the point is that even with the attention we pay to it, companies are not anxious to spend money on stuff that might not happen. And one of the things in recent years that has changed is there's a much more. A much larger emphasis on risk and risk reduction and risk recognition. And some of this is leading to better census of preparation. But the reason I mention crisis management is because I discourage people from using that term. It's a public relations term, is used, quite frankly, very loosely about almost any little glitch that goes on in an organization. And it makes us quite often be the Chicken Littles in the organization, running around telling people the roof is falling when the roof is leaking one part of the building. But when 911 happened, that changed everything in crisis management. The government, corporations, they all began to really look at how to be much better ready for these kinds of circumstances. And the nomenclature changed. The real issue as I said public relations. Crisis management is a PR word. The word that was introduced into the lexicon of managing these situations is called readiness. Readiness is a business concept. When you talk about readiness, it's entirely different conversation than talking about crisis management. The other problem with crisis management, quite frankly, is that most senior. So most senior managers just do not believe it's ever going to happen to them. The biggest reason, because I'm a smart guy, a smart girl, I did this, I did that, or this event. And there's a lot of self delusion out there about the actual safety you have from these kinds of problems. But I have to say this too. One of my closest friends, gone now, Steve Harrison, who ran a large company in a global company in employment. He was probably. Mr. Good Guy in terms of how he behaved and how he treated his employees and that sort of stuff. And we wrote a book together some years ago called the Decency Code. And this was really an attempt, it's a business mode, to begin to formally install these decency and honesty project as day to day in businesses. But the point I'm trying to make is that, and he always made to me, Look, Jim, there's 4 million companies in the United States and how many crises did you handle last year, actual crises with victims? Probably more like a dozen or so. So he was always kind of on my case talking about these serious things happening. When in reality it is true that most of the problems I dealt with happened to big organizations. You know, not the corner drugstore, you know, not the small chain of gas stations, that thing. Although I work for those people as well. So the moment, the issue really here is what are we calling this in ways that attract management's attention. So my lesson always is, you know, put key the crisis management language over the side and talk about readiness. How ready are we for this? How ready are you for that? Have you thought about these? Those are management questions. They're not really in a sense public relations questions, but they're serious management questions. And that begins a conversation with management which many of us don't have.

Jim, do you think that PR agencies are prepared to offer readiness as opposed to really, you know, gurus like you and whoever else you know is involved in the readiness industry?

Well, I mean, even in the security areas of the company and things like that, the moment placer to readiness is coming forward and consciously trying to deemphasize the notion of crisis management. Remember my definition of crisis, crisis involves victims and that's a serious problem for any organization. But it's very Serious, most for a big organization too. So this notion of readiness seems to have some real traction and especially since the government focuses its attention on these behaviors and these plans from a readiness perspective. But we're not there yet. In terms of what I see written in public relations, we're still foreign crisis management. And you're up against this notion that this market running, the police believe it's going to happen.

Well, it's always been assumed that vulnerable, you know, industries, you know, like the airlines have high readiness processes in place. Do you feel that that's so do you think that even given the fact that airlines may have to deal with severe crises, including the, you know, the loss of life, you know, hopefully never again, but, you know, periodically do you feel that everything is being done by such industries to prepare, you know, their constituencies about what needs to be done, you know, when such a crisis erupts?

I think the aviation industry as a whole has been a leader in analyzing bad things. You know, in fact, you know, we see this essentially all the time. When they airplanes have trouble, they talk about the National Transportation Safety Board and other organs of government who step in. But the industry themselves traditionally is trained and habitually does inform the industry of the smallest problem they have. And this sets them apart from every other profession. It's one of the reasons we have so few air disasters. And if the thing runs the way it does, there is this driven sense of reporting everything. There's been a lot written about this and about the airline industry and comparing it to the medical industry where essentially when a doctor makes a mistake, it's up to other doctors to determine whether it's even going to be reported, much less even investigated. It's astounding to me that, you know, there was a book written, I'm trying to think of the name of it, but it was a contrast of the airline safety industry and medicine and accidents, which is the largest cause of death, accidental problems in medicines, the largest cause of death in medicine, you know, it would be the. In medicine would be the third largest cause of death overall. And this actually is true across the world. The medical profession is really not held to account in any formal way unless you take action and sue or do something that forces them to investigate things. It's very bizarre and it's very universal. Very few. I'm not aware of any country that really formally investigates like the airlines do when their mistakes are made. But probably right now the poster child for screwed up companies happen to be Boeing Airlines. They, you know, they, the CEO, the outgoing CEO of Boeing testified yesterday before the Congress and he had this amazing, well, I didn't believe it, but expression of sorrow. We have blood on our hands, we made mistakes, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know, it started with the crash of two huge jetliners and the loss of almost 700 lives. And they still haven't, they still haven't figured out how to solve the problem because as they've learned, the great ethos at Boeing has just disappeared in mess ups and bow ups. There's a whole release of a bunch of stuff yesterday that by whistleblowers. That was the new information about parts they're using that they buy from, I don't know, the wrong suppliers or something. And they're heavily regulated by the government. One of the reasons they're as safe as they are. But the airline, having said the airlines still are the safest way to travel and they remain so because of this penchant for anticipating problems, for being ready for what they know is going to come.

Jim, what do you feel that your personal greatest contributions to your clients have been?

I think something some very specific things. I teach people how to work with me. I teach them what I'm going to teach them going forward. And when I get resistance to that, I mean, I really question whether I should be working for these people. They're going to learn from me. I even talk about how you learn from me, whether you're an intern or whether you're the CEO. I actually have kind of a quiz that I have people take every day when I'm working with them. It's called the five what questions. And I expect them, when I talk to them or they talk to their supervisors, that they talk about this at least once during the day. And the five questions are really simple. What's the most important thing you learned today? What's the most interesting thing you learned today? What's the most surprising thing you learned today? What questions have arisen that you need answers for tomorrow? And the final question, what will you do differently tomorrow based on what you learned today? The big problem we have is we assume people learn things when they do not. And it's not intentional, it's just the lives we live. But what I found is if I ask people to do this, if you work for me, you actually have a physical notebook on your desk with pages in it, and the page has each of these five questions. And I ask you to respond to one of those questions every day. And it's an amazing thing because I don't ask, I don't write a Paragraph don't have to be sentence. It can be just a phrase with a name of something, whatever reminds you of whatever the issue is that was important, interesting, fascinating, or a problem because people don't remember. This is especially true for public relations people because we don't remember things systematically. So we're constantly sort of making things up all the time. The secret to crisis in management, I learned early from somebody I don't even remember, but he or she said, look, every crisis is a pattern of circumstances. Learn the patterns and you're going to be ahead of the game. It just turns out that pretty much in life everything is a pattern. So I think this way. I try to teach people and boss them to think this way. So I really am, I'm really an educator. I've taken time over the years to break all of these things down into fairly simple lists of things that they can remember and talk about amongst themselves. I think it's a very helpful approach and I give this stuff away too. All these lists and things are available on my website and elsewhere.

Jim, I have one final question and I thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it much, very, very much. And our listeners do also. My final question is you have had, in your own career, you've had a number of mentors. We all do. And who have been your mentors and what do you feel you have learned from them?

I've had an extraordinary number of mentors. I have, I have several right now. I have actually, I have an employee we hired who was an immigrant from Africa, very intelligent, very highly educated man. He was in graduate school with me to help me through graduate school. So my coaches and counselors come from a variety of levels and disciplines and I'm constantly learning from them. I'm constantly listening to what they're talking about. And it's a two way street. I'm obligated to make sure that I'm using their time wisely when I talk to them as well. So I'm also different from a lot of consulting firms. I don't sell hours, you know, a block of hours in time. I only sell the minutes that I work. And I mean, you have to run a business, all you do is fine. But in my perspective, when I'm talking to you and you're paying for it, it better be worth every dime, every minute. And what I'm trying to tell them in reverse is, you know, when you're talking to others and working with others, time is really important. It's one of the most valuable things that you take and give to people, use it wisely, and I teach ways to do that.

Jim Lukachevsky, I thank you. I thank you so much for joining us today and to have you share your incredible knowledge and insights into the world of leadership, ethics and crisis, or as you also categorize it, readiness, a more apt word. You've been a leader in our industry and you're truly a PR master. And I thank you for joining us, Jim.

As are you, Art. As are you. I'm delighted and honored to be with you today. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you, Jim. And thank you all for joining us today. Today is number one 88 in terms of our number of PR masters podcast. So please be on the alert for our next one. And as usual, we promise you that a legend such as Jim Lukashevsky will join us and share his or her wisdom with you. Until then, this is Art Stevens signing off and wishing you all the very best.