On August 31^st 1985, China Global Public Relations opened its doors for business in Beijing. This event marked the entry of Burson-Marsteller into the Greater China market through its joint venture with Xinhua News Agency. This predecessor entity lasted eight years, after which Burson-Marsteller opened offices under the B-M brand in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Harold Burson once commented that his visit to China in 1986 was among his most memorable, but in those days it must have been difficult to foresee just how far and how fast Burson-Marsteller’s relationship with China would progress. Today, as B-M China celebrates its 25^th anniversary, we can look back on a quarter century of achievement during which time our China business has expanded to four offices with more than 150 professionals serving the growing needs of an expanding community of clients (foreign multinationals communicating with China, and Chinese multinationals communicating around the world).

It’s an understatement to say that the Chinese market is an important one for Burson-Marsteller both in Asia-Pacific and globally. Yes, it is important on account of the sheer size of its domestic market and strategic value to our clients. But its significance transcends the financial quantity of imported PR investment from overseas. When I think of B-M in China, I think in terms of the rising quality imperative, with excellent prospects for the expanding export of Chinese ideas, talent and client commerce to the rest of the world.

Under the leadership of Cindy Tian and her rising team, Burson-Marsteller China has continued to set the standard as a premier strategic communications consultancy. Our China business has client relationships stretching back for years with some of the firm’s flagship global clients. We have done groundbreaking client work in the digital, technology, industrial, brand marketing and corporate spaces and are now rapidly growing our business in the energy sector, among others. When I first visited B-M China earlier this year, I was immediately impressed by the sense of enthusiasm, professionalism and commitment to client service that characterize our offices around the country.

As Burson-Marsteller China celebrates its landmark history today, our Global CEO Mark Penn could not be stronger in his staunch support of building a successful China business for the future, so please join us in congratulating B-M China on 25 great years of business achievement, with best wishes for many years of continued prosperity to come.

Check out B-M Seoul’s new ‘Intern-Speak’ blog, the first of its kind in Korea. I like it because the idea is to engage the rising next generation of PR talent, listening to what they have to say and providing a place where colleagues can build peer-to-peer relationships with each other.

I just don’t accept that junior turnover is an insoluble problem for PR agencies. Sometimes I see this depressing tendency for senior managers to throw up their hands and assume high staff churn will always be with us, so why bother doing things differently?

Such wrong-headed thinking results in attitudes where entry-level staff can feel like they are an anonymous labour commodity expected to fail, rather than as a precious community of individuals supported to succeed.

Just about every PR firm’s offices are brimming with young digital talent. When they see their firm using modern platforms and techniques, I hope they will see a future in the consultancy business and be empowered to proactively advocate the digital approaches senior people in the profession need to personally master.

Let’s face it: there is a generation gap in pretty much every PR firm (crudely between the older ‘analogues’ and the younger ‘digitals’), and this makes staff retention more difficult. PR business leaders of high caliber and true character should confront that reality as a motivating challenge to overcome, not as a necessary evil to accept as a given.

PR leaders need to wrap their heads around the fact that the future of our business will be built by people who ‘get’ the importance of transparency and information-sharing, where the credibility of communication comes from fearless conversation, not from timid control.

That’s why I like the thinking behind B-M Korea’s intern blog.

One of the key influences in my recent PR life is Steve Bowen, who joins Burson-Marsteller on July 1st [from Edelman] as our new regional Managing Director for Marketing & Training in Asia-Pacific.

I first met Steve in 2002, when he was the head of international public relations at Kia Motors Corporation (KMC)  in Seoul, Korea. At that time, Kia was looking for its very first global PR agency, and as the brand new Managing Director of Edelman Korea, I was keen to put a few wins on the board.

For all the credit I’ve received in my career for building PR businesses in some very challenging circumstances, I always remind myself of the people who helped create the winning conditions along the way. It was Kia’s confidence in selecting my old firm — when the great Mark Juhn was KMC’s COO — that really jump-started the rise of “The New Edelman Korea,” and Steve was the best kind of client whose support and encouragement I will always well remember.

As my customer, Steve provided thoughtful and clear feedback and well educated the agency about his company’s business. He was the exemplar of excellence, a champion of quality, and a factory of new ideas. Better yet, he valued listening and thinking before just talking and doing.

Today international PR for the rising Asian multinationals is becoming an important part of our business, and Steve’s pioneering experience and track record in this area from his Kia years will help take our game to the next level.

I’ve blogged about the benefits of working with friends before, but in Steve’s case the new wrinkle is that while many people think of him as an Edelman guy, in fact he is a ‘Burson Person’ who is now returning to the consultancy where he first cut his teeth in the PR business.

Here I am speaking with Glen Frost of Australia’s The PR Report about Burson-Marsteller’s approach to Evidence-Based Communications:

A few weeks earlier at New Delhi, here I was interviewed by Ashwani Singla, the CEO of Genesis Burson-Marsteller, India’s premier public relations consultancy. Of particular interest to PR industry types is our tackling of the procurement trend in communications services.

Yesterday Burson-Marsteller announced that my former colleague and good friend of many years Margaret Key* will become our new Market Leader in Korea. PR Week in London ran a story with the headline: “Burson-Marsteller lures Edelman Japan MD Margaret Key to take charge of Korea”

Especially knowing the British journalistic sensibility and personal style of the fellow who wrote that story, I found the choice of words apropos to the situation. Just for fun, I then looked up the word ‘lure’ in the dictionary, and noted that it is defined as “the power of attracting or enticing.”

In the small town of the global PR industry, when you’ve been living there for a decade (as Margaret has) or for two decades (as I have), you get to know all the local notables of the trade. You find out who has a reputation:

• for quality work or for mediocrity
• for being trustworthy or for being duplicitous
• for fair play or for doing whatever it takes to win
• for keeping confidences well or for being indiscreet
• for actually being a thought leader or for just claiming to be one
• for heralding the accomplishments of others or taking credit themselves
• for inspiring the loyalty of direct reports or for suffering constant turnover
• for embracing diversity or for wanting to work with people just like themselves
• for knowing how to actually do things or for just how to be a cheerleader for others
• for supporting employees to improve their lives or for exploiting them for personal gain
• for reliably delivering on commitments or for making promises that never seem to be kept

Most people fall between these polarities, but the point is that every industry has its stars and its scoundrels, its utility players and everyday people. Lately there has been a lot of research about how birds of a feather flock together on social networks. Check out this study on homophily (i.e. the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others).

In my case, getting back to the point of this post, I don’t think I ‘lured’ my new colleague so much as I feel we were both attracted by the idea of working together again because we are friends who share in common a trust in each other, a respect for each other, and confidence in always being there for the other while constantly having fun as colleagues.

I’m 45 years old now. The other day we did a demographic study of B-M’s predominantly young and majority female staff of approximately 600 people in Asia, and I was stunned to discover that we have only 14 people who are my age or above. PR is indeed a younger person’s game.

So, for me as I get older, the journey is becoming much more important than the destination. Some people are willing to put up with a lot of work unhappiness hoping to get some big payday in the future, but I’m with Eckhart Tolle when it comes to ‘the power of now,’ focusing on the possibilities of the present moment. Thus when I saw a chance to work again every day with someone who is such a fine friend, I was immediately convinced that this would be a good idea.

Why?

Because one thing I know over a long PR life is that as careers evolve, the friends you work with during special and formative phases of your career scatter to the winds, so if those winds should ‘lure’ those friends together again, then life is pretty good.

* Margaret is one of Asia’s foremost public relations professionals and one of the region’s great healthcare communicators. Korea is a key strategic growth market for us in Asia and she has a proven track record of business success in Seoul. I worked with her for years at Edelman and experienced first-hand how Margaret inspires colleagues, clients and communities by setting the standard for PR excellence. She is emblematic of the entrepreneurial, digital, and ambitious new generation of diverse talent we are now rallying in Asia.

2010 B-M social media check-up

Related stories: Companies ride on social media buzz & Fortune 100 companies rely on blogs, Twitter in Asia

The expression ‘drinking from the fire hose’ seems an apt one for my first two weeks as the new CEO of Burson-Marsteller in Asia-Pacific. In starting a new job in the information and networking business that is modern PR, the amount of data one needs to instantly absorb and the extent of relationships that must be suddenly forged is fantastic. It’s a pity we humans don’t come pre-equipped with pattern recognition software hard-wired into our brains.

My first day was spent in our firm’s Washington, DC office, which is a research-rich public relations and public affairs powerhouse. Given my lifelong passion for politics, I felt really alive there, like I was in a campaign headquarters with election day looming just around the corner. What I especially noticed is the ubiquity of bright and talented young people working in senior positions alongside profoundly experienced colossi of the PR and research worlds. In a way, the place had the meritocratic feel of Star Trek, where the best and brightest have well earned the top spots on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Then I proceeded to New York, where the B-M office has all the hustle and bustle that one expects of a Big Apple operation. Its substantial quality atmosphere is a distinguishing characteristic, evidenced in the apparent confidence of people who know that they are at the top of their game. The history and gravitas of the firm are unmistakable and I found the NY folks friendly, focused and unusually dedicated to their clients and colleagues. Many of them were kind enough to come and hear me provide a presentation in tandem with the showing of this superb TED video that plots the future trajectory of Asia’s economic rise. On my last day, I shot this video with the delightful Rose Gordon of PR Week.

Following that, it was on to Singapore aboard SQ-21, the world’s longest non-stop flight. As a Canadian who a few days earlier had been shivering in Toronto’s bracing -20 weather, I found Singapore’s +30 degrees an extreme antidote to the winter. The warmth of the welcome I received was commensurate with with the equatorial heat. Our office in Singapore is bursting at the seams owing to rapid growth, and having met many of the staff, I can understand why space will continue to be at a premium.

A few days later, I discovered much the same in our fast-growing Hong Kong office, where I learned first-hand about the massive bench strength B-M offers in public affairs and corporate communications. What I didn’t know beforehand is the top talent and growing business of the firm in the area of brand marketing. I also noticed here, as elsewhere in the region, the fact that while my new firm excels at telling the stories of world multinationals in Asia, it also champions Asian multinationals communicating their stories with the world.

Actually, compared to what I was expecting and to my past experience (having competed staunchly against B-M for years), I found that my new consultancy:

• is considerably larger than what I had been told and also faster growing
• excels at doing all kinds of great digital work that clients count on every day
• offers an above average consistency of quality service across practices and geographies
• has a far more sophisticated program focused on large multinational clients than I’ve ever seen before
• consists of generally happy people who seem to feel that the journey is just as important as the destination
• offers advanced financial systems and a well developed human resources infrastructure competently run with a sincere interest in employees’ lives
• invests heavily in serious evidence-based intellectual capital that’s actually applied to the task of devising client communications programs (rather than just agency marketing)

B-M is not perfect and there are certainly areas for development in my turf (foremost among them is spreading the word more about the under-appreciated positives above), but these are the stand-out characteristics that I noticed.

Now that I’m into my third week (four if you include the days I spent personally responding to 778 congratulatory e-mails after my announcement went out), I feel confident in saying that B-M in Asia:

• will always aim at setting a new PR standard with a relentless focus on achieving certainty of positive business outcomes delivered through client-centric consulting excellence
• will be driven by an ambition to be the best we can be through continuous improvement to maintain our premier position

Yes, you can tell that I am now advocating my new company’s point of view, and more likely to emphasize that our glass is half-full. One of the things I have respected most about B-M over the years is that it didn’t need to call itself a thought leader to actually be one. But this is no time for complacency about our offer. These days, the competition is out there self-heralding its attributes more aggressively than ever, so I feel we need to underline where we are strong and growing with an evidence-based confidence that I am told by our veteran players has always been at the core of B-M’s corporate character.

I’m a greenhorn in the company with lots to learn (and no doubt many mistakes to make), but these are some of the the experiences I’ve gained during these early weeks. I’m so busy now that maintaining this blog will be hard, but I’ll try and keep at it.

Now that it’s official I will be joining Burson-Marsteller as the firm’s new President and CEO in the Asia-Pacific region, I would like to offer a few reflections about how I got here.

When I elected to leave Edelman (where I served as its North Asia President) after six years of service, Harold Burson was kind enough to send me a personal e-mail message wishing me well. I was intrigued that he should take such an interest in my career trajectory, and I made a mental note to follow-up with him in due course. That I did a few months later, and so on the brisk morning of October 22^nd in New York City, I met the legendary founder of my new firm for the first time.

During our pow-wow at his Park Avenue office, I was blown away by the depth and breadth of his feel for the public relations industry. I was especially impressed by his sense of people in PR and his understanding of what makes them tick. It became clear to me that one key ingredient of his success over the years is his acute awareness of the other person’s point of view and a sensitivity to their needs and concerns. This I found very refreshing, because in the small town that is the global public relations industry, there are a lot of fast talkers but not nearly as many good listeners.

The antique radio in Mr. Burson’s office caught my eye, because I collect them as a hobby. In the old technology of radio, like the new technology of social media, there is a term called ‘signal to noise.’ Let me just say that I left our hour-long meeting thinking that this man has probably more ’signal’ and less ‘noise’ about him than just about anyone else I’ve ever met in the industry.

In many ways, I felt as though I had met Mr. Burson repeatedly during my career through his consistently premium-grade representatives, aka ‘The Burson Person.’ My first PR mentor and a co-founding partner of my old firm in Canada cut his teeth at Burson-Marsteller. When I first moved to Seoul, Burson was the class act in that country and I very deliberately applied lessons learned from its winning ways when I was in charge of Edelman Korea. Later, as I traveled across Asia, I discovered that a large proportion of the region’s top talent earned its spurs at B-M and when I met Simon Pangrazio and asked for his advice about building a business in North Asia (an experience that my predecessor and I share in common), he — like all the other B-M pros I’ve met since then — could not have been more impressive.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve a few weeks ago, when I first spoke to B-M’s Global CEO, Mark Penn. I had almost signed on with another firm by year’s end, but I found his intelligence and vision most compelling and I decided to pursue the B-M option with enthusiasm. Especially because I’ve been giving these lectures on campus of late about how public relations is becoming more of a science than just an art, I was immediately drawn to B-M’s new, data-focused approach to PR called “Evidence-Based Communications.”

I’ve really enjoyed my 18 month sabbatical, but now I am looking forward to working with a tremendously talented team of the highest caliber and professional character. This is a business that’s going places (for many of the reasons I wrote about in this blog post about choosing the right PR firm).

With a rich inheritance of wisdom and experience gained during nearly four decades of experience in Asia-Pacific, Burson-Marsteller is addressing the future with confidence as we focus on setting a new PR standard of excellence in communications achievement.