If recent corporate debacles are any indication, there’s no time like the present to be working the field of crisis communications.

A great article in today’s New York Times looks at the “reputational implosions” of BP, Goldman Sachs, and Toyota over the past year and the wrongheaded PR strategies caused them.

Where did they go wrong?  By making at least one of three fatal errors, according to the article:

In the view of many who are paid to extract corporations from terrible situations, Toyota, BP and Goldman exacerbated their woes by either declining to fess up promptly, casting blame elsewhere or striking adversarial postures with the public, the government and the news media.

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Fascinating sign-of-the-times piece in the NYT today about how “the Internet-connected class worldwide faces growing pressure to cultivate a personal brand.”

In short:

“The rise of the personal brand reflects changing economic structures, as secure lifetime employment gives way to a churning market in tasks. It suggests a new unscriptedness in institutions as we evolve from the broadcast age to the age of retweets. It augurs a future in which we all function like one-person conglomerates, calculating how every action affects our positioning.”

I think I defy many people in my age group (35, for those of you counting at home) by loving the good, old-fashioned newspaper.  I simply don’t know what I’d do without my Washington Post first thing in the mornings, supplemented by my New York Times Sunday edition on weekends.  As the parent of a young child, however, I’ve long abandoned any effort to get through an entire newspaper article in one sitting.  It’s simply impossible.  Thank God for the headlines, I say, as I scan the top stories and dip in and out of lead paragraphs, worrying that I’m getting dumber all the while. (more…)

The New York Times’ Virginia Hefferman offers a startling revelation in her new essay, “Home Tool,” about moms who work from home.

It goes like this: thanks to telecommute-friendly technology, working mothers who choose to make a work place out of the home base are the real faces of modern feminism.

She writes:

Telecommuting is a familiar story, but I must sing its praises again — this time in a feminist key. For a century and a half, Mary Wollstonecraft types have tried to empower women to leave the home to work, shop, teach, learn, lead. Instead, without even marking the moment, we superempowered the home. Now if a woman stays home she’s not unambitious or antifeminist; she is — in the acronym of mothering message boards — a WAHM, a work-at-home mom, the most treasured of all the mom options (stay at home = bored; work outside the home = exhausted). This is good news. With technology that allows the WAHM to be simultaneously inside and outside, at home and at work, public and private, she no longer has to forfeit the manly rewards of grasping careerism.

To this I say, “Here, here!”  As a woman who’s struggled to get back on her professional feet after giving birth to a son nearly three years ago, I’m proud to wear the WAHM label for all of the reasons Hefferman mentions. Our uber-wired world certainly supplies us a lot of headaches, but without the advances technology brings, working women wouldn’t be nearly as able to realize all of the goals that make their lives truly complete.