The DaVinci Factor - How To Turn Your PR Job Into a Career

About the Book

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.

About the Author

AUTHOR OF POPULAR ‘STREET SMART PR’ and ”14 PERSONAL SECRETS TO MAKING IT IN PR” John F. Budd, Jr. protagonist of the anti-status quo movement, is the founder/architect of the PR field’s first “think tank.” The Omega Group. It’s comprised of a loose confederation of like-minded colleagues in a wide variety of disciplines, i.e. sociology, education, psychology, etc. He says the idea came to him when, after returning to the PR agency field after a decade on the corporate side, he said he felt like Rip Van Winkle, little had changed while he’d been gone. In his 50+ year career he’s garnered a shelf-full of national awards, 15 including – 8 Silver Anvils, a Gold Anvil, several financial relations citations – and was runner-up in 2000 for “PR professional of the Year.” His iconoclastic thinking is reflected in his newsletter “Plain Talk” and his ability to “see” what others miss is regularly on display in his newsletter Observations. (At Corporate, his global company newspaper never ran CEO editorials; used outside editorial cartoonists to poke at management and had an outside editorial advisory board of professional journalists. It won 55 editorial and graphic awards in the communications field.) He’s the author of seven books, covering PR, media relations, CEO credibility, video and managing expectations. He was a member (2000) of a Blue Ribbon Commission of the National Association of Corproate Directors examining the role of directors in corporate strategic planning. And on the seventh day, he doesn’t sleep, serving on six non-profit boards (in 1995 he received PRSA’s top national award for public service).