Household The management of a large enterprise has, it must be said, quite new problems in this day of mass communication, swelling ranks of shareholders and vocal and organized labour. Straightforward advertising a story usually told with little subtlety but much point is one way of projecting a business and promoting its goods or services; public relations is a refinement, and usually a pretty crafty one, of this technique; it is more concerned with opinion than sales. If public opinion is a factor which requires the constant attention of business management, how can management best deal with the problem? What action should management take? There are no proper answers to this question because the extent to which public opinion really counts has not, and perhaps never will be, measured. Mr Earl Newsom writes on this point: It is generally recognized, for example, that no enterprise can hope to achieve public confidence unless it acts in the public interest; that is, no amount of propaganda, however clever, can make any enterprise look better over a period of time than it really is. ... But what kind of actions do we mean? Every human being is far from perfect and every enterprise even less so, if only because it includes the activities of large numbers of human beings. And who is able to observe the true public interest in every situation in a contradictory and changing world? As far as that goes, who do we mean by the phrase the 'public interest'? Is the task of human leadership simply that of rushing to carry out the whims of the crowd it leads? On this question current empirical data seem to support traditional theory that the actions of leaders influence public opinion quite as much as public opinion influences the action of leaders. This could hardly be better expressed. Though there is a note of qualified scepticism in much presentday thinking about public relations, there are management implications indeed marketing implications which are relevant. The public will judge a business by what it is not by what it pretends to be. And so it is fair to conclude that a public relations operation whether carried out by the enterprise itself, by its advertising agent, or by one of the growing number of experts organized to handle it must start from the goal that management itself has determined and wishes 124 The Business of Management to pursue in the interests of all who are affected by that determination. This chapter, 'Management of What', has taken the three chief management means finance, production, and sales and has tried to paint a broad picture of some of the considerations that should guide the actions of the managers who are specifically concerned with one or other aspect. Apart from the fact that marketing in the sense that a marketing outlook assures the essential dynamism of a business is discussed in two places in this book, at the very start and in this chapter, the inference that it is hoped will be drawn is that management must see these three means as an entity, that they form a trinity of interests, and that neither one can be truly effective without a proper balancing of the other two. Household