Events of the week of August 10, 2017 in Charlottesville, North Carolina may go down in the history of American business as the moment that triggered something of a visible epiphany in the behaviors and beliefs of many US business leaders.  Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple was inspired to begin a national conversation about the moral responsibilities of tech businesses.

The Agony of Decision author Fred Garcia is one of those amazing, extraordinary people we so rarely meet in our lives. Luckily, we met more than thirty years ago, in New York as he recruited me to teach in his Public Relations program at NYU.  It was the beginning of a career long relationship where we collaborate, associate, learn from each other, and shared or refereed clients to each other.

The only school for presidents to learn how to be president is living and working at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as president. Ironically this is also true for most CEO positions. It’s a job that, however smart you think you are, you learn on the job every single day.

Ten areas for serious personal and professional consideration and reflection. First, change your mindset and your entire philosophy of work.

Dealing with victims remains among the least well-handled of all management activities. Here’s how your institution can appropriately respond when a victim-creating incident occurs.

The weight of public communication on public officials is enormous compared to the communication requirements in private industry, even in the non-profit sector. It would appear America is entering an era of extraordinary change in the relationship of government to people. Changes and eliminations in programs and services, the handling of public crises in general, are gaining more scrutiny from more opinionated sources.

The highest priority, greatest threat and most crucial aspect of managing crises is the victim dimension. Victims provide the explosive emotional drive that results in high visibility, high liability and high anxiety. The reality is most organizations, hospitals, schools and universities do a sloppy, insensitive or timid job of dealing with victims. This can be very costly to your reputation.

Civility and niceness begins with each one of us. Here’s one great example of a lot of people being helpful and decent to others, and the source is surprising.

The five most powerful positive words/phrases in any language or culture are…

Probably the most important lesson I ever learned, years ago, about urgent and crisis situations was that whatever the nature of problem, it very likely had happened to someone else before it has or would happen to me.