Tomorrow’s CEOs Will Come from HR and PR!!!

I am often asked by college and university students, “Where will tomorrow’s CEO come from?” As requirements vary between industries or business, it is difficult to make an accurate prediction. But if you were to ask me to hazard a guess or make an educated inference, my opinion will not impress most. I am in the minority. Most will say finance, marketing, sales, business development, engineering, production or information technology, but at the risk of being proven wrong, I put my money on Public Relations (PR) or Human Resources (HR). My inexplicable sixth sense tells me that by 2025, a number of big and medium sized companies will have CEOs from the PR or HR domain.

With talent management, social responsibility, image management, ethics and corporate governance becoming increasingly important factors for stakeholders (including investors and customers) in an organization, I can envision a future where PR and HR will be treated on par with perhaps, two of the most important (widely regarded) present day functions of businesses– marketing and finance.

People make iconic companies and perception makes them credible. HR and PR epitomize these aspects better than any other management function. You can hire the experts i.e. the best CFO to create more wealth, the ablest CTO to develop the most innovative hi-tech solutions, and the smartest CMO to be the trailblazer for cutting-edge, innovative and customized products and services, but for an uncertain, evanescent and fast evolving world, you require a ‘change manager and sagacious human capital specialist’ as a CEO, which to my mind would be best provided by an HR specialist or expert.

In a competitive world where discerning individuals decide which organizations to work for based on its environmental friendly policies and customers buy from companies that have adopted social responsibility goals as a belief system, the public relations czar too would be a great choice for the CEO role.

It is a fallacy to continue to assume that marketing and finance people know best how to run companies. If this were true, why did the economic crisis of 2008-09 touted as the biggest financial wreckage in decades mar the fortunes of some of the most renowned or iconic companies across the world? Apparent reasons—greed and wrong decisions. Veneered reasons—Lack of visionary leadership and image management skills. Marketing may be my first child and public relations the second offspring, but at the cost of speaking out of turn or shooting myself in the foot, I do feel that future CEOs will come from public relations and human resources domain.

It is imperative to demolish stereotypes—‘PR and HR is a soft skill or meant for the weaker sex.’ PR cannot be defined merely as publicity and HR as hiring or recruitment managers. The major components of PR include media relations, investor relations, corporate social responsibility, image management, new media, internal branding and employee communications, crisis communications, issues management and speechwriting.

Human Resources go beyond recruitment and selection. It includes, among others, organizational development and leadership, diversity, talent management, training and development, career customization, succession planning, employee appraisals, change management, international HR, and compensation and benefits.

I would exhort, every young mind to spend adequate time understanding the nuances of public relations and human resources. Whether you work in the mainstream or non mainstream realm, you will need public relations and human resources skills at some point in time. Irrespective of whether you take the self-employment or the salaried employee route, you will need new age PR and HR skills to build your own brand, your organization’s profile, and augment the development of your establishment’s human capital.

Young Minds, HR and PR are getting hotter by the day. You are requested to remember a cardinal principle—you cannot create an iconic brand without strategic PR and you cannot create a great organization without adept HR. Please remember this equation: