Thorough and highly applicable advice for communications consultants.
A public relations professional pulls back the curtain on his consulting practice.
In this second installment of a two-volume series, agency principal Darnell offers a comprehensive manual that delves into how to operate a public relations/communications consulting business. The first book, The Communications Consultant’s Foundation (2021), provided an introductory framework for starting such a business. This sequel takes a deep dive into the nuts and bolts, first covering communications strategies and account management, then discussing the business of running an agency, and finally providing an action plan for implementation. Darnell not only explains communications consulting in sometimes-dense detail, he also liberally cites examples, many very specific, from his own career. The author’s experience is credible and considerable; he has worked for other firms and run his own small communications agency for over two decades. It’s a credit to Darnell that he willingly discloses his business philosophy, strategies, and practices, right down to how (and how much) he charges his clients. In Part 1 of the guide, readers will get a solid understanding of the process of pitching accounts as well as insights into more mundane topics such as record-keeping and billing. Also in this section is useful information about client positioning, internal versus external communications, the specialized area of investor relations, and a helpful rundown of various media and public relations tactics that could be employed on behalf of clients. The second part of the work focuses on agency management, professional development, how to scale a business, and potential exit strategies. Here, Darnell delivers some wise suggestions for how best to research media as well as seasoned observations about trade associations and industry gatherings. Perhaps most intriguing is the author’s advice on ways to scale a business, in which he draws from examples of other practitioners. Part 3 summarizes previous material and shows how to apply it in the form of a “Marketing Action Plan” that can be developed for clients. The level of detail in this section is particularly impressive. As in his first book, Darnell includes a wealth of questions to answer and relevant exercises to complete.
Thorough and highly applicable advice for communications consultants.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-201257-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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