(Chapter 1)

The next day, Saturday, September 1, 1979, an ambulance sped to our home where my father had been playing tennis with three other men. One of them had rushed up to the house to make the emergency call. I didn’t think to worry. Lots of men fall out of breath during exercise. Dad was only fifty-three and in the prime of life. He’d be back home in a few hours with a heart prescription and doctor’s orders to take it easy.

Instead my mother and brothers and sisters and I gathered in the emergency room of the Bryn Mawr Hospital and heard a doctor softly say, “I’m sorry. We did all we could.” My father was dead. My hero was gone. At age forty, his wife was a widow with seven children between the ages of eight and twenty-one. Certainly I had known people who had died during my still-young life; but death was supposed to happen to older people, in other families. . . .

Arthur S. DeMoss was the wisest man I knew. Now he was in heaven, less surprised by his departure, I suspect, than we were. I still miss him. He never saw me play college football. His place was vacant when I married the most wonderful girl in the world. He missed greeting his first grandchildren. When I started a business, he wasn’t there to advise me—though I had more counsel from him than I realized at the time, which is a large reason for my writing this book.

There are No Degrees of Integrity

(Chapter 15)

Seven million people logged on to dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster’s online site in 2005, all in search of a definition. More of them were looking up the word integrity than any other word, and here’s what they found: “strict adherence to a standard of value or conduct. Personal honesty and independence. Completeness: unity. Soundness.”

Why so much interest in a word everyone should know? Could it be that in 2005 so many otherwise intelligent and accomplished people seemed to have dropped the word from their lexicons?

. . . We often hear someone described as having “a lot of integrity,” but to my thinking, that’s impossible. If integrity means “completeness”—the Latin integritas literally means “whole”—then the question of completeness wants a yes or no response, not How little? or How much? Author-poet-speaker Sid Madwed said, “Would you want to do business with someone 99 percent honest?”

Everyone’s in PR

(Chapter 10)

Take this test: Name someone, anyone, not actively involved in public relations. Now, whoever you came up with, think again. In this chapter, I submit that no one, anywhere, ever, is exempt from PR duty. Even without speaking, every person, you included, is a mouthpiece, a critic, a supporter, a case in point, an endorsement, an argument, a walking billboard, a testament for or against something. Everyone is in PR.

Buy Some Stamps

(Chapter 6)

Check your mailbox. If you’re an average American, you’ll have to receive one hundred pieces of mail if you’re hoping to get just one personal letter. What’s more, that personal mail is most likely not a letter at all, but a greeting card, an announcement, or an invitation.

What the Postal Service calls “household-to-household” correspondence is less than 1 percent of the one hundred billion pieces of first-class mail every year. The quickest blame goes to e-mail, but I suspect that letter writing began its regrettable decline with the lowered cost of long-distance phone calls. For whatever reason, people no longer reach out and touch through thoughtful, lasting, handwritten (or even typed) words on paper. And I mourn the loss.

Honesty Can be Costly

(Chapter 8)

Another time, an up-and-coming pastor of a large, growing church flew in to see me. Our discussion of public perception included lifestyle issues such as the appropriateness of his driving a Rolls-Royce (something I did not endorse). He had come to see us ready to write a first month’s retainer check. I suggested he wait for a proposal, which I sent a week later. I never heard from him again.

On another occasion, one of the nation’s larger Christian nonprofit organizations wanted a public relations firm to help manage a crisis. On a conference call with several leaders of the ministry, I advised of the importance of financial disclosure, particularly for nonprofit organizations. They requested a face-to-face meeting at their headquarters and we set a date. My assistant later received a call informing us the meeting would have to be postponed, and we heard from them no more.

The money we’ve lost in business declined would tally into hundreds of thousands of dollars, no small thing for an agency our size; but I’ve never regretted the lines we’ve drawn. I’ve never regretted not compromising what we know in order to tell people what they might want to hear. Even when it comes at high cost, honesty is always a bargain.

God Owns it All

(Chapter 12)

One evening of network news should be enough to convince us that personal ownership is at best temporary. To the degree that we know and accept that, life holds considerably less surprise or stress. To the degree that we cannot accept it, our possessions own us.

Shut Up and Listen

(Chapter 18)

It’s safe to say that in my life I have never learned a single thing while I was talking. My willingness to close my mouth and open my ears, on the other hand, has granted me free admission to a great education. . . .

As the head of a public relations firm, people pay me to advise them; they want me to talk. And while I take seriously that words are my stock in trade, I also know that the quality of my inventory rises or falls with what I’ve taken in before I speak. In the process, I have learned that good listening is an act of the will and an exercise of the intellect. The trick is to let the moment pass when you might, short term, have the floor and hold attention. To dominate a meeting or conversation is not power; informed good judgment is power.