Advice from the PR Pros: Bill Nielsen

The Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication has conducted oral history interviews with dozens of the nation’s most influential public relations practitioners. The Page Center website features a vast collection of transcripts and videos of these interviews. On this blog, we will highlight some of the advice given by professionals on attaining positions in the field of public relations.

Willard “Bill” Nielsen served as consultant to management of for-profit and non-profit organizations. He retired as a corporate vice president of Johnson & Johnson.

The importance of counseling in the corporate PR world

“CEOs today are smarter and smarter about their roles and they are also surprised, most of them, to learn how much time they have to devote in their roles to communications. And they know they need counsel to do that.”

“It’s an interesting topic to take up with younger people, particularly in college and communications schools because they all ask the question, ‘well how do you become a counselor?’ I usually say, starting right now, everything that you do, every project that you take on needs to be looked at and you need to take from that involvement or that project or that assignment, something that you learned about the execution of that.”

“That becomes eventually a part of who you are. When you turn around and start providing counsel to those who are younger or to organizations, you’re going to find yourself drawing on those experiences. And that’s how you become a counselor.”

“There isn’t any strict academic track that you have to follow. It’s more a matter of paying attention to what’s happening around you, what you’re doing, and the reasons why certain things have occurred… That’s the way to begin to get there.”

“I would also say that the college experience… the bottom line is, they’re there to learn how to learn. The requirement for a bachelor’s degree, or whatever, is not dependent necessarily on rote memorization of formulas or a perfect recitation of American history. But these subjects are put out to students to teach them how to learn.”

“And that’s a particularly critical element in the background of a good public relations person: the ability to learn, the ability to learn quickly and the ability to take that new learning and to act on it. That’s certainly the bottom line in good crisis management.”