Thank you, Kelly, for those gracious and generous introduction.
I hope that after all these years of placing at war, we're paying because you have forgiven us since we were due away from Hill and Knowlton, where you now domicile again.
So congratulations on a stellar career. Let me add that also when my good friend, Maril McDonald was my good friend, Maril McDonald called me to tell me about this award.
My first reaction wasn't humility, it wasn't pride. It was surprise. Still no more surprise than I was 15 years ago when I was asked to join the Page Society.
Both times I had a brief ballot of imposter syndrome. I'm not a practicing communicator. I'm a headhunter. But it dawns on me that the Page Society thinks headhunters are people too.
And the reality is, I want to especially point out that Tom Martin has been not only a good friend, a client and advocate has done spectacular work at the College of Charleston.
But his kindness has always been my best PR advocate. So thank you so much Tom for nominating me. I also want to say that I wanted to mention Frank Oviatt because Frank Oviatt was the first person to invite me to be part of an organization that you guys are part of and recruiters won.
And that was IPR. But it dawned on me that it was more cleaner than actually. nominated me to be part of IPR and Frank and I had known each other from professional relationship and Frank welcome me.
On that note of gratitude I would like to recognize a few people without whom you get the drift. Some are here, some are not.
Either way I'd like to share some moments of pride and joy with them because without their friendship, love and support there isn't any way I would be here this evening wouldn't have had the career that I've had.
Let me start by thanking my wife Doreen. I'm thrilled to say she was sitting here beside me. She is sitting here beside me tonight as she is done for 41 wonderful years with grace and dignity.
Let me tell you a little story about Doreen. She's nervous now. She's very nervous. About 30 years ago I mentioned 41 years of marriage, about 30 years ago I was getting ready for a business trip out here.
live in New York and I was going to be going for a couple of weeks and Doreen was wrestling our
are two daughters who were very young at the time, and I glanced up from the suitcase I was packing, and I said, I feel so badly about the fact that I'm leading you to take care of these two, and that, you know, I'm not going to be back for 10 days, two weeks, and her comment to me was, we'll be here when you get home.
Thank you, Dorian, for saying that, for meeting that, and for being you then and now, there is no me without us.
Now she's choked up. Up next, and I plead with Roger about this, don't count this toward my seven minutes, is I'd like to talk about my good friend and fellow honoree Gary Sheffern.
A few years ago, PR Week published a story on the number of Fortune 500 CCOs. started their careers at GE.
When the story came out, Gary called me and said, I don't know if you've seen this piece, but you should be very proud.
What he didn't say, and probably didn't need to say, was we had placed over 20 people in marketing and communications at GE.
But Gary, that classy gesture meant the world to me, just sharing the stage with you here tonight was. You've been a good friend, a valued colleague.
Let me tell you another story about Gary Shepherd. Gary Shepherd and I share a love of the New York Yankees.
Deal with it. Fernandez too, by the way. Anyway, several times I invited Gary to be my guest at a Yankee game, and several times Gary said, no can do.
You're a vendor, I can't do that. Now, he was the only one that ever said that. I guarantee you to him.
But years later, he and his son, Mark, I went to a game and we had a terrific time and we speak of it all time.
In fact, he mentioned, again, I apologize for the baseball story here, but he mentioned this week in a text and he said, tonight we get to be one Soto and Aaron Judge.
So I don't know who Soto will go wait for. A few years from that, over lunch, remember lunch? was a thing.
Once used to be a thing. I used to do it a lot. I was surprised again when the Bloomberg chairman, Peter Greer, told me, your business model is Floyd.
Before I could think of anything to say, he said, because the people you place stay so long that by the time they start a search for their replacement.
No one remembers that you put them there in the first place. Is Doug Pinkham here? Yeah. All right. You can tell that story at the bar afterwards.
Speaking of successors, I really wouldn't be here tonight if it wasn't for my successor, Jessam and Katz. I wouldn't have dreamed of leaving Haman Associates without complete confidence that I was leaving the firm in her capable hands.
She's a terrific leader, a great friend, and she's done wonderful things for the profession in a short period of time.
I'd also like to recognize two of Jessam and my colleagues who are not here tonight, Lisa Ryan and Mary and Rainone for their long-time support and leadership.
Now Roger Bolton, over the course of his tenure at Page, Roger is then more than anyone to make this organization more diverse, more global, and outward and forward-looking.
Thank you from all of us, Roger. I only wish you the best, and my hope is that you will never
miss a Cincinnati Reds fantasy camp for the rest of your career. I also want to recognize my two friends that that Kelly referred to my business partners now Bob Feldman and Don Spentner when we found that FHS Capital about five years ago to invest our knowledge experience and capital.
Is that worked out? Okay. Knowledge experience and capital in communications startups with the potential to transform the industry Bob just had as we speak kidney stone surgery in Stanford Hospital East supposed to be here tonight and my good friend Spentner is here with me.
So thank you for your friendship and partnership and we certainly miss Bob. I would like to give Bob a little bit more of a shout out for putting me on a path that still makes me wonder if I will ever truly retire.
Since I announced a year ago that I was passing the baton to just I can honestly say that the work I've been doing since leaving Haman Associates is the most important work I've ever done, and let me explain.
Let's first start with the dialogue project. First, the dialogue project, as many of you know, let me start this way.
Some of you attended the page meaning five years ago in Boston when Bob Feldman actually received this award. That night, he turned what could have been a safe speech into a bold call to action.
For all of us in this room, and in that room then, and in our industry, his warning was not only prescient, but even more timely today.
What Bob did, what did Bob tell us five years ago, that the gravest threat to our society and our profession is political global polarization.
He described the state of public discourse as deeply disturbing. He spoke about how the media landscape is fragmenting into a toxic stew of sound bites.
echo chambers and conspiracy theories. He said that sent up that urgent spoke signal in the fall of 2019. How could we have known just a few months later the pandemic would so quickly devolve into a case study and how polarization poisons.
Remember lockdowns, mass mandates, closing schools and houses of worship, the gap between those that worked at home and those that were working on zoom, how that tore our social fabric.
Then after the George Floyd murder prompting protests, counter protests came the contested 2020 election. All those traumatic events unfolded as the dialogue project found a home at Duke University.
Today a vibrant think tank, the dialogue project is making tangible contributions to soothing our troubled waters. Its research has shown the moderate middle
has a very vocal voice and is an important constituency for us to consider. With our help, fundamental human decency can and must cut through the clutter and noise, more dialogue, less shouting, more listening.
Thank you, Bob, and I hope you're feeling better. Next, the conversation, many of you are familiar with the conversation.
In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic locked down our community of communicators in our homes and our bedroom offices, I got a call from Jane Randall, the former head of communications for Kate Spade.
Today, Jane is a sought after consultant in domestic violence and social issues for clients such as NASCAR and an NFL.
Our discussion that night sparked one of those cathartic pandemic experiments. We formed a cohort of committed connected communicators looking for an antidote to isolation.
and burnout. One of those cohorts, and I know you're over there someplace, was the then Chair of Page, Charlene Willis.
I thank the group that helped us start that. The conversation was and is an exciting, engaging, informative forum for expertise, information, and a refuge from this information.
Like the Dialogue Project, we took the view that a real discussion requires a willingness for all parties to be exposed to ideas that challenge their established beliefs.
If there was one tagline for the conversation which we hear a lot from people is, I learned something there I couldn't have learned anywhere else.
I thank those people that helped us start that and help us continue. In January of 2021, with vaccines on the horizon and the end seemingly in sight, we had invited the CEO of a rapid testing company, the chief virologist from MIT, and the head of
the chief medical officer from Moderna to brief us on global vaccine progress. That session was scheduled for January 7, 2021.
That morning I had the unenviable task of holding these three generous people and telling them we kind of need to move in a different direction.
And one of our cohort was able to convince Tom Friedman to address the group, so we discussed what had happened in Washington DC day earlier, and it was extremely lively discussion as you might expect.
Finally, the Eisenhower Institute. Some of you know me for a while, know of my deep devotion to my alma mater, Gettysburg College.
Most of you don't now, that of all the executive search site conducted over my 40-year career, none was more meaningful than the search that Haman Associates conducted for a new executive director of Gettysburg College's
renowned Eisenhower Institute. Part of the significance of that, by the way, this was not a communicator, but this was what was going be running a public affairs think tank.
The Eisenhower Institute honors the memory of a soldier and statesman who dedicated his life to freedom, peace, and the fight against totalitarianism.
In his humble way, I'd like to get better than non-partisan bipartisan. I like the middle way. In that spirit, the Institute's mission is to train the next generation of public policy leaders to place the highest priority on learning to understand and respect people from other points of view, other countries, other cultures.
As we set our search out for a new head, it was really important that we found somebody who was a proven leader with gravitas and independence, and also somebody who could be objective and bipartisan.
That's a lot. that's asking. And by the way, the president of the college said to me, make sure you just don't round up a bunch of lefties.
So we were able to recruit a woman by the name of Tracy Potts, who was a distinguished journalist at a longtime NBC anchor and she's taken the institute to new heights and had the extreme good judgment to invite me to serve on the board of the Eisenhower Institute, which I do proudly.
All these public interest entities embody the page principles in their own way. A low page never wrote them down.
He lived them every day. Many of us learn the hard way that telling the truth can be stressful and risky and even at times professionally suicidal.
Still history and experience have taught us time and again that if we don't take the first page principle seriously, the rest don't much matter.
Author page believe business should say what The businesses should say what they do and do what they say. Before going corporate, he worked in government as a proud propagandist during World Wars I and II and became a close friend and trusted advisor to Dwight Eisenhower.
Page said, operating a big business in a democracy means operating in the public interest. If we succeed, we will be helping to make a better country for all of us to live in and better life for us all.
We should all be proud of being in this profession and being part of this organization. And again, I can't thank you enough for inviting me to be here tonight.
Thank you. Wow, that was great, you know, and just, you know, just to reinforce what a small world we live in, Tracy Potts and I are classmates from Northwestern University Graduate School, and you made a remarkable choice again, so.