I wasn’t able to make it that first year, but I’ve been faithfully attending ever since and I have to say it’s one of the best things I’ve done in PR.

There are superb keynote speakers like psychologist Dr. Robert Cialdini or Robert Scoble. I first learned about social media at CA from Giovanni Rodriguez, who piqued my interest in the blogosphere and started my head swimming.

Whenever I leave a spring conference, I’m filled with fresh ideas, energized by the people and excited about our industry. It’s the highlight of my year.

Hope to see you there.

Gini’s Note: Ben Wheatley and I coordinated the breakout sessions for this year’s conference. We focused on finding the best of the best to discuss profitability, people, and potential, including other communicators, but also leaders from other industries.

See you in Palm Springs May 31-June 2!

Mike Greece, who heads Padilla’s New York Office, has long been a proponent of applying “lean” principles to professional service organizations. Here’s the abstract from a roundtable he’s delivering to the PRSA Counselors Academy Spring Conference at the end of May. Might be an event worth considering if you’re an agency leader.

“Lean, the business philosophy that has driven Toyota’s relentless rise to the top of the auto industry, is making significant inroads into banking and financial services. And the results are impressive. The gains through eliminating waste and improved customer service after adopting Lean are hard to ignore.

In its simplest definition, Lean is a business and operations improvement methodology built on Toyota principles such as cross-functional collaboration, “time management,” reducing “waste” and continuous improvement. Waste is defined as activities that do not add value in the delivery of a product or service to the customer. Examples include waiting time between steps in a process, chasing after missing information, errors, producing unneeded reports, and requiring too many reviews or approvals of work. A key Lean tool is to engage cross-functional groups of employees and executives in collaborative “kaizen events” to map work processes and identify activities that can be eliminated or changed immediately to reduce end-to-end delivery time while also reducing costs and errors.

By implementing the right Lean tools and practices at each level of the organization, they create a continuous improvement mindset throughout the culture. For example, senior leadership may leverage a “value-stream vision session event” as a methodology to support the continuous improvement goal of communicating, translating and deploying a new retail mortgage strategy. Middle managers may rely on Kaizen, Business Reviews, and “War” Rooms to drive weekly and monthly execution to operating commitments. And first level managers and employees may use MDI (Managing for Daily Improvement) tools, Performance Boards, and Point Kaizens for daily continuous improvement of existing processes.”

It’s been everything I can do not to comment on legal analyst, Andrew Cohen (yes, an attorney), when he went on CBS and said, “Show me a PR person who is “accurate” and “truthful,” and I’ll show you a PR person who is unemployed.”

But rather than comment on either (until I’ve had the chance to read the book), I am commenting on ethics in PR.  Like Matt Kucharski, I think a profession that was built around creating and sustaining positive reputations would have fewer ethical dilemmas or critics, such as attorneys.  Turns out, our profession is in the same league as personal injury attorneys, corporate raiders, and politicians.

This article by PRNews is based on surveys with members of the PRSA Counselors Academy, and points to some fairly interesting divergence in opinions on the role and importance of ethics in the field.

Personally, I take great affront to this survey, and to the comparison to ambulance chasers.  If a client were to ask us to “spin” a story or leave certain facts out in order to get better coverage, we’d resign that business immediately.  But then, I guess without unethical people in our profession (thanks Scott McClellan!), we wouldn’t have this blog, would we?

Please forgive me as I brag that I “had” to go to Mexico for the PRSA Counselors Academy conference.  Hey, I didn’t organize it (at least not this year)!  The photo above is of the lovely Westin, which is where the Conference was held.

Rather than talk about PR spin today, I thought I’d list the top 10 PR lessons I learned while in Cabo.

1. Creating client service teams around your staff’s passions makes for a much more fun work environment.

2. Asking your staff once a quarter what they love about working for your company helps with recruitment – you’re talking about reality and not just your vision with job candidates.

3. Emerging media is just that – constantly emerging and we have to stay on top of all of it, not just blogs, Wiki, and Second Life.

4. Robert Scoble is sheer genius; I mean, who creates celebrity status and makes money out of a passion?

5. Use emerging media on your business first; after all your agency should be your most important client.  Then create a case study to show how well it can work for your clients.  There are two firms I most admire in this area: Shift Communications and Eastwick Communications.

6. The big PR firms are becoming more integtrated – we should all consider it.

7. Running a business, even if the business does PR, is still running a business – the top people have to run the business and stay out of the day-to-day work.

8. Taking your firm international isn’t as scary as it seems.

9. When interviewing prospective employees, ask yourself “could this person do my job”?  If the answer is yes, hire them immediately.  If the answer is no, pass on them.

10. When you put a bunch of senior-level PR people in the room, they all want to share their success and failure.  But what is said in Cabo, stays in Cabo.

And three little things I learned from the mountain biking guides: When you bike down the mountain, don’t fall in a crevice, don’t fall off your bike, and don’t bleed – they don’t want to get their van dirty.