The Piar Podcast - Interviews with Global PR & Comms leaders

The Art of the Possible: Why More CCOs Aren't at the Table YetThe CCO role is more vital than ever. CEOs understand the importance of communications. The world is more volatile. Stakeholders are multiplying. Yet the number of executives with the formal title of Chief Communications Officer remains remarkably small. Why? And what can senior communications leaders do about it?In this episode of The Piar Podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Tabita Andersson, author of "Chief Communications Officers at Work" and a senior communications leader with over 25 years of experience across agencies, in-house teams, and freelance consulting in the B2B industry. Tabita has personally interviewed CCOs from large global organizations, and her book unpacks what she calls "the art of the possible" for communications professionals who want to reach the C-suite.What You'll Learn:Business Acumen Is Non-Negotiable - Every CCO Tabita interviewed ranked business acumen at the top of required competencies. Communications professionals are skilled at writing, presenting, and press releases. But many reach senior positions only to realize they lack commercial and management understanding. The CCOs in her book gained it different ways: some went back to school, others rotated across functions, one came from a sales and marketing background before entering communications. There's no single path, but there's no skipping this step either.You Already Have the Bird's Eye View - CCOs are often the only people in an organization, aside from the CEO, who work across every function and stakeholder group. This positioning is a competitive advantage. It means communications can connect dots that others miss, bring critical thinking to strategic planning, and spot gaps, blind spots, and blockers before decisions are locked in. The key is getting invited to the table early, not after decisions are made.Ordering Chaos - Strategic communications means bringing systems, processes, and plans to what you do. But you can't be overly prescriptive about everything. Tabita describes it as balancing frameworks with flexibility. Crisis scenario planning, tabletop exercises, and "what if" workshops train a muscle. The more you train it, the stronger it gets when you actually need it.Build Trust Before the Crisis Hits - One CEO told Tabita: build trust early, so when something happens, you can skip the niceties and go straight into action. CCOs work as trusted advisors and confidants, handling sensitive information constantly. That's why CEO departures often correlate with CCO departures. The relationship is that tightly coupled.The Pincer Movement - Tabita is passionate about opening more CCO roles. But it won't happen automatically. It requires dual action: communications leaders stepping forward, building relationships with C-level executives, and demonstrating value beyond media relations and internal comms. And it requires CEOs and other C-suite leaders opening their minds to what a strong communications leader can contribute to strategy, not just execution.The profession has come a long way in 10-15 years. There weren't many CCOs to count back then. But there's still distance to cover before the role reaches parity with positions like CMO. For senior communications leaders who see themselves reaching that level, this episode offers both the encouragement and the reality check you need.

How do you grow from tactical executor to strategic advisor in communications? What skills separate those who stagnate from those who advance? In this episode of The Piar Podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Keith Berman—a no-nonsense internal and executive communications professional whose career spans companies from 20-person startups to Fortune 10 businesses with 250,000 employees—to explore the skills and mindset needed to grow in this profession.Keith's perspective is refreshingly direct: "I just say what's on my mind and unfortunately sometimes the filter just magically goes poof." His career across telecommunications, entertainment, B2B SaaS, healthcare, industrial, food and beverage, medtech, and insurance gives him a unique vantage point on what drives career advancement.What You'll Learn:Think Like a Central Nervous System – Keith's framework for understanding strategic value: you're not just sending messages, you're translating executive strategy into actionable steps for every level. "The executive team is the brain. Communications carries signals through the system. But critically, the system is bidirectional. You need to carry signals back—speak truth to power when something isn't working."Psychology Is Your Superpower – Keith's undergraduate psychology degree has been instrumental in his growth. "You've got to know how people will think when they hear or read something. People take action based on emotional response. We're not entirely logical. If you're really good at your job, you create the emotional connection that drives the desired action." Understanding cognitive biases and behavioral patterns becomes a competitive advantage.Learn How the Business Actually Works – Keith describes going directly to CFOs to ask them to teach him about the business. "Can you teach me what it means to calculate EBITDA? They've been appreciative because it shows curiosity. Now I can walk into conversations more well-rounded and avoid proposing something that will destroy our revenue stream." Business acumen isn't optional for growth—it's the foundation of strategic credibility.Move Beyond the Mechanism – Too many people see communications as just execution—send the email, post on the intranet. "We do so much more in strategy and translation. External comms keeps an eye on the market. Internal comms surfaces insights from across the organization. If you want to grow, demonstrate that strategic value, not just execute tasks."Navigate AI Thoughtfully – Keith warns about AI's impact on career pathways. "AI takes in everything, averages it to the middle, and produces content that's palatable for everyone. That doesn't stand out. More concerning: if you remove entry-level grunt work and outsource it to AI, you destroy the lower rungs of the career ladder. How will people learn why certain communications work? That's how you grow to the manager level."The Growth Mindset – Curiosity, willingness to learn business fundamentals, understanding psychology, thinking strategically rather than tactically, and maintaining the human elements AI cannot replicate—these are the differentiators for advancement.Whether you're early in your communications career or looking to make the jump from manager to strategic leader, Keith's insights offer a practical blueprint for growth in this profession.

"Many may simply not want to learn the truth of what's happening in the PR and comms world." With that warning, host Tan Sukhera opens one of the most consequential conversations in The Piar Podcast series—a deep dive into why correlation is not causation, and how causal AI is solving the measurement problem that has plagued PR and communications for decades.Dr. Frank Buckler is an author, researcher, and CEO of SUPRA whose work is built on a simple idea: growth comes from understanding what truly drives success, not from copying generic best practices. With a background spanning marketing, engineering, management consulting, and corporate leadership, he's helped some of the world's largest organizations solve problems that big agencies and big consulting couldn't. He began researching AI in 1994, driven by one question: why do people buy? His PhD work developed a causal AI methodology that remains SUPRA's foundation today—evidence first, informed by knowledge, not assumption.What You'll Learn:Why Causality Matters – In business, PR, and communications, we're driving actions. Actions that work build on truth—not facts, but the hidden mechanisms between action and outcomes. Frank uses powerful analogies: scanning a computer's circuit board shows where electrons flow, but not what the processor does. Scanning the brain shows activity, but not how thinking works. "You cannot measure causality. You can only infer it."The Complexity Problem – Technology is complicated but not complex. Complex problems have many drivers that interact unpredictably, with effects that emerge at unknown times. Social science lags behind technology precisely because human behavior is exponentially more complex than engineering problems.The Lazy Why Trap – Business leaders invest enormous sums mapping business performance but weirdly accept the first answer to "why" things happen. As Rory Sutherland calls it, "the lazy why." Frank shares devastating examples of spurious correlations that cost companies millions.The Lottery Company Revelation – Everyone believed older people were the target audience because older people play more lottery. Causal AI revealed the opposite: younger people are more likely to play when all else is equal. The real drivers are habituation and winning experiences that accumulate over time. Time correlates with age, but age doesn't cause lottery playing. The same pattern appeared with charitable donations.Marketing Mix Modeling Failures – Traditional models create false confidence by showing correlations between spending and sales. But they miss the mechanics. Without understanding true causality, companies optimize for the wrong things.Counterfactual Reasoning – Causal AI builds an "inner mechanics machine" of PR and communications. Once built, you can simulate scenarios that never happened in reality—war gaming future outcomes, predicting impacts of investment changes, testing campaign components before launch. Like a weather forecaster narrowing a hurricane's path, causal AI constrains possibilities based on true mechanisms.The Kitchen Sink Confession – Tan admits his own past failures: "I used to layer earned media coverage on top of sales data, add HR data, business performance data, hoping to prove causation. But I was just creating spurious correlation. There's a time lag to impact. Unless I test it, I wouldn't know it."What This Means for PR Leaders – The holy grail of PR measurement is being found. This changes everything: career pathing, strategic counsel, trust and confidence in the boardroom. As execution gets relegated to AI, human leaders must develop decision-making, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills to interpret results, communicate findings, and inspire action.

What separates a vendor from an indispensable partner? The ability to think like an owner. In this episode of The Piar Podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Jon Amar—strategic communications consultant, former startup founder, and celebrated for his no-nonsense hot takes on the PR industry—to explore what it actually means to win in public relations.Jon brings a unique edge: he's taken a startup from zero to acquisition (Vetted, a PR technology platform acquired in 2022) and led communications across 20+ industries. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fortune, and The Washington Post. But more importantly, he understands what founders and CEOs think about every day—and that changes everything.What You'll Learn:The Owner Mindset Shift – Stop being a line item in a marketing budget. Start getting invited into the boardroom. Jon explains how to switch from vendor to partner by understanding business goals, how clients make money, and where they need to show up to close deals. "You want to become so indispensable that you're basically the head communicator for all external and internal communications."Why Big Agencies Struggle – Jon reveals the reality inside large agencies: quarterly profit chasing, constant turnover, and the "bait and switch" where senior people close deals then disappear. "Clients feel like they're not getting what they paid for because these agencies are so focused on quarterly growth and scale."Building Business Acumen – Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but anyone can develop an owner's perspective. Jon shares how reading business journals daily taught him to think in business terms and speak the language of executives.The 7:1 Crisis – PR professionals now outnumber journalists roughly seven to one. Newsrooms are shrinking, reporters are underpaid and overworked, and earned media has become harder than ever to secure.The Digital PR Collision – SEO experts are entering earned media without understanding PR fundamentals, creating confusion about what PR actually is. "They're making clients think PR is just link building. It's not. PR is trust building." Jon sees 2026 as the year traditional PR and SEO must unify.The Corporate Newsroom Revolution – With AI services pulling more from company blogs, Jon predicts renewed investment in brand journalism. Big Tech is hiring head of content roles paying $200,000-$400,000. "Companies that will succeed in 2026 are treating their communications platform as if it were a newsroom." His advice? Hire journalists or former journalists.Whether you're building a consultancy, leading in-house communications, or proving your strategic value to the C-suite, Jon's insights offer a blueprint for positioning yourself as the indispensable communications architect your organization can't live without.

Internal Communications or Internal Combustion: Mike Klein on Surviving the Big ShiftAI isn't just automating work. It's accelerating it. And that acceleration is about to expose every crack in your organization's decision-making architecture. In this episode of The Piar Podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Mike Klein, one of internal communications' most connected and candid voices, to unpack what he calls "the big shift" and why the next six months matter more than the next three years.Mike Klein is founder of the #WeLeadComms recognition program, editor-in-chief of Strategic Magazine, and an IABC Fellow. He holds an MBA from London Business School and has worked with large enterprises across seven countries on culture and communication challenges. Currently on a six-week research tour across India, Mike brings a ground-level perspective on what's actually happening versus what industry surveys suggest.What You'll Learn:The Acceleration Problem Nobody's Talking About - ChatGPT does in two minutes what used to take an intern two weeks. But here's what matters more: when AI accelerates your work, it accelerates decision speed across the entire organization. Reports that took three months now arrive in days. Leadership won't have two weeks to review them. Maybe a day. Maybe an hour. Most business cultures are built for escalation, not decision. This mismatch is where internal combustion happens.The Talent Disruption Triple Threat - Three forces are converging: AI automation, white-collar layoffs at profitable companies, and Gen Z entering the workforce while hiring freezes lock them out. The old social contract of loyalty-for-security is dead. "We want your loyalty, but we're no longer giving you security. That's not a model that's going to work."Why Internal Comms Gets Trapped - Most internal comms functions report to either HR or marketing. Neither comfortably hosts a 360-degree organizational perspective. HR wants its KPIs hit. Marketing wants products pushed. Mike offers three paths out: become a skilled negotiator, build C-suite allies who will defend your budget, or find an organization where comms reports directly to leadership with real organizational dependency.Training's Brutal Moment - People aren't buying training right now. Companies are unsure who'll still be employed. Employees are uncertain which skills will exist in a year. Mike's advice: forget training on AI (you'll learn by using it). Instead, invest in understanding adjacent fields. Learn PR if you're in internal comms. Learn business strategy. Learn sales. Understand how the business actually makes money.The Differentiation Endgame - When AI handles 60-80% of execution and every competitor uses similar tools, what's left? "The sole source of differentiation is going to be the communication, the decision fluency of the organization, and the compelling nature of the organization's story." No function is better positioned to deliver that than communications.Throughout the conversation, Mike emphasizes thinking like both CEO and employee simultaneously, understanding stakeholder motivations beyond transactions, and building the judgment muscles that AI cannot replicate. His message is direct: this isn't a three-year transformation. It's happening now.

Crisis Communication Isn't Improv: Philippe Borremans on High-Stakes Decision-MakingCrisis communications isn't improvising well in the moment when things go wrong. It's a high-stakes discipline where hesitation, confusion, and a poorly chosen word can cost lives, trust, and reputation. In this inaugural episode of the Piar podcast, host Tan Sukhera sits down with Philippe Borremans—one of the world's foremost experts in risk and crisis communications—to unpack the dangerous assumptions that derail even well-prepared organizations.Philippe brings 25+ years of experience advising global organizations including the World Health Organization and the European Council across 30+ countries. As author of Mastering Crisis Communication with Chat GPT and former president of the International Public Relations Association, he's built an ironclad reputation for sage wisdom, unwavering commitment to putting people first, and telling C-suite leaders what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.What You'll Learn:The False Confidence Trap – Why having crisis plans for cyber attacks, product recalls, and other scenarios creates dangerous complacency. In today's polycrisis and permacrisis environment, flexibility beats comprehensive planning every time. The best-prepared organizations train constantly through lunch-and-learns, tabletops, and e-learning—not just annual reviews.Why Comms Still Can't Get a Seat at the Table – Philippe pulls no punches: communications professionals remain too conservative with technology, speak the wrong language, and fail to make the business case. "If you're pushing out press releases and making the company look good, you're running a cost center. CEOs are right to see it that way." The solution? Understand the business inside and out, translate comms activities to bottom-line impact, and stop asking "how do we measure?" when the answer is already obvious to finance teams.The Risk vs. Crisis Distinction – Risk communication happens before the crisis—it's strategic horizon scanning, predictive analytics, and stakeholder preparation. Crisis communication is reactive response when things go wrong. Organizations that conflate the two miss the opportunity to prevent disasters entirely.The Heathrow Disconnect – When Heathrow went into blackout, business continuity professionals celebrated a 12-hour restoration at one of the world's largest airports. Comms professionals saw a reputation disaster. This gap reveals why crisis preparedness requires cross-functional collaboration between comms, risk management, and business continuity teams.The "Rebranding" Problem – In one telling anecdote, Philippe was called in by risk management and business continuity teams to discuss multi-country crisis preparedness. When he asked why comms wasn't in the meeting, the answer? "They're busy with rebranding." This encapsulates why comms struggles for strategic recognition—and what must change.Throughout the conversation, Philippe emphasizes that modern crisis communication requires understanding interconnected risks, speaking the language of business impact, and building flexible response capabilities. With AI enabling better horizon scanning and predictive analytics, the tools exist. The question is whether comms professionals will step up to use them strategically.Whether you're an agency leader, in-house PR manager, or communications consultant, this episode delivers the frameworks and mindset shifts you need to elevate from tactical executor to strategic advisor. Philippe's direct approach and real-world examples make this essential listening for anyone responsible for organizational reputation in an age of continuous volatility.