CorpComms Magazine

'I am ashamed to say that when I came into corporate communications, I had a very high regard for journalists and a fairly poor regard for corporate communicators,' muses Peter Morgan. It is a common enough bias amongst journalists who switch to PR but Morgan, who went into PR from the BBC ten years ago and joined aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce as group communications director last November, admits he has since reversed that position.

'Over the past five years, that balance has changed a bit, and I find myself less sympathetic towards journalists and more sympathetic towards communicators,' he continues. 'I think journalists are now in a very, very difficult position. Journalists are now spread very thinly across their sectors, which have become so big that it's difficult for them to keep track of what's going on at all the companies. It's not because they are lazy or vindictive. The online requirement just puts enormous pressure on journalists to file immediately.'

A fun filled career

Poacher-turned-gamekeeper Morgan, 50, sounds like he never wants to go back to the other side. 'I had a fabulous 20 years at the BBC but I just thought that the next 20 years was going to be much less fun.' he says. 'In broadcast journalism, it's very hard to grow old gracefully. When I was thinking about leaving the BBC, someone said to me You'll be able to build a new career if you leave at 40 but not if you leave at 50. I think that was true then and it's probably truer now.'

His decade as the BBC's business correspondent and his final posting as Berlin correspondent certainly produced some memorable times and he particularly recalls a trip back to the Polish shipyards with Lech Walesa, covering the revolution in Albania ('as close as I ever came to war reporting'), and making three films in Afghanistan before 9/11.

Morgan's career in corporate communications has not been short of action either. He arrived from the BBC at Weber Shandwick, just as the dotcom bubble was bursting. The PR agency had built up a roster of dotcom clients and then cut costs as it suffered inevitable client losses but Morgan stayed three years and helped build up business again.

Then he was headhunted by BT Group, initially with great reluctance. 'When the headhunter called, I was not at all keen,' he recalls. BT's bureaucratic legacy from its public sector days were well-publicised and Morgan wasn't sure. But that all changed when he met the then chief executive Ben Verwaayen, now chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent.

'He absolutely convinced me that he was going to effect a fundamental change at BT,' he says. 'He wanted to put communications at the heart of that and I think he did both of those things. I went with Ben to the World Economic Forum in Delhi and I remember seeing at first hand the energy that it requires to be a CEO. We worked some unearthly hours and then, when we got back to Heathrow after all an all-night flight, he said Are you going into the office? and I said No. I'm going home to sleep. He couldn't understand that. He went into the office and worked a full day. He has amazing energy.'

Morgan joined BT as head of press but moved up to group director of communications after six months and stayed at the company for another five years. It was his first time in-house in PR and it was a baptism of fire as he came to grips with the media attention that constantly surrounds BT as a major consumer company. 'It was a really busy and challenging time,' he says. 'In communications, it's very easy when things are going well but much tougher when things are not, so it was a very educational experience. We had to deal with an awful lot of stories that were very dubious. There are companies that make money from people switching away from BT so there is always stuff being put around. You only have to look at the front page stories there were last December about BT Group chairman Sir Mike Rake being the only person in his village to get a broadband connection. It's a great example of how the press love to write about BT and the sort of coverage that tends to be directed around the retail company.'

A different challenge

Communicating mainly to a business-tobusiness audience at Rolls-Royce is an altogether calmer proposition for Morgan, who says he made the move because he wanted to be on the executive committee of a large company and work globally. 'BT has 20 million customers, while Rolls probably has about 1,000 so it's a very different sort of proposition,' he states, adding that the interest generated in the financial press about the transition between the two chief executives and two chairmen that he served there also needed a great deal of attention.

'There's much more crisis management in a week at BT than there is at Rolls-Royce in a month,' he adds. 'It's a lot calmer, there's much less news and a lot fewer stories explode out of nowhere and are then on the front pages of tabloid newspapers.'

Morgan also has a boss in Rolls' chief executive Sir John Rose who is much more publicity shy than the media-friendly Verwaayen but he says there is less need for publicity as the group is already ranked alongside Glaxo SmithKline, Vodafone, BP and Diageo as a major UK company respected globally.

'Sir John believes you should talk about the company, not about yourself,' he says, 'and there's less interest because it's business-to-business. But it's a company that people admire and it has a tremendous reputation.

Morgan, who is married to Caroline, a former journalist, and has three children, spent his first few months preparing for the annual results and building his team. However, he intends to travel widely around Rolls-Royce's operations to gain a detailed view of the operations. 'My communication style is very much open door, very informal and very much about common sense,' he says. 'I don't think PR is rocket science.'

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