Picking up tips from NIB scandal

Breaking the Bank by George Lee and Charlie Bird tells the authors' story of how they broke the two NIB scandals earlier this year. The bank was broken in the story as a wild horse is. Tamed, but not dead. Since the journalism ended and the legal processes have begun, NIB is still there to be broken, as in destroyed. One possible outcome is still that it will lose its banking licence.

Business managers, and bankers in particular, will probably read this story with some thought of what it might tell them about how to deal with a public relations crisis arising out of a threatening media story. Such reflectiveness will probably be submerged in some quarters by boundless schadenfreude, although the person caught in adultery could have some words of wisdom to pass on to anyone too quick to snigger at NIB's "misfortune".

The first lesson is terribly ordinary: just say no; be clean; be honest. For if you do so in your business, there's no scope for any real story. And if muck-raking is attempted, a proficient PR adviser, quick lawyers and strong leadership could rout the media. This is what RTE feared - that it would be taken to the cleaners for millions by NIB if it got anything wrong. RTE didn't fail. But like any drama, it was not at all clear last January that the cards would fall the way they later did. This part of the story, the threat of the libel laws, is told well in the book.

It is an extreme, but not entirely rare scenario that a business should have to manage a media crisis arising from allegations of scandalous illegality. A more moderate situation would be that there is something not illegal, but embarrassing or likely to provoke protests, which a business may be engaging in, or merely tolerating. There is something to hide from public view, in other words.

A clear lesson from the NIB saga for both extreme and moderate scenarios is that the bad management of people and the creation of disaffection will eventually rebound badly, even fatally, on the business.

This book serves a useful function to remind anyone with something to hide not that somehow or other Charlie Bird and George Lee will be sure to unearth it, but that someone, somewhere knows a lot. Since some people always know, it is simply a matter of motivation for that information to be leaked. This year was one for going to the media. To say that journalists are mere typewriters, as barrister Adrian Hardiman asserted, is as sensible as saying that barristers are the mere mouthpieces of clever solicitors. No viable PR strategy treats journalists as typewriters, whether they are hostile or not. The skill and methods of the media must surely be better understood and anticipated than that.

The skill evident in this book, albeit written by the journalists, is not so much in the unearthing of new information by their own efforts, as in making sources comfortable to reveal it, and then knowing how it can be used. That's not to be underestimated.

However, this book is not a full case study, for business or journalism. In reading the story, we are left dying to know what was going on at the same time in other places - in NIB, the Central Bank, the Revenue, Murray Consultants (who come out rather badly, not surprisingly) and Matheson Ormsby Prentice, NIB's solicitors. Unfortunately, we'll probably never know it all, but we could do with more.

A word about the book, as a book. Blackwater Press has done no justice to the authors by skimping dreadfully. Its presentation doesn't reach the standard of homemade, desktop publishing. There is no index. The layout shows little evidence of design.

In places, the narrative is too much like a storyboard, too much under the obvious influence of TV. The device of the authors writing about themselves in the third person, surnames only, doesn't work. The editing also allows the story to proceed up to the point where NIB computer print-outs are leaked and then you realise you're on the last page and that's it.

Finally, one can only say that the better part of valour should have allowed at least one incident to be dropped. The backgrounds of Mr Lee in RTE Current Affairs and Mr Bird in RTE News ended up in their only, heated, disagreement, which was made up in achingly touchy-feely style. Please, lads.

Perhaps a media management lesson is to make sure you drive the old wedge between RTE News and Current Affairs, which, we learn, co-operated here for the first time on a major story. Can this be true? Is it a scandal? Put Mr Bird and Mr Lee on to it.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist.