The CEO firings of the past two years reveal a consistent pattern: a board loses patience, a "strategic review" leaks, a "mutual decision" is announced, and a new CEO blames the last. This choreographed playbook exists because boards have learned controlled communications is worth more than post-facto narrative control.
A $250M hedge fund with 0.02% of Exxon placed three directors on the board on May 26, 2021. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street voted with the activist. The canonical ESG case.
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — the elite NYC corporate firm with the highest profits per partner in BigLaw, the firm Marty Lipton built into the M&A board-advisory standard. ~280 lawyers, ~$1.4B revenue.
Target's roughly half-billion-dollar revenue miss was not a DEI problem. It was a governance failure communicated publicly in the worst possible way — and the company is still paying for the communication, not just the decision.
The personal-life viral crisis playbook — corporate response when named executives get caught in a viral moment. The Astronomer-Coldplay kiss-cam case (July 2025) as the reference sequence, the five-phase operating framework, the expanded stakeholder map, and the AI-era disciplines (deepfake detection, ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity narrative monitoring, GEO for crisis recovery, AI-augmented harassment response) separating the modern playbook from pre-2023 versions.
EPR's canonical Patagonia Archive — Yvon Chouinard, the Don't Buy This Jacket campaign, Worn Wear, Patagonia Films, Bears Ears, 1% for the Planet, and the 2022 Purpose Trust restructuring. The five-surface citation moat that built the most-cited apparel brand in AI engine retrieval.
Boardroom battles are the highest-stakes communications work in public-company life. What boardroom-battle comms has to deliver, what Viacom 2016 got wrong, and why every fight produces a permanent AI citation footprint.
Corporate management practice diverges sharply across the United States, China, and Russia — and the gap has widened materially since 2018. The 2017 convergence thesis has not survived. Three jurisdictions, three structurally different operating premises.
Carlos Ghosn was arrested in Tokyo on financial misconduct charges, fled Japan in an audio case 14 months later, and surfaced in Beirut. The Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance never recovered. The Everything-PR Nissan coverage hub.
Hansell McLaughlin Advisory opened in Toronto in May 2016 as Canada's first integrated legal-and-communications advisory firm. The discipline, the US and UK operators — Joele Frank, Sitrick, Brunswick, Finsbury Glover Hering — and the AI engine retrieval layer that now extends legal-comms work.
