How much is crisis prevention worth?

This communicator wants to measure his worth by the disasters communicators prevent—do you agree?

Bill Boyd is kind of an idea guy.

He’s a veteran of corporate communication wars at Weyerhaeuser, AT&T Wireless and REI, Boyd now works at a sort of consulting co-op called Outsource Marketing; he also heads up an IABC-affiliated organization of senior communicators in Seattle.

And it seems he’s forever coming up with new communication models, looking for solutions to problems like “information overload” (he’s the only communicator on the steering committee of an organization formed to do just that) and calling communication trade editors with wacky ideas.

Like the notion he approached Ragan.com with recently. While he was working on a project with a company’s risk-assessment team, an idea struck Boyd like a bolt out of the blue.

Maybe after all these years of trying and largely failing to establish the return-on-investment of communications—the positive effects communications has on the bottom line—perhaps communicators would be better off focusing on the organizational mishaps that our work prevents.