Chase, W. Howard

W. Howard Chase is best known for coining the term issue management. A man of unique intellectual and experiential depth, Chase argued for the following statement as the official definition of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) in 1947: “Public relations is an operating philosophy that integrates the corporation into the daily lives of the people it serves” (Crane, 2003, p. 49). With this line of reasoning, Chase was one of a few leaders who recognized that constant change and innovation were necessary not only for how people practiced public relations but also for how the profession was defined. As businesses were sharply criticized during the turbulent 1960s, he was primed to demand more responsiveness and leadership from practitioners and helped revolutionize the practice in many ways during the 1970s and 1980s.

A Phi Beta Kappa cum laude graduate of the University of Iowa, Chase received the Sanxay Award granted to “the outstanding senior who gives promise of achieving the highest career.” Postgraduate studies included the London School of Economics and Harvard University. Dongguk University in Seoul, Korea, the largest Buddhist university in the world, awarded Chase an honorary doctoral degree in economics. He taught at Harvard-Radcliffe, Drake University, New York Polytechnic Institute, The George Washington University, and the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Connecticut, where he introduced the first course ever offered on issue management.

As the first chair of the Executive Committee of PRSA, Chase was one of many leaders of the profession who helped to found this organization of working professionals. Chase twice received the PRSA's Gold Anvil Award for “distinguished professional proficiency.”

Chase's corporate service as officer or director included American Can Company, General Mills, and General Foods. In 1951, Chase assumed the post of political public relations director for U.S. Army Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of all Republican National Convention arrangements for Eisenhower's presidential nomination in 1952. Subsequently, he served as assistant secretary of commerce for the initial Korean War mobilization. He also served as deputy administrator for the Office of Defense Mobilization under Charles Wilson, Lucius Clay, and Sidney Weinberg. He served as a trustee at Wellesley College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Mannes College of Music in New York City.

In 1962, Chase created the Council for Management of Change, with the monthly newsletter, The Innovation and Management of Change (IMC), as an incubator of his ideas. The newsletter's thesis was “The principle of responsibility of senior executives today is the successful management of change itself.”

In 1976, he coined the term issue management as part of a robust discussion centering on the question: How should management respond to the deep and wide criticism being heaped on corporate America during the 1970s? With the publication of his 1984 book, Issue Management, Origins of the Future, Chase presented his signature comprehensive approach to strategic issue management. He defined the new field's objectives, in the debut edition (April 15, 1976) of the newsletter Corporate Public Issues and Their Management (CPI), as follows: “to introduce and validate a breakthrough in corporate management design and practice in order to manage corporate public policy issues at least as well or better than the traditional management of profit center operations” (Chase, 1976, n.p.). That same year, the Institute for Public Issues Management, of which Chase was founder and director, in cooperation with the Graduate School of Business at the University of Connecticut, sponsored the first of a series of seminars on issue analysis and techniques for corporate reorganization of public policy functions.

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