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Mark Penn ranks #13 on PRWeek’s PR Power List of the 25 most powerful leaders in the communications industry in 2010.

Mark Penn
Worldwide president and CEO, Burson-Marsteller

Love him or hate him, public affairs guru Mark Penn has the ear of some of the most powerful people in the world, having worked with luminaries such as Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In terms of Washington power brokers, Burson-Marsteller’s Penn stands right at the top of the food chain. His challenge is to remain relevant and influential in a rapidly changing global political climate, and to lead his Burson- Marsteller empire from the front and ensure key staff members come along for the ride.

Download the PR Power List 2009 (pdf format)

Mark Penn ranks #10 on PRWeek’s PR Power List of the 25 most powerful leaders in the industry in 2009.

Mark Penn [’08 rank - #10]
CEO, Burson-Marsteller

Last year wasn’t easy for Mark Penn. His candidate lost the presidential primary, and his actions were publicly cited for the loss of his firm’s client, Colombia. Yet Penn remains resilient. He is active on client work, including pitching key accounts, and he doesn’t shy away from defending the industry. When MSNBC personality Rachel Maddow took Penn and his firm to task for its client roster, including AIG, Penn defended the importance of its services, even to embattled companies, in an internal memo. And despite Hillary Clinton’s defeat, there’s no doubt that Penn will remain politically influential in the future.

Download the PR Power List 2009 (pdf format)

Why don’t you start by telling me some of the toughest moments you’ve been through when advising people in tough situations.

The truth is that in today’s world, there’s no success without failure. If you can’t tolerate a failure, it’s virtually impossible to have a successful life. The road to success is paved with roadblocks. Difficult moments, things that have gone wrong, attacks you didn’t expect. To be successful you have to be able to overcome and learn from failure. The moment you lose that perspective, you don’t climb back from that.

Maybe it’s easier said than done. How do you remind yourself at the toughest moment that it’s an inevitable part of success and that you just need to get through it? How do you keep a long-term view?

You’re right to say that it’s not easy—to really understand what you’re about, where you’re going. If you look at movies, almost all movies and popular culture are based on the idea of someone who’s different standing up. But in reality, being different and standing up and having a counter view is one of the hardest things to do in our society.

I try to remember that it’s not necessarily about what everybody else thinks at that moment. It’s really about, “Are you going to have the kind of strength and fortitude to carry through with what you believe in, even against the odds?” That’s what’s made me a tough competitor and a fighter that people relied upon through their difficult situations. When you find yourself in difficult situations, are you the shoemaker without shoes? You have to be able to find some of that personal fortitude.

Are you thinking of any movies in particular?

I grew up on movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Inherit the Wind that were always about standing up for what you believe regardless of the pressure. Today you can go to even kids’ movies and they are always about the bee, the penguin, or the cub who grows up by standing up.

My most successful strategies—like “soccer moms” in ‘96 for President Clinton or the Upstate Strategy for Hillary in 2000—were always opposed by just about everyone, and I can tell you that fighting for things outside the zone of conventional wisdom will always take a lot of flak, and a lot of energy to sustain.

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Meet Clinton’s ‘Number Junkie’: Despite Influential Role in Clinton Campaign, ‘Microtrends’ Author Says He’s No Karl Rove

Mark Penn is a self-described numbers junkie who started out as a shy boy from the Bronx, N.Y. Penn’s shyness has actually become an asset — he wanted to discover what people were thinking without having to ask them.

Penn conducted his first poll at age 13. It was a poll about race relations in America, and the moment he sent it out, he said he realized, “Wow, I can find out what different people thought by sending out flyers and analyzing them, and being a different detective. & I always found it fascinating from this very first poll.”

He now polls on everything from the Iraq War to what television shows people watch (Republicans like “24,” he said. And for the last 10 years he has been the man that Bill and Hillary Clinton have enlisted to help them figure out what voters think.

Rumpled Mark Penn, Clinton Pollster, Goes Back to Battle

“…For more than a decade now, Mr. Penn, 53, has functioned as the Clintons’ left hemisphere, drafting and interpreting meticulous and incessant surveys to furnish them, along with his other clients, with the market-tested language and policies to get them into power—and keep them there.

In the words of Doug Schoen, his polling partner for more than 30 years in the firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, “Mark is somebody who is very, very comfortable with quantification. He is very comfortable with numbers and very comfortable to be able to see things in black and white.”

One gets the impression, talking to Mr. Penn, that he’d be happy enough dealing with data and nothing else…”

Clinton’s PowerPointer:
With Data and Slides, a Pollster Guides Campaign Strategy

It was fairly simple, Mark J. Penn said calmly to Vice President Al Gore, reporting the findings of an exhaustive survey he had conducted in the early stages of the 2000 presidential campaign. Voters liked Gore’s policies. They just didn’t like Gore.

Gore laughed, according to people who attended the meeting. He had heard that before. But the vice president, worried about the effect President Bill Clinton’s scandals might have on his campaign, had another question for his pollster: Was there any evidence of this “Clinton fatigue” that people kept talking about?

“I’m not tired of him,” Penn replied. “Are you?”

Mark Penn: The Most Important Man in Washington, London Times Magazine (2006)

Policy and Politics by the Numbers

One night a week, a select group of White House aides and Cabinet members would file into the Yellow Oval Room in the White House residence. And Bill Clinton, the most polished and talkative politician of his era, for once would let someone else do the talking: a disheveled man who even friends say was ill at ease except when the conversation turned to numbers.

The man was Clinton’s pollster. The weekly residence meeting was the place where this president got his fix of the data that drove a presidency.

As Clinton prepares to leave office 20 days from now, even his sharpest critics bow to his mastery of politics. This was a president who understood his times and became the dominant voice of them, who faced every conceivable adversity yet managed still to survive and prosper. What is less understood is that Clinton’s political gifts were more than the magic of personality. They were a set of precise techniques that relied on constant gauging of public opinion, and constant responses to it in ways large and small.

So Clinton’s legacy is in many ways a story about polls. It is not true, as some critics say, that Clinton always did what pollster Mark J. Penn’s numbers told him to do. It is true that no previous president read public opinion surveys with the same hypnotic intensity. And no predecessor has integrated his pollster so thoroughly into the policymaking operation of his White House.

Mark Penn: The Guru of Small Things, New York Times Magazine (2000)

Mark Penn: Masters of the Message, Time Magazine (1996)