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Management is a skill and a great example of nature and nurture coming together as one. In PR, there’s no way to skip straight to management. It’s vocational enough that you simply can’t start delegating without the proper understanding of what you’re asking of people, what you expect from them and, as much as anything, experiencing good and bad management yourself.

But in recent years, other industries have pushed forward with a dynamic that ignores this – the graduate trainee scheme. The idea of these is that if you bring in talent with allegedly great potential and fast track it, you make sure the cream of the crop gets to where it’s needed in your business as quickly as possible.

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An interesting slide deck came to my attention today via @JordanStone, which takes a look at examples where companies have failed on social media.

But the key fact is that the story doesn’t end there – it then looks at what they did to recover and the intelligent moves they made to correct the situation or turn it into a positive.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff being written about failure today – seemingly a growing buzz around the idea that it does happen and you shouldn’t be afraid to take risks which might result in it. What matters is what you do next.

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As you may have heard, last week my agency Wildfire PR released some social media research which saw some pretty excellent pickup all over the place.

As PRs, we’re all pretty used to the value of good coverage- traditionally,  it’s one of the great magical currencies of what we do and a satisfying achievement.  But it’s easy to start seeing it in pragmatic terms as a commodity listed in Excel, meeting targets and making clients happy.  It’s easy to lose sight of what coverage may mean to clients, not just in the marketing department but for everyone from the founders downwards.

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By now, you’ll have seen the excellent recent Old Spice ads as well as the ingenious @oldspice followup campaign.

But the thing is, as good as they are, its not going to make me buy old spice. And I don’t think I’m the only one. They’re amusing precisely because they take the piss out of the OTT manliness traditionally associated with the brand.

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