Basil Towers
Director
Basil is a researcher and adviser on organisational reputation and the development of high performing Corporate Affairs or Communications functions.
He founded Hesleden Partners in 2005, acquired by Blue Rubicon in 2014, to help companies build strategic, operational and organisational approaches to reputation as a source of value, and to help Corporate Affairs to become the high performing function that enables this.
The research programme sits at the heart of the Blue Rubicon Institute for business reputation, an international centre of excellence for research, thinking and strategic consulting. Its core principles are that reputation is a precondition for strategic and operational success, and the outcome of organisational ambition, decisions, actions, performance and behaviour. The programme, which is in its 11th year, is undertaken in Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia amongst multi-national corporations. The research informs the development of proprietary models, tools and benchmarks.
Basil began his career at Burson Marsteller before moving to Shandwick (now Weber Shandwick), where he ultimately became Managing Director of Shandwick Communications and a Director of Shandwick UK, the holding company for 14 public relations consultancies. He established Christow Consultants, a corporate communications consultancy, in 1989. Christow subsequently developed a significant bank of reputation data and knowledge shared through research papers and the publication, Corporate Affairs.
Basil is a graduate of Exeter University, a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and the Public Relations Consultants Association. He is an Honorary Fellow of Glyndwr University, Wrexham where he was a Governor for six years and an Associate Fellow of Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation at the Saïd Business School.
Hesleden Partners established the Corporate Affairs Academy in partnership with the Saïd Business School’s Centre for Corporate Reputation in 2012.
