The PRmoment Leaders 2026 programme most recently featured a masterclass from Charlotte West, vice president of global corporate communications for Lenovo.
Charlotte has risen to the global level in-house after a long career agency-side within the Chime Group and at Harvard (now part of VCCP Roar). She gained a lot of attention on LinkedIn late last year with a thought-provoking post that explored the updated requirements for PR leadership in-house. I responded with a blog post looking at the same topic from an agency-side perspective.
In her masterclass, Charlotte further developed that same thinking. Key points from her session included:
Comms now has a high-stakes strategic mandate
Reputational risk often takes precedence now over other factors in c-suite decision-making
The modern comms profile requires the ability to make split-second judgments with incomplete data, requiring a ‘no drama’ approach to issues management
Comms must act as a corporate guardian against the ethical threats posed by AI both to and by the business
Reputation is the only metric that matters
In this short video, Charlotte offers some smart guidance words around optimising the client-agency relationship. Namely, that agencies often do their best work, in collaboration with the client, when making things awkward and uncomfortable for everyone...
We continue to build out a compelling masterclass calendar for PRmoment Leaders in 2026, featuring leading client-side figures like Charlotte alongside the best thinkers operating agency-side.
Click here for full details of the current semester.
Get in touch with me directly if you're interested in boosting professional development for you and your agency.
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