Not many of us look over the parapet of our hotel to see a rocket-propelled grenade streaking up towards us. But that was what Mark Turnbull faced when he went out onto the roof to make a mobile phone call. Mind you, this was in one of the world's hottest spots. Luckily Turnbull suffered only minor injuries, despite being blown off his feet.
"It certainly shook me up a bit, and I take a more careful assessment of risk now," he says. "But it reminded me that you’ve got to live life on your own terms. If you’re not going to do something that matters, why do it at all?" And helping to promote democracy certainly qualifies as "something that matters" in Turnbull’s book.
After a peripatetic early childhood following his BP executive father through countries such as Trinidad, Libya, Abu Dhabi and Canada, Turnbull was eventually installed in a British public school. He went on to read Philosophy and Law at Cambridge, graduating in 1983 and emigrating to Canada. He soon got his own interview show on cable television in Toronto, and from there, discovered a passion for communications. "I love asking people 'what do you want to be famous for?', because communications is ultimately about knowing who you are and being true to those values. Reputation management has a bad name because people perceive that it is about papering over the cracks. What we do is the exact opposite – we try to fix the fundamentals."
He won a job at a Toronto agency, took a masters degree in International Relations, and eventually left Canada for London in 1989. He joined Shandwick, worked freelance across Europe, and joined Lowe Bell, the forerunner to Bell Pottinger, in 1994. After the agency advised F W de Klerk’s election campaign during South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994, Turnbull ran Bell Pottinger’s South African office, advising premiers, ministers, government departments and blue-chip companies. He came back to London in 2000, and worked on assignments in Sri Lanka, Latvia, Ukraine and Beirut.
"Strategic communications is coming of age, not just in boardrooms but in global politics. All the big tectonic shifts - the rise of globalisation, the threat of Islamic extremism and the spread of democracy - are about the clash of ideas and ideologies. The new battleground is hearts and minds, and in our 24/7, internet-wired world we need a far more sophisticated understanding of what shapes opinion and drives behaviour across national and cultural boundaries," he says.
When not mountain biking, skiing, travelling across Europe or wreck diving in Micronesia, Turnbull finds time to collect books and modern art. He is also studying for a diploma in psychoanalytical psychology at Birkbeck College, London. The only thing that seems to slow him down at all is his baby daughter, Olivia.
If you would like this information as a PDF please click here.
