Presidential reputation

Buy Cinnarizine Without Prescription, The reputation of business is certainly in need of repair. New York. Los Angeles, California, CEOs probably even more. Here’s a start to helping show that they do serve a purpose.  President Obama turned to chief executive officers for ideas on making the government more efficient and modern, purchase Cinnarizine online no prescription. Online buy Cinnarizine without a prescription, At least the President and business leaders were seated at the table together and acknowledging that business has something to teach government in return.  Nearly 50 CEOs were invited to the White House this past week to “brainstorm” how to better streamline technology to improve government infrastructure.  CEOs were placed in break out groups to discuss ideas on making government more responsive and customer service oriented with the help of IT. The sessions were called Forums on Government Modernization, buy cheap Cinnarizine no rx.

The President says that government can’t do it alone, Buy Cinnarizine Without Prescription. Acheter en ligne Cinnarizine, acheter Cinnarizine bon marché, He said that while the public can make dinner reservations or buy movie tickets online, people can’t electronically set up appointments with the Social Security Administration.” The general public could surely tell the President that the technology revolution has not reached government.  Anyone applying for a government document knows this well, Cinnarizine price. Fort Worth, Texas. Denver, Colorado, CEOs came up with several ideas such as producing performance report cards to reach goals, instigating a crisis to get things started, Jacksonville, Florida, Columbus, Ohio, Cinnarizine withdrawal, snort, alcohol iteraction, changing the culture, creating a Manhattan Project group, order Cinnarizine no prescription, Online buying Cinnarizine hcl, etc.

As the president said:

To this day, Austin, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Las Vegas, Nevada, there are still places in the federal government where reams of yellow files in manila envelopes are walked from desk to desk, or boxes of documents are shipped back and forth between offices because files aren't yet online.  Believe it or not, Baltimore, Maryland. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Buy Cinnarizine online no prescription, in our patent office -- now, this is embarrassing -- this is an institution responsible for protecting and promoting innovation -- our patent office receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically, where can i buy cheapest Cinnarizine online, Farmacia Cinnarizine baratos, Cinnarizine online kaufen, then manually prints them out, scans them, order Cinnarizine online c.o.d, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Phoenix, Arizona, and enters them into an outdated case management system.  This is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years.  Imminently solvable; hasn't been solved yet.

Business has its problems but not this bad!   Business leaders have teachable experience getting organizations moving forward on difficult and culture changing initiatives and changes.  CEOs have faced many of these challenges many times over and can lend a hand. The White House videotaped the discussions (here’s one of them) and it didn’t take three years to get them up on their site, Cinnarizine FDA approveds. Cinnarizine for sale, Progress.

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A few items crossed my desk [or should I say desktop] this week having to do with corporate governance. The first is an interesting article in the Financial Times about banning blackberries from boardrooms. The argument is that board members are charged with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and blackberrying or texting during meetings might be considered a breach of contract.  Board members are not doing their jobs if they are busy typing replies or reading scores of emails in meetings. I enjoyed the article because authors’ David Beatty and J Mark Weber also got into the idea of “inattention blindness” and how that might interfere with the weighty decisions required of board members in this tough business climate. One neuroscientist in the article is quoted saying that humans can not concentrate on two things at once.  I recall reading that people can only hold seven things in their head at once which is a reason most of us experience infofog a good part of the time.  At least I do. Anyhow, the point is that board members need to pay full  attention during board meetings today, particularly when the stakes are so high, and responding to electronic messages can only direct attention away from the hard work at hand.  Since board reputations are already in jeopary as one company after another failed this year, I wholeheartedly agree with the authors’ advice that boards enact “no wireless” policies in meetings for now.

 

I was also reading Karen Kane’s blog on corporate governance and totally concurr with a quote from Stephen Davis of the Yale Millstein Center that she cited.  Davis said that today “directors need the tools of a politician.” In other words, as Kane says, they need to persuade and explain why they took the actions they did. I think that in the future we will be seeing more explaining as Obamanomics works its way down to boards.  Greater transparency and clarification for stakeholders as well as shareholders will become more common in the years ahead. 

 

Now to tie the two items above together….if President Obama can do without his blackberry at times, so can board members.

 

  I was reminded today of some information I read a few months ago about President Obama. Apparently his correspondence director makes sure that Obama sees 10 letters or emails every day from average Americans. Some of these letters are positive and some negative but they are clear reminders of how Americans are suffering and thriving today. President Obama also reads them aloud at certain meetings when he looks around and notices that people are losing touch with the common man or woman. I am sure they come in handy. When I wrote my first book on CEO reputation (CEO Capital), I mentioned a CEO who started every weekly management meeting with a tape recording from a call center where people complained about the company's service. The CEO felt that it was important to remind his team that there was still plenty of room for improvement. The Obama example above is similar to the company CEO one I told. I think that this act of customer awareness is a practice that could help many CEOs who sometimes forget that the purpose of a business is to create a customer, to quote from the late Peter Drucker. Both presidential and CEO leadership needs to be reminded who they serve to safely steer their country or company reputations in the right direction, especially in these tough times.

Maybe it took me a long time but the word “reset” has become awfully popular. I first noticed when it was used by GE’s Jeff Immelt in his Letter to Shareholders about the effects of the economy and how GE needed to reset itself in response to the global economy. I found it an effective word because it brought to mind a reset button. 

 

IMMELT: “I believe we are going through more than a cycle. The global economy, and capitalism, will be “reset” in several important ways. The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner […] I think this environment presents an opportunity of a lifetime. We get a chance to reset the core of GE and focus on what we do best.”

 

Then I noticed President Obama using “reset” in reference to his visit with Russian President Medvedev. "I think that there has been a time over the last several years where Russian-U.S. relations were not as strong as they should be. What I said coming in is that I wanted to press the reset button on relations between the United States and Russia."

 

Since I liked the term, especially for talking about my favorite subject of reputation, I decided to investigate whether it has been around for a long time or was fairly new.  In the chart below, you can see that the word reset has jumped 337% since 2000. As expected, the greatest jump occurred between 2007 and 2008.

Unfortunately I was not the only one to notice this trend. The New York Times Magazine columnist William Safire wrote about this popular new word in April 2009. I found the article online when I was searching to see if others were thinking the same thoughts. Apparently the reset button idea bloomed during the U.S. presidential election when it was used repeatedly by VP hopeful Joe Biden and President-elect Obama to describe their campaign strategy. Even secretary of state Hillary Clinton has taken to using the phrase now.  As Safire writes, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum mentioned the growing ubiquity, “Press the reset button. Is there any phrase more enticing in the modern lexicon? We all know what it means: Press the reset button, watch your computer reboot and presto! A nice, clean screen appears, and you start again from scratch.”

 

I am glad that “reset” is a trend and intend to use it as often as I can for describing reputation-building.  You have to reset your reputation now.  Until you press the reset button, your reputation will be ground zero. Resetting your reputation is the right thing to do. If you don’t like the word reset, you can always substitute reboot.

 

To say the least, the article in yesterday’s New York Times on blogging made me wince. “According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.”  I obviously fit into the 5% that keep blogging (or sticks to their knitting). Is there something wrong with me?  What distinguishes this 5%? When I finished my dissertation many years ago, I realized that there were many fellow students who never completed the degree. I thought to myself then that there must be something wrong with me for toiling all those years  when others just made the decision to move on. I guess I don’t move on well. Back to my blog, two interesting tidbits for my posting this evening.  First, I read that the pre-presidential Obama administration asked the following of applicants: “If you have ever sent an…email, text message or instant message…that could…be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family or the President-elect if it were made public, please describe.”  We should all be adding similar questions to our employment applications. Social media is key to reputation-building and reputation-busting whether you are in public or private business. [This appeared in the Economist, April 18th, 2009 and cannot find the article.] The second item I saved recently has to do with the CEO of online shoe store Zappos.  CEO Tony Hsieh is the new Jeff Bezos.  You may have heard this story if you follow social media tales among the executive set like I do.  Hsieh’s Twitters are now quite famous and the company receives extraordinarily high marks in terms of its reputation for extreme customer service (“deliver WOW through service”).  What I particularly like is this story about Hsieh’s team focus.  Since talent is so important, recruiting at Zappos is heightened.  Imagine this. Hsieh offers new employees $2,000 to quit their call center trainee jobs in order to weed out those who won’t make the grade.  As reported, three people took the money and ran last year.

“Do CEOs Matter?” asked Harris Collingwood in The Atlantic. The article begins with a discussion about the anticipated return of Steve Jobs to Apple in June and the impact on Apple's share price during the past year’s ups and downs regarding his health prospects. Steve Job’s mortality raises the timely question about the value of CEOs in today's world. Do they matter at all? Collingwood refers to several academic studies and concludes that CEOs do not matter as much as we think and can have as large a negative effect on business performance as a positive one.

 

Since I have spent quite a while in the CEO reputation area and authored a book, CEO Capital,  on how CEOs build reputation to achieve business success, I have seen equal proportions of studies that downplay the CEO’s impact on financial performance as those that show a sizeable return on a company's destiny. As the article rightly points out...not all industries are the same -- the CEO effect is marginal in some industries where strong government regulation prevails. Does that say alot for all those TARP-supported companies we are now watching. All in all, I firmly believe that CEOs can play a profound role in a company’s future by making the right decisions that shape its long-term growth. We are certainly seeing our new president shape the reputation and future horizon of America Inc.

 

The article highlights a quote from GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and apparently confirmed by his predecessor Jack Welch.  Immelt told a gathering sponsored by the Financial Times that in the 1990s, “anyone could have run GE and done well…Not only could anyone have run GE in the 1990s, [a] dog could have run GE. A German shepherd could have run GE.”  Somehow I don't quite think that is the case but they must know. CEOs may have indeed mattered less in the 90s but there is no doubt in my mind that they matter more now as our world has turned more global, more complex, more imitable, and more transparent. We are being short-sighted if we do not think that the right leader can make a difference most of the time. Not everyone is Steve Jobs but I would not want to work in a world led by mediocre business leaders.

  Ironic. I was finishing my reading of an article by Michael Hirschorn from Atlantic Online that I was given by my boss. Today is the day after President Obama's inauguration. The article titled "End Times" is about the death of traditional (or "old") media in favor of "new" media, with a particular spotlight on The New York Times. "The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn't imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start." I could not help but think that such a disappearance might be inevitable after reading about the paper's dire economic straits and contemplating the reading habits of the younger generation. I stopped into my local newspaper shop where nothing much is ever happening at 6:15am. The newspaper stand is located on Flatbush Avenue and Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn where I live. The guy who I hand over my $3.50 over to every morning (The Times and the Wall Street Journal) is from the Middle East and has four fingers on his hand that hands me back change. The newsstand is like most in the city...grungy, poorly lit and dingy. This morning it was packed. There was a line of at least 30 people, mostly African-Americans, standing on line to buy their copies of the New York Times. The Times had not been delivered yet which was unusual but every person wanted their own personal copy with President Obama on the cover. The commemorative issue for posterity!  I tried to imagine what we would do 10 years from now (maybe 5?) when all news was online and we wanted a keepsake of some momentous event. Somehow downloading the Huffington Post or even The New York Times Online would not do it for me.  I thought back to 9/11 and how that horrific event would be covered without the old news publications. It would not be the same as picking up the paper to those two page spreads of person after person killed and their heart-wrenching individual life stories cut short. Not the same. No way. The incongruous juxtaposition of reading about the potential death of newspapers and this morning's long line at my local newsstand with people beaming with pride, speaking languages I could not place and knowing that seeing President Obama on the front page of the most reputable paper legitimized everything will not be forgotten.