So I get it. But I can still ask the question. I guess it is just me.

• These most powerful women spoke at 218 unique events in 2011.
• The leading speaking forums in 2011 for these top women executives included Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, The World Economic Forum/Davos, India-US CEO Forum, Women Corporate Director’s Global Institute, the Paley Center for Media International Council Summit and the APEC Women and the Economy Summit.
• We also provided insights on what types of conference events they spoke at – from industry-specific events (e.g., World Food Prize Conference and FICCI-IBI Conference on Global Banking) and conferences geared toward job function (e.g., Techonomy and ANA Conference), followed by women’s leadership and academic forums.
• Our research also found that the digital category (e.g., Digital Life Design and South by Southwest) is starting to emerge and is crossing women business leaders’ radar screens.

We do this type of analysis every year and sometimes we analyze all CEOs and top level executives –men and women. However, we thought that looking at where executive women spoke was past due. So here we are.

I was asked where all the celebrity CEOs had gone which made me recall my first book on CEO reputation. The book was released at the height of the dot com boom when 22 year old CEOs were the norm and celebrity CEOs were plentiful.  In my book, I tried to make the point that it was not CEO celebrity that mattered but CEO credibility. As I was answering this question, I realized that I hit on some of the right notes as to why CEO celebrity was not the same today but missed a few. In fact, I mentioned that being CEO today was not  an easy job whatsoever. CEOs are much more embattled.  Here are some of the reasons I talked about yesterday but others as well taken from an Economist article I was saving to post about.

• CEO tenure is shorter than it used to be (on average 6.6 years, according to Booz’s research).  They usually come into office with great fanfare. They get approximately two years of grace when they start out (more like 18 months), 2 years to provide evidence that their strategy is working and two years to get pushed out. After six years like this, it’s best to be a CEO nobody.
• CEOs don’t have all the power anymore. Most CEOs now have separate chairmans that are looking over their shoulders and asking a lot of questions.  Booz found that in 2002 48% of incoming CEOs were also chairmen.  In 2009, that number dropped to 12%.  Hard to be a celebrity when there is power sharing going on.
• CEO compensation is always a headline and increasingly links the CEO title to perceptions of greed. CEO compensation is actually declining.
• Shareholders and stakeholders are not sitting idle. They are much more aggressive.  Some hedge funds are actively browbeating CEO and corporate decisions and in executives’ faces. The ridicule can get strenuous.
• Boards are more active too. They don’t want their reputations shamed either by poor CEO decisions or poor behavior. And according to Korn Ferry, new board members are more likely to be deep in international experience and have worked abroad. They are not necessarily golfing buddies like board members of yore. Angry birds maybe, but not necessarily tee time!

With all these barriers in place to curb the power of CEOs, celebrity CEOs can hardly flourish. Instead, we are looking at a new world of convening CEOs who communicate internally to employees, communicate online or through video to netizens, travel to speak to customers and influencers at forums they convene themselves (IBM‘s Smarter Planet  method), partner with third parties and government to problem solve on today’s economic woes and so forth.

Thanks for sharing my interest.

In this instance, the one brother hired Invisible Hacking Group located in China and here is how it works:

“It requested the target person’s email address, the names of friends or colleagues, and examples of topics that interest them. The hackers would then send an email to the target that sounded as if it came from an acquaintance, but which actually installed malicious software on the target’s computer. The software would let the hackers capture the target’s email password.”

You get the picture.

Reputation blackmail presents a very scary scenario. Not only is privacy damaged but reputations which take a long time to rebuild get decimated.  Reputation protection can only go so far. Risk management and reputation warfare gets more complicated by the day.

Luckily, we now have research on how important the corporate brand or parent company really is and why it matters to consumers and executives alike. We released the research today, The Company Behind the Brand: In Reputation We Trust, conducted with KRC Research. Some of the key findings are:

• 70 percent avoid buying a product if they don’t like the company behind the product (consumers)
• 67 percent are increasingly checking product labels to see what company is behind the product (consumers)
• 61 percent get annoyed when they can’t tell what company is behind a product (consumers)
• 56 percent do research to learn about the companies that make what they buy (consumers)
• 56 percent hesitate to buy products if they can’t tell who makes them (consumers)
• Executives estimate that, on average, 60 percent of their firms’ market value is attributable to its reputation. 
• 86 percent of executives report that their companies increased their efforts to build reputation over the past few years

More to come. And it’s been a busy day getting the research out so will return shortly.

Here is the  part that I liked best because it speaks to corporate reputation today. “For many decades, the CMO’s job was to market an organization’s products and services. Today, it begins with the marketing of the organization itself.”  A fairly sizeable 61% said that one of the initiatives they have set for themselves ahead is to orchestrate a single view of the brand, something we call enterprise branding.

When people ask me what reputation means, I always say it is all about a company’s character. Glad CMOs agree.

1. The World Economic Forum released its report on the top risks facing the world in 2012. Social unrest and income inequity were at the top. Natural disasters such as the earthquake in Japan were also high on the risk list. And as pointed out, one risk affects another creating a domino effect. “The Internet, meanwhile, can magnify and spread the effects of a disaster in other ways. Rumors, even if incorrect, spread quickly on social networking sites — sometimes more rapidly than emergency services can communicate accurate information. As word of disasters like the terror attacks of Sept. 11 or the earthquake in Japan spreads globally, consumers hunker down in front of their computer screens or televisions, rather than going about their daily lives. This increases the economic effects of a crisis, even in areas far removed from the source.”  Disasters such as the horrific earthquake, tragic 9-11, death-defying financial crisis, massive oil spills and nasty ash clouds coming from Iceland all heighten other risks in some way. And risk spells reputation damage depending on how a company or country responds and solves the problem.

2. The report from WEF also mentioned that risks are on the horizon as leadership transitions are in full force this year. It is not just the U.S. presidential election that poses risk and stirs up emotional angst. There are leadership transitions underway this year in France, Russia and China as well. Add to that the sudden transitions in the Arab world this past year and we see upheaval and uncertainty. When CEO transitions are underway, the first few months can be risky so as we see world leaders change, tighten your seatbelts. The public will be more socially active than ever. We’ve already seen that in Russia.

3. I’ve written here about rankings and so-called “worst of” lists where companies, CEOs and environmental records are put on notice that they are not making the grade. In most Januarys, TripAdvisor.com comes out with its “dirtiest hotels” in the world.  No more. The CEO Stephen Kaufer says, “We want to stay more on the positive side, so we’ll continue to feature the best destinations, the top hotels.  We’re slicing and dicing the ‘best of’ in different ways this year, more than focusing on the negative.”  Although the article where I learned about this says there were potential legal considerations and competitive reasons for abandoning the January list, it also mentioned that the original “worst of” list was done for PR reasons and that TripAdvisor is less interested in that now.  Perhaps there is a reputation-reason afoot here. There is so much negativity online on some of these sites and it is so easy to find what you are looking for that a list of the 10 worst may be hardly worth alienating visitors to your site. Everyone worries about the detractors and the praisers. Maybe it is time to just worry about the average site visitor who does not want snarky comments and lists, but just the plain old straight forward facts to plan a plain old relaxing get-away.