Posts Tagged ‘BusinessWeek’

In October, the WSJ wrote about how Fortune was cutting back on its heroic CEO magazine covers as it revamps itself in light of the changing media and anti-CEO landscape. The article said, “One casualty will be the CEO-as-god magazine covers that have been a staple of the magazine, whether with Jack Welch or Warren Buffett.” As a Fortune lover, former employee and CEO-watcher, that quote remained firmly imprinted in my brain. Despite the negative perceptions of many CEOs today, CEOs still hold great interest to business people, investors, employees and other key stakeholders. They still help to determine the destiny of companies by picking the right teams, building best-in-class cultures making the tough decisions. So as the year comes to a close, I decided to look into whether the business magazines and Time have been pushing CEO mugshots on or off their covers during this tumultuous year  and compared to the past several years. The results are below. 

 As you can see, there was pullback in the business magazine category except for Fortune. Fortune had 8 covers in 2007 and in 2008 and one more in 2009. Besides Bernie Madoff of Ponzi fame, the CEOs on Fortune’s covers were the likes of champions such as Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — leaders that all accomplished amazing deeds and built good reputations.  It would be hard to argue that they did not deserve to grace a Fortune cover. Time actually added one (Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.) in 2009.  Will be interesting to see where the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek falls out one year from now.

We’ll take a look again in 2010 as CEO reputations hopefully begin to rebound (a little).

PS. The cover in my post is one of my all-time favorites and I have a large one framed in my office at home. It’s spectacular.

The airlines have a lot to tell us about managing reputation and being prepared. I came across an article in BusinessWeek a few months late but I found some of the advice about preparedness and reputation resilience worthwhile enough to repeat here. The gist of the article was that the airline industry “is truly the school of hard knocks.” They are always dealing with immense challenges such as soaring fuel prices, terrorism, storms, horrific events such as 9-11 and the global economic downturn, labor strikes, accidents and government intervention. Plus the airlines have amazingly vocal naysayers who take to the Internet when they lose a bag, dislike the food, miss a connection. American Airlines (Disclosure: Client) reaches out to people on social networking sites, according to Roger Frizzell, vice president of corporate communications, brand and advertising and quoted in an article on Forbes.com about brand detractors or “badvocates” as we call them at Weber Shandwick. “In August, when New York’s LaGuardia Airport closed a terminal due to a bomb threat, American Airlines posted notices on its Web site and sent a Tweet to its followers on Twitter. It leaves general information on lost baggage and canceled flights on its Facebook site. Getting the word out before consumers run into problems at the airport is one way to avoid criticism, says Frizzell.” Reputation management is a daily business in the airline industry.

Here are the lessons from the airline industry that BusinessWeek summarized.

1. You need to prepare for what you cannot control which is most everything today. Executives should be trained to respond to the unexpected and boards should review contingency plans because worst case scenarios do happen.

2. Board members need to be more patient while plans are being implemented as airline executives manage with unintended events. Sometimes the implementation is what makes or breaks a successful crisis response. Stakeholders are more forgiving when the recovery plan works.

3. Get all stakeholders aligned. The airline industry seems to have more than their share of stakeholders and if one segment is not moving in line with the others, beware. “For example, when airline employees oppose management, they take it out on customers, who in turn stop flying the airline, which in turn affects shareholder returns – a vicious cycle.” No one should be overlooked although it takes an army to manage this.

4. Seize the moment. In my book on reputation recovery, I called it Seize the Shift but it is the same idea. Opportunities come around usually only once when massive shifts in business or public opinion are bubbling up. Make them your opportunity because chances are that they won’t resurface in the near term. It is everyone’s job to be alert to those moments when fundamental change can be applied.

  Not sure it means anything but we thought we’d take a look at whether there are more scorecards/rankings now vs. one year ago. We keep this large, complex and detailed database on which awards exist for companies seeking to be recognized as being the most responsible, best at diversity, most ethical, best leadership, best reputation, best training, etc.  The database looks at when applications are due, when they are announced, who fills out the surveys, how to apply, how popular the ranking  is, etc.  You get it.  The database, called Scoreboxx™, helps companies “credentialize” themselves and communicate how they lead the industry.  It is part of our reputation-building services.

Since we realized it would be next to impossible to determine if there has been a change in the number of scorecards year over year since many scorecards just disappear or just get added randomly, we took a look at response rates to some of the rankings in 2007 vs. 2008. Not a scientific analysis but interesting nevertheless.  Listed below is our brief analysis of some of them for what’s worth.

Some are up and some are down. Some are flat. Here is what Liz, my colleague, and I think. For those awards where recruiting or talent  are important, higher responses have been recorded year over year. More employers returned surveys for BusinessWeek’s Best Places to Launch a Career and Fortune’s Top 100 MBA Employers, more applications were received this year for DiversityInc Top 50 and more nominations came in for the World’s Most Ethical Companies.  It goes without saying that the lower number of respondents for BusinessWeek’s Most Innovative Companies means nothing since this has been a disruptive year for business and some executives were just holding your breath that they were not getting pink slips. And presumably many did.

What does seem interesting is that in a world where companies have stumbled catastrophically and reputational equity has been slipping away, the focus on talent, diversity and ethics might be a good sign of better things to come.

This week I received my 92^nd Street Y catalogue of lectures, events, and everything under the sun that is available at this amazing institution. It truly is a New York landmark of cultural affairs and happenings.  I often attended the Captains of Industry CEO engagements that are moderated by BusinessWeek’s top editor. This year is their 10^th year.  So I was eager to see what the schedule would be for 2009. I can’t say I was too surprised to see that it was fairly skimpy. Henry Paulson spoke in December (if he made it out of DC due to the bailout) and Martha Stewart is slated for February 2009. Martha is not one to shy from controversy and take a stand. And that’s it. Executive visibility is probably not too high on company agendas as the economy delivers its daily shock waves.  Or perhaps it’s impossible for CEOs to schedule anything when they do not know if they will make it to the second quarter. BusinessWeek included an article this week on which CEOs were most likely to lose their jobs in the next 12 months. My guess is that CEOs are being ultra-selective about what they do that requires  them to be away from running the business day to day.  CEO reputations are on the hot seat. Makes sense.

More of the speaking platforms are geared towards the economy instead. The 92^nd Street Y has Paul Krugman on deck along with Robert Rubin, Gary Hirshberg (CEO of Stonyfield Farm), Larry Summers and real estate pros from Corcoran.  The economy and business are grabbing the headlines whereas captains of industry are busy plugging the holes in the lifeboats (for good reason).