Posts Tagged ‘reputation loss’

I could tell that it must have been the one year anniversary of the Costa Concordia because I started hearing about the shipliner crash in the past few days.  Reputations keep rolling along throughout the year but especially hit home one year later. Whereas they might be fleeting memories at first, they all come together on the year one anniversary to make us take notice. Today I started hearing more about the memorial service for survivors and families of those who lost their 32 dear ones in Giglio, Italy and it started to stick more than two days ago. There were 846,000 mentions on Google when I searched for Costa Concordia anniversary today.

For reputation, one year anniversaries are part of the reputation process.  It is almost like it fits into the five stages of grief. The one year anniversay is a day of reflection and return to the reputation demise that caused the loss in the first place. All the pictures of the cruise ship on its side off the shores of the little Tuscan city are back in view. Debates over raising the ship and removing it are back in the news. Anniversaries are important because they remind us that reputations should not restored overnight. The bigger the loss (especially when lives are lost),  the longer reputation takes to repair. That should be law.

I especially remember the Costa Concordia because we were launching our survey on how corporate and brand reputations have become nearly indivisible. The parent company of the cruise liner pushed media requests over to the Costa Concordia CEO — the brand leader — in an effort to disentangle the corporate reputation from the brand reputation. Due to the ease of information flow and the Internet’s reach, much of the media coverage mentioned the parent company in the coverage which only proved that corporate and brand reputations have definitely converged. Because the entire incident happened just as we launched the survey, it is forever lodged in my mind.

Talking about reputation, tomorrow’s Oprah Winfrey interview with cyclist Lance Armstrong will be another one for the record books.  I am not sure how Lance’s confession that he used drugs to help him win the Tour de France several times will go over. My sense is that an apology might not curb his rapid reputation decline and Lance’s reputation might not just keep rolling along but might face a hard stop for awhile. No telling where it will be, however, in three or four years.  I will be interested to tune in and watch.

What spooks markets the most? If you closely follow crises, you probably think about how many different types of crises there are. For example, how do the markets react to a crisis that is due to the questionable behavior of the company or employees? What about product recalls? Or litigation? What about loss of customer data? All good questions to ask about reputational damage. International law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer decided to investigate how the markets react to different crises and how long the crisis lingers. This chart below is from their study:

Behavioral crises (company or employees acting questionably or illegally) have the greatest short-term impact on shares and the only type where the companies have the possibility of regaining their market share after six months. However, they spook the markets the most and can cause shares to crash by 50% or more on  the day they become public, according to the researchers. Investors, however, forgive these types of crises more quickly than others.

Operational crises (when the company’s functioning is halted due to a major product recall or environmental disaster) have a modest impact in the first two days of the crisis breaking but the greatest long-term effect on share price…down almost 15% after six months. One quarter are still down one year later. These type of crises strike fear in companies and reputations are hit for the longest period of time.

Corporate crises (companies where the financial wellbeing is affected such as liquidity issues or material litigation) made up more than one quarter of companies experiencing a share drop on day one. Most often, these companies recovered quickly.

Informational crises (when companies IT such as system failures or hacking) were of moderate concern to the markets. They did not fall more than 3% on day one. According to the research, none saw shares fall more than 30% within a year of when the crisis struck. Possibly, investors figure these can be resolved and its everywhere today, not necessarily at the core of the company’s business.

As the research states, “Our research shows that directors typically benefit from a window of 24 to 48 hours, during which financial market reaction to news of a major reputational crisis will be relatively constrained.”  In the public relations world, we often refer to the first hour after a crisis breaks as the “golden hour.” According to Freshfields, it sounds like there is an even longer” golden window.”

The natural question to raise is why does operational crises do the worst? Freshfields answers appropriately, “Crises that strike at a business’ core have a greater long-term impact on share price as markets are more likely to lose faith in a management team that cannot resolve a crisis that is intrinsic to its operations.” As Oxford Metrica’s research in 2012 for AON showed, management response is showcased for all to see when crisis strikes. The kind of  CEO or executive response can make or break reputations and create reputation loss of great magnitude if done poorly. To prevent such reputation loss, prepare!

These few sentences were chilling. They refer to the sentencing of Rajat Gupta  who was sentenced to two years in prison on Wednesday for leaking boardroom secrets to the former hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratam.

Legal counsel…” tried to keep his client out of prison by arguing, unsuccessfully, that Mr. Gupta was a proud man for whom the loss of his reputation was a punishment far worse than incarceration. This is a fall from grace of Greek tragedy proportions.”

I have been trying to figure out why Jamie Dimon has not received as much reputation mud as you’d expect considering the fiasco over the trading loss JPMorganChase recently revealed. I am also trying to figure out how Ina Drew, the chief investment officer who resigned over the debacle, managed to keep such a low profile. I don’t recall her ever having made it to the Fortune’s Most Powerful List and yet she certainly had a big job. These two enigmas baffle me.

On the one count re Dimon, I think that his immediate response to the crisis saved him. He immediately owned the problem, publicly agreed that it was outrageous and took the blame personally. His response was in keeping with our public understanding of what kind of person he is — blunt, decisive and unequivocal. But I have to admit that he has managed to do what few others have managed in a crisis……evoke sympathy. There was an article I read last week about how he could not sleep, how he told his wife he had screwed up big and how he felt terrible having to let Ina Drew go (something like she was practically a sister). I actually felt bad for him. The other reason I think that he has managed to have his reputation stained but not decimated is that there are no customer stories where individuals are shown having lost their entire retirement savings or otherwise. When we watched those stories about what people lost with Bernie Madoff or people who lost their lives with the BP oil spill at Deep Horizon, it was crushingly real. I guess that’s the advantage of the CIO loss, it’s the bank’s money!

As for Ina Drew, in 2011, there were 21 mentions of her when I searched on Google. Just in the first five months of 2012, there are 7,570. Quite the uptick! She managed to keep such a low profile for such a powerful woman. And when I looked closer at those 21 mentions, only one had to do with her and that was about her compensation. Otherwise the mentions had to do with Ina’s or Drew’s or the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).  So basically, she had NO profile which is hard to believe. How did she do that? Not either a best dressed executive headline! (Did you see yesterday’s Best Dressed CEOs?)

I have no doubt that Dimon’s and JPMorganChase’s reputation have been hurt. But now is the time for them to “recover.” I hope they read my book. The first step after the spotlight somewhat ebbs is to focus internally and reassure employees that the future is ahead.

In a piece I wrote for The HuffingtonPost for 2012, I forecasted that reputation blackmail would show its hand this year. Lo and behold, a front page article in yesterday’s paper headlined “Hackers-For-Hire Are Easy to Find.”  The article had to do with two feuding brothers from Kuwaiti who were suing one another over business they held. One of the billionaire brothers found someone to hack into his brother’s account and post online all his brother’s personal emails including finances, legal affairs, pharmacy bills and everything else that you can imagine gets sent and received from one’s personal account. The cost: $400. Hackers to hire are that cheap and apparently easy to find. One of the reasons there has not been much on this topic where reputations can be easily lost is that people do not want to report this type of reputation blackmail and generate even more attention.

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.

There has been a fair amount of news this year about people who risk everything and ultimately lose their whole reputation.  Why would anyone take that risk?  An article on “What makes a rogue trader?” made me think about people who take risks without realizing that they have so much to lose.  Also the news today about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich being sentenced to 14 years in jail for corruption made me wonder what drove him to this pitiful situation. Money? Power? Just because he could do it. Interestingly, the article posits one theory….”What matters most of all is not how much a gamble alters their wealth, but where they start –whether they are already satisfied, or have suffered loss. Their overriding trait is their inability to accept loss.” Thus, these people are compelled to do whatever they have to in the name of gaining more wealth or achieving political office to avoid loss of their stature or status or sense that they are okay human beings. The loss seems to always outweigh what they sought in the first place. And these risk-takers lose all remnants of reputation and respect in the end. Something that you can’t even put a price on. Makes you think about Bernie Madoff. What was he thinking? His reputation is in shreds, at best.