Posts Tagged ‘reputation’

I don’t even have to do the math to figure this out. The increase in mentions about Jamie Dimon’s reputation is astronomical. Last year on May 14, there were nine mentions of Jamie Dimon with the word reputation.  Fast forward one year and there are 3,160 mentions just today. The articles all have a similar ring to them… no surprise considering that the bank he leads lost over $2 billion on a trading error. Pretty soon, I expect they will be calling for his head. “The reputation that Jamie Dimon honed for decades on Wall Street has been severely damaged in a matter of days.” “…tainted the reputation of the bank's high profile chief executive Jamie Dimon.” "We made a terrible, egregious mistake," said bank CEO Jamie Dimon, who had a reputation as a master of risk management.” “So here you are Jamie Dimon. You have a sterling reputation. Why? Because people say he knows how to manage risk better than anybody.” “A black mark for a survivor of the financial crisis.” The one thing I can safely conclude is that the word reputation is firmly embedded in our lexicon. I used to notice the mention of reputation once in a while but in the past year "reputation" shows up everywhere. It has become ubiquitous. This is not because crises and scandals are skyrocketing which is how it feels every day but is not the case. We had as many scandals and crises just two or three years ago when the economy tanked. It is just clear to me that "reputation" is such an economic competitive asset, that it is its own form of currency today.  Hence, it falls into the same rubric as dollars and cents.  Reputation is definitely playing a larger role in what drives our economy. There is no doubt about it.

Just came across some research from ReputationInc that holds some very interesting information. Here are the main facts they discovered by examining the curriculums of the leading Executive MBA programs identified by the Financial Times. They were looking to see how reputation was incorporated into the course work.

 

•       1 in 5 leading EMBA programs teach none of the 10 core reputation disciplines

•       Just one of the 50 leading EMBAs has ‘Reputation’ as a core module

•       Communications & relationship building skills are taught in less than 20% of programs

•       Government & policy relations is covered by fewer than 1 in 5 EMBA program

•       Governance and ethics is the most popular reputation discipline being taught to business leaders today (no surprise there)

 

ReputationInc cites McKinsey research that found that one-half of global CEOs say managing external affairs is one of their top-three priorities. Yet one fifth of the world’s top 50 global Executive MBA programs do not offer any training in the core disciplines of reputation management. They report that the missing disciplines include CSR, stakeholder engagement, government relations, communications, and reputation management strategy.

 

More worrying still, just two of the top 50 business schools surveyed offer a dedicated reputation

module and 80% offer no training on either public affairs or external communications – the two core “hands-on” skills executives need to build reputation. “The results reveal a frightening gap between the reputation skills business leaders must possess in 2012 and the cursory attention they get in the traditional executive MBA.” 

                                                         

The programs with the highest ranked scores for including reputation are Henley Business School, Essec/Mannheim, and the University of Texas at Austin: McCombs.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement: “On this evidence, companies and shareholders should be concerned that Executive MBA programmes risk creating ineffective business leaders who leave academia without the skills to actively manage the precious asset of corporate reputation,” said John Mahony, CEO, ReputationInc.  “Reputation management skills are vital for today’s CEO who sets the tone and mood for a corporation and must lead from the front in communicating the purpose of the brand and its value to society. Many managers are not born ready to meet this challenge and will benefit from coaching and confidence building in reputation, something today’s Executive MBA courses fail to adequately provide.”

 

 

 The Power of Reputation.  Chris Komisarjevsky’s new book, The Power of Reputation: Strengthen the Asset that Will Make or Break Your Career, is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how to steer their reputation into a career worth having.  Chris provides practical, easy-to-apply advice, techniques, tips and best practices on how to build that reputation you always wished you had but maybe never planned with very much care. He covers all the many elements that make up an enduring personal and professional reputation (they are the same, you know) such as values, character, behavior, trust and communications.   I regard myself as an insider when it comes to Chris’ new book.  Chris was CEO of Burson-Marsteller when he hired me and throughout my time there, encouraged me to build the bank of reputation research we launched as a firm.  He also served as a role model for how CEOs should lead their organizations and build a best place to work.    There are so many great examples that I remember from his leadership and I got to experience up-close how the character of the person at the top sets the tone for the entire organization. There is no denying the inextricable link between the two. Perhaps for that reason, I was particularly drawn to the chapter on Values. Chris provides a list of values that can guide your career path. It seems that everyone should be given that list as an exercise when they start a new job so they can be regularly reminded to follow it. The Power of Reputation also provides terrific real-life examples and anecdotes from a wide variety of CEOs who have been faced with reputational issues and had to decide what was most important to the organization and its members.   Overall, if you are looking to better understand what you stand for, what your company should stand for, and how to build trust and an enduring career, this is a great book to read.    

Thought I would check out Pinterest and see if anyone was posting on reputation or CEO reputation. Why am I not surprised that the pickings are slim.  Pinterest is not exactly the place where people want to pin interesting items and favorite photos or sayings on reputational matters or CEO quotes. But I had to take a look. For "reputation," there are a bunch of quotes and the same infographic over and over. Seems to be a favorite. It is about how to manage your personal e-reputation and its from a reputation management agency in Geneva. Good for them. As for CEO reputation, there are two items pinned of photos of people.  But mostly a non-pinterest event.  Thought I'd see a little more but no. Infographics seems to be popular on pinterest. They add visual splendor.  I have a pinterest account but never started it. I might just do that today. Might be fun. We will see.

While I am on the subject of Social CEOs (see my last post), I wanted to mention a study that was released by BRANDfog, a firm that helps executives get social.  Survey respondents report that more than 80% of respondents believe that CEOs who engage on social media are better equipped than their peers to lead companies in a Web 2.0 world. What’s more, 93% of respondents believe that CEO engagement on social media helps communicate company values, and grow and evolve corporate leadership in times of crisis.  Similarly, 82 percent of survey respondents said they were more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage in social media. Since reputation is all about trust, it sounds like the demand is there....we've just got to supply it with examples and role models.

Beautiful morning here in New York. I even hear the birds chirping, almost like Spring. However, for me, it is a sit-down day. I am working on an article which I will tell you more about later but I am looking at many hours in front of my laptop as I draft away. I already started my list of what I want to do when it gets done in a few short weeks. When I wrote my books and other articles, I started a similar list that contains all the things I want to do on an ordinary Saturday or Sunday like see a movie, go out for dinner or lazily walk in the park.  Anyhow, back to my blog post. I have my own reputation and risk to manage with this article looming before me. I kept an advertising insert from a few weeks ago because it had a few good stats on reputation. It was on Risk Management, a favorite of mine because reputation often comes up.  It was written by Joe Mullich. I am unable to find the link, apologies. A few interesting facts:

1. Accenture found that 44 percent of companies do not gauge reputational risk
2. The Federational of European Risk Management Associations (FERMA) along with the Institute of Risk Management (IRM) found that reputation risk from social media is cited as a "material risk" by nearly 50 percent of European companies, making it one of the greatest threats that companies face.
3. Corporate responsibility or CSR is having a large impact on consumers' buying habits.
4. Reputation is seriously affected by missteps. Mullich's section cites a 2010 study of the world's largest 1000 companies and found that 80 percent of those firms have a major "reputational" event every five years that causes them to lose one fifth of their value.

I particularly liked #3 above because we found a similar trend in our recent study on the importance of the corporate brand behind the product brand. And this quote intrigued me...."The higher the cost of the purchase and the more that translates into a long term relationship, the important reputation becomes." I think that is exactly right. When consumers are buying big ticket items or even medium sized ticket ones, the relationship is deeper and the consumer wants to get it right. They want to invest their dollars with a nod to doing right and supporting companies that treat employees right. The big shift however is that consumers feel this way about the company behind the brand for smaller, everyday purchases. The article also mentions how insurance companies are introducing reputational risk or crisis management insurance policies (something we know about) and interestingly, that there is a new data terminal that incorporates a reputational risk indicator "which allows investors to identify the severity of criticism and negative press coverage directed toward individual companies and market sectors." That's new to me and quite interesting. Perhaps it is one of those predictive systems that advise companies on emerging threats that we have seen as more clients are being proactive vs. reactive.

It has been an unusually warm couple of months here in New York. I can't    help but think that global warming is staring me right in the face.  I often think of myself as a bear that hibernates when cold weather arrives. I often joke with my neighbors that they won't see me until spring because I'll be going into my bear cave for my "winter sleep" when the first chill arrives.  So the past couple of months have been an anomaly as I have wandered out doors more often than usual on the weekends. Of course I have to go to work and do the ordinary errands that surround my life but given the choice, I stay inside. Maybe that is why I like to write about reputation because it gives me an excuse to sit in my little office cave that is closed off to the world. All of this got me to thinking about how climate change gets communicated today when there is criticism about  the science after controversies arose from the release of stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This happened a year or two ago.  Undoubtedly this is the perfect case study for how an industry (climate change scientists) suffered reputational damage and now has to recover and restore reputational equity. Climate change skeptics were fairly adept at effectively persuading many in the general public to doubt the scientific validity of global warming. I was glad to see an article in the New Scientist (sorry, you need a subscription) by Robert Ward (policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics) on how some of the reputation recovery methods that I recommend in my book might be applied to regain confidence and trust in climate science.  He sees the situation right, "Even if the claims of misconduct and incompetence are eventually proven to be largely untrue, or confined to a few bad apples, mud sticks."  This is a truism -- no matter how much science you have on your side, it is sometimes never enough when it comes to public opinion.  Sometimes the facts just don't matter as much as they should in a perfect world. Ward is right that hope is not a solution to rebuilding reputation. Many CEOs used to think they could outlast controversy but in fact learn the hard way that it only extends the problem.  "Communicating tirelessly" -- one of my recommendations -- is the right path forward.  "No comment" does not work as it used to. Whether it is finding neutral partners or independent coalitions to bring additional voices into the discussion or actually training climate scientists to transparently talk about and defend the science -- its certainties and uncertainties, communications will do more good than harm in this digital world. An interesting analysis of temperature records appeared in an article in The Economist  which speaks to the importance of bringing in a third, fourth or fifth party opinion to validate scientific findings.  I read it on a plane to Europe in November but kept it because it made commonsense as an approach to understanding the climate change debate -- is it getting warmer or not?  Let me just add here that the topic of global warming is a lot more complicated than I will ever understand -- gaps in readings, different criteria, different types of thermometers, urban settings where temperatures might be recorder higher, etc.  But interestingly, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project stepped into the argument on climate change 18 months ago to test existing analyses. And they did so with the addition of skeptical scientists and funders as well as Nobel prize winners. As it is often said, let's open the kimono and thus they did. And they found that the existing temperature records that the earth was warming was not far off the mark from what had been previously reported.  A peer review is underway and I look forward to learning more about that when it is released.  Next up, however, for climate scientists and institutions affiliated with climate change,would be communicating openly and collectively (and maybe relentlessly) to explain how the newest findings answer questions, raise new ones and guide us as to what we need to be doing Now not Later.

I went to the Thesaurus today to get a sense of synonyms and antonyms for "reputation." I was just curious. They are listed below. I thought it was interesting that the word "image" was not a top synonym for reputation. Perhaps it is an old-time word that is not used much these days. I also was surprised that "credibility" was not among the selected few. However, some standbys such as esteem, trustworthiness and character are there. As an antonym, the word "disreputableness" does not exactly roll off one's tongue. The note about reputation is not terribly illuminating. I agree that reputation is how you are perceived by others but I think that reputation shines a light on a company's or individual's reputation and reveals how they are perceived. Not sure I get the distinction. Reputation is character. Either way, how you behave reflects on reputation. I love the voice when you click on the megaphone.

Main Entry:	reputation [rep-yuh-tey-shuhn]  Show IPA
Part of Speech:	noun
Definition:	commonly held opinion of person's character
Synonyms:	acceptability, account, approval, authority,character, credit, dependability, distinction,eminence, esteem, estimation,  fame, favor,honor, influence, mark*, name*, notoriety,opinion, position, prestige, privilege, prominence,rank, regard, reliability, renown, rep, report,repute, respectability, standing, stature,trustworthiness, weight, éclat
Notes:	character is what one is; reputation is what one is thought to be by others
Antonyms:	disreputableness, ill repute, notoriety

 

You've heard this statement before. "What you spend years building, someone can  destroy overnight." I have probably written this several times on this blog when talking about crisis and reputation risk and I certainly wrote something very close in my book on reputation recovery. Well today it was cited in an article about GM's former CEO Rick Wagoner. The article was about his graduation speech made at Virginia Commonwealth University. A short 12 minute speech about "taking risks and accepting defeat gracefully."  He has been silent for over three years. Talk about grace.  But in his closing lines, he made the statement about building and losing reputation which Mother Teresa apparently said (I did not know and am glad to have learned the origin of this statement). And he added his own two cents at the end to this famous piece of advice about reputation. He said "Build anyway." A good reminder to those who wonder if being CEO is worth it or leading a country, I might add.

One of the advantages of having worked at several companies is that you really get to understand how different cultures can be. In the newest strategy + business study -- The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture is Key, the researchers make the point that the most important ingredients in building an innovative environment is strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation. They found after studying the world's biggest spenders on R&D over seven years that "there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending, in terms of either total R&D dollars or R&D as a percentage of revenues." That's a very revealing statistic. It is natural to assume that high R&D spenders would have the best bottom lines and most success. It just is not true. Now that innovation spending is back on track after a poor economy, the authors conclude the following below. This is such a critical point for those wishing to understand innovation and what really is important in building a reputation for being a best place to work:

"Culture matters, enormously. Studies have shown again and again that there may be no more critical source of business success or failure than a company's culture -- it trumps strategy and leadership. This isn't to say that strategy doesn't matter, but rather that the particular strategy a company employs will succed only if it is supported by the appropriate cultural attributes."

It always gets back to the people and the culture. The research is alot deeper than this but the quote above about culture trumping strategy and leadership just jumped out at me. I'd have to argue that the leadership provides the foundation for a culture that supports innovation and that leadership might matter even more than strategy but culture shapes success, and ultimately reputation.