How to Maintain a Corporate Reputation

SynergyBlog has found a great post regarding the importance of corporate reputation – how to earn it and how to maintain it.

Referencing the demise of many corporate reputations, according Edleman Trust Barometer, a number of Britain’s most admired leaders sat down to discuss the maintenance of a good name…

The full transcript of the panel can be found in Management Today. Enjoy the post!

A recent trust survey confirmed that management has lost public respect. It’s not just individual businesses in the firing line, but business itself. MT brought together Most Admired leaders and other practitioners to debate the issue of how to hang onto your good name…

MATTHEW GWYTHER – Where better to start on a discussion of reputation than with Shakespeare? Iago may be a thoroughly disreputable character, but he has some sound words (Othello, III.3) on the value of character:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

The concept of reputation or honour was around for thousands of years before Fred Goodwin. But nowadays it has moved from the individual to the corporate realm, to the point where it is one of the most important things that faces business organisations.

We’re interested in corporate reputation today – not only of individual businesses but of business generally and how this may have been affected by the downturn. Certainly, inasmuch as it is aligned to the subject of trust in business, it has taken a battering – as a recent Edelman Barometer of Trust survey confirmed.

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TRUST: Still The Essential Business Asset

American consumers and stakeholders find reasons to distrust business, political, and civic leaders every time they tune into CNN or other news outlets.

However, there’s been an unintended consequence: The diminishment of integrity in leaders has given voice to the presence of integrity in the rest of us!

Despite the global financial challenges that we face, there are reasons for optimism.

SynergyBlog is pleased that trust in leadership and trust in each other is becoming an integral part of the daily business discourse.

Today, like so many other days, I witnessed incredible sensitivity, tremendous integrity, and a spirit of giving we never hear about in the news… all in the context of commerce.

I witnessed corporations interested in sustainable practices; companies really interested in consumer needs and desires; organizations interested in the bottom line – and so much more. These virtues all demonstrated by business and civic leaders!

When we look around, it’s easy to point out the violations of trust – they’re everywhere. Perhaps we should sometimes do the harder thing and pay attention when colleagues, leaders, and everyday people do the right thing.

There’s a great peice on brand trust in Forbes by leadership guru Ken Blanchard and author and consultant Terry Waghorn that speaks to this. See the full article here:

How do you keep people trusting you at a time like this? Trust is essential in our lives, and it has been since the beginning of our country. Our dollar bills say In God We Trust. Yet today trust is all but vanishing, especially trust in our business leaders, whose greed and short-term selfishness seem to have been a major cause of our economic crisis. With negativity running amok, it is no small wonder that trust within the organizational context is slipping.

Yet that need not be the case. “Managed properly, trust can actually grow in such adverse conditions,” says Shawna O’Grady, associate professor of management at Queens School of Business, in Kingston, Ontario. “Taking this point to the extreme, consider the bonds forged between comrades-in-arms in a theater of war.”

The key to building trust in both good and bad times is to realize that none of us is as smart as all of us. There are companies that have embraced this simple truth and used it to maintain trust before, during and, we’re sure, after this economic downturn. All these companies seem to have two characteristics in common.

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Obama Administration: More Confidence (T-R-U-S-T) Required to End Recession

President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, spoke to a forum on Friday and said that the nation’s economic crisis has led to an “excess of fear” among Americans that must be broken to reverse the downturn.

Mr. Summers stated that, “Fear begets fear,” and that “is the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis.”

“It is this transition from an excess of greed to an excess of fear that President Roosevelt had in mind when he famously observed that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself,” Summer said. “It is this transition that has happened in the United States today.”

Summers spoke amid new signs of a deepening recession. The U.S. trade deficit plunged in January to the lowest level in six years as the economic downturn cut America’s demand for imported goods, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

The economic adviser said it’s still too early to gauge the broad impact of the president’s recovery program.

“But it is modestly encouraging that since it began to take shape, consumer spending in the U.S., which was collapsing during the holiday season, appears, according to a number of indicators, to have stabilized,” Summers told the Brookings Institution, a think tank.

Summers was asked by a member of the audience what the nation’s business community could do to help speed the recovery.

“What we need today is more optimism and more confidence,” Summers said.

SynergyBlog agrees – and we’ve decided that we are going to do our part to end the recession by not allowing it to self-fulfill.

We need to establish trust in the marketplace and in our organizations. To do that we must do the following:

1. Deliver Excellence in the products we make and services we provide. Every time.
2. Exude a level of Goodwill that can be detected in the things we do and say. Is it that difficult to help a neighbor or a colleague in need?
3. Maintain the highest level of Ethical Standards in your industry sector. Promote integrity in word and deed.
4. Create Value for our clients, constituents, strategic partners, and colleagues. Ask yourself daily, “Have I delivered on my brand promise?”
5. Listen to the needs of stakeholders and act on what you hear. Responsiveness can make the difference between success and failure in these economic times.

By continuing to exemplify trustworthiness in the marketplace, we fuel the engine of confidence in the economy. One business at a time.

See the full AP story here.

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Restoration of Consumer Confidence a Necessary Ingredient for Recovery

Here is an interesting piece by Dr. Anthony DiBella about the need for trusted leadership. Enjoy. Thrive. Trust and be Trusted.

In their efforts to manage the ups and downs of the business cycle, economists often talk about the need for soft landings. During the past six months, what seemed like that has turned into a major crash that continues to spiral downward. When will the tunnel digging end? How do we create a financial phoenix and turn the nose of our economic flight upwards again?

It should be clear by now that the $750-billion bailout package passed by Congress last year was a case of don’t just stand there, do something. In a society that values action over reflection, there are major pressures on our politicians to act (fire first, aim later). Action is vital, but if not guided by rigorous and valid analysis, can cause more harm than good. The bailout money given to the financial sector was intended to free up credit. Instead, it’s been used primarily for private rather than social gain, and we are worse off now than before.

With Capitol Hill and Smith Hill planning more initiatives, we need to think clearly about underlying causes and tipping points. Many pundits claim they know what will get us moving again, to turn our economic ship, to grow rather than regress. Some say it will require an upturn in the housing market, others say employment. The Fed thought that lowering interest rates would do the trick, but rates now are as low as they will ever be unless the Fed wants to give us money for free. Conservatives and libertarians think the times call for tax cuts.

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