Reputation has always been a catalyst for company success, but the attention it now demands in our culture is of a critical nature as a driver of competent risk management. Still, it is being undervalued in practice. Michael Toebe discusses the disconnect.
Follow the media closely; shortcomings are more frequent than you might imagine. New research is also providing evidence that not all companies and executives yet fully understand the connection between and the realities of reputation and risk.
It affects financial safety and growth in the market, business relationships, media beliefs and the career well-being of an organization’s highest-ranking leaders.
The gap in belief between what is true, evident and helpful and what is assumed was eminently and surprisingly clear in the findings released recently by the firm Weber Shandwick, in partnership with KRC Research, in their collaborative survey, “The State of Corporate Reputation in 2020: Everything Matters Now.”
Global executives (and boards of directors) are exhibiting blind spots and dangerous overconfidence about the risk of a lower standard of reputation in our cultural environment, a mindset that has proven to increase the risk of conflicts, crises and scandals.
According to the survey, while executives have learned that an average of 63 percent…
