Our Leadership Category
Many years ago, I helped to organize a slogan competition at both the Labour and Conservative party Conferences in Britain. It was fascinating to see what slogans the delegates came up with as they wandered past our stand, representing British advertising. Of course most of the slogans offered on both sides of the political fence were identical and extraordinarily unimaginative, indistinguishable from the official party slogans at the time.
You know the sort of thing: “Forward to a Bright Tomorrow”, “Leading the Future”, “Power to all the People”, “We Make the Tough Decisions”, and so on. I cannot even remember most of them, except one, the one that I decided was the best, as it happens, from a Labour Party Delegate. It was very simple, although it took me a while before my politically overworked and feverish mind could encompass its simplicity:
“Tax is the cost of living in a civilized society”.
How true – and how rarely stated – is this?
The idea behind it is as old and as simple as buttons but the implication is huge, opening up a new line of significance for the assessment of corporate reputation.
Powerful individuals and big firms should be assessed, and their reputation proportionately enhanced, on the overall contribution they make to the communities and the populations in which they operate and from which they benefit. But I am not talking about corporate social responsibility, with its family days, site exhibitions, charitable contributions, patronages and local sponsorships. Important and valuable as these are, they are not the real benchmark of a socially responsible company.
The payment of tax, whether national, regional or local, is the real bottom line of corporate responsibility. Many companies cannot be faulted on their voluntary and well publicized efforts in social responsibility, but the same companies employ lots of effort and people to maximize their tax breaks and minimize their returns and are most unwilling see their profits taxed more than the absolute minimum necessary. Some of the tax bills of leading US corporations are, quite frankly, breathtaking in the complexity of thought and application that led to such a small assessment.
And many large US corporations are on record as insisting that the US should balance its budget and cut social spending so that the national debt can be managed but they also contribute hugely to that debt (of $14.5 trillion) with their extraordinarily and cleverly low tax bills.
A range of potential legislation comes to mind, but perhaps the first necessary regulatory change is that governments should remove tax concessions for all those self-serving charitable donations, sponsorships, scholarships and corporate foundations and simply ask corporations to enter a straight-as-a-die tax return on the basis of its turnover. The bigger the better. The bigger the more responsible. The bigger the contribution, dare I say, the better the reputation. I can certainly see a relatively easy corporate reputation assessment becoming available..
So, to corporations the message is: stop being charitable, stop these tricky and clever negotiations with the tax authorities and just start paying tax, for tax is the cost of living in a civilised society. For everybody. Including companies.
“What’s more dangerous, pesticides or horse manure?” The answer may surprise. Researchers await the first human death from pesticide residues, fifty years after DDT was introduced and thirty years after its use was banned in the United States, but horse manure is claiming lives daily through the bacterial contamination of organic food.
We take our health for granted and it is natural that we do. We do not examine the whys and wherefores of living longer, on average, than our grandparents and their grandparents, but with a current life expectation of between 75 and 80 for the average European, no less than 30 years have been added to this average total during the course of the 20th century. It’s a miracle of science, so they say.
If it is, then science has been regularly and consistently performing miracles on our behalf for several generations. Some might say even here that it has been playing God. What right have scientists to indulge in research that will result in people living longer using ‘artificial’ drugs and medicines? Modern pharmaceuticals, as well as processed food, have been stretching our life expectancy despite the fact that we did not directly ask for it.
What did people do before pasteurisation? What did people do before fluoride was added to water?, before the widespread use of food additives, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides? What did people do before penicillin, iodine, chlorine?
Well, to be completely and brutally accurate, they died, often wracked by a very painful disease such as TB, rickets, smallpox, polio or some other disease now extremely rare in the developed world. It’s an uncomfortable but telling fact, informing us that science has indeed made major strides on our behalf in this century and that virtually all of these have benefited humanity and especially human health, in one way or another.
There has been a reaction to many of these advances. Organic farming, in particular, is just such a reaction in the most precise sense. Before the introduction of pesticides and other synthetic additions to the crops, all farming was organic, in the sense that organic matter was used for crop protection and fertilizer.
There has been controversy about the degree of toxicity in organic crops. Organic farmers have been forced onto the defensive and have stated that organic produce is no more toxic that conventional produce. This may often be the case but I doubt it as a general rule. Many will be surprised to hear that organic farming can be toxic at all but therein lies one of the confusions that beset this debate and that makes new agricultural technology so easy to criticise. I have no objection to organic farming at all. But I would not insist upon feeding it to my children. Here is why.
Essentially, organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. Animal manure is the biggest reservoir of the bacteria that are making so many people ill.
In truth, until the last few years the threat of food-borne bacteria was relatively mild in the U.S. It was prudent to refrigerate one’s food and to wash one’s hands before preparing food or eating, and those simple procedures kept food-borne illnesses to a minimum. On occasion, neglect of these rules would cause a family to suffer severe stomach aches. And every year a few weak individuals — the very young, the very old, or those who were already quite ill — would die from exposure to food-borne bacteria.
As these lethal new bacteria spread, organic foods have become a more risky food choice.
Organic and “natural” food consumers also face an increased risk of illness from toxins produced by fungi — and some of these toxins are carcinogenic. Refusing to use artificial pesticides, organic farmers allow their crop fields to suffer more damage from insects and rodents, which creates openings through which fungi can enter the fruits and seeds. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly tests samples of various foods for such dangers, and it routinely finds high levels of these natural toxins in organically grown produce. It found, for instance, that organic crops have higher rates of infestation by aflatoxin, one of the most virulent carcinogens know to man.
The organic-food sector stresses the natural production of foods and beverages — even to the point of refusing to pasteurize milk and fruit juices. As a result, many people become seriously ill after consuming products they mistakenly believe are purer than other foods. For instance, in 1996 E. coli 0157 sickened more than seventy people who contracted it from unpasteurized apple juice produced by the Odwalla Juice Company. One young girl in Colorado died because of this. Odwalla was fined more than $1 million in the case and now pasteurizes its juice. But more than 1,500 other companies still cater to the “natural means raw” idea by selling unpasteurized beverages that can prove deadly.
Even without pesticides and pasteurization, producers could render their organic and natural foods safe through irradiation. Irradiation uses low levels of gamma radiation to kill bacteria, and the process also preserves the freshness of foods such as strawberries and chicken. But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently proposed an organic-food standard that would have allowed irradiation, the plan drew more than 200,000 angry protests from organic farmers and caterers.
According to recent data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC), people who eat organic and “natural” foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157: H7). This new E. coli is attacking tens of thousands of people per year, all over the world. It is causing permanent liver and kidney damage in many of its victims.
“Natural food” proponents claim that organic farming is “earth-friendly,” but it’s not. The ugly secret of organic farming is that its yields are only about half as high as those of mainstream farmers. Approximately one-third of the average organic farm is not planted to marketable crops at all; it is planted to green manure crops (such as clover) to build up the nitrogen fertility of the soil depleted by the previous crop. If the organic farmers gave up animal manure as a nitrogen source, the percentage of land they keep in green manure crops would have to become even higher. Mainstream farmers take their nitrogen from the air, through an industrial process that requires no land to be taken from nature. Also, the organic farmers suffer higher losses from destruction by pests. They expect it. Books on organic farming tell their readers to live with it.
For all these reasons, widespread organic farming is simply not a viable option at this time, unless you can afford it. The first consequence of a global shift to organic farming would be the plowdown of at least six-million square miles of wildlife habitat to make up for the lower yields of organic production. That is more than the total land area of the United States.
Agriculture already takes up 36 percent of the world’s land surface. (All the world’s cities cover only 1.5 percent.) A world with a peak population of 8.5 billion affluent people in 2050 will need at least 2.5 times as much farm output as we have today.
In fact, the worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea are leading the biggest surge in demand for meat and milk the world has ever seen. It is now probably too late to save wildlands by preventing people from acquiring a taste for meat and milk, and there is certainly no sign of mass conversions to vegetarianism around the globe. It is becoming uncomfortably likely that disasters will have to happen before the world wakes up to the realisation that organic farming takes us further away, not closer, to sustainability and feeding the world’s hungry millions.
If the world does not triple the yields on the high-quality land currently in farming, we will pay the price not in human famine but in forests and wild meadows cleared to produce more meat, milk, and produce.
Giving up pesticides would mean the certain destruction of millions of square miles of wildlands, much of it in the species-rich tropics. Because much of the world’s biodiversity is in those lands, a move toward widespread organic farming would cost nature far more than the careful use of today’s safe, narrowly targeted pesticides, high-powered seeds, and factory-produced fertilizers.
Somalia, the world’s most failed and least governed state, is incapable even of investing its own government with the powers and the authority it needs to distribute the aid that it gets from the international community. So it has little chance of protecting its people or fighting international crime. But up until some years ago, a very profitable part of the Somalian economy was coastal sea fishing. In this at least, Somalian coastal areas were a horn of plenty.
Thanks to excellent research by journalist Christopher Hyatt* and others, some uncomfortable details emerge that are perhaps not well enough known.
Following the 1991 civil war, large numbers of Somalian refugees fled to the coastal areas to escape the drought and warfare and in the hope of benefiting from the country’s long-established and successful fishing communities.
Soon afterwards, large foreign ships could be seen from the shore. These ships, from Europe and Asia, were entering Somali waters, driving away the native fishermen, and undertaking large scale fishing operations with drift nets and underwater explosives, also destroying coral reefs along with the previously sustainable Somalian fishing industry.
But the ships that were stealing the livelihoods of the fishermen were not only there to plunder Somalia’s marine resources. In 2005, a study conducted by the FAO found evidence of “illegal dumping of industrial and nuclear wastes along the Somali coast”. The United Nations Environment Program also confirmed that “Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990’s”.
So what had been happening just off the Somali coast was nothing less
than a bullies’ paradise, a mutually agreed and largely unreported free-for-all in the Horn of Africa region for international companies, who dumped their waste in the waters off Somalia rather than disposing of it properly elsewhere.
The Somali fishermen continued to scrape a living, but the fleets decided that even this could damage their profits. They started to chase out the fishermen. The High Seas Task Force, a group of ministers and NGOs who combat illegal fishing, reported that the foreign ships were caught “pouring boiling water on the fishermen”, also crushing smaller boats and “killing all the occupants”. In a country where famine had taken the lives of 240,000 people since the beginning of a civil war, the fishing communities saw no option but to challenge the invading fleets.
The local fishermen began arming themselves when heading out to sea and set up groups such as the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia, whose initial motive was to scare away the foreign ships with menaces. The Volunteer Coast Guard’s intimidation alone did nothing to deter the foreign fleets, so they decided to start boarding them, demanding ransoms for the release of their crew.
The tactic of hijacking and hostage-taking were successful. A type of Robin Hood style protection racket was born. Inevitably, this led to warlords and gangsters to take advantage and the local fishing boats armed in defence found themselves attacked not only by foreigners but also by other Somalis, who wanted their boats so that they could launch their own attacks on any vessel which happened to pass their way, whether it carried oil, food aid or bananas.
Now organized armed criminals (possibly financed by the pan-African direct action group al-Shabab) whose only motive is financial gain have learned from the desperate fishermen. Since the element of terrorism is also at issue, the international armed guards patrolling Somali waters have become less patient. An EU spokesperson has documented cases where “armed security teams have opened fire on fishermen believing them to be pirates” because their training “hadn’t been that good” in explaining that many Somali fishermen carried weapons in order to defend themselves from pirates attempting to take their boats, and trawlers attempting to take their livelihoods.
According to a recent BBC report, Somali pirates seized a record 1,181 hostages in 2010, and were paid many millions of dollars in ransom. In the fall of 2011, more than 300 hundred people were being held hostage by various pirate groups based in Somalia.
The economy of the coastal area, the Puntland, has now been transformed from reliance on fishing to reliance on providing the pirates with a suitable standard of living from the organized criminality.
Just feeding and housing the hijacked crews helps sustain the economy in Puntland. A BBC report describes life in a Somali pirate town: “Eyl has become a town tailor-made for pirates – and their hostages. Special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships. As the pirates want ransom payments, they try to look after their hostages.”
The pirates are a combination of ex-fisherman, ex-militia, and computer geeks. And they don’t see themselves as criminals. One interviewed by the New York Times said: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
Somalia does not take action against these pirates; it cannot. It has a barely functioning government. A few years ago, there was no government at all.
So here is the problem. It’s one of those with local impact and global implication. It is not quite the same as is often reported in papers with a requirement for a fast, safe, comfortably predictable and intuitive story, but it relates a genuine grievance ignored, an environmental challenge turned down, and not least an ethical challenge of huge proportions spurned.
By 2012, international naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden were making it difficult for Somali pirates to launch attacks. But, at least 40 vessels and more than 400 hostages are still being held in or just off Somalia, according to the Ecoterra International group which monitors piracy in the region.
The truth is not the same as the reality. The UN had already proposed twice, in 2005 and 2006, that an embargo placed on fish taken from Somali waters would mitigate the problem, but they were quite simply ignored. No significant diplomatic action taken from this perspective has occured since. Most efforts now concentrate on making the seaway safe for the tankers and arresting the pirates.
In this question of global trade interests against a subsistence economy and ethical trade, public pressure could also encourage stricter regulation on EU-registered trawlers, were this issue and its history better publicized and distributed.
In a peculiar but direct way, the plight of those living in and around the coastal communities of Somalia, and most especially the way their life dependencies have changed from sustainability and fishing to dependence and criminality, have become the responsibility of all those who use and waste most of the world’s oil.
Somehow, the fact that this affects one of the poorest, hungriest and most needy countries in the world, means that nothing apparently can be done to hinder those sacrosanct world trade flows and their doubtless unintentional impacts.
*http://www.wessexscene.co.uk/politics/2012/03/28/we-have-helped-create-the-somali-pirate-problem/
April 27th, 2012
Reputation Contrast: Two captains of the England football team, 50 years apart
John Terry is the current captain of the England football team. Well, actually, technically he isn’t because he has been charged with a crime and is awaiting his case in court. Many claim that he is also a good player, even one of the best, and those who support Chelsea certainly think he is a brilliant player. Last week he was sent off in a crucial European match in which Chelsea were involved. Away from the play, he deliberately kneed one of the opposition’s players in the small of the back. I rather doubt it hurt as much as it looked and the player concerned rolled around in agony for a while but John Terry was promptly sent off.
Why did he feel the need to knee the player, a Spaniard, from behind, off the ball, and without provocation, apart from the fact that the Spaniard was getting past him easily and often?
Amazingly John Terry said in a post match interview that the man had run in front of him and that his action was unintended and an accident. “I’m not that type” said Terry. It prompted a flurry of UK trending activity on Twitter around John Terry excuses of the “He assaulted my fist with his chin” type.
In September 2001 Terry was fined two weeks wages by his club after drunkenly harassing grieving American tourists in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks. A year later, he was caught on camera in public urinating in a beer glass, which he then dropped on the floor before leaving the pub.
In January 2002 Terry was involved in an incident at a West London nightclub. He was charged with assault and affray, but was later cleared. In the same month, Terry was fined £60 for parking his Bentley in a parking space reserved for disabled people.
In 2009 Terry was investigated by Chelsea and the FA for allegedly taking £10,000 from an undercover reporter for a private tour of the club’s training ground.
In January 2010 John Terry won a “super-injunction” preventing any reporting about his affair with the girlfriend of England team mate Wayne Bridge (and mother of their child), which collapsed in a welter of recrimination and accusation after it became clear that he had had a four month affair with her. His England team mate later caused a minor media flutter by refusing to shakle hands with him at the next game.
Last November, Terry was investigated following an allegation of racist abuse made by Anton Ferdinand, a fellow footballer. He has since been charged and now faces a criminal trial this July. Video footage circulated on the internet has led to accusations that Terry called Ferdinand a “fucking black cunt”.
Terry is reliably reported to be paid almost 10 million pounds per year.
Robert “Bobby” Moore, OBE captained West Ham United for more than ten years and was captain of the England team that won the 1966 World Cup. He is widely regarded as one of the all-time greats of world football, and was cited by Pelé as the greatest defender that he had ever played against.
On 29 May 1963, 22-year-old Moore captained his country for the first time and was given the job permanently the following year, when he also lifted the FA Cup as captain of his club, West Ham. The following month he captained England to its first (and almost certainly only) World Cup win, assisting three of England’s goals. Of many memorable images from that day, one is of Moore wiping his hands clean of mud and sweat on the velvet tablecloth before shaking the hand of Queen Elizabeth II as she presented him with the World Cup.
Moore was awarded the coveted BBC Sports Personality of the Year title at the end of 1966, the first footballer to do so, and remaining the only one for a further 24 years. He was also decorated with the OBE in the New Year Honours List.
The year 1970 was a mixed and eventful for Moore. He was again named as captain for the 1970 World Cup but there was heavy disruption to preparations when an attempt was made to implicate Moore in the theft of a bracelet from a jeweller in Bogotá, Colombia, where England were involved in a warm-up game. Moore was arrested although subsequently the case was dropped entirely; an exonerated Moore returned to Mexico to rejoin the squad and prepare for the World Cup. The strongest explanation (other than a completely false accusation) was that he covered for a known kleptomaniac in the England squad.
Moore went on to play a leading role in England’s progress through their group. In the second game against favourites Brazil, there was a defining moment for Moore when he tackled Brazil’s Jairzinho with such precision and cleanliness that it has been described as the perfect tackle.
Throughout Moore’s total footballing career of nearly twenty years at international and club level he was booked only once. After an unsuccessful career in business, blighted by his attempt to pay off all those who had invested in a business of his that failed, Moore died of bowel and liver cancer at the age of 51 on 24 February 1993.
On 28 June 1993 his memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey, attended by all the other members of the 1966 World Cup Team. He was only the second sportsman to be so honoured, the first being the West Indian cricketer Sir Frank Worrell.
Moore was made an Inaugural Inductee of the English Football Hall of Fame in 2002 in recognition of his impact on the English game as player. The stand replacing the south bank at West Ham’s ground, the Boleyn Ground in Upton Park, was named the Bobby Moore Stand shortly after Moore’s death.
In November 2003, to celebrate UEFA’s Jubilee, he was selected as the Golden Player of England by The Football Association as their most outstanding player of the past 50 years.
Bobby Moore left just over 20,000 pounds in his estate when he died. He had continued to pay off those to whom he imagined he owed money.
“He was my friend as well as the greatest defender I ever played against. The world has lost one of its greatest football players and an honourable gentleman.” Pelé
“Bobby Moore was a real gentleman and a true friend, the best defender in the history of the game.” Franz Beckenbauer
“Moore was the best defender I have ever seen.” Sir Alex Ferguson
“Immaculate footballer. Imperial defender. Immortal hero of 1966. First Englishman to raise the World Cup aloft. Favourite son of London’s East End. Finest legend of West Ham United. National Treasure. Master of Wembley. Lord of the game. Captain extraordinary. Gentleman of all time.” Inscription on the Bobby Moore Sculpture.
John Terry and Bobby Moore. Reputations contrasted.
The phrase “creating edge” made its debut in biz-speak at least around 40 years ago (although there is no certain origin). It had a longer history in real language and dialogue, as cliches must: the phrase first arose in theater criticism to describe acting that was so impressive it was ‘on the edge of reality’. How ironic that such overused words quietly wait so long before biting your legs.
It has now expired in polite society, barrack rooms, music notices, boat decks and theater reviews, and is treated largely as a ironic joke phrase in popular intercourse but it is still going strongly if blindly in that parallel universe of biz-speak, thanks probably to its multiple meanings, its promise of clarity and its actual delivery of doubt and ambiguity.
Someone who is creating edge should be proposing ideas, projects and programs that are imaginative and exciting and which rock the institutional, social or corporate boat. The description is intended to be a positive description and in biz-speak comes with an unspoken addition that such boat-rocking should not be in a capsizing way. As such, it is often explicitly included in large companies’ Mission Statements, Visions, Values, Dreams, Guidelines, Overall Objectives, Pathways, Roadmaps, Manifestos, Corporate Challenges, Global Challenges, Constellations and Star-maps. I am sure I saw it in my tea-leaves the other day.
A person in a company who truly creates edge is, however, often and literally on it, and can find himself or herself on the wrong side of it, even when having, perhaps to much applause, created it.
When senior managers and their acolytes use the phrase they generally offer an example, normally from safely outside the company, of creative expression that can seem to get doves fluttering in their dovecots, the cat prancing among the pigeons, and various worms crawling out of half-opened cans. Not to mention the unthinkable: Pandora thinking outside her box.
A little instability is A Good Thing, the rolling stone will not gather moss unless it moves, and the comfort zone can lull you into inactivity. People who create edge are good for destabilizing those who are too comfortable, and for helping the idea along that companies are at their best when they remain in perpetual structural change.
Hmm… It is significant that none of this actually stands up to any proper scientific test, nor any academic assessment or review. This is a theory without an author, a movement without a prophet, a manifesto without manifest, a morality without commandments, a business case without any supporting evidence or even operating instructions.
No-one has ever proved that constant corporate structural upheaval is good for companies, people or society. But permanent upheaval definitely needs consultants and agencies to fill the research void by talking and repeating themselves about creating edge and getting uprooted from comfort zones.
However, the reality is that those creative people creating edge cannot be allowed just to create the edges that keep the workers and doers worried and over-working but squarely in their place. Unfortunately their habit also causes concerns and worries to the senior management. This is the creation of true edge. And this of course is unacceptable.
Perpetual structural change must of course exclude the senior management, who obviously need to be settled to do their job properly. Let’s face it, senior management never wanted to encourage people to worry them. It has quite enough to worry about already.
So creating edge in this direction cannot be allowed to happen. Most tough-talking CEOs can be heard saying that they hate surprises. This, more than any other phrase, is responsible for corporate intellectual sclerosis and constitutes copper-bottomed proof that creating that sort of edge is just not allowed.
So those truly involved in the creation of edges are deliberately and pointedly excluded from seniority by most companies, because thinking on the edge means knowing where the edge is, which means having a view of the outside perspective, which in turn means that you cannot be trusted.
In practice, contrary thinking is required to achieve geniune creativity. This becomes self-evident when we realize that thinking the way your leaders and bosses think results most often in mimicry, in the parroting and repetition of meaningless phrases, a clever skill and a sincere form of the much respected practice of flattery, but still requiring an absolute minimum of creative thought, as well as providing the spark that unfailingly gives birth to prejudice.
No, if someone senior tells you that you are creating edge, check your contract and employment conditions immediately, run a quick internal test on their “creative ambiguity” rating, review your messages and join Linked-In; you are about to be performance-assessed out of your job because you are a menace to many.
“A lie can travel halfway ’round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain once said.
The desire to be first with the news, even at the risk of being wrong, is nothing new. But social networks and Internet accessibility have combined to contribute more errors into the newsfeed than ever, now that everyone has become a journalist.
With speed at a premium, some websites have built a following by actually trafficking in rumors and uncertainties. The ability to post quickly means that misinformation can be initiated and spread quickly, and although it can also be corrected quickly, few notice the correction, as they might have done more often in the printed press. In many cases no-one bothers even to retract, finding an excuse in the defense that rumor is itself newsworthy.
When bad drives out good..
For those seriously and professionally involved in news and information, these developments are a menace. It is better to delay until you have the facts right, or you risk adding to the flood of misinformation and error. But you don’t get the headline and indeed your story may be spiked beyond retrieval by the time you have perfected and checked it.
So the bad drives out the good; the careless drives out the accurate and lies chase out the truth. It’s a truism that certainly predates the Internet.
The danger for us news and info addicts is similar to the fate that faces most of the world’s currencies (and their users). If currencies go on devaluing and pretend that they haven’t (the pound sterling is a perfect example of this over the last century), then in the end the whole system becomes totally devalued and therefore completely worthless.
A similar fate awaits people’s trust in news and information, especially from traditional outlets. There may be a collapse of credibility that will see news replaced entirely by entertainment, and information replaced by fiction. Should we be worried about this?
The signs have been increasing for some years, and there is some evidence that people are becoming more sceptical and even cynical. But I fear that in practice and overall the opposite is true. People are actually becoming more gullible, trusting and over-sensitive. Exaggerated fears, not large yawns, are the scourge of those trying to communicate directly, honestly and realistically.
When people believe nothing they will also believe anything. This is why we should all try to restore respect to dialogue, and value to communications in business, politics, economics, society and culture. And we must do it quickly, robustly and with settled determination. We must put on those shoes before the lie closes the circle.
At the beginning of the AGM season here is a pertinent question.
How do you deal with people who hate your company? There are some organizations and even more individuals who dislike companies so much that their dislike can seem to border on an obsessive hatred, an inability to think rationally or with moderation. Or, at least, this is how it can appear to companies who are being challenged or even threatened.
Every company has them. They can be lonely losers, self-obsessed, wielding specific and narrowly targeted influence way beyond the real circumstances of their actual situation. They can be embittered ex-employees with a burning grievance or sense of having been swindled or unfairly dismissed. They can be powerful, influential, rich and externally obsessed, like Ralph Nader, millionaire, Lebanon-born American king of NGOs, six-time candidate for President of the United States, and hero of the campaign against the US car industry and General Motors in the 1960s and 1970s.
Admittedly most companies hardly ever bother with the first two categories, but the third category is a recognized problem, posing a real and running threat to corporate reputation. General Motors was certainly obsessed with Nader. It hired private detectives to tap his phones, check his bins and exhaustively investigate his past. It also hired prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations (unsuccessfully). It is far too long ago for him to be accused of being a secret Muslim.
Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case early for $425,000, a very large amount in the 1960s, equivalent to nearly $10 million today.
Nader’s lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover “overzealous surveillance.” Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law and funding his own substantial additional projects. The car industry’s own goal was complete. Indeed it was a hat-trick.
Nonetheless, forty and fifty years on, companies still try to counter-spy, to uncover private facts and more about individuals who appear to display a hostile approach to them. They still try to smear those they perceive to be their enemies, and in doing so forget their lines, their responsibilities and their own stakeholders’ expectations.
I have, unhappily, witnessed a few of these operations, and none of the actions that I have observed to this effect has ever worked without some form of countervailing blow-back. Significantly none of the actions were ever taken on the basis of a management consensus; most were minority actions taken with the private approval of very senior management.
Sometimes, particularly with regard to social media, it’s best not to engage vociferous and determined opponents substantively once it becomes clear that a debate is not being offered.
But some companies get stubborn and self-righteous. They want not only to be right but they want proof and a certificate of it. Deep down, they want their critics to make public grovelling apologies, little realizing that in this there is no difference between them and their tormentors. Eventually they lose credibility with their real customers and other stakeholders by being seen to beat the same drum over and over and enter a corporate trance like an addled hippy.
However, companies need to mix circumspection with passion. They need always to be responsive. They don’t have to turn the other cheek but they should not hide and should never fail to respond with a sense of the debate as a whole and not just the last thing said.
They need also to remain genuine (as long as they had been before) and to show continued understanding of the issue or the grievance.
But really none of these things can be done if you do not demonstrate a transparent commitment to talk directly and openly with external groups and any other individuals who are taking you to task. They may not reply satisfactorily but you have done your best and you will thus impress the people and institutions watching you who really matter.
April 6th, 2012
Comparing reputations for the MOOT Award 2012: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, DSK
Calling politicians out of touch is a very old, even antiquated catcall. Politicians have been guilty of being out of touch from the beginning of politics and there is really nothing new in the criticism. It is always likely to hit the spot in any context and more or less any environment.
But there is more than a touch of irony in the recent international resurgence of this particular criticism. Politicians are being called out of touch everywhere and anywhere. But here’s one for the hardcore political heckler. Who is most out of touch: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, or Dominique Strauss Kahn?
These three gentlemen are the finalists in the Clement Reputation MOOT Award for 2012. MOOT stands for Most Out Of Touch. Please note that I have had no say in the choosing of the finalists. They are here because of a statistical result delivered by Clement Reputation’s brand new reputationometer, set up to count unfavorable reputation-based observations over the past few weeks. But before opening the envelope, let’s have a quick look at how each politician made it here.
George Osborne is being called out of touch because of his imposition of value added tax on hot take-away food bought from food retail establishments (rather than take-away establishments). The idea looks a bit old-fashioned in a class-conscious sense because hot take-away food means pies and pasties, mushy peas and, I presumed, fish and chips. Cold take-away food includes sushi, prawn sandwiches and avocado dip. Need I say more? Well yes, I should, because the way this debate went actually enforced the mistaken impression that this was the Chancellor’s own idea peremptorily picked out of his snooty upper-class satchel, whereas, to be fair, it was an attempt to close the 30 year old loophole that had been generating a 20 percent tax burden on food from hot takeaway food shops for example fish and chips, as at present, but had withheld it on food shops that sold hot food, such as Gregg’s, which is not officially a take-away food shop. Are you following so far?
Few understood this distinction at the time or even now but everyone loved the opening question by a Labour MP to Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Select Committee meeting at the height of the political crisis that developed from the Budget. The question was “when was the last time you bought a (hot) pasty?” George replied that he could not remember. The Labour MP then said, wrongly, that this was exactly the problem. The media ruckus ended with the Chancellor looking foolish and apparently out of touch, whereas the truth was, in many respects, quite the reverse.
Let us move to Seamus the Dog. Er, I mean, to Mitt Romney, a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Presidential elections later this year. Mitt Romney cannot shake off a series of unflattering stories told about him, all of which in one way or another seem to point to his aloofness. His huge wealth is clearly making it difficult for him to get through this particular needle-eye. However, the best story (and it was ever thus) is one he told himself, that three decades ago when he was the governor of Massachusetts he once put his dog in a cage strapped to the roof of his car (a station wagon) presumably because of a lack of space in the car.
This story continues to dog the unfortunate candidate because Romney, a multimillionaire, has struggled to make clear to people that he understands and feels for the common man. While the dog incident has nothing to do with his wealth, it is taken as symbolic of the idea that he seems to live on a different planet, unconcerned about the impressions of others, including dogs.
(Note to Americans: In England this man would have had to resign and probably commit suicide within minutes of telling this story.)
And now the man many Frenchmen have taken to their heart, a sure sign being the ascription of an acronym to identify him: DSK.
Last year, while trailing his coat for the Socialist candidacy for the French Presidency election, he texted the following cheery message to his friend (my translation into English) “Do you want (can you?) come over to a magnificent hot totty club in Madrid with me (plus some action) on 4 July?”
It has since transpired that DSK did not think that the naked women wandering around at the parties (which he may have had a hand in organizing) could possibly have been prostitutes. The girls have said that the party featured scenes of violence and bestiality. DSK also says that his rights have been manifestly violated by his arrest on suspicion of being the party planner (or “pimp”).
Whatever the merits of the legal case against DSK, and the details of the case are already startling, the political and ethical case is even more challenging. Here is a man who saw nothing wrong with what he was doing, and the significance of this is not the careless amorality but the extraordinary assumption that he would not be condemned by the French public or by his peers, or apparently by his wife, if he was discovered, an attitude he also demonstrated after his unseemly exit from a Washington hotel room earlier last year.
“On reflection,” DSK said recently, “I think I have been naive.” Hey, DSK, that’s not even close..
All is not lost, however, his outrage at his treatment by ordinary people has been mollified by a rapturous welcome to the international speech circuit in Kiev, delivering a lecture organised by Ukrainian billionaire businessman Viktor Pinchuk.
In the circumstances the Clement Reputation MOOT (Most Out Of Touch) award is given to.. DSK!
The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China. Targets hit in the mass defacement action included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others.
A message available on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government’s strict control of its citizens. Wow, that must piss them off, big time.
It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime/ Let’s hope that they do. The announcement awas made via an Anonymous China account that was established in March.
Sites defaced had the same message posted to them that scolded the nation’s government for its repressive policies.
It read: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”
China has one of the most comprehensive web control and surveillance systems in the world, known as the Great Firewall of China. It reinforces its political social controls and tries to restrict what Chinese people can talk about when they go online.
The Anonymous attackers have posted links to help people avoid official scrutiny of what they do and say online.
There has been no official confirmation of the action. News wires have reported that government officials have denied any action had taken place. No surprise there.
However, many of the sites listed are now offline and a few others displayed a hacked page for a long time rather than their own homepage.
Well done the Anon. On the evidence so far, you are better friends to ordinary people than any Government.
Just as the nature of reputational risks varies from company to company, so too does the potential damage of each such risk that any company faces.
But one of the biggest risks of all is probably the most difficult to cover or even to address.
This concerns the inherent honesty of the company concerned and that of their senior management. Some companies have integrity built into their culture, an honesty that stays embedded because of the practice of the personnel; senior, junior, top and bottom. Other companies do not have integrity but they think they do. Others have little or no integrity, know they do not, but claim they do, believing the outside world to be gullible. Others yet again just have no integrity, do not claim to do so, and do not care. This is most normally demonstrated in their treatment of personnel.
For the companies who are dishonest or in denial, this situation presents a very difficult early hurdle to overcome for the in-house reputation manager, especially one arriving new to the company and to the task from elsewhere.
It is a commonplace observation in the larger and international companies that new recruits or external consultants are effectively the only people who can even aspire to change things in the company, as everyone else is too tired, too discredited, too ground down, too arrogant and too ‘experienced’ to stake their careers on what will be often presented as disloyalty.
Companies where this observation is a commonplace are generally institutionally corrupted, perhaps not irrevocably so, but it’s difficult to see how transparency can work in such an environment, or how a genuinely ethical culture can put down roots.
Another sign of corruption can show from the attitude of the senior communications manager. Is he or she a hoarder and guardian of information or a provider and sharer of information? If the former then that person is far less likely to be honest in other areas of decision-making and leadership.
In such companies, communications resources get consumed by the bigger functions of the company, for example in brand maintenance (featuring the ever-expensive advertising) and enterprise risk management rather than issue, stakeholder or reputation management.
These are also generally the companies in which a senior manager asks you repeatedly for the business case for reputation management. As a response you can ask the questioner to provide the business case for NOT having reputation management. But update your CV first…
Many companies have adopted and implemented robust enterprise risk management (ERM) systems, largely because it is far easier to make a short term business case for these. But, given that reputation disasters can encompass enterprise disasters, companies should also be developing processes to address threats to reputation with at least as much effort as they do with threats to enterprise.
Progressive companies with integrity are unlikely to have these problems. They allocate appropriate resources for covering reputation and issue exposure.
Communicators in these companies, managed and encouraged by sharers of information, are making better-informed decisions affecting reputation and this is creating a robust platform for strong and confident external relations.
In fact, if this platform isn’t there for all the company communicators and not just the CEO and senior management acolytes then the reputation of the company will inevitably suffer, whatever the enterprise or the markets may do.
