Performance assessment, for example, has become almost entirely meaningless in most senior management positions, ever since senior managers realized that if applied properly it would challenge the assessor in many ways more than the assessed. This is because it would prioritize the interests and approaches of the assessed above the prejudices and assumptions of the assessor.

Properly applied and implemented performance assessment of more than ten direct reports should take around 20 percent of a good manager’s entire time.

This makes it unlikely that anyone is really doing it properly, and the recent emergence of the verb “to performance assess” as a synonym for “to make redundant” is a startling outcome of the huge and discrete cynicism that surrounds the practice by both assessors and those assessed.

In a time of rampant bureaucracy and increasing cynicism about new programs, many innovative leaders are struggling to survive, let alone impress their superiors. Everyone is filling in more forms in the vicious circle of political compliance, and many managers are choosing greater isolation as a way of immunizing themselves from the widening cynicism that pervades the leadership model. One small example is that senior managers, according to a recent survey, are now doing on average 20 percent more administrative tasks than they were ten years ago.

The current climate of uncertainty and insecurity makes it very difficult to display the enthusiasm to be creative and preserve that “edge” that so many leaders pretend that they want. Edges are sharp, uncomfortable and often dangerous. Edges and their makers need to be given an HSE form to fill in, with its mindless acts of compliance, before they present themselves in the company mainstream again.

A genuine sense of community is getting harder to find in organizations. This is because, contrary to popular assumption, genuine creativity is not a lonely pursuit.

Creativity flourishes in community, in debate, in public. So when companies encourage and protect healthy communities that are free to discuss and debate and criticize, the result is creative communities and an innovative culture.

This will do a company more good in the long term than any number of mindless acts of compliance.

But the more standard the procedures are, the more likely it is that these procedures may not be enough and may be ineffective, and may even divert you from the real issues. Let us take an obvious case.

A company is being hounded by a disgruntled ex-employee, who is posting a series of abusive messages. The company is genuinely innocent of the charges, has excellent employment practices, and has an enviable reputation. The employee is a malicious and spiteful individual with a negative attitude and moreover is lying.

The company is losing customers because of the campaign of abuse, who believe that where there is smoke there is fire. An online reputation management agency is engaged and after several weeks of work monitoring and analyzing the social media, succeeds in silencing the abusive author, derailing the harmful correspondence and muffling the bad stories with a bright parade of good news.

It cannot be done quickly. Maybe the company survives the calumnies. Maybe it doesn’t. Mud sticks, even where it shouldn’t. New customers become harder to find, the reputation damage is on the record and cannot entirely be removed.

But supposing the truth of the matter was that the disgruntled ex-employee had been a honest and public spirited whistle blower who had exposed corrupt or dishonest practices at the company and had been dismissed unfairly, or, to coin a phrase of one of my colleagues, had been “performance-assessed out” of his job by his unscrupulous employer.

Reputation in the picture

With the roles reversed, unfortunately the skills of the online reputation manager can equally be brought into play, and so are available for the good as well as for the bad and the ugly, just as lawyers and other advocates are equally for hire.

The truth of the matter gets subsumed by the reality. Except for the fact that the truth actually lies elsewhere, and so a distinction must be drawn between online reputation management and the process by which a company acquires and keeps a reputation.

I have always been suspicious of the often repeated phrase that a reputation can be ruined overnight. Maybe it can in some cases.

But a really good reputation, honestly earned and properly maintained, simply cannot be ruined overnight by unsubstantiated gossip, hate mail or mischievous accusations. Serious and lasting reputational damage can be caused only by the exposure of the truth. Gerald Ratner’s famous comment at the CBI was so damaging precisely because it was true and because, being true, it exploded the pretensions upon which the company had secured its success through such products.

In short, tittle-tattle cannot ruin a reputation securely planted, but if the reputation is a lie, however securely planted, then of course it will be ruined quickly by the ultimate discovery of that lie.

The popularity of social networking websites has opened the door for anyone wishing to assess your character and reputation, as imprinted on the screen.

Social networks and data mining are becoming easier and more accessible, more understandable and quite possibly less rather than more influential.

Certainly, an online reputation management program is not optional any more. The hatches must be battened down, the holes patched up.

So someone should be scanning the internet efficiently each day for you, and engaging wherever necessary, and whatever the output looks or feels like, such a program should be as much part of your daily monitoring just as the quaintly named press clippings were in the past.

However, with technology exponentially refining and improving the service of media analysis, the practice of online reputation management may very soon become a free app or get bundled into some other package of branded software that helps to create and sustain a branded presence on the web.

What will be left is the real and abiding issue, the one that technology alone cannot influence – the truth that always lies behind a good reputation, demonstrated by the growing presence and significance of the corporate reputation element in markets, corporate processes and operational systems. This is not so easy to besmirch; the mud does not stick.

This is less about dealing with disgruntled employees or responding to the social media equivalent of hate mail, this is about the nature of tomorrow’s company, the work to create the publicly trusted company of the next generation.

So, with the defences shored, and with scanning and selection in place, good managers should know that the really serious work to create and maintain a great corporate reputation has only just begun.

Rupert Murdoch admitted that he “screwed up” with the purchase of MySpace in 2005 but few then predicted the disastrous investment that it proved. Sure enough, in this most rapid of fast-moving sectors, new media can make fools of us all.

Markets open and close according to the relative technology cost of the service. When that cost plummets, as it often does when there is plenty of access and plenty of production, or when regulation eases, whole families of products and services can often become unsaleable overnight.

Where the service inputs continue to be profitable because producers have been able to defend their investment, either through technical complexity, intellectual property protection, public subsidies or technology import bans, the commercial markets deriving from them flourish only for a few years (or even just a few months) until an improved technology or combination of newer technology and relaxed regulation or just a return to regulatory common sense brought the market opportunity or the business model to a sudden end (and, of course, opened others).

The technology rush is not just maker and breaker of markets. It seems to be molding individual behavior as well. By how much? The 40 year stranglehold of terrestrial television on our leisure time has changed. And with it have gone many cultural shibboleths. Who the hell is Paul McCartney anyway?

Of course, technology change is also shaping reputations and especially perceptions of reputations. And the time factors have similar characteristics. Have we all become totally cool and unimpressible? Or are we all just losing our memories?

Reputations in the social media are starting to look a lot like those little yellow ducks bobbing along the line. Take the weapon, put it to your shoulder, Ready, Aim….

The word ‘social’ is surely and not so slowly dropping out of the well-known phrase upon whose basis many thousands of jobs and functions have been created over the past generation or so.

The term Corporate Social Responsibility has become old fashioned for the process that is determinedly taking place throughout the corporate sector. The word social in the middle unwittingly offers an uncomfortable confirmation that the objective of the process is an exclusively social one, detached from profit and turnover.

So the more genuinely and inherently responsible that companies get, the less they need a specific function of corporate responsibility. The early use of the acronym CSR complete with its S for social harks back to the 60s and 70s when a company’s social responsibility was seen as having only a marginal impact on its perceived character. It was optional and discrete, often expressed as a type of senior management slush fund for charities and special requests for sponsorship or community support.

A really corporately responsible company today and certainly tomorrow will have functions that engage internally to check on sustainability, environmental application, ethics, good workplace practices etc but may not have such CR functions as standalone role profiles (least of all within the communications department, where most of the CR/CSR jobs used to be). CR is destined, inevitably and necessarily, to become subsumed into the corporate structure strategy and thus, in a sense, disappear altogether.

Reputation is what your stakeholders think about you. It is not something that can be bought, but it can certainly be earned by being, in effect, a good, responsive and transparent corporate citizen. But does CSR/CR contribute to corporate reputation? Yes, but so does absolutely everything else that a company does.

The warm feelings of charitable involvement initiated by the CEO have moved a long way over the past generation.

Well-meaning charitable acts and sponsorship have given way to social responsibility according to agreed themes and guidelines that fitted with the company’s brand, and were therefore proposed and nurtured by the communications department.

This gave way to genuine corporate responsibility, seen as an attribute of the whole company and all its functions and processes and not just as a social statement desirable for external relations. This was the cue for CR to leave the communications department and start examining sustainability in the company’s processes from production to global supply.

Now the debate is widening out to what sort of company is going to be seen by the general public (not just its own stakeholders) as the model in the future, say 2030?

Today’s corporate responsibility commitment must develop wider and deeper and further as people and stakeholders become more demanding and are encouraged to believe that companies can continue to improve their reputation exponentially.

There are few resting places on this path since companies either lead the way or will copy each other in what is becoming a virtuous circle.

Within a generation there will be some companies who may have achieved even a measure of secure public trust and credibility.

It could happen if such companies today agree to stick to ordinary common sense values of honesty, transparency, enthusiasm, community and adding social value.

At that point traditional CSR will look a bit quaint, rather as we now see Victorian charitable values. Good, but too old fashioned to work well for today’s drivers of corporate reputation.

Maybe this is the happy valley where lentils and dreams grow?

Wrong. Here’s the deal. The counterfeiter takes cheap paper and turns it into valuable currency by pretence. Creating real value, which means making real goods or services in return for valuable currency, is hard work. How much easier to simply claim actual goods and services with pretend money?

That’s why counterfeiting is illegal. It’s not because I wish any benefits to those absurd brand owners who claim that their advertising budget of $500 million has miraculously created $1bn of brand value (as that claim is a reasonably direct expression of counterfeiting) it is because counterfeiting robs those who work for money, however they value it or use it. They have worked for it in a society that for all its many injustices and imbalances, tends to reward people for working hard.

So given that counterfeiting, the creation of false value, is illegal, then clearly we need to charge the Governors and members of the Boards of the Central Banks of most of the world for counterfeiting. And quickly, before the whole world drowns in the deceitful webs of their mutual calumny. These master counterfeiters have and currently are printing money without creating any value to match up to their deliberate inflation of money. Worse still, is the certainty that they know it doesn’t make sense, but they also know that in the long run, they are all dead. Hence they are counterfeiting.

A government based on the rule of law and on respect for real work and real compensation would arrest these criminals immediately, deny them bail, and keep them jailed on remand until they sew enough prison clothes to put the missing value back into the economy.

But the controversy is very interesting, since most of the debate has been generated by the feeling that Facebook is somehow ours to have and to hold and to do with as we wish (as our FB pages, seemingly. are not), that the company itself is somehow “of the people, for the people, by the people”. In short, Facebook has been getting close to acquiring the basis at least of public credibility, and even the mistaken aura of a publicly trusted company (PTC).

That is a considerable achievement for the founders and early backers, since no large company has ever achieved public trust in the sense that all its stakeholders could be said to believe it and trust it. Facebook shows that it is close to corporate nirvana when people start to complain that it shouldn’t act in the market as other companies do.

But I did notice and admire the five core values of Facebook. These values are a good example of what every company needs. Often largely unnoticed outside the company, the core values of a company invariably provide the basis for its reputation as well as a compass to set direction.

In bullet points the core values of Facebook are stated as:
• Focus on Impact
• Move Fast
• Be Bold
• Be Open
• Build Social Value

Nowhere does it say Don’t Make Mistakes or Strive to Lead or Provide Solutions or Be the Best. None of these, particularly, are primarily seen as virtues. All the better. They are remarkably free of cant and hypocrisy.

Facebook has apparently been built on the simplest of values. And it is about to reap the rewards.

I only noticed because I have been programmed to look out for it in news perusal, not because it achieves anything but because important people go there and create news by saying what we all expect them to say. As a piece of news it has the consistency and interest of a cold pancake even as it happens.

And don’t take my word for it. My thanks to the brilliant www.zerohedge.com for the colourful metaphor that this year it “achieved nothing except allowing a bunch of representatives of the status quo to feel even more self-righteous and important in the world’s biggest annual circle jerk”.

What is it about the confluence of politicians and businessmen that creates such an intercourse failure?

It is essentially that politicians try to sound like businessmen in order to appear more businesslike, and that businessmen try to sound more statesmanlike by talking like politicians. At Davos they reassure each other that the similarity is economically stimulating.

As categories of (mostly) male tribes, curiously they don’t even like each other but they do seem, startlingly, to inhabit similar vocabularies and culture systems, rather as burglars and security guards do.

After the snowborne shindig, everyone simply returns home and carries on doing what they were doing before. It’s high time to re-evaluate and performance-assess the Davos network with extreme prejudice.

Let the circle jerk be broken.

No boss I have known has ever admitted that they were bad leaders (as this is professional suicide), but most of them were not only incapable of managing people properly or fairly but also adept and exhaustive at promoting their leadership qualities to their own bosses. This has often been characterized as the ability to kiss up and kick down.To be sure, the performance assessment of leadership has always been the wrong way round. Those who are suspected of bad leadership are assessed by those who lead them and not by those who are led by them, thus the assessment is always from the top and not from the team.

In turn this always generates a disconnected assessment, since the person assessing your qualities, being on the higher ground where actual productive work is less but management work is more, has little idea of what you are actually doing and how you are doing it.

If the opinions of the leader’s team members ever mattered over the prejudices of their leader's bosses, there would be a better and brighter set of leaders in business right now. The incommunicators, the leveragers, the information hoarders and the socially inadequate would be those worrying about their career, and the genuinely well supported and respected team players would be the leaders.

Nothing in any of the leadership courses I have suffered from for over thirty years has done anything other than to confirm that the most useful leadership skills in big business are in fact about managing upwards and not downwards. This is because doing it the right way round would start a revolution and remove most business leaders from their posts fairly prompto.

Thus, when leadership is never seriously tested by asking those who are led, and since those who are popular with their superiors are rarely popular with their team (and vice versa), it follows that no company suffering from the leadership myth will ever manage to achieve a genuinely good external or internal reputation. They will always be asking the wrong people. They will never see the signals. They will never hear the messages.

It is true that at first glance there is little to bind the Wikipedian and the PR professional. The objectives of each are markedly if not diametrically different.

Wikipedia strives for a negotiated neutrality, one that weighs rather than evaluates the evidence. A page of rubbish can equate, if properly published and referred, to a page of truth. Additions are suspect when not referred properly, but a reference can easily be counterfeited and thus accepted. Rumour holds the same currency as scientific research.

Wikipedians know this and understand the potential problem with this form of information assessment, but they say, rightly, there is no other way through if neutrality is to be preserved, given that the faith structures and political certainties of yesteryear are now missing from our developed but relativistic societies.

On the other hand the corporate approach to Wikipedia has been extraordinarily naive. In many companies there are still senior communications professionals who will believe that the corporate positioning must be reproduced in Wikipedia, whatever it takes. Equally naive but less pompous company employees often try to cut and paste their company’s entry with that of their Annual Report and then wonder what all the fuss is about.

Many CEOs, considering themselves now to be long past the learning stage, are still impossibly demanding about the company text and think their communications personnel and functions are useless when their underlings report back that they cannot change it.

Wikipedia is a perfect example of the great dictum that truth is not reality, and that many impressions taken together can often form a stronger reality than anything in the scientific world

Wikipedia is sometimes seen as having a “centre-left” leaning. This is not an unreasonable assessment. The political leaning comes from two drivers. One, that freedom of information, marginally, is a centre-left preoccupation, and two, that the centre-left response is an automatic reaction to the corporate tendency to lie where it can get away with it, and to bark irritably at the audience without staying for an answer. In this the corporate tendency is, naturally enough, aided and abetted by its advocates.

But there is certainly room for mutual acknowledgment and will be generated best and most effectively by as frank an assessment of the mutual positioning of the respective sides as possible. Know your neighbor before you think about loving him.