Consider A Corporate Reputation Programme

As Warren Buffet famously said, it takes twenty years to build a reputation and only five minutes to destroy it.

We have always used the word “reputation” in our daily lives without thinking of what it really means. What is “reputation” in the strict sense of the word? The Cambridge dictionary defines reputation as the following: the opinion that people in general have about someone or something or how much respect or admiration, someone or something received, based on past behaviour or character.

A “reputation” is not just a collation of past actions, but it can also influence future behaviours. You would rather hire someone with a “good” reputation than a person with a “bad” reputation because we are concerned about the longer-term implication to our businesses.

Add the word “corporate” to reputation and you get a whole new animal, one which gets the CEO and the public relations consultant all hot and bothered.

Corporate reputation is intangible, but every decision made has an impact in the plus and minus columns of reputability. But if you think you have a stellar reputation today, do not think you can kick back and put your feet up because reputations, carefully built over years or even decades, can be destroyed overnight in a perfect storm.

Take the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill perpetrated by BP. Its share prices crashed by 53 percent after the Deepwater Horizon oil production platform caught fire, causing the largest accidental oil spill in history and the loss of eleven lives.