Younger Rupert - The Reputation Game: the Art of Changing How People See You

More Praise for The Reputation Game

An insightful and really rather fascinating study of what one might argue is the issue of our age: the creation and management of a reputation. The authors have clearly managed to get great access to a huge number of people and the results make for very compelling reading. Its well-written, too. In fact, its required reading for anyone who truly wants to understand the modern media age.

Tom Bradby, Presenter, ITV News at Ten

Youll learn why reputations are more valuable than money; youll learn how theyre built and tended and enriched; and how, if neglected, they can catastrophically implode. It might have been called, How to ensure that everybody knows just how good you know you are really.

Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP

The insights in The Reputation Game are a masterclass of pattern recognition. This book shows us that no matter who you are, your industry or hustle, reputational capital is at the centre of success or failure. Waller and Younger use as examples the rise and fall of great companies, countries, gangsters, and pop-culture icons to show us the moments and choices that are truly the art of changing how people see us all.

Steve Stoute, CEO, Translation LLC

To our families: Max, Pippa, Munro;

Catherine, Alec, Honor and Lorna

David Waller and Rupert Younger, 2017

Note on the authors

David Waller was a journalist with the Financial Times for the best part of ten years, working in Frankfurt and on the influential Lex column. More recently, he is a partner in a global consulting firm and has been an adviser to companies and governments on reputational issues. He has also written four books on business and historical subjects.

Rupert Younger is founder director of the University of Oxfords Centre for Corporate Reputation, a leading academic teaching and researching how corporations and institutions create, sustain, destroy and rebuild reputation. He is a member of the senior common rooms at Worcester College, Oxford and St Antonys College, Oxford. Rupert is also co-founder and global managing partner of Finsbury, the strategic communications consultancy headquartered in London.

Contents

Introduction

On the morning of Friday, 27 January 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May met with President Donald Trump at the White House. It was the first meeting with a head of government in the Trump presidency and was heralded as a diplomatic coup for Theresa May at a time when she was under pressure to show to her detractors that Britain, following the contentious Brexit vote, was still a world power.

There was much to discuss. British newspapers had in the days prior to her visit called on the prime minister to tackle Trump directly on his stated support for torture and his protectionist policy agenda, but May was determined to make this a charm offensive. And that she delivered. The most iconic image from the trip was a picture of the two leaders holding hands while walking through the colonnades surrounding the White House. The picture sent a signal that the special relationship between the UK and the US was alive and well, but it was also perceived as evidence that the abrasive Donald Trump had a softer, perhaps more chivalrous, side to his character.

Yet thirty-six hours later, President Trump was reported to have slammed the phone down on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after only twenty-five minutes, following what was by all accounts a bad-tempered exchange. Trump himself described it as the worst call so far with a world leader. At issue was a deal agreed by the Obama administration to accept around 1,250 refugees, primarily from Iran, held in detention camps in the Pacific islands off the Australian coast.

When pressed to honour this agreement by the Australian prime minister, Trump reacted angrily, according to reports in the Washington Post . He alternately berated the deal and bragged about the size of his electoral college victory. A few days later he tweeted Do you believe it? The Obama administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

So what can we conclude about President Trump from these two very different events? Who is the real Donald Trump? A chivalrous, polite, courtly and respectful leader with a keen eye for diplomacy or a bullying, intemperate and irrational man prone to outbursts of uncontrolled anger?

Contrasting reputations have been at the heart of the various controversies surrounding Trump. For some, he has been perceived as misogynistic, racist, bullying and egotistical a figure so divisive and unpredictable that he is unfit to hold the most powerful political office in the world. Yet for others he is the campaigning outsider, the successful businessman who is unafraid to drain the swamp of Washington elites and officials who have enriched themselves and left the majority of the electorate marginalized and without a political voice. Trump understood this, and used reputation as his most effective weapon.

This books central argument is that reputation is more valuable than money. We seek to define reputation, arguing that it is different from marketing, PR, branding, status or image. We set out why such distinctions matter. We show how personal, corporate, institutional and national reputations matter in visceral terms. And we go on to explain the key elements of reputation engagement: how reputations are created, sustained, destroyed and rebuilt; how leaders in business, the military and politics use reputation to achieve their goals; how celebrities and criminals build and exploit their reputations for their own advantage; and how our reputations precede and follow us, online and in other social networks.

What other people say about us dramatically affects our ability to achieve what we want, even if what they say is gossip. Our personal reputations are vital to our self-esteem and can make us feel happy, fulfilled and appreciated. A good reputation helps us to find a soulmate, sell a table on eBay, rent out a room on Airbnb, get invited to parties or secure a new promotion. By monitoring what we say and do online, and what others say and think about us, huge corporations are also able to build up a picture of our shopping habits, sexual preferences and behavioural quirks in ways that are only now becoming apparent.

When you ask people if they live in a networked age, most people would say yes, LinkedIn co-founder and Silicon Valley titan Reid Hoffman told us. But the vast majority of people have not internalized this at all and understood that everything becomes a reputational issue. It is a major component to everything relationships, decision making and so on but most people dont actually parse this out.

In the commercial world, reputation is everything. According to a Harvard Business Review article by Bob Eccles, Scott Newquist and Roland Schatz, some seventy to eighty per cent of all value on the stock market derives from hard to assess intangible assets such as brand equity, intellectual capital, and goodwill. Companies with top-flight reputations hire and retain the best people, charge more for their products, achieve better profit margins and benefit from higher share ratings, creating a virtuous cycle. Companies with poor reputations, on the other hand, have trouble hiring and keeping people, get treated with suspicion by government and regulators, and are shunned by customers and investors alike.

High-profile crises at organizations such as BP have shown what it looks like to lose a corporate reputation. The banking industry has inflicted enormous reputational damage on itself in many parts of the globe. Reputation is the biggest risk faced by many big companies, and a great opportunity for those who figure out how to build and maintain the right kind of reputation. It provides organizations with their broad licence to operate. Big insurance companies have developed policies to protect corporate clients from the quantifiable consequences of reputational disasters. These include disgrace policies that come into force when, for example, an athlete such as the Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova fails a doping test: most of her sponsors dropped her overnight, severely damaging her $20 million-plus annual income.