Rethinking Reputational Risk

A company's reputation is one of its most valuable assets, and reputational risk is high on the agenda at board level and amongst regulators. Rethinking Reputational Risk explains the hidden factors which can both cause crises and tip an otherwise survivable crisis into a reputational disaster. Reputations are lost when the perception of an organization is damaged by its behaviour not meeting stakeholder expectations. Rethinking Reputational Risk lays bare the actions, inactions and local 'states of normality' that can lead to perception-changing consequences and gives readers the insight to recognize and respond to the risks to their reputations. Using case studies, such as BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Volkswagen's emissions rigging scandal, Tesco, AIG, EADS Airbus A380, and Mid-Staffordshire NHS Hospital Trust, and analysis of their failures, this hard-hitting guide also applies lessons drawn from behavioural economics to the behavioural risks that underlie reputation risk. An essential read for risk professionals, business leaders and board members who need to understand and deal with business-critical threats to their reputation, this book presents a new framework that will be invaluable for all involved in safeguarding an organization's reputation.

A compelling mix of reputation management, crisis leadership and the role of politics in business, this book provides unique practical steps that leaders can take to protect their reputations and those of the organisations they head in an ever more open social media-led world. Although leaders increasingly recognise the vital intangible asset that reputation represents, too many do not really understand what reputation is and the steps that should be taken to build it and their corporate value. Given the range of factors depending on the organisation, each aspect of its complex reputational story needs to be unpicked if a reputation is to be built, maintained and protected. This step by-step-guide offers advice on how to develop the strategies needed to do this, provides clear lessons throughout from a range of experts - and distinctively, looks beyond the corporate sector to charities, governments, NGOs and the public sector. Boards, trustees, non-executive directors, senior management, and leaders of all types of organisations need to consider the steps that should be taken to build, maintain and defend their reputation, and that means knowing what their reputation is and the audiences that matter most to them. This book is the roadmap.

The report describes the development of a new risk management culture within professions, companies and governments. The obsession with managing risk is creating organisations which are not so much risk averse as ‘responsibility averse’. In medicine, doctors are practising ‘defensive medicine’ where opinions are heavily qualified with caveats and patients left to make big decisions. The report also refers to growing evidence that since Enron’s failure, major accountancy firms are declining to work with ‘high risk’ clients - the very ones that should be thoroughly audited. “When disclaimer paragraphs are longer than the professional opinions they follow, we know something has gone wrong,” says author Professor Michael Power, a director of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation at the London School of Economics. “In the interests of transparency, small print should be made large and ruled out as a secondary risk management ploy. “The trends in professions such as medicine and auditing signal a withdrawal of individual judgement from the public. Minimal records are kept, staff are cautioned about the use of email, and normal correspondence is littered with disclaimers. The risk management of everything implies a society of ‘small print’.” Power sees the rise of the ‘risk management of everything’ as a related trend to the audit culture, which included the government’s now widely criticised love of targets as a policy tool. The Audit Explosion, Power’s previous Demos pamphlet, predicted that the overuse of audit leads to a focus on measurable outputs rather than real outcomes. “The most influential dimension of the audit explosion is the process by which [organisations] are made auditable and structured to conform to the need to be monitored,” Power wrote in 1994. Power’s new book argues that risk management is the ‘new audit’ and is having a similar distorting effect on the performance of professionals, companies and government.

Good public relations is no longer just icing-it's a strategic imperative more important to your competitive success than even advertising or marketing. This is true whether you're a century-old multibillion-dollar corporation or a penniless startup. In Rethinking Reputation, public relations guru Fraser Seitel and John Doorley, founder of the Academy for Communication Excellence and Leadership at Johnson & Johnson, examine a fascinating new set of case studies-including the BP oil spill and the launch of CitySlips-to glean the PR dos and don'ts for the new media world, covering both standard reputation maintenance and crisis management. They also show start-up companies and entrenched organizations how to use the power of word-of-mouth to jump-start business like never before. This is a wake-up call from two industry legends-for public relations professionals as well as entrepreneurs, CEOs, and anyone else tasked with representing their organization to the world. These new media lessons include: * Remember that research is cheaper, and more critical, than ever. * Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good-launch your idea before someone else does. * Don't get so excited about social media that you forget about traditional media. * In a crisis, you are never offstage. * Never lie, never whine, and never try to predict the future!

Roman merchants, artisans, and service providers faced substantial prejudice. Contemporary authors labeled them greedy, while the Roman on the street accused merchants of lying and cheating. Legally and socially, merchants were kept at arm’s length from respectable society. Yet merchants were common figures in daily life, populating densely packed cities and traveling around the Mediterranean. The Reputation of the Roman Merchant focuses on the strategies retailers, craftsmen, and many other workers used to succeed, examining how they developed good reputations despite the stigma associated with their work. In a novel approach, blending social and economic history, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant considers how reputation worked as an informal institution, establishing and reinforcing traditional Roman norms while lowering the cost of doing business for individual workers. From histories and novels to inscriptions and art, this volume identifies common reputation strategies, explores how points of pride and personal accomplishments were shared with others, and explains responses to merchant activities on the small-scale. The book concludes that merchants invested heavily in their reputations as a way to set themselves apart from common, negative stereotypes without admitting that there was anything shameful about the work they did.

"This book will show you how to build a sustainable reputation risk management framework and how to handle your next reputation risk crisis. It will help you identify ways in which reputation risk can impact bottom line, and then show you how to set up a framework for turning that risk into an opportunity for good, sustainable business. Reputation risk is a strategic risk and a potentially material risk, all the more so in the "age of hyper-transparency". This needs to be clearly understood by both management and boards of directors so that the people tasked with reputation risk have the support they need to align their reputation risk management with business strategy and planning. The Reputation Risk Handbook provides a clear framework to identify, manage and resolve reputation risk, including: a clear description of what reputation risk is and how it fits within the pantheon of corporate and institutional risk and strategic management; a practical process for creating early warning systems and on-going management and monitoring of reputation risks; techniques for aligning reputation risk management with business strategy and business planning; several case studies, including examples of when reputation risk management has gone wrong; examples of how to manage specific reputation risks successfully or deal with a reputation risk crisis. The Reputation Risk Handbook is not just for practitioners - those who manage risk and reputation directly - but for those who have oversight of risk management - namely boards, their committees and the c-suite. In addition to a framework for practitioners, the book provides specific suggestions for boards, including questions to ask management and what to look for within their organizations."--Provided by publisher.

The subject of leadership and managerial psychology exists as a sub-branch of psychology within the fields of industrial and organizational psychology. There still appears to be ongoing debate regarding the core pathology for gaining managerial expertise in professional roles relative to having suitable leadership skills and managerial knowledge beyond the direct daily work involved in organizations. Professional organizations inherently include varied levels of sensitive human interactions, which further necessitates their management professionals to have leadership styles that are adjustable contingent on a given situation. Relative to this edited book, managerial psychology is being utilized in a way that may subsequently seek to develop a series of scientific theory principles where the focus is to develop managerial axioms that advance contemporary existing knowledge surrounding professional management logic. The Handbook of Research on Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Managerial and Leadership Psychology provides value uncovered by a collaboration of generalists and specialists who bring professional managerial and leadership opinions to light through narratives and research inclusive of fundamental theory principles that can be applied in practice and academia. This edited reference is focused on the enhancement of management research through managerial psychology while highlighting topics including business process knowledge, management in diverse discipline situations and professions, corporate leadership responsibility, leadership of self and others, and leadership psychology in a variety of different fields of work. This book is ideally designed for leadership and management professionals, academicians, students, and researchers in the fields of knowledge management, administrative sciences and management, leadership development, education, and organization development sub-branches or specialty practices.

Risk management has become a key factor of successful organizations. Despite risk management's importance, outdated and inappropriate ideas about how to manage risk dominate. This book challenges existing paradigms of risk management and provides readers with new concepts and tools for the current dynamic risk management environment. The framework for the book is a series of questions that allows for an interesting and thought-provoking look at current ideas and forward-looking concepts. This book, intended for senior managers, directors, risk managers, students of risk management, and all others who need to be concerned about risk management and strategy, provides a solid base for not only understanding current best practice in risk management, but also the conceptual tools for exploiting emerging risk management technologies, metrics, regulations, and ideas. The central thesis is that risk management is a value-adding activity that all types of organizations, public, private as well as not-for-profit, can use for competitive advantage and maximum effectiveness.