March 11, 2008
Reputation, reputation, reputation: audio interview
With the Société Générale and Northern Rock sagas, it is a good time to be in the business of advising errant companies on how to restore their lost reputations. Leslie Gaines-Ross (left), chief reputation strategist at PR firm Weber Shandwick, has just written a book on the subject entitled Corporate Reputation, 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation. She braved Monday’s storm to give me her opinion on how ceos should apologise when they or their organisations make mistakes, while also addressing topics such as whether or not a company should engage with hostile bloggers. Listen to the 8-minute audio interview here.
Continuing with the theme of SocGen and angry bloggers, the French bank features in a rant from tompeters!, the management guru we knew as Tom Peters in a more conventionally punctuated age. Writing from his farm in Tinmouth, Vermont, tom has just used his blog to have a pop at Daniel Bouton, the bullet-headed SocGen chairman who is somehow still hanging on to his job after the Kerviel affair. It’s part of a broader tirade about executive pay. Other ceos who feel his wrath include Boeing boss Jim McNerney and Fidelity’s Peter Lynch. This is tom’s understated conclusion:
I don’t want The Law to muzzle exec pay. But I would like common sense to prevail, or at least make the occasional appearance. The 500 Fortune 500 CEOs are no more flawless, genius, etc., than my dog Dodger, who, trust me, via his own sort of Excellence, can reverse the tide and part the waters by producing a fart that carries on the wind from Tinmouth VT all the way to Wall Street.
Spitzer Vs Bouton.
This may seem like an odd comparison, one is in public service and the other obviously as private sector as you can get. But it just came to me last night as i sat there reading about Gov. Spitzer’s resignation. They are not that different…there are some obvious similarities in their position, responsibilities, role model like expectations that arise from being at the helm of large entities.
The biggest difference in spite of all these similarities is that Spitzer, (atleast from whatever is currently known ) did not put the state’s economy at peril nor did he erode ’shareholder’(in this case taxpayer) value and yet we are looking at his upcoming resignation. Which is not too say he should not resign. On the contrary, this was expected and infact surprising that it did not come any sooner.
Bouton, on the other hand is the chairman of SocGen and it was on his watch that SocGen suffered massive losses. The circumstances of such losses point towards inadequate human resource management, loose internal controls and inadequate reviews and supervision and maybe even collusion. Nevertheless, Bouton continues as the bank’s chairman. Under his leadership, SocGen raised capital to make up for the losses, took cover under one of the most obscure and rarely used accounting rule thereby booking their losses in financial year 2007 and are now looking ahead.
Why are we not yet looking at his resignation? What makes him so different? Don’t SocGen shareholders care that this can happen again or don’t the French believe that Bouton has failed in his moral obligation as a corporate leader. I guess they just threw out Corporate Governance out of the (french) window!
Posted by: The CG Factor | March 13th, 2008 at 3:25 am | Report this commentSocGen issue is not over yet, what is evolving will reverbate for a long time and it will contine to hunt SocGen for a long time.If the shareholders do not push Bouton out now the customer lack of confidence will do so later on. Some still belief that morality does not mix with business and belief that the end justify the means, if this is so time will tell when the dusk finally settle.
Posted by: osu akande LONDON | March 18th, 2008 at 10:22 pm | Report this comment