The Reputation Seekers

I think Schumpeter has become one of the best writers in the Economist. Each week he or she takes a sideways look at some issue in business. Often the conclusions are imaginative and thought-provoking. This week the article concerned reputation, and it was generally trashing the industry that has grown up of consultants trying to help corporations manage their reputations. I have plenty of experience of this. I remember well the Shell scandal of inflated reserves. Sadly, this was not the only Shell scandal while I worked for them, but it was a big one. Senior managers right up to the CEO had been forced to admit that, under pressure to produce results, they had created a culture of inflating how much oil we could lay claim to. In the long run, this caused less damage to Shell than the Deepwater Horizon did to BP, but it felt life-threatening to the company at the time. After resignations, the guy appointed as CEO to sort out the mess was Jeroen van der Veer. I remember a quote he made at a big meeting soon afterwards. “Reputation arrives on foot, but departs in a Ferrari”. I agree. Frightened of the potential damage a lost reputation can do, many companies have responded by trying to actively manage their reputation. This has spawned the industry Schumpeter refers to. Luckily for Shell, Jeroen was wiser. Like Schumpeter, he also saw that reputation was a result rather than an input. Of course, it makes sense to consider reputation in actions. The point Jeroen was actually making was that all employees had to consider the reputational impact of all our actions. It is valuable to measure reputation. It is also valuable to have communication messages ready to spin any story as well as it can be spun. But stop there. Don’t start setting reputation as a KPI, or employing armies of consultants. For it won’t work. Actually it may be counter-productive, as staff may subconsciously transfer some of the responsibility for reputation to outsiders. Precisely because it arrives on foot, reputation can only be built slowly and across a whole organisation. It starts with authenticity, the very quality that the consultants invariably lack. Jeroen was a strange guy: he spoke badly, was unashamedly technical and lacked any charisma. The markets found it hard to empathise, and that was mutual. But he was so plainly authentic, he was the perfect choice for Shell at the time. When I see how the BP leadership reacted to Deepwater Horizon, I feel doubly blessed about Shell’s parallel experience. Yet nowadays Jeroen is the exception, and BP the norm. Just look at the sheiks and money men with their ready sound bites in Bahrain last weekend. Or any politician you see, in the UK, USA or anywhere else. Or the religious gurus we come across. Or even John Terry, with his first reaction to his sending off appearing on Tuesday to be a pack of lies. When I see these things, I tend to shrug and think that the Ferrari will arrive for them in the end. Sometimes even Ferrari’s take a long time to arrive, even generations, but authenticity usually wins out in the long run. In the age of the internet there are gradually fewer and fewer places to hide as well. So how can we be authentic ourselves? If we need to be told the answer to that one, we probably have already been swallowed by the reputation sharks. But we can always do better. One clue is to recognise the difference between inputs and outputs. Outputs in the end are what matters, they determine our success and our well-beings. But usually outputs cannot be directly influenced, so they are the wrong place to focus. Good work on inputs leads, in mysterious ways, to better outputs. We see this in everyday situations. In choirs, I am sometimes asked to use my diaphragm, and sometimes asked to blend with other singers. How do I do these things? I cannot feel my diaphragm, let only use it. And how exactly I am supposed to blend? Should I try to put myself into a sort of human coffee grinder? In both cases, these are outputs. My diaphragm will work for me if I stand a certain way, breathe using abdominal muscles, and so on. I will blend if I tone down, listen and look for parts that I can harmonise with. When I am teaching, I have the same problem, and most experienced practitioners do as well. That is why some people make great trainers or teachers. They can work back from outputs to inputs, and express the inputs in a way that pupils can action. But there are more important outputs in life than blending or good breathing. What about love? Happiness? Peace? Even reputation? Receiving? Fear of death? In each case, the answer is simple, yet so difficult to put into practice. Saint Francis captured it perfectly. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life. Amen If spirituality can teach us one thing, it is this. To receive most outputs, work on the input that is the converse. And not just for God, because it works! Saint Francis is probably not quoted in many boardrooms. Perhaps that is too much to hope for. Reading Schumpeter and getting rid of some of the snake oil salesmen might be a more attainable goal for now.

Changing the Game

Ben Dirs is one of my favourite writers on the BBC website sports pages, always witty and usually distinctive. This week he wrote a blog about people or moments which changed a sport forever. I’m not sure about his list. Ronnie O’Sullivan in snooker is a choice I don’t agree with (Alex Higgins or Steve Davis, surely?). His other choices are Usain Bolt, Adam Gilchrist, Tiger Woods, Jonah Lomu and Muhammed Ali. I recall his chosen moments for all these except the Ali one (1964 is a bit before my time). As usual, my main take-away is how personal memories are. We all see different significance in events unfolding around us, which is one reason why the world is so complex, and interesting. Anyway, the article was enough to make me think about the same question for myself. All my events occurred since 1970, as it is my list built around my memories. I have to agree with Woods, and I also agree with Ben’s chosen event and its significance. Due to Woods, millions play and watch golf. Due to Woods, nearly all professional golfers behave like sportsmen, with fitness and mental coaching, rather than the amateurs of yore (though we still love throwbacks like Bubba Watson). Due to Woods, the bar of what is possible at golf has risen several notches. And he is of mixed race, which has changed conservative attitudes in golf around the world, including the all-white Augusta club. Once he retires, I hope we remember all this more than we remember his downfall. For Rugby Union, I also like the choice of Lomu, from a world cup match when he steamrollered England scoring four tries. The English must have prepared for the match, but they just had no answer at all. If it is the same match as the one I recall, the first try cam virtually from the kick-off. New Zealand simply passed the ball to Lomu and no one could stop him. Dirs is right that this was the catalyst for Rugby players nowadays more often resembling Lomu for size and strength. A second game changing moment for me in Rugby came in commentary, with Bill Beaumont describing a typically dull 5-nations game in the 1980’s. Someone kicked for touch as usual, and Bill said something like “well played, that is the art in international rugby, get the ball off the pitch whenever possible”. I like to think I wasn’t the only one who heard that remark and wondered why we bothered to watch. Since then, regulators have changed the rules many times, most often for the better. Thanks Bill. It is interesting that soccer does not feature on Dirs’ list. I could go for Cruyff and total football, or Beckenbauer and the invention of the sweeper (since morphed into the holding midfielder). I could go for Wenger: much as Woods has changed the work ethic of golf, Wenger has done the same for premier league football. Do you remember Superstars back in the 1970’s? Sportsmen from all sports competed in various fitness and skill challenges. The footballers always lost. ‘Nuff said. But my football choice in the end goes to Bruce Grobbelaar. Look at old footage of goalkeepers. They leave their line a few yards to meet a cross, or to face a striker one-on-one, but that is all. Grobbelaar was the one who changed that, turning the number one into a true eleventh player. They all do it now, thanks to Bruce. His decision making and shot-stopping was not the best, but he changed his art forever. Gilchrist is a reasonable cricket choice, and I like the example of an innings that won a test match in fourth innings. It surprises me that this is still not commonplace. Teams still hate to chase batting fourth (ironically, Australia more than most). I predict that this will change in the next ten years. For me, the lasting change in cricket started with Kerry Packer. Before him, cricket was like the county championship still is, an elite pastime with little interest for a spectator who wasn’t an insider. Packer blew this apart, and if he were alive, he would be smiling at twenty-20 and the IPL, as well as the fact that test cricket has improved too. In athletics, for negative reasons, I go for the Ben Johnson 100m Olympic win then disqualification. For me, I still cannot watch any athletics without wondering who is cheating. So I never watch athletics. Hansie Cronje gets a passing mention in cricket for the same reason, but the game just about holds on to its credibility for me. Athletics (and cycling road races) sadly do not. Boxing never had it for me. Formula One may not be tainted by cheating, but I still don’t see the point. In tennis, my choices are Billie Jean King as a precursor to Martina Navratilova. They were great players. They changed their sport in their emphasis on work and fitness – and that matters more than elegant skirts, surely, if we want only beauty we should follow fashion not sport? But I also love that they were lesbians and did not hide that fact. As a sheltered teenager, this was a revelation to me, and it really helped to understand that difference exists and is OK. We forget how prejudiced and fearful we all were then. Those two made a contribution beyond their sport to removing one of humanities great injustices. While I adore US football, I can’t think of a stand-out game-changer there. Other Us sports I don’t know well enough. That was a nice exercise, and I recommend it as good thought-provoking fun. I reminds me how much sport has developed in the last forty years, from the days of Eddie Waring and Kent Walton (was he the wrestling guy on ITV?). It also reminds me that some sportspeople have changed not just their sport, but their society as well.

Days that shape Lives

I’m half way through “One Day” by David Nicholls, and enjoying it very much. I loved “University Challenge” too. The author appeals to me because he writes of exactly my generation, he captures the embarrassing and pathetic truth in all our lives, and because I love his jokes.

The book is set on the same day across many years, but the title is also making the point that individual days, even moments, have a profound effect on all our lives. We rarely see them at the time, but there are forks in all of our roads, where we veer left or right. Which way we turn shapes the rest of our life.

This is certainly true of my own life, and probably of everyone’s. Last week I was sitting with an old friend in a bar. This friend is old as in I have known him a long time, but he is also not young. We talked about the day of his medical for Dutch national service. He had a minor heart defect, and at the end of his examination, the army doctor offered him a choice – he could complete the form in a way to excuse my friend his service, or he could allow him to join up with everyone else. My friend chose to by-pass the national service, and that choice, made in an instant, had a huge impact on the rest of his life. If he had known that at the time, he might have been paralysed by indecision.

Today, as an exercise, I tried to write down ten or twenty such shaping moments. I tried to be selective, choosing not momentous occasions, but rather decision points or points that had a lasting effect on me. The momentous occasions are often the outcomes of such points rather than the points themselves.

The exercise was poignant for me. Unsurprisingly, many of the moments I chose were very personal and at times quite intimate, so I won’t share them here. Nonetheless, I recommend the exercise. What I will share some general discoveries.

One weird discovery is about association. For many of the events, I can recall vividly something else going on at the time. I recall one decision I made in 1978, and just at the time the news came on TV that a pope had died (two died in that year, so I can’t quite place the moment). Another moment in 1985 I associate with listening to a particular piece of Rachmaninov on my first Walkman. A more recent decision was made listening to Byrd. A fourth association is of a weekend exactly thirty years ago, a shaping weekend in my life played out to the backdrop of war being declared on Argentina.

Now, what is going on here? True, many pieces of music or world events do have some association in my mind. But it seems extraordinary that so many life-changing times have such clear linkages. It is not as if I knew the long-lasting effect of these moments at the time, at least not consciously. Perhaps something was happening in my subconscious. I cannot explain it, but I find it noteworthy.

A second discovery is the role of other actors. We like to think we have a modicum of control over our lives. We make plans, lists, choices. Yet in many of the items on my list, a critical role was played by someone else. And usually the someone else is, in Hollywood parlance, not a co-star in my movie, but merely a supporting actor or actress, someone who has otherwise played a bit part in my life. A chance remark or a reaction to something I said or did was often what shaped the lasting effect.

This discovery also came as a surprise. Far from striding manfully through my own life, I am blown around by the whims of others. Not just blown a little bit either, blown into a different ocean. True, I am in charge of my own reaction, but I cannot escape the conclusion that at key moments I have placed my destiny squarely in the hands of a dice roll of someone else. This made me wonder who else I have been the one rolling the die for? Whose life have I shaped without realising it? How small we all are!

A final discovery is how little I have considered key decisions. True, it would have been impossible to anticipate that many of the moments on my list would have had such a lasting impact. But for others it was all too obvious. Here was a huge road sign in the middle of the road, offering clear choices with major repercussions. Yet when I think back to those choices, I was very careless in how I made them. Did I write down pros and cons? Did I consult others? Did I take my time? Did I heck! In most cases I shot straight from the hip. I won’t say the choices were wrong, actually in many cases they seemed to turn out fine, but I certainly can’t claim I was using all the tools available to me at the time.

A bit like the associations, perhaps the subconscious has played a role here. Knowing the weight of a decision can be a massive burden, it can make a decision making process very painful and inhibit a decision at all. Perhaps my subconscious knew that, and deliberately set me into spontaneous mode. I wonder. What is also true is that maturity has lent more consideration to my key decisions, that I am not as impulsive as I used to be.

So I emerge from the exercise rather humbled. My key decisions have often been made using a flimsy process or delegated to random other people. My subconscious can spot a key moment of truth a mile off, so much so that it provides an association to mark the spot, but my conscious self cannot reward this. I have been blown around through my life like a feather in the wind.

As well as humbling, I find this discovery valuable. I already knew that as a parent I could claim little credit (or blame) for how my children blossomed, understanding the far more important roles taken by the children themselves and by fate. If I thought about it, I also knew my life outcomes were driven far less by my own choices but by accidents of birth (a white male child born in a middle class home at a time of unparalleled peace and prosperity, blessed with a high IQ – wow, what could be a luckier draw than that?). Now I come to realise that, even when given a limited opportunity to shape my own fate, my hand on the wheel is far from steady.