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The reputation of your organization, although it is an intangible asset, is likely the most valuable asset to manage and maximize. Your good reputation can attract and keep customers, members, investors, employees, subscribers, and whoever else is important to your success. The better your reputation the easier you can weather crises, scandals, errors, or other events. A bad reputation may cause your demise. This week's articles are focused on helping you protect and manage your reputation.

It is essential in today's fast moving environment for organizations to be able to respond swiftly to threats to their reputation. (Item #1) The loss of reputation, not a shortage of cash, frequently deals the final blow to a company, yet the art of protecting organizational reputation is poorly understood and underdeveloped. (Item #2) We forgive error far more readily than duplicity or intentional misbehavior. (Item #3)

It is important that a nonprofit perform a reputational risk assessment to ensure that its reputation is in good standing. (Item #4) Although reputation is an intangible concept, research universally shows that a good reputation demonstrably increases corporate worth and provides sustained competitive advantage. (Item #5) Managing reputation is not that easy. (Item #6)

As always, we look forward to hearing about your concerns with regards to business continuity. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered, please email me at bmellinger@attainium.net

Best Regards,

Bob Mellinger
President
Attainium Corp

Quote of the Week

"It is generally much more shameful to lose a good reputation than never to have acquired it."
-- Pliny the Elder --

Articles

1. Corporate Reputation: How to protect your biggest asset
The threats to corporate reputations arise both from within a company and from outside. The issues in this paper are not exhaustive but give an insight into some of the steps that can be taken to protect corporate reputations.
http://www.sjberwin.com/publication/download/index.php?publication=in_house_lawyers_litigation&published=2008_02_15

2. Reputation: Risk of Risks
Protecting an organization's reputation is the most important and difficult task facing senior risk managers, according to a new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Reputation is one of the most important corporate assets, and also one of the most difficult to protect, according to executives who participated in the survey that forms the basis of this report.
http://www.acelimited.com/NR/rdonlyres/2B964DD5-F93E-47C3-BA44-999A0BAEAD40/0/RISK_REPUTATION_REPORT.pdf

3. The Stupidity Defense
Error can actually nurture a corporate reputation. Two crucial components of reputation are competence and humanness. They tend to be inversely correlated, A prompt and rueful apology for a screw-up that did little actual harm an do some reputational good. At a minimum, it does less reputational harm than the alternative hypothesis: You thought you could get away with it.
http://www.psandman.com/col/stupid.htm

4. Nonprofits need to conduct reputational risk assessment
Nonprofit organizations depend on the public's trust. One of their most important assets is their good names and reputations, without which they may lose funding, donors, clients, employees and directors. With that in mind, a nonprofit should assess its reputational risk as part of its enterprise-wide risk assessment.
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2007/09/09/business/financial.html

5. Why a good corporate reputation is important to your organization
Corporate reputation is a soft concept. It is the overall estimation in which an organization is held by its internal and external stakeholders based on its past actions and probability of its future behavior. The organization may have a slightly different reputation with each stakeholder according to their experiences in dealing with the organization or in what they have heard about it from others. Many organizations put the importance of a good reputation to the back of their minds while they attend to more hard-edged, day-to-day urgencies.
http://www.cuttingedgepr.com/articles/corprep_important.asp

6. Guidelines for improving and protecting corporate reputation
Corporate reputation, a key (albeit implicit) responsibility of business continuity managers for years, has become a topical and vital asset and risk for companies to manage. However to manage reputation adequately necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach and allocation of necessary resources.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0350.htm