“Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” wrote William Shakespeare in Othello. A topic that is important to us all. But is it something that is only perceived by others or can we influence others to perceive us in a favourable way? Can we, in fact, accept the popularly accepted reputations of many of the world’s famous? Let’s take two examples.
These are two situations that caught my eye recently. First, was it a strange coincidence that on the same morning as the FBI director, James Comey, was announcing that charges were not to be brought against Hilary Clinton, she was boarding Air Force One with Barrack Obama to travel to North Carolina for a major political rally? This carefully organized occasion was certainly planned to offset any negativity that might impinge on her reputation from the FBI’s investigation.
Second, Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, knew very well as he left his London home on the day of Chilcot Report that his credibility was in shatters. An enormous poster with the saying, “Blair must face war crimes” stretched across the street as he left his home. Blair was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, so he had to defend his position no matter what.
Even though Blair is in this state of denial, and now cannot change the contents of the report, it is the general public that will ultimately judge him and bequeath him his reputation. It will be almost impossible for him to manage it, irrespective of what he or his spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, does or says. Blair’s reputation is in tatters.
The famous intelligence dossier, now known as ‘dodgy dossier’ that Blair relied on, does not stand up to scrutiny. One specialist writes, “A Cambridge academic had discovered that some passages had been ‘lifted’ verbatim without attribution from various published sources. Other material had been taken from a thesis by a postgraduate Californian student, and from work carried out by an American journalist”.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell had even recommended the Blair dossier to the world in a keynote presentation to the United Nations, calling the report a “fine paper”. On top of this, Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector, was reminding people last week of how he had telephoned Mr Blair only five days before the invasion, that no nuclear weapons existed. The rest is history, but Blair’s reputation as an honest and serious prime minister was discredited, which is unfortunate, as Tony Blair in other respects is considered highly by many.
Warren Buffet over twenty years ago told us, “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. But, we may argue, our reputation is in the hands of others. It is the estimation in which we are held by our colleagues, neighbours, friends, our local community or the public at large. It is an overall quality or character as seen or judged by people in general. So it is not surprising that Mrs. Clinton was sitting on Air Force One with the President of the United States while the director of the FBI was describing her as careless or even reckless, but not criminally liable or that Tony Blair was desperately trying to recover his good name on radio and TV stations.
But reputation is not just an issue for public figures; it also concerns each and every one of us. We know there is a pecking order in every aspect of life, and each of us are aware, whether we admit it or not, of where we stand. In our jobs, for example, we all know where we are in the pecking order and what our reputation is, and we try to manage it in so far as we can. But living in an environment populated by competitive and ambitious people, there surely will be things which we would like to forget. But they remain and are often placed in the public domain by our competitors later on.
William Shakespeare in his play, “Julius Caesar”, puts this fact very succinctly when he warns us, “The evil that men do live after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”. This is probably Tony Blair’s greatest fear! It is probably what Hilary Clinton wanted to avoid also.
Dave Larcker, a Stanford University professor, published earlier this year an interesting study which gives 38 examples of bosses behaving badly from 2000 to 2015. The study is called “Scoundrels in C-Suite: boards need to be aware of the impact”, and it tells how the behaviour of some CEOs leaves their company’s reputation in tatters even years after they have been fired. “The fallout”, according to a review of this study in Bloomberg (May, 9, 2016), “from a lying, cheating, embezzling or offensive CEO can linger to soil the reputation of a company by an average of five years after an incident has passed.” Every one of us, whether managers or not, is concerned with their reputation in this digital age.
Indeed, as a result, we have a huge reputation industry emerging within the area of public relations. It is also called branding and it sets out to influence or control an individual’s reputation especially in the media. This industry will add or detract information as it deems fit, to protect or enhance the reputation of their clients. So what are we to believe when we see reports of Hilary Clinton on Air Force One or listen to Tony Blair’s story? Or are they just stories manufactured by others for us to believe?
Perhaps Shakespeare understood our human capacity to reinvent our stories to our own liking and so protect or enhance our reputations!