the reputation gap
Warren Buffett isn’t often wrong. Yet he was when he said: ‘It take s 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.’ Most reputations are severely damaged because an organization has failed over many years to operationally live up to the high expectations set by their PR and marketing activity. BP is a prime example. Most assume that is was the lack of a viable crisis comms plan and poor execution that led to the company’s disastrous reputational implosion after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That could and should have been handled better, but it wasn’t the reason for the monstrous damage caused by the spill. That was a result of the ‘reputation gap’ between BP external claims and its long-term internal operational procedures. /Read more