Saturday Good Reads: Why We Don’t Trust Companies

Speaking from (too much) personal and professional experience, I can testify that massive amounts of information, data, and research exist on the subject of reputation – corporate reputation, to be specific. Public relations and marketing firms have practices devoted to reputation management. Book after book has been published on the subject. And who can quantify how many billions of dollars have been spent by companies seeking to improve their reputations?

It’s not exactly comforting to know that, after all of this effort and expenditure, people trust corporations (and CEOs) only marginally more than they trust Congress.

Which is the same thing as that they don’t trust corporations at all.

This past week, I read three articles by Charles Green at Trust Advisor, a consulting firm that focuses on the subject of trust. What caught my eye (and I have to say, my heart), was this statement: “Most companies confuse trust with reputation. They view it as a communications problem, something to be handled by PR, especially in times of crisis. Trust problems are addressed by amping up the messaging.”

That first sentence bears repeating: Most companies confuse trust with reputation.

Another way of saying that: if you have a reputation problem, the problem is not your reputation.

I went back and reread the article. And then I read Part 2 the next day, and Part 3 the day after that.

After 40 years in the organizational communications business, I can say that I have never read more common sense – and truth – than I did in these three articles.

Part 1: Why We Don’t Trust Companies

Part 2: Why We Don’t Trust Companies – the Three M’s

Part 3: Why We Don’t Trust Companies - Risk

It’s not about reputation.

It’s about trust.

Monday Update: 

Part 4: Why We Don't Trust Companies - The Solution

Top photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Café gone fifty years

Passing the place where the café

was once, I smell strong coffee

where no coffee brews in this street

of commerce and business; the café

gone these fifty years, a few tables

with red and white checkered

tablecloths, leathered cups of dice

on each to see who would pay

the bill amid murmured conversations,

muted laughter, biscuits made

from scratch brushed with butter:

businessman’s breakfast. A car horn

blasts; a delivery truck blocks

the right of way. The smell of coffee

lingers in the humid air.

Photograph: 400 block of Gravier Street, Central Business District of New Orleans.

Poetry at Work: The Poetry of the Organization Chart

I’m likely to date myself here, but when I first worked for a large organization, one of the most important documents one could be given was the organization chart.

The chart made sense of the organization, in this case a large corporation. It demonstrated order, logic, rationality, and control. It provided a compass or map, allowing an employee to navigate the organizational terrain. And it also showed you where you belonged; your box on the chart, and how your group’s chart rolled up the larger chart, signified your place and how you were part of a much larger whole.

How the boxes were positioned on the chart was also important. The higher the box, the higher or more important you were in the organization. A chart, done properly, let everyone in the team group, division and organization know who fell where. Similar titles could be differentiated by slight differences on the chart (some of this was rather, bizarre, I know). The chart was the physical manifestation of the political pecking order.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Poetry at Work: A Poet Jump Starts a Company

A part of the company – the business that was the old heartland of the enterprise – was being spun off. The people going with the spin-off fully understood the meaning.

Companies don’t spin off operations or businesses that are highly profitable, with long-term prospects for success, no matter what anyone might say. No, companies spin off businesses that “no longer fit the portfolio,” won’t produce the desired level of profit, or – best-case scenario – will just chug along at a less-than-desirable return on investment.

It was a wrenching experience. The new company had nine months to prepare – create an organization, find a new name, fight over assets, select management teams, file a raft of legal documents, apply for stock registration, and prepare employees for a new world.

Management was struggling over the best way to launch the company. No one felt like celebrating. The situation felt more like a funeral than a birth.

The poet was asked to figure it out.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Poetry at Work: Dana Gioia on Poetry in Business

In Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia included an article on business and poetry. His focus was on the odd fact that many poets who worked in business, some their entire working lives, wrote virtually nothing in their poetry about their business or anything related to it. This includes poets like T.S. Eliot (Bank of England), Wallace Stevens (Hartford Insurance) and Ted Kooser (Liberty Financial Insurance). (Farmers, like Robert Frost and Wendell Berry, are a different matter.)

The conventional wisdom, Gioia says, and especially the conventional American wisdom, is that poets “must be people out of the ordinary; they must be strong, even eccentric individuals.” In other words, Walt Whitman fits our preconceived notions; Wallace Stevens, corporate lawyer, does not.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

WWJD – and the “J” is Jack

I've read Fast Company magazine for close to a decade. I like its approach to talking about business, and the editors’ slightly but not overly edgy approach in describing the new economy or new technologies or people (and the people are usually different from the ones who find in Fortune and Forbes).  The articles lean to the counter-intuitive, pointing to innovators and entrepreneurs who often see opportunities where most people see nothing.

In December, 2010, the magazine had feature stories on the chaos in the advertising industry, Gov 2.0 promoting civic engagement at the local political level, how games are becoming common in our work and life in general – and a story entitled “What Would Jack Do,” with the Jack in the question being Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric.

It turns out that Welch, business guru James Collins, Colin Powell and other business, government, cultural and religious leaders routinely speak at annual Global Leadership Summits at Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago, attended in person by 7,000 pastors and church leaders and viewed via satellite by 62,000 people in the U.S. and Canada, and later by videotape by 65,000 more worldwide. The goal is leadership training, absorbing lessons taught by business leaders as well as well known speakers from Christian and other religions.

The idea that the church can learn better leadership skills from business is not new, and Willow Creek hasn’t been the only proponent. The church has been hosting these summits since 1995, and there were numerous consultants and conferences before and since. For more than two decades, the language and practices of business have been absorbed by scores of churches in North America and elsewhere.

As business people (and the rest of us) are fond of saying, you can’t argue with success. Churches – especially large and so-called “mega-“ churches, have employed the lessons of business – strategic planning, vision, mission statements, management, leadership training, and long-term plans.

I don’t argue with the success of using these ideas to maintain and grow large institutions and organizations. But I do have to ask how this changes our biblical understanding of the church.

I've worked in corporate America for almost 37 years, in communication jobs – employee communications, community relations, issues management, media relations, executive speechwriting – that placed me almost at the center of what business leadership is about. The lessons of leadership clearly apply to business. They can apply, in a modified way, to academia and non-profit organizations like foundations and charities.

But the lessons of leadership are largely about the preservation and growth of organizations, like companies, universities, and the United Way. They’re not about spreading the gospel message or making disciples. (To its credit, some years back Willow Creek publicly acknowledged that it had fallen short in the making of disciples – helping people growth in their faith. It had been much more about attracting “seekers.”)

The lessons of corporate leadership do not come free of charge. They carry certain baggage, certain assumptions. Business people are familiar and comfortable with these assumptions, because this is what they know. Assumptions include: 

• The utilitarian purpose of all resources –all are to be used, and even overused if considered replaceable, and, if necessary, jettisoned, for the good of the enterprise. 
• The structures of governance – like the board of directors, executive teams, chief executive officers and administrators. 
• The predominance of one stakeholder group, perhaps two; it’s usually investors for publicly held companies. 
• An emphasis upon performance standards, and particular in the area of what sells. 
• And measurement – quantifiable, explainable, understandable numbers.

The language and teachings of business are impregnated with these things. They form a kind of structure or business rhetoric for the specific “message” or content, and in so doing they shape both the message and its results. Embrace the teachings of business for a non-business enterprise, and you embrace all the assumptions that come with them.

Years back, I attended a church that was trying very hard to embrace the Willow Creek model. For me, going to church often felt like going to work. At one point, I was asked to stand for the office of elder. And I was told my primary qualification was my background in corporate communications. I said I didn’t recall that qualification from the list in 1 Timothy 3.

I didn’t stand for elder.

We are to be disciples. We are to be salt and light in the community and culture at large.

The process isn’t supposed to work the other way. 

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the article I wrote.

Throw Out the Marketing Campaign

Every customer is a potential reporter, and every employee is a potential marketer and customer service person. The world of business has profoundly changed -- it's not about brands and logos any more; it's about people and relationships.

To read more, see my new post, "Throw Out the Marketing Campaign and Start a Real Conversation," at The High Calling.