“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll often do things differently,” said Warren Buffett, the scion of the remarkably successful Berkshire Hathaway finance house. Do you agree?
Reputation is the opinion held about a person, institution, or importantly in commerce, brand, built on performance criteria such as the quality, value, reliability in products and services; the ethics, vision, transparency, and accountability in governance; and, personally, trust, behaviour, and character. Over the years, many have fallen, unaware that ‘good reputation is more valuable than money.’
Take cyclist Lance Armstrong, the seven-time ‘Tour de France winner with a reputation as a ‘man of steel,’ but who was living an outrageous lie. He was outed by former team-mate Floyd Landis, and global drug enforcement agencies in 2012, for using erythropoietin (EPO), a human growth hormone. “It was just one lie, told a thousand times,” Armstrong said, “But take me back to 1995, when I started, and I’d probably do it again,” thus showing that while reputation, as Abraham Lincoln said, “Is like fine china, once broken, can’t be repaired,” can be set aside, if you have a thick enough skin.
Theranos, the brainchild of Elizabeth Holmes, launched in 2003, became worth $9 billion by 2014, touting portable blood-testing devices that used a pinprick of blood and were described as an “external point-of-care Blackberry.”
However, it was fraud, an idea, nothing more, and Holmes is now serving jail time over it. To be fair, Holmes had many doubters, but she dazzled investors who were perhaps more blinded by ‘believability,’ than reputation.
Shakespeare, of course, enriches reputation with clarity, as the villainous Iago seeks to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Iago brutalises the threat of reputation, what others may think, to weaponise his words demeaning money, “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands,” while elevating reputation thus... “But he that filches from me my good name, robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed.” Lago sows doubt in Othello’s mind. From then, Iago’s cunning words, his tapestry of deceit, alongside a misplaced handkerchief, cunningly placed, draw rude consequences and from these seeds, reputations are questioned, trust is mislaid, and Desdemona perishes by Othello’s hand, only for him to take his own life when he finds how Iago misled him.
Reputation then, can be devastating, behind closed doors, and in public, so I encourage a flagship carrier to respond positively to the appalling customer service ratings it currently holds with global review platforms Trustpilot and Tripadvisor, and on social media.
Yes, there are challenges and difficulties in regional air travel due to the Iran conflict, but that is even more reason to meet customer needs quickly, and efficiently. Don’t put things in a ‘too hard’ basket.
In this current situation lies an opportunity to become better... to be the best. Remember, your reputation is your best advertisement.
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