It's Easy to Believe Your Eyes Yet You are Not Bulletproof: Don't Think You Are
Just because others escape just punishment, don't assume you will too
Headline: Does It Matter How Much You’re Fined? Or How Bad Your Reputation Is?
That’s an interesting question, don’t you think? The answer seems obvious yet maybe it is a trick question, a trap. It gives off that appearance.
Here’s why the write of that article in Forbes magazine posed those questions.
“There are only two metrics that matter. Fines as a % of revenue and the financial impact of fines. So does it matter if you’re fined a lot for various crimes and misdemeanors? Not really. At least not according to some novel research done by David Silverman. By the way, companies with the worst reputations also do quite well too,” writes Steve Andriole, a Thomas G. Labrecque Professor of Business Technology in the Villanova School of Business at Villanova.
He goes on to provide examples: Apple, Meta, Comcast and The Bank Of America, before offering an answer and conclusion to his rhetorical question, writing that “These are some of the fines that made the headlines — but were soon forgotten — which is the whole point of this discussion. At the end of the day, no one really cared and the fines barely landed a punch. Stock prices didn’t suffer either. Bad reputations? They don’t matter much.”
I wish that assumption and conclusion were really that black and white. They aren’t.
I clearly see what Andriole is asserting: Many companies can absorb large financial punishments and some bad, shaming times of media coverage and harsh criticism and move forward, almost as if they never conducted themselves poorly, egregiously, and shamefully.
He’s correct. That is often the outcome. Yet I respectfully push back a little when he communicates that bad reputations don’t matter much. They do, because the bad behavior is now of public record, the media knows about it and critical observers remember it. Sometimes the people involved lose trust, status, money, jobs, opportunities and careers. They are consider radioactive. Or go to prison.
The point: Don’t believe you are Teflon. You’re not. Eventually, bad actors — companies or individuals, even if they miraculously survive and inexplicably continue to thrive despite their wrongdoing, eventually run up to the tipping point, which is a point of no return and end up in inescapable places: Punishment, pain and suffering.
Don’t believe you’re bulletproof because that’s a ridiculously false conclusion that will surely lead to a certain failing of self control and botched risk management.
Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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