Can Responsibility Help Liberty Mutual Sell Car Insurance?
“Greenwashing” is a term that’s being used more frequently these days, and for the most part it’s not a compliment. It refers to the practice by which companies, organizations or individuals with less-than-outstanding reputations on green issues attempt to market themselves as friends of the environment. If a company’s greenhouse gas emission levels have increased dramatically, for example, it might seek to distract attention from that unfortunate fact by launching a program that enables first-grade schoolchildren to plant new trees around the school. With environmental sustainability now dominating so much media buzz, greenwashing is an attractive if unseemly route to improving a questionable public image.
The Wall Street Journal recently published a summary of the events of 2007, as chronicled throughout the year on the paper’s front pages. The Journal did a good job of detailing the course of the year, and as I read over the list, I wondered what last year’s events — the accounting fraud, overpaid executives, insider trading and ethical violations – tell us?
In a transparent and hyperconnected world, in which nothing stays hidden for long, one would think that reputation would matter more than it ever has. I’ve argued this point elsewhere — more and more, reputation is a critical component of any company’s enterprise value.
I was struck by research presented in the Wall Street Journal that appears to contradict my position. In a recent article there, Dennis K. Berman discusses a study that suggests that there is a financial limit to the value of reputation.
Barry Bonds just made the number. It was a big number, one of baseball’s great records: the most home runs ever hit by a human being. 
In general, this would be big news. Almost every pursuit of a major baseball record like this has commanded rapt national attention.
Yet surprisingly, for most of us, our feelings toward Bonds’ milestone achievement range from indifference through ambivalence to disgust. These curious reactions speaks volumes to the way the world has changed in the last few years and tells us a lot about what the 21st century holds in store for sports, business, and life.
Here is a terrific as-it-happens example of the intersection of reputation, information availability, and the online persistence of memory.
Business author Debbie Weil suffered what she felt was discourtesy over lunch in D.C. and decided to do something about it.
According to her blog, here’s what happened: Weil momentarily left her half-eaten meal and open newspaper to purchase coffee at the cafe counter. She returned to find a group seated nearby had commandeered her table for their meeting and unceremoniously dumped her lunch in the trash.
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