Alex Harris (4) (1963–)

Alex Kennedy is a PR professional who has worked for many years in both Australia and the United States.

She doesn't like what she sees in the business world. Companies behave badly, and call her in afterwards to put a pleasant face on their greed, incompetence and arrogance.

Clearly, she's fed up. The global financial crisis, which Kennedy sees as a predictable outcome of the failure of business leadership, pushed her over the edge. She decided to write a book.

The book aims to be a how-to show more guide for our new post-crash, hyperconnected world. One in which evading liability comes at a high cost, when you consider the damage to your reputation which such evasion can cause. You may see your business a series of commercial contracts, but your consumers and stakeholders see a moral contract. One which implies fairness, reasonableness, and responsibility.

In the first several short chapters, Kennedy starts out with promise. You can sense, among many things, the moral outrage she feels about modern business.

She points out that the OECD has clear coroprate governance guidelines, which many business schools teach as nice, but not strictly necessary. She quotes one ghastly instance of a seminar on the subject that seemed to imply the definition of corporate governance was somehow personal and subjective. She lambastes this notion.

One might get the impression that she has, correctly, identified the question as a moral one, rather than a commercial one. But as the book progresses, she falls into the trap of seeing responsible behaviour predominantly in terms of cash to the bottom line.

Conventional wisdom would have it that corporate social responsibility pays dividends in warm feelings amongst your potential customers, and goodwill from stakeholders and regulators. Kennedy points out that in modern times, when bad vibes can get spread by blog and tweet, the cash comes more in the form of PR disasters averted.

This means that it's much harder to account for in the short term. Rather than a guideline, it becomes a principle. Rather than question of best-practice, it becomes a question of good-and evil. I looked forward to her explaining how thieves and bastards fail to prosper.

It is a promising notion; that businesses need to stop acting like faceless machines, and start acting like moral beings, since that's how the world views them. But as the book progresses, she recoils from her main argument.

Frankly, Kennedy would serve her argument best if she told it as a moralty tale. Each of the many examples she cites, and the experts she quotes, is part of a fable with a moral. The prose should pay more attention to telling a story than making a point.

(I recommend Annette Simmons' "The Story Factor", in my library, as a good text for Ms. Kennedy to take to the beach this Antipodean summer.)

Instead, as many reviewers point out, the author quotes large paragraphs from others; many chapters (for example, Ch. 20) groan under the weight of quoted authority.

Further, her prose seems to have adopted something of the overconfident swagger of Australian and American corporate boardrooms. The style comes across as strident and hectoring. I almost threw the book at the wall when she started a paragraph, "Now, work with me here..."

Ms. Kennedy is in a uniquely powerful position. She has made it her calling to prod commerce from the inside; to catch businesspeople in their customary hypocrisy, and remind them that you can't get away with it anymore. If, indeed, you ever could.

But I fear that the book does not do this calling justice. It certainly does not live up to its cover blurb, which bills it as a new "In Search of Excellence"!

The cover states that this is volume one of many. I trust that Ms. Kennedy will take some time to reflect on her important insight--that the equation which calculates the cost of liability against damage to reputation has been tipped, inexorably, in favour of the latter. And truly explore its implications, both moral and commercial.

I, too, have worked as a communications professional on both sides of the Pacific, and know how valuable this lesson is.

Please, Alex, teach it rather than preach it. show less

"Your reputation is created at and affected by every touch point of the organization. Reputation management means addressing your organizational reputation as a strategic issue. It requires a whole-of-business approach to genuine corporate social responsibility and sustainability, and a culture of thinking beyond quarterly financial reports."

The quote above is the start of the epilogue to 140 pages of rivetting perspectives about and examples of the way organizations mis-manage reputation, show more the risks and consequences of such actions, and insights into best practice. Reading Reputation at Risk will leave you in no doubt about the clear link between business success and effective reputation management, and the umbellical cord that connects reputation and corporate social responsibility practices and reporting. Alex Harris, the author, was born in Papua New Guinea and now lives in Australia, so this book has a healthy helping of Australian stories and references, and a lively, provocative style which brings the Alex's passionate temperament to life for the reader.

Reputation at Risk provides a view of corporate governance and the lack thereof that caused the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), the role of business schools , the risks to reputation from CGM (consumer generated media (no, i didn't know what that meant either), crisis management and more. There is a checklist of positive corporate responses to a crisis or a serious issue and some good advice: "Too often, companies assume the crises will occur in normal working hours when all the key executives and trained operatives will be available. They rarely do". Alex promotes Corporate Social Responsibility as a key element of business, contributing to public image and reputation. She advocates that CSR should be part of the DNA of the business as csr influences a business's abilty to attract and retain skilled staff, maintain effective customer relationships and shareholder satisfaction and more. Reputation at Risk speaks in favour of corporate transparency and reporting - "The way companies communicate their CSR activities is just as important as the CSR itself".

Whilst Reputation at Risk is not classic text-book style writing (an advantage, in my view), it is certainly a book to learn from. I enjoyed it greatly and recommend it to those who are interesting in learning about Reputation Management and corporate communications and risk.

elaine cohen show less

The concept of this book is important, but the writing is too casual for many of the points it makes to be taken seriously. As an extended blog, it may well serve its audience; Harris clearly knows (and is passionate about) her subject but perhaps she's not so confident with her writing ... which was shown up in her use of well-written quotes to illustrate her points. This book may have well have been pushed out to attract a market influenced by the financial crisis, however the substance show more would have been more recognisable if Harris had written with more literary or even academic rigour. show less

This book is based on a blog and as such is structured as a series of blog entries. It aims to talk about how businesses should address risks to their reputations and offers some advice as well as discussing the dangers inherent in ignoring these risks. Generally the advice boils down to "don't be too short-termist" and "don't do really stupid things" which are both obvious (although often ignored by people and companies). I found the book did not particularly interest and lacked many show more insights that a person with a degree of common-sense could have come up with. This book could be a possible first look at the topic for someone who has never thought about these problems before but i would hesitate to recommend it. show less