Reputation Management Online

The lawsuit filed against Ernst & Young for their auditing of Lehman Brothers and their acceptance of the now notorious “Repo 105″ manoeuvre that Lehman used to hide their leverage in their quarterly filing and thereby mislead investors as to the true state of their finances has revealed that some of  E&Y’s auditors were concerned and brought up the issue of “reputational risk”.

Reputational risk is growing more fashionable as a concept among strategy thinkers but rarely has much traction among the board or within the C-Suite where a fight between quick profit and long term reputation is usually a round one knockout to profit. Reputational risk is a function that considers the risk of reputation damage as one of the criteria in decision making. The question goes: “what will people think about us or our products if we make this decision, it might be profitable but long term will we lose out as our reputation suffers for being dishonest, etc.” Read the rest of this entry »