Book excerpt: Leverage your company’s most important asset! In our lightning-fast digital age, a company can face humiliation and possibly even ruin within seconds of a negative tweet or blog post. Over the last year companies such as BP, Goldman Sachs, and Toyota have experienced serious blows to their images that could have had reduced impact if their leaders had implemented reputation management into their business strategy and culture. There is no one in either the corporate or academic sphere with greater expertise in the area of corporate reputation than Dr. Daniel Diermeier. An award-winning professor at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Dr. Diermeier has blazed a path in understanding the significance of reputation management and demonstrating how a company can create a program so powerful that it can help turn a potential public disgrace into a public image success story. Reputation Rules is a landmark work bringing to light Dr. Diermeier’s groundbreaking insights in this critical area. He offers the frameworks, strategies, and processes for changing your company’s focus as quickly as the world is changing around you. He touches on all of the reputational issues that need to be managed from a strategic level, describing how to: Overcome direct challenges from influential activist and political forces Manage corporate scandals, including executive compensation Use external, seemingly unrelated events to boost reputation Build a reputation management process into everyday operations In addition, Dr. Diermeier provides case studies of Shell’s confrontation with Greenpeace, Mercedes’s recovery from the Moose crisis, AIG’s executive bonus fallout, Wal-Mart’s reputation-building response to Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other scenarios illustrating what works and what doesn’t when it comes to reputation management. Brimming with keen insights and lucid examples, Reputation Rules is a guidepost for your organization’s future—and a salve for crisis management.