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By Root 1639 0

reputation action by action over the course of a business day. Over time, it tends to settle into place. Your reputation is not for your epitaph; it’s like a baseball player’s batting average—very difficult to move up more than a few points towards the end of a season. It takes a long-term commitment to becoming a more consistent hitter and to improving your ability to make contact with the ball, to raise your batting average year over year, over the course of a major league career. Reputation also kicks in much earlier in life than it once did. People used to think of reputation as a legacy issue, something to be considered in the second half of your career; after you became successful, you worried about how your reputation would be viewed by others. Now, employers check the MySpace pages of recruits just out of college. It is as if your batting average is no longer limited to your performance in the majors, but also includes how you swung the bat in Little League; the things you do as a kid stay with you throughout your career. Reputation is built one interaction, one gesture, and one event at a time throughout your life. Even someone like Steve Wynn, a man whose reputation was built on big successes, agrees that building reputation is about the little things, the simple, authentic impressions you make in each interaction. “It’s not about home runs,” he said. “It’s about hitting singles and doubles, one meaningful experience at a time.” In an age when your reputation is built on authentic impressions, the pressure is on to act authentically right from the start.

When Drexel Burnham fell and the high-flying stock market of the 1980s crashed on Black Monday, 1987, Michael Milken became the poster boy for 1980s greed and corporate avarice. Although there was little to suggest that this quiet financial genius was nearly the Machiavellian schemer the press, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and federal attorneys made him out to be (former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then lead attorney for the prosecution, has since expressed full support for Milken’s presidential pardon),19 Milken paid the price. Years in jail, the largest fine ever levied in the history of U.S. securities laws at that time, and a lifelong ban from the thing he did best left Milken picking up the pieces of a shattered life and damaged reputation.20 Now, years later, Milken’s valuable philanthropic efforts on behalf of cancer research and public education through the activities of the Milken Family Foundation are helping him restore the reputation he lost, as he helps others.21 It seems Milken evolved from a man motivated by the pursuit of success into a man inspired by the pursuit of significance, and in that transformation, that shift from a focus on the self to a focus on others, he was able to find a solid measure of redemption.

REPUTATION, REPUTATION, REPUTATION

Second chances are harder to come by in a transparent world. It is easier for people to trip you up and, since times are full of uncertainty, harder for people to extend trust after it is broken. The fall down the ladder of trust is often long, and the landing particularly hard. Reputation is the only known antidote. It can inoculate you, to some degree, against the unease that others feel when suspicion enters a relationship. It buys you the benefit of the doubt.

In a world of connection and transparency, getting your hows right means making the shift from managing reputation to building it in everything you do. A good reputation is like a good rope and piton for a mountain climber. Every good climber is going to slip occasionally and sometimes even take a fall. However, when conditions get rough, only a good rope, well secured, will keep you from being blown off the mountain.

The Marlboro Man and Me

In 2001, David Greenberg became senior vice president and chief compliance officer of Altria Group, Inc., the parent company of Kraft Foods and Philip Morris, among others.22 “When I took my current job,” David told me recently with a laugh, “what I knew about compliance