How - Dov Seidman [99]
REPUTATION IN A WIRED WORLD
Reputation is another of those soft things, like trust, that everyone wants but few think about how to get. For much of our history, the importance of reputation was largely self-evident. When most people lived in smaller, semiclosed communities, the proximity and familiarity of other people placed social pressure upon us to conduct ourselves within prevailing norms. As we moved from towns to cities and our day-to-day communities expanded in size, we maintained many of the closed community structures that kept behavior in check. The great European and American cities of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries stayed organized in neighborhood structures that mimicked the small town and village traditions of feudal times. Multigenerational households were common, and families often stayed rooted in the same general locality for generations. People transacted most of their business on a local level, with known and trusted suppliers. Large businesses benefited from the slow pace of the world and were able to form trusting relationships over time upon which large enterprises could grow.
The last part of the twentieth century saw remarkable changes to the underlying structures of how we live. Increasing affluence, ease of transportation, expanding multinational business practices, and the transformation of economies from manufacturing/agricultural to information /service exerted tremendous pressure on the nuclear cohesion of communities. Families spread out. Neighborhoods whose character had been consistent for 100 years saw influxes of new people, new customs, and new wealth. Ironically, the increased connectivity made possible by advances in communications technologies allowed people to be further apart. Though your new job took you 2,000 miles from the town your family had lived in for three generations, you could still “reach out and touch someone” relatively cheaply.
These transformations broke the bonds of familiarity and tradition that placed high value on reputation. In a new city, or a new job, you could reinvent yourself. Identity became more fluid, opening up new opportunities for change and growth, but also removing some of the external pressures of conformity. More was possible, and so more was possible. Until about 20 years ago, for instance, it remained relatively difficult to thoroughly check someone’s background and reputation. Until then, information was more controllable and, to some degree, avoidable. You could often elude that dark spot in your past with a change of locality and make a fresh start.
All that has changed. The world of business is faster, more spread out, more transient, and more fluid than ever before. Information flows. Yet, paradoxically, the overwhelming capacity of technology to connect us and transmit information to us instantly and cheaply binds us together as never before. It creates conditions of interdependence as high as if not higher than when locality bound us in commonality. In some sense, the whole world is now local (or glocal, as the current meme goes, both global and local at the same time). What does this mean for individuals and companies? From a reputation standpoint, what is old is new again. Reputation—how others think of you—is now more critical to your ability to build long-term sustained success than ever before.
Reputation is the sum total of your HOWS: What you