Must Reads
There is so much to read, so much to know, so many sources to follow. And the volume of news and information just keeps growing exponentially. How to keep up? Even more, how to rediscover the serendipity of learning something new and interesting for its own sake?
Here, for your enjoyment and interest, are the articles Temin and Company considers “must reads.” They are primarily on the topics of reputation and crisis management, the media, leadership and strategy, perception and psychology, self-presentation, science, girls and women, organizational behavior and other articles of interest.
They are listed below with the most recent articles first, and to the side, by category.
We hope you enjoy them and would appreciate your comments. And whenever you have any favorite articles for us to add, please let us know so that we might include them for other readers to enjoy.
There is so much to read, so much to know, so many sources to follow. And the volume of news and information just keeps growing exponentially. How to keep up? Even more, how to rediscover the serendipity of learning something new and interesting for its own sake?
Here, for your enjoyment and interest, are the articles Temin and Company considers “must reads.” They are primarily on the topics of reputation and crisis management, the media, leadership and strategy, perception and psychology, self-presentation, science, girls and women, organizational behavior and other articles of interest.
They are listed below with the most recent articles first, and to the side, by category.
We hope you enjoy them and would appreciate your comments. And whenever you have any favorite articles for us to add, please let us know so that we might include them for other readers to enjoy.
The Morning Risk Report: Greater Compliance Spending Brings Need for Better Focus
Ben DiPietro, The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance Journal, April 17, 2017
Companies continue to spend more money and resources on compliance, but a report concluded that firms aren’t leveraging their investments to their fullest extent possible. A survey of 150 compliance executives in the banking, capital markets and insurance industries by professional services firm Accenture found 48% said they expect spending on compliance over the next two years to rise between 10% and 20%, with 18% predicting spending will rise 20% or more. Making better use of existing tools and technologies would improve the ability of organizations to make the most of their compliance spending, said the survey report. […read more]
How Gender Bias Corrupts Performance Reviews, and What to Do About It
Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, Harvard Business Review, April 12, 2017
Annual evaluations are often subjective, which opens the door to gender bias. These biases can lead to double standards — a similar situation gets a positive or a negative spin depending on gender. A content analysis of individual annual performance reviews shows that women were 1.4 times more likely to receive critical subjective feedback (as opposed to either positive feedback or critical objective feedback). But when organizations implemented gender-neutral, real-time feedback tools, such biases were reduced. […read more]
Marissa Mayer: Do Something You Feel Unprepared To Do
Bill Snyder, Insights by Stanford Business, April 12, 2017
Marissa Mayer, who will see Yahoo through the acquisition by Verizon, shared tips on how to win a promotion and how to make a sound decision when multiple career options arise. […read more]
How United Became The World’s Most Hated Airline In One Day
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, January 18, 2017
It’s no longer crisis as usual for United Airlines, or anyone else. Live social media posting has changed what you can get away with in a crisis — forever.
It used to be that if an airline made as monumental a mistake as United Airlines just did by causing a paying customer who had done nothing wrong to be dragged off a plane screaming, bloodying him up along the way in front of all his fellow passengers, they might still have gotten away with it.
After all, on a plane, passengers were basically incommunicado, so people couldn’t have protested easily, and they might not have been believed, especially if the airline denied it or called it an “overreaction.” The populace tends to believe its leaders in these situations, if compelling evidence to the contrary doesn’t exist. It rather makes one wonder about how many times such a debacle has happened before, and just not been caught on video.
But today all that changed. Live footage of the assault of an innocent passenger by security personnel was captured and immediately posted on social media around the world, instantly making United one of the most hated companies in the world. […read more]
PR Nightmares: United Fiasco Among Worst Corporate Gaffes
Christopher Palmeri and Jeff Green, Bloomberg, April 11, 2017
When it comes to bad public relations, it’s pretty tough to top the sight of a United Airlines passenger being dragged, bloodied and screaming, from a flight.
The incident, including two attempts at apology by Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz, has been airing on cable TV and raging on social media for days. But the fiasco is hardly the first self-inflicted corporate blunder. Munoz can take comfort that it’s happened to others, and in many cases the bosses didn’t lose their jobs, as our PR Tales From Hell illustrate.
Over Easter week in 2009, two Domino’s Pizza employees in North Carolina posted a video on YouTube showing one sticking cheese up his nose and pretending to sneeze on a customer’s sandwich. With the clip reaching one million views, management fired the employees, sanitized the store and produced its own video with a formal apology from President Patrick Doyle.
The company’s response was to show outrage and take action, said Davia Temin, head of the New York-based crisis-management firm Temin & Co. CEO David Brandon kept his job and now runs Toys “R” Us Inc. Doyle succeeded him. […read more]
Navigating the United PR crisis
Amara Walker, CNNi, April 11, 2017
Amara Walker talks with public relations expert Davia Temin about United Airline’s handling of their latest crisis that sparked worldwide outrage, in which a passenger was dragged off the airline when he wouldn’t give up his seat on an overbooked flight, and how they can recover from the blow to their reputation.
To watch the interview on CNN, CLICK HERE.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘The US will lose its leadership in technology if this doesn’t change’
Kif Leswing, Business Insider, April 7, 2017
Apple CEO Tim Cook believes that the gender imbalance at tech companies could hurt the American tech industry if more women don’t enter science and engineering fields. Cook discussed diversity, the issues facing gay people, and engineering education in an exclusive interview with the Auburn Plainsman’s Corey Williams published on Thursday. […read more]
How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons
Noam Scheiber, The New York Times, April 2, 2017
The secretive ride-hailing giant Uber rarely discusses internal matters in public. But in March, facing crises on multiple fronts, top officials convened a call for reporters to insist that Uber was changing its culture and would no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks.” Notably, the company also announced that it would fix its troubled relationship with drivers, who have complained for years about falling pay and arbitrary treatment. And yet even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth. […read more]
The Corporate Implications of Longer Lives
Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, MITSloan Management Review, Spring 2017
Across the world, people today are living longer. There is growing awareness that increasing longevity will have major implications for how people manage their work lives and careers. Rising life expectancy means the level of savings required to provide a reasonable income for retirement at age 65 is becoming increasingly infeasible for most people. And few organizations have come to grips with the opportunities and challenges that greater longevity brings. […read more]
Crisis of the Week: Hacked Twitter Account Gives McDonald’s Indigestion
Ben DiPietro, The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance Journal, March 27, 2017
The crisis magnifying lens puts it focus on McDonald’s Corp. after a message was sent on the company’s Twitter account calling President Donald Trump “a disgusting excuse of a President” and trolling him by saying he has “tiny hands.” The White House did not comment, but some supporters of the president called for a boycott of the burger chain.
McDonald’s said it was notified by Twitter that its account was hacked. McDonald’s deleted the tweet, secured its account and said an internal investigation found the account had been hacked by “an external source.” The company put out a statement apologizing that “this tweet was sent through our corporate McDonald’s account.”
The experts evaluate how well McDonald’s handled this crisis.
Davia Temin, chief executive, Temin and Co.: “The fake tweet sent from McDonalds’ Twitter account on March 16 that disparaged President Donald Trump catapulted the company into the land of alt-tweetdom. Today, as companies and individuals alike struggle to delineate truth from fiction in public discourse, McDonalds had an immediate imperative to let the public know it had not officially sent the insulting tweet. It had to act quickly to set the record straight, before it even knew what really had happened. It couldn’t let a lie stand.
“It did an excellent job. I usually say you have 15 minutes to respond to a crisis these days. McDonald’s took the tweet down within 20 minutes, issued an apology that was just right, announced it had ‘secured its account’ and was investigating what happened. It followed up by saying Twitter had informed it to say its account had been compromised. It was a perfectly done, two-step response. Immediately the company acknowledged the problem and acted, promising an investigation. It followed up, as promised, with results saying its site was hacked. Not too much, not too little.
“Plus, it rightly knew it couldn’t control the Twitter responses from the public, which ran the gamut from jokes and hilarity to a threatened boycott. So, it didn’t even try, though [it’s likely] the company monitored it closely and was prepared to act if needed. But it was an essentially small matter and McDonald’s let it play itself out within a day or two, with no further comment; it didn’t let itself get ‘twitterpated.’ Had it continued to talk about it, it would have kept the issue alive even longer. McDonald’s deserves a break today on this one: its communications team gets an A-plus.”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.