Helping Leaders Build, Sustain And Protect Corporate Reputation
Reputation drives trust, attracts opportunity, and creates long-term value. Neglected, it becomes one of an organisation’s greatest risks.
For 27 years I’ve helped executives, leadership teams, and boards across 17 countries build, sustain, and protect reputation as a strategic asset, working upstream of the crisis rather than reacting after one hits.
My work takes three forms. Training builds the playbook for known scenarios. Facilitation builds the judgement leaders need for situations no playbook covers. Advisory work means something else again: I develop strategy and protocols directly, and counsel leadership on the decisions themselves. Most organisations draw on some mix of the three.
Executive advisory
I advise leaders on reputation strategy, reputation risk governance, and stakeholder relationships, including board and executive briefings and building the internal capability teams need to manage reputation matters on their own.
Executive education
I design and facilitate programmes on corporate reputation, reputation risk, crisis leadership, and stakeholder trust, and have trained more than 800 executives since 2006 through my own Stakeholder Trust and Reputation masterclasses. I’ve also facilitated Management Development Programmes and Executive Development Programmes at universities including GIBS, the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and UCT’s Graduate School of Business.
Keynote speaking
I’ve delivered more than 125 keynote presentations and hundreds of executive workshops internationally, on corporate reputation, crisis resilience, and leadership decision-making under pressure. Organisers have invited me back repeatedly, four times each for the Southern African Institute of Internal Auditors and the Compliance Institute’s Annual Conference. See testimonials.
Proof in practice
When Statistics South Africa faced intense public scrutiny ahead of the 2011 Census, I developed the reputation plan and protocols and advised management directly throughout. I worked with ATNS on crisis preparedness ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. I helped Vodacom integrate reputation risk into its enterprise-wide risk management system. In health and safety, the same advisory-and-training combination shows up as protocol training, safety audits, and incident investigations.
Why organisations bring me in
Reputation is treated too often as a communications task. I push leaders to see it as a leadership responsibility instead, tied to governance and decision-making rather than messaging alone. Everything traces back to one foundation: stakeholder trust.
Background
I’m a Registered Professional in Public Relations, Training & Development and Health & Safety, with qualifications from Henley Management College, the Graduate Institute of Management and Technology, and Nelson Mandela University in strategic management, public relations, governance, risk, and ethics. I also hold a diploma in Safety Management (SAMTRAC) and an ITIS from NOSA. I wrote a chapter on consultancy marketing in Professor Charles Fombrun and Mark Nevins’ The Advice Business, and I edit Powerlines, my newsletter on reputation insights, read by more than 16,000 subscribers.
Before working independently, I was an organizational development consultant to 6 business units; and a corporate affairs adviser to small businesses, and served in the South African Military Medical Services at the Institute for Aviation Medicine.