Only 20 percent of workers "strongly trust" the top management of their organizations, while 36 percent "moderately trust" their top management, according to a new Leadership IQ survey of 7,209 U.S. based executives, managers and employees.
Public relations firm Hill & Knowlton released its "Return on Reputation" report that shows reputation is now perceived as having a direct correlation with financial performance. How do consumers measure reputation? According to the 282 global companies surveyed for the report, brand and marketing message (76 percent), corporate culture and working environment (51 percent), employee compensation and career opportunities (49 percent), and social responsibility/community investment (22 percent) all play an active role in reputation assessment.
The best corporate reputation belongs to Microsoft Corporation, according to one of the oldest and most respected indexes from Delahaye. It's top spot is cemented by its well-publicized philanthropy. Long known for becoming wealthy by building Microsoft into the world's largest software maker, Bill Gates last year said that in June 2008, he will focus on philanthropy full time at the $60 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he runs with his wife.
Yesterday, in a Harvard commencement speech, Gates noted that the student newspaper, the Crimson, had called him "Harvard's most successful dropout," and he said: "I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class...I did the best of everyone who failed."
"I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequalities in the world--the appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of poverty, disease and despair," he stated.
In the analytical style for which he became famous in high-tech circles, Gates recommended a four-point plan for attacking a complex problem:
1. Determine a goal
2. Find the "highest-leverage approach"
3. Discover the ideal technology for that approach
4. And, in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have.
He continued, "The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand--and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior"--a goal that requires its own four-point plan.
Gates exhorted the graduates each to take on an issue and "become a specialist on it"....even if they devote just a few hours every week.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2007