Thought Leadership
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"Reputation Matters" White Papers seek to offer deeper insight on a wide range of topics we help clients address.
Specialists in marketing through ideas, information, and insight, Temin and Company turns clients’ intellectual capital into true thought leadership.
We also seek to practice what we preach.
Temin and Company’s own thought leadership includes white papers, yearly client letters and podcasts, published articles, a Forbes.com column – Reputation Matters, Huffington Post and American Banker articles, and appearances in other news articles and broadcasts.
Further, Davia Temin is a frequent public speaker and moderator – for clients, their own client events, and their “high potential” training programs. She also presents regularly at CEO conferences, and has developed a range of “Crisis Game” role play simulations to prepare CEOs, Boards, and client companies for real-life crisis situations.
It’s Not Over Until It’s Over: The Perils Of Declaring Victory In Crisis Too Soon
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, July 20, 2021
Covid Crisis Rule #7: It is not over just because you want it to be.
Do you remember that ill-starred speech in the middle of the Iraq War, when President George Bush stood on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, with a banner hung behind him that announced “Mission Accomplished”?
Of course, the mission had not been accomplished. In fact, guerrilla warfare escalated and the vast majority of casualties in the Iraq war occurred after the speech had already been given. The whole affair turned into a huge embarrassment that President Bush later called one of the bigger mistakes of his career.
It turned into a global symbol of the triumph of wishful thinking over the truth.
But the President wanted the war to be over; everyone did. There were indications that it was winding down. And frankly, the war that started as apparent revenge for 9/11 had become such a political hot potato that he needed it to be over. The ambiguity was simply insupportable politically and practically, and so everyone jumped on a lie as if it were a lifeline.
Sound familiar?
Of course, we are in the middle of making another such mistake, and it is a classic crisis management mistake that can hurt us even more: This pandemic is not over, and we pretend it is at our peril. […read more]
50+ Days Of “House Arrest” — What You Can Do To Feed Your Soul, Heal Your Spirit, Keep Hope Alive — And Save The Planet
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, May 5, 2020
It’s been 50+ days now, give or take, since America has been sequestered at home. Whether you’re still on lock down, or beginning to plan a return to semi-normalcy; whether you’ve been sick, had loved ones sick, or are still worried about catching the virus and passing it along — for most this perpetual ambiguity we find ourselves in is not just getting old, it’s gotten ancient, unbearable.
Despair has set in for some, or is lurking fairly close for others. Spirits are flagging, souls are tried, and some have even begun to question their purpose and existence.
The globe’s dark night of the soul has gone on for two months, and though it may abate, there is no certain end in sight. Most of us feel relatively helpless. […read more]
Chaos Rules: 8 Ways To Navigate Through The Fog Of Crisis
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, April 3, 2020
In wartime they call it the fog of war.
In crisis I call it the fog of crisis — but what it really amounts to is chaos.
So as we’re surrounded by a deteriorating civic infrastructure and national political response; as our lives and businesses are put on indefinite hold; as working indefinitely from home becomes untenable in many situations and organizations; as family pressures or the pain of isolation mount when we’re all sequestered at home; as joblessness careens; as the products we need the most – in hospitals and in our own lives – continue to be unavailable; and as more people get sick and die (this time, who we know) — the result is the fog of the coronavirus crisis.
It’s murky, dense and difficult to navigate. And it probably will exceed most of our abilities to cope at one time or another.
Chaos Rules
So, here are 8 ways that might help you get through it… [read more]
Chaos Leadership: When Does Global Crisis Turn Into Chaos And How Do We Survive It?
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, March 27, 2020
As we balance on the cusp between global crisis and total chaos — and we could make the jump into full-bore chaos at any moment — it is time to explore the difference between the two.
It also is time to talk about how the rules for handling chaos differ substantially from those that govern crisis response. Because if we cling to crisis management rules in order to address chaos, it will be as ineffective as if we treat coronavirus the same way we treat the common cold. […read more]
Expert Advice From Front-Line Physician On Leadership Needed To Combat COVID-19
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, March 18, 2020
Earlier this week I wrote about Communicating in Crisis – Building Trust in an Untrustworthy World, and ended with the suggestion that true expertise and expert advice are critical to building trust. But it is almost impossible to sort out the expertise from all the misinformation floating about out there.
So, I asked my own trusted physician, Dr. Jacqueline Jones, one of the country’s leading ENT specialists, currently on the front-lines of fighting COVID-19 especially in children, for her expert advice. She shared it, both for patients, and for leaders in business, insurance, and medicine — and it is excellent. I would like to share it with you now. […read more]
Communicating In Crisis: How To Build Trust In An Untrustworthy World
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, March 4, 2020
As we enter the first full week of the global pandemic and crashing financial markets, we are all looking for who to listen to, and who to believe.
We’re looking for a trusted voice in the storm to help guide us, one that can steer us toward the truth as it unfolds, and away from lies and misstatements, be they well-meaning or malicious. This is the leaders’s task — to provide that “True North” to employees, community, customers, investors, and stakeholders.
But this is an almost impossible task in such a topsy-turvy landscape, where it can be impossible to distinguish sky from ground.
Sequestered — quarantined by choice or fiat, or simply avoiding exposure by working from home — our choices for who to listen to have changed. No more can we comfortably sit across from our boss in a group meeting and use all of our senses to tell whether he or she is telling us the whole truth. Working remotely, half of the sensors we are used to using are missing.
And while we’re incredibly lucky to have video and teleconferences, podcasts and webinars, live streaming, virtual chat rooms, and virtual galas, salons, board meetings and policy meetings — still that personal touch is missing, and with it many of the clues we use to determine integrity and truthfulness.
So who do we trust? And how can leaders establish trust? […read more]
Crisis Leadership In Real Time: 8 Best Practices For Public Healthcare Emergencies
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, March 4, 2020
So, it’s here. We now have a public healthcare crisis in front of us that is already disrupting global markets, businesses, and lives, and has the potential to do much more damage. Or not, depending upon who you are, and what and who you believe.
Just as with the climate crisis, while the facts are the facts, how we respond to the COVID-19 crisis says more about who we are, and how we lead, than it does about the crisis itself.
So, it’s probably a good time to begin recasting more generic crisis management rules into a specific set of rules for our current challenge. Whether the current Coronavirus crisis is ever dubbed a pandemic or not, we surely need to develop some advanced thinking on how to deal with it.
Following is a new set of 8 pandemic ‘best practices,’ for your consideration. […read more]
Nancy Pelosi Changes Course: The Art Of The Leadership Pivot
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, September 24, 2019
Conventional wisdom used to say that in a jam, a leader had to make a decision, any decision, and then stick to it. Waffling, indecisiveness, or changing one’s mind was considered to be weakness. True strength came in just deciding something, anything, and standing by it right or wrong.
No more.
Nancy Pelosi has just demonstrated the courage it takes to change one’s mind – with the whole world watching. After months of vigorously resisting her own party’s calls to start impeachment proceedings against the President, she abruptly changed course, and announced she was commencing impeachment proceedings immediately. Based on new evidence showing the President had asked a foreign power to do something that was in his own partisan interest, she flip-flopped; she waffled; she changed course. […read more]
Great Crisis Management is Counter-Intuitive: That’s Why Boeing, Wells Fargo Are Getting It So Wrong
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, April 7, 2019
It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, especially for huge companies facing huge problems. But too many companies, like Wells Fargo and Boeing, are getting it all wrong time and time again.
The stakes for their failure – doing the wrong things in crisis and not understanding why – are too high. And consumers, investors, partners, and stakeholders are suffering the consequences. Why the blind spots? Why the inability to get it right when crisis hits?
Why Companies Are Getting Crisis Response So Wrong
The core reason that so many big companies, who should know better, fail in crisis is because the best crisis management is counter-intuitive, sometimes even illogical, and they absolutely do not understand that.
So they listen to the wrong people, consider only partially the impact and ramifications of their actions, ignore emotion or the zeitgeist of the moment, reflexively make the wrong decisions, dig themselves into holes, and then are loathe or incapable of digging themselves out again. […read more]
How To Bring Down A Bully Or Extortionist – Lessons From Jeff Bezos, Nancy Pelosi And More
Leadership, “Reputation Matters,” Forbes, February 11, 2019
Sometimes it takes the richest man in the world to bring down a bully; sometimes, the Speaker of the House. But this is what heroes are made of.
Lately as a nation and world we’ve been idolizing a lot of adult bullies. We’re not talking about the schoolyard anymore: From reality TV shows like The Apprentice (“you’re fired”) and Survivor to the White House and the National Enquirer — we seem to like our power misused and abused — taking advantage of those weaker, poorer, kinder, in trouble, or with a disability or two. Compassion seems to have flown out the window as survival of the nastiest prevails.
This does a number on our soul, of course. But few people — including religious figures — have been able to turn it around. Until Jeff Bezos and Nancy Pelosi. Both hugely powerful, rich (mega rich in Bezos’s case) and successful in their own rights — they are charting a roadmap for how you can challenge a bully and win. So whether it’s the current president or his tabloid-publishing buddy, or your boss, co-worker, client or relative, here are some new ideas on how to publicly vanquish a bully. […read more]
White Papers»
"Reputation Matters" White Papers seek to offer deeper insight on a wide range of topics we help clients address.