ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS	9
FOREWORD	11
The latest turning point in the flow of history	11
INTRODUCTION	13
CHAPTER ONE	17
Reputation Management Templates	17
Journey to World Citizenship	20
Globalization of Individuals	22
Battles as Business Models	24
“Managing Reputation While Let’s Playing Monopoly”	26
Stop?Way of Doing Business without Reputation	27
The Issue of Ethics	31
Do you Have a More Important Task than Managing your Reputation?	33
Unmanaged Reputations are Managed by Competitors	35
Reputation is Built on Culture and Values	37
Reputation Management Starts Internally	39
Reputation Likes Risks, Reputation Management Manages Risks	40
You either Leave ‘Trace’ or ‘Soot’ in Life!	41
CHAPTER TWO	44
We are Aware of the Business Game and We are In!	44
We take the Impossible Path!	45
Does Mafia Cares about Reputation? if “yes” What is Ethical for Them?	52
Should Brands Be Ethical with their Promises?	58
Judges, Doctors, Referees and CEOs…	64
Tarnished Brands	70
Can there be a Legacy of Morality?	77
Artificial Intelligence Beat Humans at “GO”; Ring the Funeral Bells!	81
From Göbeklitepe to Palo Alto… Building a New World…	87
Don't Forget to Take Your Shoes Off when Entering Amazon!	93
We are Back in “3 Ps” in the “Ps” World of Marketing…	103
Brand Reputation	110
What Color is the Planet's Red Line for Us?	116
As Long As Sustainability Isn't A Lifestyle…	120
Being Responsible for our Responsibilities	124
Companies are as Reputable as the Responsibilites They Assume	132
Social Responsibility: The Price of Our Irresponsibility versus Quality of Life!	137
New Generation Social Irresponsibility	140
These Bosses Think Their Companies are their Fathers' Property!	146
CHAPTER THREE	152
Corporate Lessons Like Third Page News	152
When the Chairman of the Board of Directors Loses Sleep…	153
One of the Brands with the Most Tarnished Record: United Airways	156
Zara’s Fondness for “Reputation”	160
There are Multiple Lessons in Each Scandal	165
If Oxfam Loses Its Reputation ...	167
The Crisis is Under this Cover	170
An Airplane Hanging on a Cliff	174
How Goodyear Became “Bad Year”?	180
The Cost of Mixing Local Values and Politics	184
If KOTON Puts Children's Fashion on the Agenda…	188
The Filli Boya TV Ads that Create the Agenda	192
The Price of Recalling Products	195
Trendy Brands are Always Thrown Mud	197
Its name is “Continental”, but it forgot Turkey on its Map	200
In All of Life, We Have “One Identity”	204
Using Logos in Obituary Notices	206
A Career Is Not Just a Path to the General Director's Chair	208
Which Nails are CEOs Sitting on in their Chairs?	212
Earning a Million Dollar Manager’s Life Starts with Mowing Lawns	218
Why did Unilever Buy Ben & Jerry's?	222
Too Much Creativity Sometimes Returns very Costly!	226
A Branding Case without Reputation: Which one? SHUBUO (This or that)?	229
Cost of Short Cut Dreams of Making Money!	232
CHAPTER FOUR	237
Have a Nice Work Day!	237
Can we Patent the Sun?	238
How Would Banks Lend $20?	242
The 1% That is Filming the Documentary of the 1%	247
“Big Issue” But Sample Solution	252
Sharing the Success with Employees! An Ethical Lesson for all Business	256
Social Entrepreneurship's Social Entrepreneur	258
EPILOGUE	261
NOTES	264

Human life ends in the blink of an eye. We learn until our 30s, then use what we've learned until our 50’s, striving to achieve our so-called “goals”. And after our 50’s, we spend our life in the fantasy of “gearing down, staying healthy, and prolonging our life”.

The kind of life we’ll leave behind is naturally related to our “character”. Yet, our character alone can’t manage everything in our business life. This is because institutions have character just as individuals do. The characters of bosses and senior management create the culture of the company, and this culture travels with us throughout our careers. After all, life turns out to be what remains after certain lessons – that we are part of or that we personally create – filter the rest away. And with these remnants, we are forced to play the “happiness” game.

If all of life is a university with no diploma – we call it “work” – then we can learn lessons from our experiences that suit our character and, of course, end with a “happy ending” if possible.
Corporate lessons from the past and the future can apply to all of us. Examples from real life travel with us throughout our careers.

How did the experiences of tens of local and foreign brands/companies reflect on public opinion? What can we learn from them? That’s what this book is about.

There's definitely a page in this book for you!

A page from this book is definitely for you!

The latest turning point in the flow of history

There are three writers whose books I’ve read in recent years that have been very helpful in clearing my mind on many of the problems I’ve been thinking about. Of course, there are others, but the five books I read from these writers especially, brought the crumbs of knowledge in my head together and were a factor in shaping my profession, my life, and my role in society. Most people who've read these books share similar thoughts with me. When we evaluate the premises and conclusions of these books, perhaps examining the origin of today’s problems and writing other - new - things about them becomes unnecessary.

The first three books belong to Yuval Noah Harari [i] “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” and “21 Lessons for the 21^st Century”. The next is “Why Nations Fail” by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson [ii]. The last one is Harvard’s legendary teacher Prof. Michael Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy”.[iii] In fact, Prof. Sandel teaches “justice” at Harvard University and more than 1,000 students attend each course. Taking topics from the depths of history, Sandel discusses the culture of behavior in the context of “ethics” in the net of morality and values with his students. The lessons are available on YouTube and can be considered an ethical design template for shaping everyday life, not just intellectual enrichment.

The starting point and destination of these books are shaped around the idea that every step mankind has taken over 12,000 years to shape social life has created problems that have accumulated over time to become unsolvable. In short, in the pursuit of living a quality life, we have made the earth uninhabitable. We have moved away from the virtues of being human. We have become “jealous” of the feelings of animals, and we have been “emulating” their meticulous design of life.

In the process leading up to the agricultural revolution, although solutions to ensure coexistence seemed to “work” for a while, when the concept of property ownership came into force, the “talisman” was broken. So much so that it all consisted of the fiction of nature clinging to life with its own laws, and then how people would hustle each other and turn it into a life design.

The origin of all indicators that we can’t solve today, that darken our future, date back to that time. The focus of the writers is the “character of man”. This character shapes what things are and how they should be. And in the end, we see that we’re not doing very well.

There are events that serve as examples in my book and some blog articles (2016 and later) where we can learn more than one lesson from people and organizations and their reflections on consequences.

The goal is to learn lessons from events, developments, and behavior. It’s worth reminding ourselves of events that we might be experiencing – but perhaps are not paying a “price” for – in order to avoid paying a big price in the future.

I am reminding you… Enjoy your reading.

Human life ends in the blink of an eye. Barring any internal or external accidents, the phenomenon we call “life” takes shape over an average of 75 years, giving clues about the end through a “map of accumulations”. We learn until our 30s, then use what we’ve learned until our 50’s, striving to achieve our so-called “goals” while continuing to learn. And after our 50’s, we spend our life in the fantasy of “gearing down, staying healthy, and prolonging our life”.

The kind of life we’ll leave behind is naturally related to our “character”. Our “character” starts with family, develops in our school, street, and neighborhood environments, and finds an identity through our friendships, always shaping our opinions and thoughts about what's good or bad, what's right or wrong, and what's beautiful or ugly, thus forming the spine of our life.

Of course, private life plays an important role in a scenario spanning an average of 75 years. Starting with the questions, “Will we be able to get married? With whom and how many times? How many children will we have?”, our “private life” then concerns itself with our children’s future and forms the primary source of our impulse that “triggers everything” and shapes all our decisions. On the other hand, the necessity to obtain the training, experience and expertise we need to make a living and survive is the main driving force of this journey, i.e. the absolute requirement. But how will we achieve this?

Our work life, that we assume begins in our 20s and continues actively into our 60s, undoubtedly affects almost everything that belongs to us and our private. Where we live, who we socialize with, our friendships, our private life, and our bad and good habits all take shape from what we call “work life”.

“Fine details” such as what's written on our business card, what furniture suits our office, the model of our company car, the identities of our “competitors” and what advantages they have haunt us in our dreams, sometimes becoming our nightmares, scratching our character. Maybe opening wounds.

Through these processes, our character emerges, in good or bad shape. What did we go after, what did we get? Did we say short-term profit, or did we focus on long term gains? What gains? Does that mean anything?

In a nutshell, how did we live?

Our character alone can’t manage everything in our business life. This is because institutions have character just as individuals do. Three dimensions influence the formation of an institution's character. The first is the historical background and origin of its founders, and their culture and values. The second is the institution's processes and ways of doing business. And the third is the people who run the institution, who make the decisions, and who have the final say. That is, the character of the people in top management. The sum of all these creates the culture of the company, and it travels with us throughout our careers, intervening, affecting, and driving our decisions. The more diverse companies we work for to achieve our goals in business life, the more different cultures will influence how we work and our values.

From the way companies hold meetings to whether they offer tea or coffee to participants, this culture is in every detail of the daily workflow, and undoubtedly includes the procedures and principles of how stocks are managed and raw materials are supplied for production. But the most important thing is “how we make money”.

In work life, how long we stay in an organization we selected or who selected us shows how compatible we are with this character. Sometimes character disputes cause big problems. In these cases, it’s up to us to walk away and look for new opportunities since organizations cannot terminate their own duties.

Of course, we may also get tired of the boring, plaza-oriented, rules-based, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and monotonous nature of corporate life and want to start our own business. In our dreams of turning this opportunity into a highly profitable business, there will definitely be the experience or accumulation of what we call “corporate culture”. As we build the pillars of our own business, after a while, we'll see how they resemble the pillars that we hated from corporate life. These structures will be in constant conflict with our initial dreams. Every time we look in the mirror, the corporate character we're rebelling against will appear and grin at us as we fight and think about how to break out of this spiral. Perhaps fate will force us to get an office in a multi - story plaza whose front door we don’t even want to enter. The “spiral monster” will appear in the mirror of the elevator we ride as we go for our 45 minute lunch break.

In work life, other social, economic, and environmental factors not originating from a company’s workplace can also play dominant roles in the character of the organization. In the early 1980s, for example, bankers were rather popular in Turkey. High profits in a high-inflation environment were perceived by the middle class as “life savers”. On every corner, there was a shop with some “nondescript” people who called themselves “bankers”.

I wonder what hope those who entrusted their money to 20-year-old Banker Yalçın were trying to realize? Leaving aside the personal characters of those who hung the “banker” sign on their office block, weren’t the characters of their colleagues on the same side of the seesaw? In the end, they all hit the wall together when the Finance Minister at the time said, “Those who invested their money in bankers were gambling”.

The global ‘mortgage’ crisis shouted, “I’m coming!” at every stage. Before the crisis, institutions palmed off loans to people who clearly wouldn’t be able to pay their monthly installments. Is the character of these institutions different from that of the so-called loan managers who pumped out these loans? And did the institutions giving high credit ratings to these organizations have a different identity from the managers of these institutions?

In the end, life turns out to be what remains when certain lessons – that we are part of or that we personally create – filter the rest away. And with these remnants, we are forced to play the “happiness” game.

If all of life is a university with no diploma – we call it “work” – then we can learn lessons from our experiences that suit our character and, of course, end with a “happy ending” if possible.

The title of my book is inspired from an article on my blog: “These Bosses Think Their Companies Are Their Fathers' Property”. This sentence was a gift from a friend of mine, a professional serving as CEO in one of our country’s primary holdings, and it opened new horizons for me. This book goes into the details about what I meant on my blog post. While the blog and the book's main theme are the same, its lessons speak to not only “bosses” but also CEOs and senior managers who make the most pivotal and strategic decisions.

We’d be happy if it contributes even slightly to a higher quality, human-focused life that is sensitive to the planet…

Since 12,000 years ago, when people began to live together en masse, three main breaking points have led us to build a way of life based on “irresponsibility” not our “responsibilities”. We are in the fourth breaking point now.

If we remember, first the concept of “property ownership” entered the lives of man with the agricultural revolution and the mine-yours fight became the “livelihood” of empires. With the industrial revolution, science ethics faced a stern test regarding money, and the third breaking point was humanity's rehearsal of its own end with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. We can claim to have lived by chance ever since.

Artificial intelligence entered our daily lives with the design of the information society at the end of the last century, and it has taken us back to where we started. We will regain the skills of the hunter-gatherer community, perhaps with some changes in shape and design. This is because the way of life we call the “consumption society” that arose following the industrial revolution destroyed the planet we live on over the next hundred years. To top it all off, the US – the lead actor in global warming and nuclear weapons – withdrew its signature from both the Paris Climate Conference and the nuclear disarmament treaty it had agreed with the Soviet Union and then adopted by the Russian Federation. These steps have become the basic source of our pessimism.

2018 United Nations data shows that the number of people forced to migrate from their homelands exceeded 70 million. There are 324,000 stateless children in Turkey alone. The number of refugees and migrants is projected to exceed 200 million by the end of the century. People are migrating! And in large groups. At the end of 2018, thousands of Latin Americans were distraught and hoping to enter the United States as refugees on the Mexican-U.S. border in what was labeled a humanitarian drama. When asked why they had to migrate, they cited reasons due to global warming: the lack of access to water, insufficient arable land, erosion, environmental pollution, and streams and lakes drying up. Those migrating from Africa added wars, pandemics, poverty, and famine to the list above. These people risk death, but they migrate together with their children. That's how desperate they are. They migrate to developed countries, the same countries they blame for the situations they are trying to escape.

And we mentioned the artificial intelligence agenda. We’re getting to the point where money is no longer “power”. “Power” belongs to those who own artificial intelligence, the most extreme output of technology. You can see this very clearly if you look at Fortune’s list of the world’s largest companies comparatively over the last 20 years.

One of the most recent examples of this was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which used people’s information on Facebook in an irregular manner.

Is there anything that differentiates the power of advanced technology, artificial intelligence, and “companies that wield power using them” from the power obtained by pushing monopolies in the early 1900s?

Alan Turing

Alan Turing started the first artificial intelligence work merely 60 years ago. A life without artificial intelligence is unimaginable today. Is humanity moving towards an artificial intelligence that serves us, or is artificial intelligence developing towards a point where humanity will serve it?

Scientists think 2060 will be a turning point. Even I might be able to see that, if I try.

Let’s think the opposite: Are “humans” necessary in a world run by artificial intelligence? Does artificial intelligence need water, food, oxygen, or anything else we seek to achieve in the name of corporate social responsibility today? All it needs is energy, and it can find and produce its own energy! But if humans are involved, they need an ecosystem, and this system's sustainability must be secured.

That’s why “bosses” should study hard! CEOs and senior executives should consider the world of the future independently of the interests of the companies they represent. Soon they may not be able to find the raw materials to produce the products people are waiting for expectantly, they may run out of energy, and moreover, the consumers who would buy what they produce may have become “hunter gatherers”. Therefore, managers at these levels should adopt the idea of contributing to the “solutions” of global problems as part of their competing criteria.

The current picture tells us that the most important work of artificial intelligence is to ensure that communities experiencing mass migrations regain their “hunter gatherer” qualifications and skills. These people may not be like what they were in primitive times, but they are already living in refugee camps or in countries where they are immigrants as a result of the consumption society.

Now, we have an important job: we have to bone up on issues related to preventing global warming, which is the “number one” agenda that threatens the future of humankind. First ourselves… Then our family members… Then our neighbors… And then, of course, we have to keep this in mind when we make decisions at work and when signing contracts. Rather than being a participating individual of the consumption society, we must understand that paying off the debt we incurred from the Earth by using its resources is a moral and virtuous duty.