SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

We had a conversation with the SUSTAINABILITY STEPS ASSOCIATION on DECEMBER 17, 2020. You can find the conversation (as led by the association’s president Mr. Emrah Kurum) below. Our subject: the pandemic, reputation and sustainability.

The main points of Emrah Kurum’s questions, alongside my answers are as follows:

Reputation & Sustainability

Before we begin talking about reputation, what is it? That is, what does reputation mean?

Reputation is obtaining (achieving) the admiration and appreciation of the society as a corporation.

Reputation can be built on  values and culture of the society.

Reputation is not a project, but rather a philosophy.

Reputation management begins within the organization by  deploying this philosophy to all employees.

The ultimate goal of reputation is to turn a company’s employees into ambassadors of that company’s values and culture by all means at all times.

Good reputation management comes with many rewards: Qualified professionals prefer to work for reputable organizations. Employee loyalty is comparably high at such organizations. Consumers purchase and re-purchase that organization’s products further more recommend them to others, ultimately having a positive effect on the company’s business results and in the competition. Financial institutions provide loans to these companies with better terms and conditions. Foreign investors first knock on their doors seeking partnership or cooperation. Individual investors also prefer them first because their equities are more reliable in the long term. In other words, good reputation is an invitation to a secure future.

Its output is trust.

How are reputation and sustainability related to one another?

Sustainability is a relatively recently discovered value, albeit late. Actually, it is a way of life that defines normality. It defines a philosophy of life that is sensitive not to money but to the planet, nature, and humanity. Organizations that do business in line with these values stand out among those who do not care about them at all and are appreciated by society.

Everything necessary to build the future lies within this understanding, and includes fundamentals such as human rights, natural resource protection, and sustainability for the planet.

Any company that society admires and appreciates does sustainability remarkably well. They care about their employees, and they sincerely support women’s, children’s and animal rights. They are keen and careful when it comes to waste as well. They enter into ethical contracts with their suppliers, and they stand behind their products and services, whilst being transparent, fair, and accountable. Briefly they are aware of the fact that they are responsible of their responsibilities!

How does reputation come and go, and how should it be managed?

Reputation is like a wall—you painstakingly build it brick by brick over many, many years. It never quite reaches completion. However, protecting and maintaining what you have built requires just as much care the construction itself . Even the slightest slip can blow everything in to the sky. The bad news is, no detergent can remove the stain!

The Pandemic and Change/Transformation

As a reputation consultant, what have you observed during the pandemic? The pandemic has made us question virtually everything. What have companies begun to question? Where are we going wrong? Do we—or can we—have other priorities?

The pandemic created mass confusion when it first hit the scene. People thought it was going to be temporary. Alas, when borders started closing, we all of a sudden realized that this was no joke.

Anyone who considered what was happening to be a ‘crisis’ was wrong. The situation fell into was outright ‘chaos’. All you have to do is to look at my blog post, “Coronachaos” (March 2020), for proof. 

Crises are manageable. Their rules are clear. You can overcome a crisis with little damage if you run your business according to these rules. Chaos isn’t like that at all. You don’t know where to press the pause or play buttons on it. Chaos is a cloud of dust that takes over life until it settles. Just as is the case now… Chaos is still continuing.

Throughout the world, organizations that have diagnosed chaos accordingly have resorted to measures that ensure the health of their employees, including their families. They have also demonstrated that they will stand by their suppliers and make it through this difficult period together.

Using any and very piece of technology imaginable, they’ve resorted to measures that ensure that production and business continues at full speed ahead without endangering anyone’s health.

More importantly, they have pioneered an environment of support and solidarity for society. They have sincerely poured in the effort to support those affected by these difficult times.

Covid-19 has handed everyone a new life. Perhaps masks will be the historical symbol of this period. We are obliged an imperative distanced life by all means.

The changes have affected us individually as well. People have resigned, move to the countryside, and spend more time with their families. How do you interpret this shift?

The concrete fatigue of urban life had already prepared us to make that shift. People had already been asking themselves “what they were doing, where they were going, and how far they were going to go” in an urban life, once they are admired.

In other words, we are trying to explore the normal that should be.

Post-Pandemic Prep

Do employee commitment and employee happiness matter? How do the two differ?

We must refute concepts. Let’s go back in time a bit. Before the 1990s, it was the job of a company’s personnel directorate to report to administrative affairs directorates. They primarily dealt with payrolls and personnel affairs. In the 1990s, quality became the core of business management; personnel departments evolved to human resources. Shortly thereafter, people came to the realization that employees “mattered”, as they directly affect a company’s performance. Hence, they shifted their sights on employee satisfaction, which then spread like wildfire. Sincere practices played a large part in this. Yet, before long, people quickly began noting that that even satisfied employees still left their jobs in pursuit of a better offer at another company. The 2000s saw the emergence of employee loyalty policies. However, that was not enough to hold down highly qualified employees either. This is where employee happiness concept enters the picture. In other words, things such as creating fair working environments, caring for employee’s families, offering fair ethical management, care about employee’s opinions, creating opportunities for employees and encouraging them to take active roles in social responsibility projects were all just as important as financial satisfaction.

But we have to keep in mind that we can’t manage happiness without sincerity.

You don’t talk about the ‘new normal’ in your articles. Rather, you discuss people transitioning to ‘the normal that should be’. How will or should the ‘normal’ be after the pandemic?

Over this process, we’ve learnt that whatever  we were thought  in the past was wrong. In other words, perhaps our returning to the basics as normal might be what secures our future.

I dub this the doctrine of Confucius.

Ethics and politics… Exploring the virtuous person.

Most of us have valued the so-called virtuous person and society living in harmony. If we want to achieve this ideal, we have to clarify who or what the virtuous person is, and then somehow bring them forth. Their teachings make no room for the afterlife, God, or the supernatural. The Greek philosopher Socrates carried a similar line. 

Like I said in my conversations in the past; there are two sets of laws: The laws of nature and man-made laws, and the laws of nature always prevail. Since the dawn of man, we’ve been in constant conflict with the laws of nature, and we’ve yet to win! If you built your houses over a creek bed, nature would pull your ear. How do human beings interact in cities? Lies, deceit, fraud… Confucius taught these as well.

Then, we should begin the journey to normalcy by embracing a life that is in harmony with nature. Unfortunately, the Industrial Revolution is what brought carelessness and indifference out of us. Now we can’t seem to hit reverse! All we have to do to see what normal ought to be is to look at all of the ancient settlements that were built here in Anatolia thousands of years ago: We see cities, markets, amphitheatres, galleries, and plots of land for agriculture, among other things. They are all in harmony with nature!

Why should we keep our hopes up in 2021?

The only way improves our quality of life is if we remain hopeful about the future—and I don’t just mean 2021 either.

• We need bold actions.
• We have to put our old-fashioned way of thinking aside.
• We have to get over the rhetoric surrounding our carbon, water and plastic footprints. We need more than that.
• New global organizations are inevitable. We have to replace shelf life expired institutions (e.g. the U.N., the I.M.F, and World Bank) with brand new ones to generate momentum on a global scale so that we can tackle the climate crisis and global warming.
• We need to realize that stocks have no meaning and that that they can darken our future. All must be removed!
• We need to get rid of from our lives of stock markets—the game board of choice for a handful of speculators—all together.
• We mustn’t let companies grow a large scale.
• We need to move towards a single global currency.
• We need to consider becoming a WIKIPEDIA society.
• We need to shun immoral science.
• We need to create societies where even sculptors can be tax champions.
• We have to make justice the real backbone of society.
• We have to rely on and trigger local production as part of agriculture. We must preserve millennia-worth of knowledge about nature and agriculture,( that goes back to thousands years) and pass that on to our children and grandchildren. We have to cut starvation at the quick.

I had written an article titled, What If Energy, Water and Seeds Were Free… right when the pandemic first broke out. You can read from my blog if you so wish.

Here’s a snippet from it:

And what a dream at that!

We are living in a world where water, energy, and our ancestral seeds are “free”. Yet, we “presently” don’t focus on who would manage them, how we would invest in and make all three accessible to the public. However, water, energy in all of its forms (trains, buses, planes, and cars are already powered using either electricity or solar energy) and—above all—seeds, plants, and tree saplings (the core of healthy eating) are free!
Let’s imagine that health care and medicine were free! A dream, you say?
Next, we see the entire world morph into a “Wikipedia” society, so to speak. That is, communal lifestyle where everyone feeds production for free, and where products are shared for free!

And money? What about that?

We’ve solved that: the end of currency! In a virtual world, only one type of currency is used. The population dictates its value. The lower the population a country has, the more valuable that country’s money is. 

An article in the Guardian reads: “Let’s shut off the valves of the fossil fuel industry while we have the chance”. Every last one of us knows too well that for the world has not seen the light of day in over 150 years at the hands of petrol, water, and now seeds. All three have turned into “amusement parks” in their own right to business ventures. Our planet’s resources are caught in a web with three spiders: energy, defence, and finance—who start wars at whim, turn stock market upside down, and play with the nuclear armament card!

They dictate politics, trade, religion, production, consumption, and technology.

An imposed “man-free order” has become the new normal.

This new normal has thrown the whole world into a “quarantine” with seemingly no end in sight.

Close to eight billion people have suddenly become “refugees” overnight. They’ve come face-to-face with the ghetto. The Maserati at the door has suddenly become a backyard fixture.

The rich and the poor are now equal.
A state of emergency is the new normal.
Borders have been closed.
To say that life has been re-formatted would not be an exaggeration

We can say that the Corona Virus—which has made its way into the identity of millions as “carriers”—is cause of all this. That said, were it not virus, climate change and global warming were already waiting impatiently at the side-lines as reserve players. Likewise, Ebola was one of the top eleven players on playground. Disease otherwise attributed to birds, goats, pigs, and cows have been yo-yoing back and forth between nature and humankind in recent years.

The fiftieth anniversary of World Day is now behind us. We haven’t lent our ears to science, to reverse our environmental problems—hence our poor quality of life. We’ve literally lost 50 years! We have turned a blind eye to that this planet—and its flowers, insects, birds, and trees—is our responsibility. We have failed to fulfill our custodian mission for our virtual riches. Humanity has paid and continues to pay a heavy price for this world, where even the rich can’t enjoy their wealth.

I can’t help but think whether or not we might one day open the door ever so slightly to future where humanity will be able enjoy the virtues of being human, and where energy, water, and seeds are free for all.