Masters of Scale

Uncovering the $7 trillion reputation economy

33 min
Feb 17, 20262 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Corey Dubrowa, CEO of Burson, discusses how corporate reputation has become quantifiably valuable—worth $7 trillion globally—and explores the unprecedented challenges businesses face navigating political polarization, AI governance, media erosion, and stakeholder expectations in 2026. He emphasizes that reputation comprises eight distinct levers beyond simple trust metrics, and that authentic action must precede effective communication.

Insights
  • Corporate reputation now has measurable financial impact: companies with strong reputations realize 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns, creating quantifiable business value
  • Reputation is multidimensional (citizenship, creativity, governance, innovation, leadership, performance, products, workplace) rather than binary, requiring bespoke strategies per company
  • Actions precede and enable communication: companies must act authentically aligned with stated values before messaging can be effective; reputation is built into product design, not bolted on afterward
  • Context and stakeholder management matter more than perfect messaging: collective action (like the Minnesota letter) signals commitment even if imperfect, and silence can be strategic when companies lack meaningful positions
  • Leadership empathy and long-term thinking compound reputation: focusing on employee wellbeing, creator safety, and stakeholder interests builds resilience through volatile periods
Trends
Shift from binary trust models to nuanced reputation frameworks accounting for multiple stakeholder perspectives and company valuesRising importance of company-owned media and storytelling as traditional media trust erodes (only 28% of U.S. adults trust mainstream media)Digital influencers becoming primary news source for 40% of U.S. adults, reshaping corporate communication strategiesGlobal political shift rightward creating regulatory uncertainty and forcing companies to navigate tariffs, protectionism, and polarizationAI governance becoming competitive advantage: companies investing heavily in responsible AI development and transparency to manage reputational riskCollective corporate action on social issues emerging as middle ground between silence and individual positioning in polarized environmentReputation risk expanding: corporate leaders and tech executives facing personal safety threats, requiring integrated physical and reputational securityLong-term product development prioritized over speed-to-market when reputational risks are high (Google's Gemini vs. OpenAI's ChatGPT approach)Polycrisis management: companies must simultaneously navigate multiple disruptions (AI, politics, climate, social unrest) with fragmented stakeholder basesEmpathy and employee wellbeing emerging as core reputation drivers, especially post-pandemic
Companies
Burson
Global communications firm where Corey Dubrowa serves as CEO; primary subject discussing reputation strategy
Google
Discussed extensively regarding AI strategy (Gemini), responsible product development, and reputational decision-maki...
Starbucks
Corey's former employer (8 years); case study for citizenship initiatives and reputation management under Howard Schultz
Salesforce
Corey's former employer; mentioned for reputation strategy under Mark Benioff
OpenAI
Contrasted with Google's cautious AI approach; released ChatGPT without same reputational constraints as established ...
Procter & Gamble
Referenced as example of company maintaining consistent core values and mission since founding
Adidas
Mentioned as example of company with immutable values consistent since founding
The Washington Post
Cited as example of media trust erosion; lost one-third of staff amid declining institutional credibility
Capital One
Sponsor featured in multiple ad reads with customer success stories
Deel
Sponsor offering global payroll and HR management platform for early-stage teams
CoreWeave
Sponsor providing AI cloud infrastructure for research labs and enterprises
People
Corey Dubrowa
CEO of Burson; primary guest discussing corporate reputation strategy, AI governance, and leadership in polarized env...
Bob Safian
Host of Masters of Scale/Rapid Response; interviewer conducting discussion on reputation economy
Sundar Pichai
Google CEO; discussed as example of long-term strategic thinking and engineering-first approach to reputation management
Howard Schultz
Former Starbucks CEO; Corey advised him on reputation and corporate citizenship initiatives
Mark Benioff
Salesforce founder/CEO; Corey advised him on reputation strategy during his tenure at Salesforce
Susan Wojcicki
Late YouTube CEO; exemplified leadership focused on employee and creator safety over personal reputation protection
Ken Frazier
Referenced for quote on core values: 'if you believe in something only when it doesn't cost you anything, it's not a ...
Nancy Guthrie
Mentioned as beneficiary of Google's Nest Cam technology that helped identify an assailant on her property
Quotes
"Reputation is not an extra thing you bolt on at the last minute and go, oh shit, what if something goes wrong? It's a part of the process."
Corey Dubrowa
"Your actions give you the hall pass to communicate. You only really get to communicate after you've taken action."
Corey Dubrowa
"If you believe in something only when it doesn't cost you anything, then it's not really a core value."
Ken Frazier
"The entire world is reacting to the actions of this administration. This administration is engaging like no other in history, not even the first instance of the Trump administration."
Corey Dubrowa
"We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes. The companies with strong reputations realized almost 5%, 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns, creating a reputation economy that's worth almost $7 trillion."
Corey Dubrowa
Full Transcript
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It provides a purpose-built AI cloud designed specifically for pioneers at leading AI labs and enterprises ready to power the biggest ideas and the boldest ambitions. ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com slash ready for anything. Bob, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, hey, if this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us? Reputation is not an extra thing you bolt on at the last minute and go, oh shit, what if something goes wrong? it's a part of the process. The entire world is reacting to the actions of this administration, right? This administration is engaging like no other in history, not even the first instance of the Trump administration. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes. That's Corey DeBraua, CEO of Burson, the global communications firm. At a time of incredible disruption from AI to ice shootings in Minneapolis, I wanted to talk to Corey about the unprecedented reputation challenges facing businesses and brands. Corey's pre-Burson roles included advising Howard Schultz at Starbucks, Mark Benioff at Salesforce, and Sundar Pichai at Google. He talks about why reputation is still one of the most powerful and most misunderstood assets in business and the high-stakes decisions companies face right now about whether, when, and how to speak up. Whether you're leading a major business or contributing to a team, Corey offers great insights for navigating a volatile era. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Corey Dubrowa, CEO of Burson, the global communications agency. Corey, thanks for being here. Bob, thanks for having me. It's great to see you sort of in real life for the first time in 2026. Yeah, I see you have your Seattle Seahawks hat on. You were saying you're feeling a little FOMO about not being at the Super Bowl parade. I'm feeling a huge amount of FOMO this morning. I'm literally, before we got on, was watching on Twitter, sort of scrolling through like crowd shots and was just remembering the last Super Bowl parade that I was a part of, which was in Seattle, the Marshawn Lynch edition way back in the day when I worked at Starbucks. So yeah, a little fun though. The hat's going to have to, the hat'll have to tide me over for this morning. Have to serve the function. Yeah. I think so. Exactly. You took over at Burson in 2024, and it's just been kind of wild times since then. Disruption era everywhere. Not because of you, of course, but like, do you- Thank you for that clarification. Do you long for the simpler days when you were in-house advising just one business like Starbucks and Google? Or does this perch give you a broader understanding of what's going on in the landscape? So I had spent 15 years sort of monomaniacally focused on like one business, one client, one thing. Eight of those were at Starbucks. One of those was with Benioff at Salesforce. And then the last six were at Google. What I found is that your focus kind of tends to be a little bit lather, rinse, repeat in the sense that you're really focused on the message, the messenger, and the platform. You're trying to get everybody to say the same thing consistently over and over and over again. You are. You're very deep on that business, but sometimes you lack the periscope to sort of put it up and determine what's happening in the world. And I'd forgotten how much fun it is to have such a liberal arts purview. So I feel like I can actually still be helpful to our clients, but in a different way than when I was actually responsible for sort of running the message messenger and platform. I mean, you and I have talked privately in recent months about how hard it is in this environment for brands and leaders to figure out what to say, sort of where the risks are and where the opportunities are when so much seems like it's up in the air. Is that what you're hearing from your clients? They're sort of asking, looking or trying to find that clarity? Yeah, 100 percent, Bob. You know, we're in year two of Trump's second presidency. And so, So, you know, there's renewed protectionism. Certainly tariffs are sort of one aspect of this, deregulation, the America First Trade policy. And so helping companies to navigate these shifting priorities and be thinking about global trade and, frankly, regulatory uncertainty, that's sort of one thing. There's been a global shift to the right. And so there's a conservative resurgence across, you know, Japan, France, Germany, UK, to name but a few. And so helping clients to be able to, again, kind of navigate that volatility, that societal polarization that everybody is kind of dealing with. We in this country, because we sort of pay attention to our own news, will be focused on things like Minnesota. But you can also point to Iran, Gen Z-led protests across Asia, budget protests in Bulgaria, which were huge and probably not on most people's radar here. So guiding clients through social listening and activist engagement and brand neutrality, you know, how do you stand for things without necessarily putting yourself in the line of fire? Like, that's a thing. There's the global AI governance race, you know, there's competing rules about how to shape AI's futures. I mean, it was so fascinating to me to watch Google, of all companies, a company that has never really lacked for resources, go into the bond market and raise more than $30 billion worth of 100-year debt. That's a whole new thing. Yes. Because AI is expensive. And so how that's governed and the way that investments work in that world is a whole separate thing. There's erosion of trust in traditional media. The Washington Post, you and I both have friends at the Post. You know, a third of their staff is gone. And so at the same time that, you know, only 28% of U.S. adults trust mainstream media, this was the Gallup poll that came out last year. I mean, that number was like in the 70s, in the 70s, 72%, 1972. Because it's all fake news now, right? I mean, you don't know who to trust. Even the entities that are financially solvent, people have very strong feelings about. Absolutely. And, you know, what we're observing more and more, Bob, I certainly saw it at Davos and I saw it again with the Super Bowl. Four in 10 U.S. adults, according to that same Gallup poll, get their news from digital influencers, right? And I'm not saying influencers are fake news at all. Many of them, frankly, come from the world of traditional media. But the fact that, you know, the trust is so upside down now, we have fewer than one in three Americans saying they trust traditional media forms. You realize that, you know, company-owned media channels and storytelling are becoming more important than they ever have been. Clients have to navigate all of this at the same time that they're thinking about things like the erosion of institutional credibility, their own institutions, not necessarily conferring confidence in that AI, for all the advantages that it has, it actually amplifies mis- and disinformation at scale. And so I think there's a lot for clients to sort of wrap their heads around. And that's the job that we have is helping them to kind of navigate a very confusing and, frankly, pretty fragmented landscape. I mean, as you go through all of these disruptions and changes, in some ways, it's a great time to be in the business you're in because you're needed more and the stakes have never been higher. But at the same time the pressure also never been higher right I mean there is more that is at risk based on the way you communicate than it ever has been before That totally true For 15 years as a client, Bob, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, hey, if this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us? Or if this thing goes really well, this initiative, like what's the upside for us? And so we at Davos launched a study that proves that corporate reputation actually has quantifiable value. The companies with strong reputations realized almost 5%, 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns, creating a reputation economy that's worth almost $7 trillion. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes. Like what defines a strong reputation in this environment? For years, I think we have been told, or it was received wisdom, that there was this sort of binary relationship of trust, like to be trusted or not trusted. And what I always knew is that reputation was actually comprised of different things. There's a lab within the University of Oxford that helped us to develop this model. It takes into account eight different levers that comprise modern reputation. Citizenship, you know, the degree of good that a company may or may not do in the world, but also creativity. How creative are your solutions? governance, the structures and policies and integrity that sort of help the company to be managed. Innovation, you know, how forward thinking are you? What new technologies or ideas are you putting forth? Leadership, how you manage at scale, the way that you navigate things. Performance, the financial results, products, the quality, reliability, and perception of your products. And maybe more importantly, although I'm not sure it gets the play that it should, workplace, the culture, you know, the well-being of your employees, the way that you manage talent. So if you think about how companies manage these eight levers, it's pretty bespoke, right? Like there isn't a one-size-fits-all model for how every company, like the way Starbucks would have thought about these eight levers would be pretty profoundly different than the way that Google would think about those eight levers. The lens of this research was around kind of financial impact. But do business leaders have, I don't know, have responsibility to think beyond just sort of financial impact? Is there a connection between sort of reputation and courage? Every company sort of has the opportunity and frankly responsibility to think about among these eight levers, how they show up, right? Your citizenship, how creative or innovative you are the products or services you put out in the marketplace, you as a company have to determine what is your unique value that you can offer in that space and the extent to which you really choose to pull that lever hard or don't pull that lever hard. Because citizenship is one of these eight levers, I think all companies have both an opportunity to think about that and also some risks attached to that. You know, they have to think about, you know, are we picking a side, a political side? Or are we doing something that may really please our employees, but for our customer base may be a different thing. So this gets into the whole realm of stakeholder management, the way you start to think about how the actions that you take, because you only really get to communicate, Bob, after you've taken action. Your actions give you the hall pass to communicate. And those actions, sure, they can very well be related to things like corporate citizenship out in the world, but you have to be mindful of the way that people are receiving things. So the way, Bob, that we did things at Starbucks back in the mid-2010s in a different political environment with a different administration would be received, I suspect, in a very different way in this administration, in the year of our Lord, 2026, compared to what we did then. Choosing to do exactly the same things. And you might not necessarily choose to do them the same way because of that environment. Exactly. Or you might choose to communicate about them in a different way. You know, context matters, right? And so I think you have to start thinking about things like context and the actions in that context before you're thinking about message. Message is almost the last thing that you're thinking about. You mentioned stakeholders. For some business leaders today, their public communication often seems targeted to an audience of one in the White House. You know, some CEOs want to at least appear to cooperate with this administration. A few seem prepared to push back and most seemingly want to kind of hide. Like, am I being too simplistic about it? I don't know that you are. I think the influence of this administration has been immense in terms of the global order, the entire world. I mean, you know, you don't have to go to Davos. It helped for me to see it that way. But like the entire world is reacting to the actions of this administration, right? So you look at tariffs, you look at a president who was tweeting about Greenland before he even arrived to give his speech. You really start to realize this administration is engaging like no other in history, not even the first instance of the Trump administration. You can't debate the influence that's being wielded by this White House. So from a business standpoint, as a business leader, I mean, I think for companies, maybe it's not so much about being pro-Trump or anti-Trump as it is about being pro-business continuity in this hyper-polarized world, right? How do you maintain that continuity when there are all these changes going on around you? Every day gives a new wrinkle in how to manage continuity with policies that can change. They're mutable, right? They kind of evolve from day to day or week to week or month to month. And so sometimes silence can be a calculated strategy to protect the brand in the bottom line. And other times, it's simply because that company doesn't have anything meaningful to say on that topic. You know, Dara mentioned this, I think, in your podcast from last week. I'll take a different spin on it. But I think companies have to, first and foremost, be thinking about what are their values? What do they stand for? What are sort of the immutable truths of that company that have been true since it was founded? You know, P&G, when they were first founded, by and large, those things are still true. Certainly Starbucks, you know, the mission statement may have changed, but the objectives are still the same. For, you know, our friends at Adidas, it would be the same thing, right? You know, if it's not a meaningful connection to you, to your brand, to your values, to your mission, then you have to seriously question, like, well, why are you in the business of talking about that then? Corey is getting right to the heart of it. And actually, he's just warming up. Next, we talk about corporate reactions to ICE activities in Minneapolis, how AI is impacting the reputation of tech companies and more. That's after the break. Stay with us. this is mike nicholas capital one business customer and co-founder of anset uncles a plant-based restaurant and community space in brooklyn new york and he's telling us how they started a product line we already had a space in the community the food was an extension of our lifestyle and our values so we know we wanted to create something that was an offshoot to that. Our pepper sauce, that's my grandmother's recipe. That's like a liquid gold, right? If someone wants to approach us and ask us, what do we do? We provide flavor. Growing a product line is no small investment, but Mike and his wife and co-founder Nicole were able to manage with the help of their Capital One Business card. Working with Capital One Business, we're able to leverage our limits and utilize those points, making sure we can continue the scale at the speed that we needed to go. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Before the break, Corey Dubrow of Burson talked about the importance of reputation in today's charged business marketplace. Now we talk about the letter that 60 Minnesota companies signed responding to ICE activities in Minneapolis, how AI is impacting the story Silicon Valley tells about itself, and what each of us can do to safeguard our own personal reputations, plus stories from inside Salesforce and Google. Let's jump back in. There's been activity or communications that in some ways has been performative. Thinking of a conversation I had with Ken Frazier at one point where he said, well, listen, if you believe in something only when it doesn't cost you anything, then it's not really a core value. And I guess I wonder how you have those conversations with, you know, with clients, with CEOs, with leaders about like, what are the things that are immutable for you? It kind of the same as talking about reputation in the sense that it is a it almost like a pie chart right You not looking at something binary trusted not trusted citizen not citizen You know you really looking at something that has more nuance to it than that I think you and I both know that like nuance doesn't travel very effectively on the internet. It doesn't travel very effectively in today's world. But, you know, I think most business leaders have learned that the era of commenting on each and every social or news event has kind of passed, right? And I think for the most part, companies are relieved, but it doesn't necessarily mean staying mute in the face of major events. So, you know, as we've seen even pretty recently, Minneapolis or Minnesota, and you look at this letter and, you know, there were different views on the letter, right? Some people thought that it was pretty performative, pretty weak, didn't say a whole lot that, you know, it really didn't have much teeth in it. There's probably some validity to that. But I think the fact that you had companies willing as a cohort in a pack to speak up about something that was meaningful to them, meaning their local community, the place where their employees live, work, connect with one another. That's smart business, I think, for those companies. It's not performative. Maybe it wasn't as strong as people would have liked for it to be, given the stakes, given what had happened in Minneapolis. I mean, I had a private exchange with a CEO in Minneapolis just when the letter came out. And I was like, it's pretty lame. Like, it's not really, you know, getting into anything harsh. And this person said, maybe, but getting a whole group of people to agree to anything these days and to do it publicly, like, is a bigger deal than it might seem like, you know, that they all band together. Did you get called in at all on these discussions around it? Oh, we certainly advised, you know, clients who signed up as a part of the letter. And I think to your point, you know, anytime you're doing something in a cohort or as a collective, there are going to be edges to that conversation, right? So there will be companies who believe that it wasn't strong enough or companies who barely made it to the table as it was. Like to me, that letter was a good sign in the sense that, you know, exactly to the point of the person that you were speaking with, getting that many people to sign on to something that at least pointed in direction of saying, like, we disagree with the way that you are handling immigration and the way that you're standing up a presence in our community, that is a start. The start of a much longer and more meaningful conversation as opposed to the finale or some sort of bookmark that says, they're there, you know, we've done our bit and we can peace out. I don't think most companies thought of it that way. Your reputation report also warns that corporate America overall could be a target heading into the midterms. You know, the billionaire heroes of business are also villains, right? Like, how concerned should leaders be about that and kind of what can they do? I think it's a very real thing. If I go back in time to my time at Starbucks, I mean, I had never experienced a personal death threat before for doing my job. I did then. I did at Google, too, And I wasn't the only one. The first conversation that I ever had with the late Susan Wojcicki, literally the first conversation I ever had, is when I was at Salesforce and I was interviewing for the Google job. And she very sort of secretly came up to me because she was on the Salesforce board. So at lunch, she kind of snuggled up to me and was just like, you know, I hear Sundar wants to talk to you. He's great. You should go talk to him. And I asked her about the shooting at YouTube. they had had an active shooter in their building in Northern California, and that it was known that the shooter was looking for her personally. And her view of it was pretty sanguine. She was like, you know, we're here because we have a creator community to look after. I have an employee base that I'm responsible for looking after. She was very focused on safety of others, which I thought was incredible. She was a remarkable person. And that for me was sort of the first thing where I took a step back and I was like, maybe this is what leadership looks like, right? When you're constantly having to sort of juggle this idea of exposure, social exposure, real life exposure, reputation exposure. And her first thought was about the safety of her people, the safety of her creators. And so I think that, you know, corporate America being a target, it's not new, but I think we've seen shifts. And so while every situation is unique, right, our general counsel for clients is to focus on stakeholders, just like Susan was doing, employees, customers, investors. And the goal isn't to garner headlines, I don't think. It shouldn't be. It's really staying consistent with your corporate and leadership value. You're not scoring points. You know, you're managing a business. You're managing your reputation. Those things are interconnected with one another. When I think about the reputation of not just Google, but sort of Silicon Valley and big tech over all these days, it's like it's gone through these ebbs and flows. I mean, there was a point where it was just, you know, adoration, right, for a lot of those companies. And now the bigger they are, the more successful they are, it might be a little bit more mixed. Where do you see the reputation of Silicon Valley and sort of big tech right now? Well, it's really interesting. I mean, to go back to the AI point that we were speaking about before, one thing that was totally clear to me at Davos was you couldn't walk down the Davos Plats. You couldn't walk down the promenade without being bombarded by AI messages. Like every company that had a storefront or a presence had a different AI message. You know, whether it was AI as empowerment, whether it was AI as simplicity, whether it was AI as executing better at scale, whatever your company's message may be, you can do so much more than you ever could before with digital means. But by the same token, with great power comes great responsibility. We value as a society, and certainly Silicon Valley values, innovation, pushing ahead, breaking boundaries, kind of getting to a new place, as opposed to the kumbaya of getting everybody, you know, the Minneapolis thing, getting everybody to agree on a difficult thing, you know, around a table and kind of sign their name to it. And I think that's, for Silicon Valley, that's the challenge. It's both the upside of the potential, and it is the potential downside of the risks that come from a world that's catching up from a regulatory point of view and sees that for every cool part of AI, there are some downsides. I mean, you know, I've always assumed that Google could have released a ChatGPT-like product earlier, but chose not to because of reputational risks, which, of course, OpenAI as a newcomer didn't worry about, right? Like, did you have conversations about things like that, that sort of had to deal with those risks? I'll tell you the way that Sundar would think about this. Sundar would think about this more as a engineering problem to solve. So, sure, reputation is wound up in or bound up in the decisions that you make about the parameters of a product like that. If you think about like Gemini, right? Like maybe why it took a while for Gemini to get to the point where it was ready for mass consumption. And now you look at where Google is with Gemini. I mean, I think it's pretty well accepted across the industry that this version of Gemini is a considerable leap ahead of where ChatGPT is. I think Google is playing a long game, you know, and I think that Sundar thinks in longer terms than many of the people that do his job across the industry. And in my experience, he's thinking of it as a engineering problem to solve, of which reputation is a part, but it is also user experience. Reputation is not an extra thing you bolt on at the last minute and go, oh shit, what if something goes wrong? It's a part of the process. When we saw the video of Nancy Guthrie's assailant, the prospective assailant, I don't think we know exactly what it was, on the porch of her house through a Nest Cam that she wasn't a subscription consumer for. That is an example of Google doing something that I am certain Bob required engineering backflips that I can't even get my head around, right? It's backend data that's collected in an ambient way that probably took considerable resources to find. And here's Google being helpful and saying like, look, we have the means to do it. And so I think that helpfulness comes from this combination idea of beautiful design that works at scale, that also manages the reputational risks and upside in any given product. It true across everything from cloud to YouTube to Gemini I mean when you mentioned Sundar sort of engineer perspective I mean it makes me think certainly earlier in days in Silicon Valley like storytelling wasn't necessarily prized, you know, the communication. It was like the product sort of speaks for itself in a lot of ways. And that engineering mindset obviously still exists for you as someone who's there to sort of help craft a story, help reinforce the story? Like how much, is that frustrating? Or do you feel like, no, this community's figured this out. They know they need to be better storytellers. I think, Bob, they're figuring it out. I think that the idea of story as being the way that you can best connect the innovation that you're developing and the audiences that you intended for. Like story is the bridge, you know, between those things. I certainly think that the Valley, generally speaking, has gotten better at that. Is it perfect? Probably not. I think there are examples, you and I could both pick them pretty easily of stories that feel pretty ham-handed or maybe they feel pretty self-serving. The interesting thing about Sundar, he is a gifted storyteller. It does help. I think that his ability to connect intent with impact, we intend to help you. Here is what it means. It does give a company like Google a leg up reputationally, I think. your own reputation has remained strong through a lot of career shifts and moves. What kind of advice do you have for business folks who are listening about how they protect and manage their own personal reputation? Huh. Well, I mean, I don't know, Bob, that I would be the one to give a lot of advice there. You know, I'm a teacher's kid from Long Beach, California, right? So I spent eight years on some form of public assistance, like when I was first growing up. So, because we've never paid teachers what they were worth, right? So, I just try to never forget that. I just try to hold on to that. And I think if you're too worried about, like, reputation through the various chapters of your life, you're fussing with things that are not true. But if you're just focused on, like, where you came from, who you really are, like who your people are, then that feels to me like a more solid foundation to kind of come back to. We started by talking about how challenging the past year has been. You know, you were also on the front lines of crisis at Google during the pandemic. How does this period of disruption feel compared to those pandemic days and kind of what's at stake for business leadership now? The pandemic days were, they were just so anomalous, right? Like it was hard to wrap your head around the idea of being disconnected from everyone. Managing in that environment, like you're looking for different signals, I think. You know, like you and I having this conversation here online, like I was trying to learn to pay more attention to like facial expressions. And we probably were all in our heads about what we were texting one another because that was the lifeline we had. You know, we were missing body language. And so you fast forward to today and you're like, well, we're back in that in real life world again. But it's so much more complicated now. You know, the multiplicity, I'm trying to remember at Davos what they were calling it. I guess it was polycrisis. You know, the idea that there's so many things coming at people at the same time that it's almost impossible for the human brain to kind of like discern well, how do you parse the landscape in a way that makes sense? So to me, we learned some interesting things during the pandemic about how to take care of each other, you know, at a distance. I sent one of my people home from Google, like she was really excited to move to the UK. She was living in a city she didn't know with people she didn't know. She was brand new. She was kind of stuck in her apartment block with a medical condition. And I was just having a one-on-one with her. And I was like, how do you feel about going home? You know, how do you feel about just picking up and coming back? And it was the best decision I think that she and I could have made for her mental health, for her well-being and all that. but it was hard, right? Like this was her dream and it wasn't working. And so we needed to make a different decision. And so I think you take lessons from that experience and that empathy, you know, that button that we pushed a thousand times a day, sometimes during the pandemic, and you try to apply it to a world that seems less empathetic, that less sympathetic, less connected to one another. Like it's weird in real life to be even more fragmented and more polarized than we were even online. But that is, that's a fact. And so those are the lessons I try to draw from, you know, it was like the, you got to remember the empathy and you got to remember that like at the end of the day, we're trying to be in service of this idea of being helpful. And today's lessons in some ways are the same that it is about empathy, that you go back to that same core. Totally. Different landscape, different set of circumstances, different president, different world leadership, different challenges, same lessons. You're just looking for different applications of those lessons. Well, Corey, as always, great to chat with you. And thanks so much for doing this. Bob, I really appreciate you asking me, and I hope I can come back. Oh, yeah, we'll have Corey back. While he can't share all his private conversations, he gives us a window into how business leaders are thinking and acting and struggling. What stood out to me is Corey's emphasis on context and on nuance and on how it's our actions that give us license to communicate effectively. Crafting the perfect statement matters less than showing up authentically and determining when you shouldn't show up at all. Reputations like financial results compound over time. They can also erode quickly. So start by clarifying what you really stand for and then act accordingly. The right messages will usually follow. That's how to earn lasting trust in a world that's constantly testing us. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. We were awarded this incredible contract to put on an event for 2,000 people. The budget was around $1.5 million. It was a black tie event. There was a jazz band playing and a cigar bar and a bourbon bar. That's Natasha Miller, Capital One business customer and CEO of Entire Productions, a corporate event management company. And she's telling us how she had to float a large contract for nine months. It was really hard since we were carrying that $1.5 million, most of which passed through to pay for the venue and all the vendors and all the food and beverage. It's this waterfall effect. Thankfully, we were able to handle that with the Capital One credit cards, which have a 2% cash back on everything. For Natasha, it wasn't just the financial support from Capital One Business, but the personal investment as well. I had incredible support from my personal banker, Callie. I knew that at any point I was in trouble that I can call her, which I've never had before in a bank ever. With the help of Callie and her Capital One business card, Natasha was able to stretch every dollar in order to bring this monumental event to life. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards. Here on Masters of Skill, you appreciate hearing about strategies that make CEOs successful. Now we're bringing you to a podcast on business news to help you make better investments. Hi, I'm Carol Masser. And I'm Tim Stenebeck. Join us on the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast for insight on the company shaping today's complex economy. Get smarter with context to simplify financial markets and make better investments. Join us on Bloomberg Business Week Daily. On Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere you listen. Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashimaku Tonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lital Malad. For more, visit RapidResponseShow.com.