From us, open “ Hat Thief ” to Coldplay Affair: CEOs continue to become viral for bad behavior

“If you are a CEO who remembers the good old days when you got out with things, you should now know that these days are over,” said Gordon.

This reality explains why a Polish CEO has taken the video grasping a hats from a child to the US Open has become viral international, and why experts say that advice can no longer afford to ignore the risk of reputation for poor behavior of CEOs taken on social networks.

Why the boards can no longer control the story

Social media algorithms, above all, reward a good visual – and the video of Piotr Szczerek, who runs the Polish paving company Drogruk, stealing a compatriot and tennis player, Kamil Majchrzak, the hat brought to the part of a child is “a striking visual act”, said Gordon.

“The visuals are more powerful than just reading something,” added the professor. “You can go online and read something that can be bad, but in fact, see a large person tender their hand in front of a small person to intercept the hat that was sent to the small person, seeing who has a much stronger effect than reading on this subject.”

This is the kind of lesson councils that companies and their CEOs should particularly learn after the scandal that stole in July, when the former CEO of astronomer Andy Byron was surprised in the canofet during a Coldplay concert with his former officer of the Kristin Cabot people, who were both married to other people at the time.

The Byron and Cabot faces have made, and their desperate attempt to hide from the big screens, created the perfect viral moment, said Kara Alaimo, professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickenson University.

“On social networks, people carry judgments in seconds, and bad behavior can become viral very quickly,” said Alaimo. Thus, with Byron, the Board of Directors “had much choice” than replacing it, because its misdeeds were so public.

The rapid decision -making of this advice highlights the broader truth: once bad behavior disseminated to the public, companies can no longer control the story. Social media has a way to make your verdict almost instantly, often before the boards of directors have the possibility of investigating fully. This puts the administrators of the board of directors in a double banality: obliged to act quickly in order to preserve their credibility, while being aware that public opinion can be trained on incomplete or entirely distorted facts.

If companies do not move quickly, reputation damage can harden. Communication specialists refer to the first 60 minutes after a scandal has broken down as “the golden hour” of the crisis response. Alaimo compared it to a heart attack: just as survival rates soar if a patient is transported urgently to hospital during the early hours, the reputation of a company is more likely to survive if it immediately approaches viral controversy. Too many boards, she supported, wasting this critical window. Silence, she warned, is fatal.

The dangers of a company dressed in scandal

The financial consequences are just as serious. In the case of the Polish CEO, angry Internet users have “bombed” his company, Drogruk, to such a severe extent that it fell to a score of 1.1 on Trustpilot, a business revision website. Trustpilot said he had “closed” the company’s page to new opinions due to media attention.

There is no distinction between the company’s reputation and their financial value, said Alaimo. She highlighted research that suggests that the majority of the business value of a company is linked to reputation, and that scandals have not only an impact on actions – they can also make recruitment more difficult.

Nell Minow, a corporate governance academic who has spent decades advising institutional investors, said the model is clear: bad behavior at the top is not new, but social media has eliminated the advice from their ability to sweep it. In his opinion, the most important problem is inconsistency. Boards of directors are often willing to forgive leaders in a way that they would never tolerate lower level employees, which establishes a dangerous precedent inside the organization. The tone at the top, she said, is everything.

The apology is one of the first lawsuits, she said. Minow joked by saying that she and a colleague maintained a “temple of shame” of poor apologies from the CEO. The worst delinquents, she said, do not recognize the fault or do not explain how the company will prevent a rehearsal. The best answers are frank, fast and leave no space between words and action.

The advice themselves always learn to sail in this new environment. All boards should now have succession plans in place if their CEO becomes a responsibility, something too few price companies, noted Minnow. And while many administrators now monitor how their companies are perceived on social networks, she suggested that they had to do more to treat the risk of reputation as seriously as financial or legal risk.

This change is starting to settle. Minnow’s noted companies are moving faster to suppress labor relationships between CEOs and subordinates, a trend that could ultimately increase the number of women in high direction roles.

She added the recent case of the CEO of Nestlé, which was replaced on the weekend of the Labor Day to have a connection with a “direct subordinate”, marks an important cultural change, because it was forced to go out without any payment of dismissals.

“It’s really unusual,” she said, with a sardonic laugh. “I think it is actually a success badge for corporate governance.”

In the end, the lesson for CEOs is deceptively simple: as Gordon said, there is no new burden, only new visibility.

“The fact that bad behavior of CEOs can be captured more easily is less tax for CEOs and more an advantage for everyone,” he said.