Why Rupert Murdoch's Facial Expression is Harming His Share Price
Rupert Murdoch's facial expression is helping to adversely affect the image and therefore the share price of his beleaguered business empire.
After the increasingly shocking and excruciating revelations about phone hacking by one of his once glitteringly successful national newspapers, which he felt obliged to close after 168 years in operation, the demeanour of the man in charge of the $31 billion News Corporation media empire is crucial.
So what has he been doing to reassure the thousands of victims of the hacking scandal as well as his shareholders, advertisers and others?
Whether being chauffeur driven in a car or walking along a street he has been grinning too forcibly and nonchalantly. Even when, leaving a building, he kept on bumping awkwardly into Rebecca Brooks, a former News of the World Editor at the time of the phone hacking scandal, who was, until she resigned today, the boss of News International, which owned NoW, he maintained a look of banal bonhomie. This perception hasn't been helped by a series of odd hats he's been wearing at unhelpfully jaunty angles.
He's gone from Media Mogul to Grinning Geezer.
Either he's been badly advised by a nervous and increasingly worried minion or he's adopted his own take on how to manage the fracturing of a business empire that's taken decades to build into a major international force.
He's trying to look cool and collected under pressure. But his Crisis Face is not helping his crisis. Quite the reverse.
It looks like he's just been told about an embarrassing typo in a headline in one of his newspapers and not that his company is facing allegations that NoW illegally listened into the voicemails of celebrities, war widows and victims of crime and terrorism, and paid police officers for information.
Your non-verbal communications are just as important as your verbal ones, particularly in a crisis.
If you state you truly want to put right any serious and even illegal wrongdoing you or your business are involved with, then looking instead like you can't contain your amusement at a private joke only a few of you are in on will undermine all you say.
That will discolour and even destroy your business brand and reputation which, when more investors, clients and significant others desert you, will genuinely make Mr Murdoch look concerned...albeit for the wrong reasons.
After the increasingly shocking and excruciating revelations about phone hacking by one of his once glitteringly successful national newspapers, which he felt obliged to close after 168 years in operation, the demeanour of the man in charge of the $31 billion News Corporation media empire is crucial.
So what has he been doing to reassure the thousands of victims of the hacking scandal as well as his shareholders, advertisers and others?
Whether being chauffeur driven in a car or walking along a street he has been grinning too forcibly and nonchalantly. Even when, leaving a building, he kept on bumping awkwardly into Rebecca Brooks, a former News of the World Editor at the time of the phone hacking scandal, who was, until she resigned today, the boss of News International, which owned NoW, he maintained a look of banal bonhomie. This perception hasn't been helped by a series of odd hats he's been wearing at unhelpfully jaunty angles.
He's gone from Media Mogul to Grinning Geezer.
Either he's been badly advised by a nervous and increasingly worried minion or he's adopted his own take on how to manage the fracturing of a business empire that's taken decades to build into a major international force.
He's trying to look cool and collected under pressure. But his Crisis Face is not helping his crisis. Quite the reverse.
It looks like he's just been told about an embarrassing typo in a headline in one of his newspapers and not that his company is facing allegations that NoW illegally listened into the voicemails of celebrities, war widows and victims of crime and terrorism, and paid police officers for information.
Your non-verbal communications are just as important as your verbal ones, particularly in a crisis.
If you state you truly want to put right any serious and even illegal wrongdoing you or your business are involved with, then looking instead like you can't contain your amusement at a private joke only a few of you are in on will undermine all you say.
That will discolour and even destroy your business brand and reputation which, when more investors, clients and significant others desert you, will genuinely make Mr Murdoch look concerned...albeit for the wrong reasons.
posted: 15 Jul 11