Reputationovski - now there's a challenge

So Christmas is finally over, the tree (now bald) has found its way into the garden to appear sad and forgotten until Easter when it'll finally find its way to the local refuse site. But in the wonderful world of international relations, there's no let up in the horn-locking that goes on between the countries of this fair world of ours.

So the latest contestants in the ring are Britain and Russia who appear to have dusted off an old copy of Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (look it up on YouTube) and are trying to bring it into the 21st Century. In a bizarre turn of events, the Russian authorities decided to wade into one of the British diplomatic offices in Moscow and....err....close it down. Now the British Foreign Secretary is claiming that the dispute will "hurt Russia's reputation".

Now, correct me if I'm wrong Mr M, but precisely what would that reputation be ? I do feel that people in the public eye, and this extends to the popular press too, are all too quick to play the reputation card, almost like everyone walks round with a reputation rating inscribed on their foreheads ("I'm better than you" - that sort of thing). Sure, there are cases where an objective appraisal of reputation would result in a broad consensus that reputation is either good or bad (usually the latter) but that's almost impossible to do with a country. It's just too complex and contains far too many dimensions to make such a statement meaningful and, further more, is more or less meaningless since it is impossible to convert it into any sort of tangible value because it's so hard to compare it to anything.

So Russia's reputation is on the slide ? So what.

I'm often asked in my line of work how you can contextualise reputation, and the honest answer is that you have to boil it down to aspects of personality (corporate or personal - doesn't matter) that matter to the reputation in question. And those aspects can only really come from the person or corporation themselves. It's not for the humble likes of you or I to decide that a company should be carbon neutral, for example. That needs to be the company's decision.

I intend to step this one up a level and start a comparison of the reputations of planets. Or trees. Or lamp posts. Or politicians....