It’s Shark Week: What We Can Learn From Them About Managing Our Reputation

At this time every year, the media takes a few moments from obsessing over its usual diet of disasters and news of celebrities and elected officials to celebrate sharks — a creature that’s been on the planet for an estimated 450 million years.

Like a lot of other species, sharks have had their ups and downs over the years. As depicted in the 1970s in the Jaws movie franchise, they were regarded as bad guys and fair game to be hunted. More recently, they’re revered as an environmental treasure, to be respected and preserved.

The very word shark conjures up all kinds of feelings, yet they don’t rely on words to tell their story.

Individuals are affected by the reputation of the larger group to which they belong.

An individual shark is treated in accordance with what we know from stories about other sharks. There are 440 known species of shark that come in many different sizes, ranging from the mammoth whale shark to the dwarf lantern shark, which measures at just 6 inches. But as far as we’re concerned, a shark is a shark, and when we see one or hear it’s in the area, we ascribe to him the respect earned by some sharks that came before him.

What does all this have to do with us humans, and what can we learn from them?

The so-called British Invasion of the music scene in the 1960s was really more of a Beatles Invasion, which paved the way for what became a British Occupation of the charts by the dozens of other English groups that followed in their wake. We loved the Beatles, and the Beatles were a singing and guitar-playing group from England. So, if these other groups were also from England, we were pretty sure we’d like them too.

Baseball is our national pastime, but almost 30% of the players are from outside the United States. And at the start of the 2017 season, a whopping 93 were born in the Dominican Republic. A scout can only see so many players in so many places, and you can be sure he’ll spend plenty of time in the DR.

It’s noteworthy that 4 of the 9 currently sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justices previously served as clerks for other Supreme Court Justices. So, while it’s not traditionally discussed as a qualification, a candidate for the Court might benefit from a Supreme Court clerkship on his or her resume.

The business lesson: Be prepared to show how your business is similar to — or different from — any group with which your audience will associate you. 

Demonstrable capabilities speak louder than words.

We don’t need words to tell us that sharks can swim fast and have lots of teeth, or to convince us they can use them.

As humans, we claim to put a lot of stock in the spoken word: What did that politician say on the campaign trail? What “guidance” did we get from the CEO as to quarterly earnings in the last analysts’ call? What was the most recent post on that actor’s (or your cousin’s) Twitter account? What’s the buzz on this new movie?

But a visitor from another planet watching our actions would question our commitment to words when push comes to shove: Did the measure in Congress pass or didn’t it? What were the actual earnings per share this past quarter? What was the box office revenue from that new movie on its first weekend? When a major league team is looking for a new pitcher, the scout goes to see the young aspirant, not to talk, but to watch him pitch, while he measures his fastball with a radar gun.

And although many people complained about the constraints of the 140-characters on Twitter, when they doubled it to 280, users’ actual behavior didn’t result in longer tweets. It turned out that most people were ok with the 140 after all.

The business lesson? More show, less tell. Don’t say your service cleans windows better than the other guy’s; show before and after pictures of the windows themselves.

It’s critical to business success to understand customers’ picture of other companies they see as being like us. If it’s an accurate picture, we have to find ways to leverage that reflection. If it’s not, we’ve got to make the differences clear.