The Reputation Room

Javier Boix
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Management

The Reputation Room brings multiple lenses to one subject: reputation. Each episode enters from a different vantage point — AI, geopolitics, media, business, academia, executive search, crisis, culture and more — through distinctive voices who have lived and shaped these questions. In a world reshaped by AI, geopolitics and declining institutional trust, reputation has become a strategic asset and a leadership responsibility. This is a space to examine that shift. Hosted by Javier Boix. New episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube

Episodes

  1. 5 days ago

    5. Gary Grates - Expert in Business Transformation: "You Want to Be in the Room Because of the Way you Think"

    What separates a company that's respected from one that still matters? For Gary Grates, it comes down to a single distinction that has defined his career: relevance is the new reputation. In this episode of The Reputation Room, Javier Boix sits down with Gary Grates — one of the most recognizable voices in corporate communications, an adjunct professor at Syracuse University's Newhouse School, and a former senior communications leader at General Motors and Edelman. Gary has spent decades inside the rooms where reputation is won and lost, and he brings a provocative, business-first perspective to the conversation. Reputation, he argues, is about what an organization has been. Relevance is about what it is now — and what it intends to become. In a world moving faster than most institutions can adapt, that distinction is no longer academic. As Gary puts it, if you're not relevant, you don't exist. Across the conversation, Javier and Gary explore: Why "relevance is the new reputation," and what it means for how companies and communicators operateThe difference between being a communicator who does communications and a business leader whose most important tool is communicationsWhy CEOs tend to think about reputation only when a crisis hits — and how to change thatA story from General Motors about a "resource problem" that turned out to be a priority problemHow brands get caught up in societal and political moments, and why being in the right conversation matters more than being in every conversationWhat AI is doing to the communications function, and Gary's warning that our writing, thinking and strategic "muscles" risk atrophying if we simply keep promptingWhy he tells his students to let AI complement how they think, never replace itThe mindset shift that keeps practitioners in the room: you're there because of how you thinkWhether you work in corporate affairs, communications, or simply care about why some organizations stay essential while others fade, this is a conversation about staying relevant in an era that rewards it above almost everything else. Listen and follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. If this episode resonated, share it with your network.

    55 min

  2. 11 Jun

    4. Jennifer George - Author of The CCO Dispatch: "Best Practice Five Years Ago is Now Litigation Exposure"

    Some people build expertise by going deep in a single industry for thirty years. Jennifer George built hers by refusing to stand still. In this episode of The Reputation Room, I sit down with Jennifer George — until recently Senior Vice President of Communications at the Aspen Group, and the author of the CCO Dispatch, a daily newsletter now read by more than 8,000 senior communications leaders around the world. Jennifer's career has run across agency and in-house, through agriculture and water rights, beauty at Unilever, technology, wellness at Headspace, Shutterfly, and healthcare. That constant movement, she argues, is the source of her edge: a kind of pattern recognition you can't develop staying in one place. Walk into enough rooms you've never been in before and you learn to read them fast — who the real stakeholders are, where the reputation risk actually lives, and what a leadership team is afraid of but won't say out loud. The industries change. The gap between what an organization says it is and what it actually does is everywhere. We talk about how the CCO Dispatch began — in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi, two weeks into a move, with her family displaced and the news getting worse by the hour. If you advise leadership, you can't wait a week to know what you think. You have to be ready for the meeting today. From there, the conversation gets into the substance of the job as it stands in 2026: — Why communications is so often asked to manufacture credibility an organization hasn't earned — and why you can't write your way out of a values gap. — Why reputation is a lagging indicator of operational decisions made six to twenty-four months earlier, which means by the time it's a crisis, the real decision already happened upstream. — The tension between control and credibility: why earned media is suddenly having a moment as leaders realize that what an AI says about them is built on what credible third parties have written, not on what they can buy — and why the organizations that deprioritized earned media for a decade are discovering they've been building on sand. — The two things Jennifer won't compromise on when she takes a role: genuine access to the CEO, and resources that match the ambition of the business. — Where she sees the profession heading — a moment when the cost of inauthenticity has never been higher, and the reward for genuine trust has never been greater, because reputation and trust now make up the majority of enterprise value. Along the way: business archaeology, an eleven-year-old selling spark plugs to bikers, and the line that became my headline for the episode — "curiosity is a professional discipline, not just a personality trait." This is a conversation with one of the sharpest voices writing about reputation today. Follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and subscribe to Jennifer's CCO Dispatch on LinkedIn.

    1 hr

  3. 28 May

    3. Carlota Gomez, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, HIPRA: "Reputation is Coherence between Words and Perception"

    Carlota Gomez has always had the heart of an activist. An activist now leading corporate affairs for HIPRA, a Spanish biotechnology company. After a long tenure at Bayer — where she was part of the communications work around one of the most scrutinised acquisitions in recent corporate history, Bayer's takeover of Monsanto — she went back home. Back to Spain, to build and lead the corporate affairs function for a family-owned company that had decided it could no longer operate without one. For Carlota, reputation is simple in definition and hard in practice: it is the coherence between what a company says and how it is perceived. Closing that gap is her everyday mandate — and she pursues it by bringing the political, societal and employee dimension into decision-making as early as possible, not as an afterthought. The transition from the complexity of a multi-billion dollar corporation to a smaller, founder-led company with equally large ambitions has only sharpened her instincts. This is a conversation about intangible assets, activist leadership, and what it really means to read the room — in a world that is anything but consistent.

    54 min

  4. 13 May

    2. Dennis Larsen, Managing Director, Linq Advisors: "Reputation Must Be a Shared Accountability Company-Wide"

    What does success look like for a Chief Corporate Affairs Officer? According to Dennis Larsen, it's when reputation stops being owned by one function — and becomes a shared accountability across the entire company. In this episode, Javier Boix sits down with Dennis Larsen, Managing Director at Linq Advisors and board member of the European Association of Communication Directors, for a conversation that is as structured as it is candid. Dennis brings a distinctly governance-driven perspective to reputation: the argument that cultural change alone isn't enough. Real shared accountability requires architecture — reputation committees, regular exec agenda visibility, board-level oversight. The kind of structure that ensures reputation isn't just discussed in a crisis, but woven into the fabric of how a company operates day to day. The conversation also tackles the question that rarely gets asked openly in the boardroom: to what extent is a company willing to accept reputational cost for a business benefit? Sometimes the answer is yes — but only when everyone understands the trade-off before the decision is made, not after. They also explore how AI and data intelligence are reshaping the corporate affairs function, and why the leaders who thrive will be those who own their own technology rather than depend on it. A conversation about what it really takes to make reputation everyone's business.

    54 min

  5. 20 Apr

    1. Joao Belo, Chief Communications Officer, Danaher Corporation: "Good Reputation Expands Strategic Freedom"

    In this first episode of this newly created podcast, I sit down with Joao Belo, Chief Communications Officer at Danaher Corporation, for a candid conversation at the intersection of corporate affairs, business and leadership. During the conversation we touch upon multiple topics. How did he get where he is (spoiler: nothing was planned!), what a CEO or a board responds well to when it comes to reputation management, what does the title not capture about the work we do, how transparency is non-negotiable in a crisis (with caveats!), the shift in corporate affairs from art to science, AI changing everything (obvious, I know!), and how you develop the most important intangible in our profession (judgment), among many other things. About The Reputation Room The Reputation Room podcast convenes senior corporate affairs leaders for candid, peer level conversations at the intersection of corporate affairs, business and leadership. Each episode goes beyond surface to explore judgment calls, trade offs, and leadership moments that rarely make it into public forums. The aim is to create a lasting body of insight that strengthens the credibility, influence, and strategic impact of the corporate affairs profession.

    57 min
  • 5 Episodes

About

The Reputation Room brings multiple lenses to one subject: reputation. Each episode enters from a different vantage point — AI, geopolitics, media, business, academia, executive search, crisis, culture and more — through distinctive voices who have lived and shaped these questions. In a world reshaped by AI, geopolitics and declining institutional trust, reputation has become a strategic asset and a leadership responsibility. This is a space to examine that shift. Hosted by Javier Boix. New episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube

Information

  • Creator
    Javier Boix
  • Years Active
    2k
  • Episodes
    5
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Javier Boix
  • Show Website
    The Reputation Room

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