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Corey duBrowa spent much of his career advising some of the worlds most scrutinized leadersfrom Marc Benioff at Salesforce to Sundar Pichai at Google. Now, as CEO of global communications firm Burson, hes helping executives navigate a charged marketplace shaped by AI disruption, ICE activity, and nonstop reputational risk. He explains why reputation remains one of the most powerful (and most misunderstood) assets in business, and how leaders should decide whether, when, and how to speak up. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. You and I have talked privately in recent months about how hard it is in this environment for brands and leaders to figure out what to say, where the risks are, and where the opportunities are when so much seems like it’s up in the air. Is that what you’re hearing from your clients? They’re asking, looking, or trying to find that clarity? 100%, Bob. We’re in year two of Trump’s second presidency. And so, there’s renewed protectionism. Certainly, tariffs are one aspect of this. Deregulation, the America First Trade Policy. And so, helping companies to navigate these shifting priorities, and be thinking about global trade, and, frankly, regulatory uncertainty, that’s one thing. There’s been a global shift to the right. There’s a conservative resurgence across Japan, France, Germany, U.K., to name but a few. Helping clients to be able to navigate that volatility, that societal polarization that everybody is dealing with. . . . We, in this country, because we pay attention to our own news, we’ll be focused on things like Minnesota, but you could also point to Iran, Gen Z-led protests across Asia, budget protests in Bulgaria, which were huge, and probably not on most people’s radar here. So, guiding clients through social listening and activist engagement, and brand neutrality. How do you stand for things without necessarily putting yourself in the line of fire? Like, that’s a thing. There’s the global AI governance race. There’s competing rules about how to shape AI’s futures. It was so fascinating, to me, to watch Google, of all companies, a company that has never really lacked for resources, go into the bond market, and raise more than $30 billion worth of 100-year debt. That’s a whole new thing. Yes. Because AI is expensive. And so, how that’s governed and the way that investments work in that world is a whole separate thing. There’s erosion of trust in traditional media. The Washington Post, you and I both have friends at The Post. Yes. A third of their staff is gone . . . at the same time that only 28% of U.S. adults trust mainstream media. . . . This was the Gallup poll that came out last year. That number was in the 70s in the 70s72% in 1972. Even the entities that are financially solvent, people have very strong feelings about. Absolutely. And what we’re observing more and more, Bob, I, certainly, saw it at Davos, and I saw it again with the Super Bowl, 4 in 10 U.S. adults, according to that same Gallup poll, get their news from digital influencers. And I’m not saying influencers are fake news at all. Many of them, frankly, come from the world of traditional media. But the fact that the trust is so upside down now where you have fewer than one in three Americans saying they trust traditional media forms, you realize that company-owned media channels and storytelling are becoming more important than they ever have been. Clients have to navigate all of this at the same time that they’re thinking about things like the erosion of institutional credibility, their own institutions, not necessarily conferring confidence in the AI. For all the advantages that it has, it actually amplifies mis and disinformation at scale. I think there’s a lot for clients to wrap their heads around, and that’s the job that we have is helping them to navigate a very confusing, and, frankly, pretty fragmented landscape. As you go through all of these disruptions and changes, in some ways, it’s a great time to be in the business you’re in, because you’re needed more, and the stakes have never been higher. But at the same time, the pressure’s also never been higher. Right? There is more that is at risk based on the way you communicate than it ever has been before. That’s totally true. For 15 years as a client, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, “Hey, if this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us?” Or, “If this thing goes really well, this initiative, what’s the upside for us?” And so, we, at Davos, launched a study that proves that corporate reputation actually has quantifiable value, that companies with strong reputations realized almost 5%, 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns creating a reputation economy that’s worth almost $7 trillion. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes. What defines a strong reputation in this environment? For years, I think we have been told, or it was received wisdom that there was this binary relationship of trust. Like, to be trusted or not trusted. And what I always knew is that reputation was actually comprised of different things. There’s a lab within the University of Oxford that helped us to develop this model. It takes into account eight different levers that comprise modern reputation. Citizenship, the degree of good that a company may or may not do in the world, but also creativity. How creative are your solutions? Governance, the structures and policies and integrity that help the company to be managed. Innovation, how forward-thinking are you? What new technologies or ideas are you putting forth? Leadership, how you manage at scale, the way that you navigate things. Performance, the financial results. Products, the quality, reliability, and perception of your products. And maybe more importantly, although I’m not sure it gets the play that it should, workplace. The culture, the well-being of your employees, the way that you manage talent. So, if you think about how companies manage these eight levers, it’s pretty bespoke. Right? Like, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. . . . Like, the way Starbucks would have thought about these eight levers would be pretty profoundly different than the way that Google would think about those eight levers. The lens of this research was around financial impact. But do business leaders have responsibility to think beyond just financial impact? Is there a connection between reputation and courage? Every company has the opportunity, and, frankly, responsibility to think about among these eight levers how they show up. Right? It’s your citizenship, how creative or innovative you are, the products or services you put out in the marketplace. You, as a company, have to determine what is your unique value that you can offer in that space, and the extent to which you really choose to pull that lever hard or don’t pull that lever hard. Because citizenship is one of these eight levers, I think all companies have both an opportunity to think about that, and also some risks attached to that. They have to think about, Are we picking a side? A political side. Or, Are we doing something that may really please our employees, but for our customer base it may be a different thing? This gets into the whole realm of stakeholder management, the way you start to think about how the actions that you take . . . Because you only really get to communicate, Bob, after you’ve taken action. Your actions give you the hall pass to communicate, and those actions . . . sure, they can very well be related to things like corporate citizenship out in the world, but you have to be mindful of the way that people are receiving things. The way that we did things at Starbucks back in the mid 2010s, in a different political environment with a different administration, would be received I suspect in a very different way in this administration, in this year of our Lord 2026, compared to what we did then. Choosing to do exactly the same things. And you might not necessarily choose to do them the same way, because of that environment. Exactly. Or you might choose to communicate about them in a different way. Context matters. Right? I think you have to start thinking about things like context and the actions in that context before you’re thinking about message. The message is almost the last thing that you’re thinking about.
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E-Commerce
If youre tuning in to the Milan Cortina Olympics, you may be one of many spectators whos suddenly invested in the sport of curling. Youre in good company: Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, best known for his chunky homeware, has become so fascinated by the event that he used it as inspiration for his latest design. Curling centers on an object called a curling stone. Using its gooseneck handle, competitors slide the round, 44-pound stone down an ice shuffleboard toward a target zone. Westmans curling bowl, which he debuted on Instagram on February 10, reimagines the object as a snack bowl. The stones handle has been cleverly converted into the perfect slot for a glass of wine, or whatever beverage suits the moment, while its round base has been repurposed into a vessel for chips, crackers, and popcorn. The bowl is not listed for sale on Westman’s website at the time of this writing. Iconic Olympics-related objects like the ceremonial torch, cauldron, and medals may receive the most attention at the Games, but Westmans new bowl gives the curling stone the flowers its owed. View this post on Instagram Designing the curling bowl Before Westman reimagined the curling stone as a receptacle for popcorn and charcuterie, it was already one of the most interesting pieces of sports gear at the Winter Olympics. Since 2006, every single stone thats been thrown at the Games has been manufactured at one factory on the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig. Thats because the islands microgranite is formed by fast-cooling magma, which makes it ultra dense and hardperfectly suited for slamming into other curling stones at speed. Every stone is shaped, weighted, and polished to enable it to slide across the ice like butter, essentially making each a very precisely engineered work of art. View this post on Instagram Like his other designs (see Westmans whimsical collection for Ikea and puzzle-inspired shelf, for example), the bowl is pleasantly chunky, rounded, and colorful. In place of the stones usual handle is a two-pronged appendage that allows a beverage to hover directly over a spot for snacks. Overall, the bowl leans more toward artistic than performance-driven, but it does take after the real thing in one key way: It can slide. In a video posted to his Instagram, Westman tested out his design at what appears to be a local rink, sending it shooting down the ice with potato chips, wine, and several bunches of grapes on board. At home, spectators might use this function to pass hors d’oeuvres down the table while enjoying the Games. “I love being present and commenting on the time we are living in with my design,” Westman told Dezeen. “I also think humor has a big place in designthis is a great example of that for me.
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E-Commerce
For consumer packaged goods, the path from product idea to store shelves runs directly through the center of Unilever‘s new North American headquarters, and not just because the company makes market-saturating products like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and TRESemmé shampoo. This new headquarters space was designed specifically to put the entire process of product creation on display in its office, from ideation to development to marketing to retailing. Spread across 111,000 square feet in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey, Unilever’s newly opened headquarters is centered around an accessible spine of rooms and facilities that are optimized for bringing new products to market. There are “innovation labs” where ideas for new products come to life, workstations where ideas can take shape, a test kitchen and salon where products get sampled and refined, and a retail lab where the company and its retail partners can see the products as they’ll look on store shelves. “We want people to walk in and just immediately know what it is we stand for and what it is we do,” says Nathaniel Barney, Unilever’s global head of workplace services, travel, and fleet. “Not just to see it on the walls, because images come and go, but actually to feel it in the design.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Unilever’s new headquarters is about a third of the size of the company’s previous suburban campus, 12 miles north in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The smaller size prioritizes the collaboration required to develop its wide range of consumer products across personal care, beauty and wellbeing, foods, and home care. In the post-pandemic context, it’s also a recognition that the company didn’t actually need its big suburban footprint, according to Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA. “When you’re like we are, now three days a week [in the office], actually those three days are all about connection, creativity, collaboration,” he says. “That’s why this design was built for the future.” Bringing Unilver’s products to life Unilever worked with the architecture firm Perkins & Will to design the space, centering its most collaborative product development functions in a spine that connects the entire office. Accessible by anyone passing by or taking a meeting in a nearby private room or sitting aside one of the picture windows with wide angle views across the Hudson River to Lower Manhattan, the product development spine is meant to draw in peopleand ideasfrom across the company. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] One easy draw, especially for a company in the food business, is the flavor-wafting test kitchen. “It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the space,” says Mariana Giraldo, design principal at Perkins and Will’s New York studio. “Right behind reception, there are two windows into the kitchen, so there’s no way you can miss it.” Employees get a chance to see new foods and flavors being developed live, and also get a chance to taste products that may be coming to market years down the line. The test kitchen is also part of the product pipeline, where new ideas get piloted and refined. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Down the spine, “innovation labs” are intended to be blank spaces where those ideas can be born. Intentionally open and flexible in their furnishings and equipment, the labs leave themselves open to interpretation and reconfiguration. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] For products farther along in the product development timeline, there are spaces with a higher gloss and purpose, including the test kitchen and a fully equipped salon. Both can be used for research and development as products take shape, but also for marketing purposes when products are heading to shelves. Each doubles as a stage set. [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] Beyond serving the product development process, these spaces are meant to attract employees and encourage more engagement with the creative side of the business. Giraldo says the design team approached these spaces as amenities within the workplace. “Here, the amenities didn’t have the purpose of just being amenities for the for the sake of it, but really being amenities that connected back to the product, and that connected back to exactly the work being developed here,” she says. Shrinking desk space Product development also relies on heads-down and desk-centric tasks, so there are regular workstations and meeting areas in Unilever’s headquarters. But even these are shaped by the company’s focus on collaboration. Barney says that the new office carved out much more space for one-on-one meetings and smaller group interactions, and ditched formal conference rooms for large spaces that could expand or contract to host larger groups and events. (The test kitchen, for one, opens out to a common area, making it easy to integrate into an all-hands meeting or a large-scale taste test.) [Photos: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] “Today we need probably two times the number of small rooms to what we had five or six years ago,” Barney says. “What we see a huge need for is places where we can have groups of 35 to 50 people come together and then have another 20 to 30 people on screen, if not more . . . We had to create spaces that were designed around a very different set of criteria.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] While Unilever’s headquarters was designed to create products and, by extension, profits, there’s an emphasis on informality across the space. That’s tied to an ethos Patel says is integral to the company’s culture. “We wanted to create a space and a location where our organization would love wasting time with each other,” he says. “We believe wasting time together is when culture blossoms. That’s when you get to know the person, you get to know what’s going on in their lives. There’s so much more than just work.” [Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will] If that time wasting among employees leads to an idea for a new body wash concept or mayo recipe, all the better. They won’t have to go far to start turning those ideas into the products of the future.
Category:
E-Commerce
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