Reputation

What is said about you in rooms you are not in. Built in years, spent in moments, and never fully owned.

Reputation is perception hardened into consensus: not one person's impression but the settled account a community keeps. It precedes you into every negotiation and outlives every campaign, and its custody is distributed, clients, peers, former staff, all hold shares you cannot buy back.

It compounds like capital and burns like paper: a decade of kept deadlines is undone by one public failure handled badly, and the handling, not the failure, is usually what the room remembers. The only reliable strategy is dull and total: be, over time, the thing you want repeated.