Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Wednesday, October 07, 2026
Gerard Francis Corbett, APR, Fellow PRSA:
A company’s reputation collapses in 72 hours. The board is blindsided. The CEO is on the defensive. The Chief Communications Officer was never in the room. This is not a hypothetical. It is a pattern—one that plays out with alarming regularity across industries, and one that corporate governance has been slow to recognize. The pattern has a name: communications illiteracy at the governance level. And it is no longer a soft problem. It is a strategic liability with measurable consequences for shareholders, employees, regulators, customers, and the communities organizations serve.
Corporate boards are rigorously constructed. Directors are selected for financial expertise, legal knowledge, operational leadership, cybersecurity awareness, and industry experience. Governance standards, institutional investors, and proxy advisors increasingly scrutinize board composition. Yet amid all this rigor, a glaring gap persists: few boards include directors with deep expertise in communications, reputation management, stakeholder engagement, or narrative strategy.
This is not an indictment of individual directors. It is a structural issue rooted in history. For decades, communications was viewed primarily as a support function—responsible for media relations, executive visibility, and crisis response, but not material to enterprise value. That assumption is now obsolete.
Today, reputation is among the most valuable, and vulnerable, assets an organization possesses. A recent update to Ocean Tomo’s Intangible Asset Market Value Study found that intangible assets now account for approximately 92% of the market value of S&P 500 companies, leaving only 8% attributable to tangible assets. Yet board composition has not evolved at the same pace as corporate value creation. Few boards possess dedicated expertise in overseeing the reputational assets that increasingly drive long-term performance.
Most directors could not confidently define narrative strategy, stakeholder trust mapping, or reputational risk governance. Few have conducted an independent assessment of reputational vulnerabilities. Most receive communications updates that are filtered through management, condensed into metrics, and disconnected from broader enterprise risk discussions. The result is a dangerous blind spot.
Reputational crises have always existed. What has changed is their speed, scale, and permanence. A crisis that once took weeks to develop can now emerge in hours. A statement that once disappeared with the news cycle can remain searchable indefinitely. Employees, investors, regulators, activists, and customers now operate in a highly interconnected ecosystem where information travels instantly and reactions spread globally. Several structural shifts have made communications competence a governance issue rather than a management issue.
The 2019 Business Roundtable statement redefining the purpose of a corporation signaled a significant shift in expectations. Boards are increasingly judged not only by financial outcomes but by how organizations serve employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and society at large. Communications is the mechanism through which those relationships are built, maintained, and repaired.
Environmental, social, and governance reporting is often viewed as a compliance exercise. In reality, it is a communications discipline with legal, reputational, and financial implications. Every sustainability commitment, workforce disclosure, and governance pledge is ultimately a narrative commitment. Boards that fail to understand this dynamic risk creating gaps between organizational promises and stakeholder expectations.
Artificial intelligence has dramatically accelerated the creation, distribution, and amplification of information, and it has done so in ways that boards are only beginning to comprehend.
A CEO’s comment can be clipped, reframed, and shared globally within minutes. Deepfakes and synthetic media can put words in executives’ mouths that were never spoken. Algorithmic amplification can transform a minor misstep into a reputational emergency before the communications team has assembled a response. AI-powered monitoring and sentiment analysis tools now allow activist investors, short sellers, media organizations, and other stakeholders to identify and amplify reputational vulnerabilities in near real time. These are not theoretical risks. They are the operating environment. Boards that receive only after-the-fact summaries are governing in the dark.
In many organizations, communications governance consists of a quarterly update delivered through management channels and measured by metrics that sound impressive but reveal little strategic value, impressions, media mentions, share of voice. These indicators may have operational utility, but they tell directors very little about stakeholder trust, reputational resilience, or emerging vulnerabilities.
What boards typically do not receive is independent assessment of reputational risk, analysis of gaps between stakeholder perceptions and corporate narratives, early-warning indicators of emerging issues, scenario planning for communications crises, or direct access to communications leadership. Each of these omissions represents a governance failure in its own right, and together they constitute a systemic blind spot at the highest level of organizational oversight.
In most organizations, the Chief Communications Officer reports to the CEO, a structure that makes operational sense. However, it also means the board’s understanding of communications strategy is filtered through management. During a crisis, that filter may be precisely the problem.
The evidence is increasingly difficult to ignore. Boeing’s reputational crisis following the 737 MAX tragedies was not solely an engineering or regulatory failure. It also exposed significant weaknesses in transparency, stakeholder communications, and governance oversight. The board lacked the frameworks necessary to ask critical questions about trust, disclosure, and stakeholder engagement during one of the most consequential crises in the company’s history.
Similarly, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank demonstrated how rapidly confidence can evaporate when stakeholder perceptions shift. What might once have unfolded over weeks occurred in a matter of hours as digital communications accelerated the loss of trust among investors, depositors, and the broader financial community. While financial factors drove the crisis, communications and trust dynamics accelerated its speed and severity. Governance structures designed primarily for traditional risk categories struggled to respond to a crisis unfolding in real time across digital channels.
These examples highlight a broader reality: organizations spend years building trust and can lose it in days. Stock performance, talent retention, regulatory relationships, customer loyalty, and investor confidence are all influenced by reputation. Boards that fail to understand this dynamic are not merely uninformed—they are exposed.
Some governance experts will argue that boards cannot include specialists in every discipline. They are correct. Boards must oversee a wide range of risks without becoming collections of functional experts.
However, communications differs from many other disciplines because it sits at the intersection of virtually every stakeholder relationship an organization maintains. Financial performance, regulatory compliance, employee engagement, brand value, crisis response, and corporate culture all depend, in part, on how effectively organizations communicate and sustain trust.
This is not an argument for creating a “communications board seat.” It is an argument for ensuring that boards possess sufficient expertise to govern one of the most consequential risks facing modern organizations.
The solutions are neither radical nor expensive. They require boards to recognize communications as a strategic governance function rather than a management support activity.
As I have written about recently, the Chief Communications Officer should have direct access to the board on matters involving reputational risk, crisis preparedness, and stakeholder strategy. This is no different from the access routinely granted to chief legal officers, chief audit executives, and chief risk officers.
Reputational risk should be embedded within enterprise risk management and reviewed regularly by the board or risk committee. Boards should receive meaningful indicators, scenario analyses, and response frameworks, not just communications activity reports.
Boards should actively seek directors with backgrounds in corporate communications, public affairs, brand leadership, journalism, stakeholder engagement, or reputation management. The goal is not representation of a profession. The goal is informed oversight.
Organizations routinely conduct financial audits, cybersecurity assessments, and compliance reviews. They should also periodically assess stakeholder trust, narrative alignment, reputational vulnerabilities, and communications effectiveness through independent third-party reviews.
For Chief Communications Officers, the responsibility does not rest solely with boards. If you lack direct board access, begin making the case now. Develop metrics that connect communications performance to enterprise value. Elevate discussions from media coverage to reputational risk. Demonstrate how stakeholder trust influences business outcomes. Become indispensable to governance—not merely to management.
For boards and nominating committees, communications expertise should become part of the director selection conversation. The next major threat facing your organization may not originate in finance, law, operations, or technology. It may originate in trust.
For the communications profession, organizations such as PRSA, PRCA, and peer bodies should develop formal standards for board-level communications governance. The profession has established frameworks for ethics, crisis management, and measurement. It now needs a governance framework that defines the communications competencies boards should possess, the information CCOs should routinely provide, and the mechanisms through which reputational risk should be integrated into enterprise risk management.
Boards routinely evaluate whether they possess the financial, legal, operational, and technological expertise necessary to govern effectively. In an era when reputation can disappear faster than revenue, they should be asking one additional question:
Who in this room truly understands trust?
Because the board that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know about communications is not merely uninformed, it is exposed. The organizations that will thrive in the coming decade will be those whose boards understand that trust is not a byproduct of success. It is a strategic asset that requires oversight, stewardship, and accountability. By the time a reputational crisis teaches that lesson, the cost of learning it may already be measured in lost value, lost confidence, and lost opportunity.
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Gerard Francis Corbett, APR, Fellow PRSA, is Founder, Chair, and CEO of Redphlag, a strategic PR and marketing management firm. He served as Chair and CEO of PRSA in 2012 and taught at UC Berkeley Extension and San Jose State University. He is the author of Aspire to Hired: The Essential Guide to PR Career Success (2025)
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