Boards now ask about reputation the way they ask about cash

The difference shows in what comes back. When a non-executive director asks about cash, the CFO produces a number and a named owner. When the same director asks about reputation, the room usually turns to whoever dealt with the last press enquiry.

In January the Institute of Directors published NEDs Reimagined, the most substantial rethink of the non-executive role since the Higgs Report in 2003. Its central recommendation is a shift from periodic oversight to active stewardship, and it names public scrutiny among the forces that have transformed the boardroom since Higgs, alongside cyber risk and geopolitical uncertainty.

There is a practical problem with that shift. A board cannot actively steward what it hears about only as an anecdote, until the day it arrives as a crisis. Yet that is how reputation reaches most boardrooms. The finance pack comes monthly, in a format every director knows how to interrogate. Reputation comes when something has already happened.

A reputation page in the board pack is not an exotic idea. It can show how much of the company's public record originated from the company itself, or whether the chief executive and the finance director described the business the same way in their last external appearances. None of this requires new technology. In most companies the missing element is a person accountable for that page — someone who knows what reputation is built from, and how to build it.

The report asks non-executives to spend more time inside the business. Reputation is a reasonable place to start: it is the one asset directors are personally exposed to and almost never see measured.