Reputations can shrink even as audiences swell
PremiumInvestigative business documentaries are gaining eyeballs. As this glare intensifies, businesses had better watch what they do before they end up on our watch-lists for all the wrong reasons
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it, Warren Buffett famously said. Maybe that should be revised to two hours or so, the usual length of a documentary on an online streaming platform. Some of the sharpest critiques of companies take the shape of films nowadays, and thanks to swipe-to-play apps and the covid pandemic’s extension of our couch time, their audiences have been swelling. Since these must compete for viewership with fictional fare on ‘infinite scroll’ menus, they need to be riveting. And the best-made ones indeed are. The most recent recipient of rave reviews has been Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, which takes to task the plane-maker for the 737 Max scandal that followed a couple of eerily similar crashes in 2018 and 2019. Software was at fault, not some pilot error. This Netflix film traces the tragedies to an obsession with shareholder value after Boeing’s 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas, pinning them firmly on safety slippages in its pursuit of profit. As the story goes, Boeing’s need to rival Airbus 320Neo’s fuel-efficiency led it to retrofit new engines on an old design, but with an automatic nose-dipper secretly installed to cover the resultant risk of stalling at certain angles of incline after take-off. Now that pilots have finally been trained for this, this aircraft was recently deemed air-worthy again by regulators, but the film leaves an impression that Boeing may not find easy to erase.
Cinema works best when it moves us and tales of business intrigue have been achieving this routinely. Had Theranos’s founder Elizabeth Holmes not accused her ex-business-partner Ramesh Balwani of sexual abuse, the fraudulent blood-test innovation her company came up with might not have got much attention in India. But The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) has amassed viewers for the very gall with which that startup hyped itself as an innovator in a world all too keen to celebrate marvels of technology, while leaving space for us to wonder if Holmes herself was clueless of the idea’s failure. Perhaps the most appealing are non-fiction movies that depict the impact on society of business practices. Among the most popular in this category has been The Social Dilemma (2020), which could make even the most blasé of us feel manipulated by social media and panicky about our privacy. The reputational knock delivered by this documentary was chiefly to Facebook, which called it “distorted", though its chief Mark Zuckerberg arguably comes off better than he did in The Social Network (2010), a movie that was only bit less talked-about than Inside Job (2010), about the West’s Great Recession. Even when a business’s role is indirect, an engaging narrative on a screen can cause it damage. Tinder banned Simon Leviev from its dating platform after the release of The Tinder Swindler (2022), about how he preyed on women, but the film’s title has saddled its brand-name with his swindles.
It’s not as if business in India has been less scandalous. It just so happens that the genre is relatively new. The local docu-series Bad Boy Billionaires: India (2020) traced the rise and fall of tycoons like Nirav Modi, Vijay Mallya, Ramalinga Raju and Subrata Roy. With avid viewers online, we can expect many more. Unlike dry factual reports, these productions appeal partly to emotions, which often assures them a deep imprint on people’s minds. The success of this genre should matter to everyone in business. They must watch themselves, lest they end up on our watch-lists for all the wrong reasons.
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