Some people build expertise by going deep in a single industry for thirty years. Jennifer George built hers by refusing to stand still.
In this episode of The Reputation Room, I sit down with Jennifer George — until recently Senior Vice President of Communications at the Aspen Group, and the author of the CCO Dispatch, a daily newsletter now read by more than 8,000 senior communications leaders around the world.
Jennifer's career has run across agency and in-house, through agriculture and water rights, beauty at Unilever, technology, wellness at Headspace, Shutterfly, and healthcare. That constant movement, she argues, is the source of her edge: a kind of pattern recognition you can't develop staying in one place.
Walk into enough rooms you've never been in before and you learn to read them fast — who the real stakeholders are, where the reputation risk actually lives, and what a leadership team is afraid of but won't say out loud. The industries change. The gap between what an organization says it is and what it actually does is everywhere.
We talk about how the CCO Dispatch began — in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi, two weeks into a move, with her family displaced and the news getting worse by the hour. If you advise leadership, you can't wait a week to know what you think. You have to be ready for the meeting today.
From there, the conversation gets into the substance of the job as it stands in 2026:
— Why communications is so often asked to manufacture credibility an organization hasn't earned — and why you can't write your way out of a values gap.
— Why reputation is a lagging indicator of operational decisions made six to twenty-four months earlier, which means by the time it's a crisis, the real decision already happened upstream.
— The tension between control and credibility: why earned media is suddenly having a moment as leaders realize that what an AI says about them is built on what credible third parties have written, not on what they can buy — and why the organizations that deprioritized earned media for a decade are discovering they've been building on sand.
— The two things Jennifer won't compromise on when she takes a role: genuine access to the CEO, and resources that match the ambition of the business.
— Where she sees the profession heading — a moment when the cost of inauthenticity has never been higher, and the reward for genuine trust has never been greater, because reputation and trust now make up the majority of enterprise value.
Along the way: business archaeology, an eleven-year-old selling spark plugs to bikers, and the line that became my headline for the episode — "curiosity is a professional discipline, not just a personality trait."
This is a conversation with one of the sharpest voices writing about reputation today.
Follow The Reputation Room on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, and subscribe to Jennifer's CCO Dispatch on LinkedIn.
