A corporation can spend decades building its reputation, investing millions in governance, quality, customer relationships and public trust. 

Yet, someone holding a smartphone, commanding millions of followers, and operating beyond the organisation’s direct control can compromise that reputation.

Welcome to the age of reputational contagion.

Social media has unleashed a flood of influencers.

Every day, an expanding army of content creators competes for attention, promoting everything from cosmetics and fitness programmes to financial services, property investments and lifestyle products.

Some possess genuine expertise, integrity and loyal audiences. Others have little more than a carefully manufactured public image, persuasive communication skills and impressive engagement statistics.

For corporations, distinguishing between the two is becoming a serious commercial challenge.

Having worked in intelligence, corporate investigations, and risk management, I have learned that the greatest vulnerability is sometimes the risk itself. 

I have learned that the greatest vulnerability is sometimes a threat an organisation fails to recognise. Sometimes, it is the threat that an organisation willingly invites in.

Some of my earliest memories of news involve a bathroom, several blankets, a cup of coffee, and a small transistor radio.

I grew up in communist Yugoslavia. My father was a committed communist for much of his life, but over time he became increasingly disillusioned with the system around him.

I remember him getting up around four in the morning, making coffee and taking his transistor radio into the bathroom. He would listen quietly to foreign broadcasts, including Voice of America. Sometimes he covered himself and the radio with blankets to keep the sound down.

If he realized I had seen him, I was warned to say nothing.

As a child, I did not understand geopolitics, censorship, or propaganda.

I understood something much simpler.

My father was searching for another source of information.

The broadcasts from the West seemed to describe another world: prosperity, opportunity, abundance, and freedom. Meanwhile, the official picture of life available to me did not always resemble what I could see outside our building.

During the economic difficulties of the 1980s, I remember standing in queues for hours. My mother would replace me. Later my father might replace her.

We waited for ordinary things.

Coffee. Cooking oil. Sugar. Salt.

I was a child. I wanted to play, not study economics.

But I learned an important lesson long before I had language for it:

What we are told about reality and what we experience can be two different things.

That lesson followed me into war.

There is a moment I have witnessed many times in a podcast studio.

The interview finishes. The microphones are switched off. Photographs are taken. Hands are shaken.

The guest leaves happy.

They have “been on a podcast.”

A few weeks later, the episode is published. They share the link on LinkedIn or Facebook, perhaps thank the host, receive some likes and comments, and move on.

They have wasted a significant portion of the opportunity.

After years of interviewing people, being interviewed myself, and building Life the Battlefield, I have become increasingly convinced that many executives, entrepreneurs, authors, and professionals misunderstand the real business value of a podcast interview.

They believe the objective is to be interviewed.

It isn’t.

The interview is the raw material.

What happens before, during, and particularly after that conversation determines whether it becomes an asset or merely another link disappearing into a social media feed.

You do not necessarily need to be secretly recorded anymore.

You are recording yourself.

Every angry text message. Every late-night WhatsApp exchange. Every email written in frustration. Every workplace joke on Teams. Every Instagram DM. Every voice message. Every photograph sent privately. Every message is followed by: “Delete this after you read it.”

We have created a remarkable contradiction.

Never before have ordinary people had such sophisticated communication technology in their hands. Yet, we have become remarkably casual about documenting our own behaviour.

We record arguments. Relationships. Negotiations. Complaints. Promises. Insults. Threats. Affairs. Workplace conflicts. Financial arrangements. Gossip. Sometimes, we even document conduct that may later become relevant to an investigation.

Then we press SEND.

And psychologically, we often treat the message as though it disappeared into the air.

It did not.

The setting does not look dangerous.

A five-star resort. A recovery spa. Warm weather. People are sitting besides a swimming pool with their phones placed on the table. 

Executives have temporarily escaped their boardrooms. 

Defence personnel are away from their units. Police officers are on leave. Consultants have switched on their out-of-office messages. Entrepreneurs are celebrating another successful year.

Everyone has supposedly come for the same reason: to switch off.

Then someone starts a conversation.

Where are you from?

What brings you here?

What do you do?

How long are you staying?

Are you travelling alone?

What sort of clients do you work with?

And perhaps, eventually, the conversation moves towards politics, defence, international conflicts, technology, government contracts or the wars dominating the news.

There may be absolutely nothing sinister about it.

In most circumstances, there probably isn’t.

But there is a counterintelligence lesson hidden inside this perfectly ordinary encounter: being on holiday does not make the information inside your head worthless.

For decades, my professional life has involved observing how people obtain information from other people. 

Travelling internationally continues to remind me of something remarkably simple. Human beings disclose enormous amounts of information when they believe they are having an informal conversation.

The boardroom creates caution.

The swimming pool often removes it.

And that difference deserves considerably more attention from corporate Australia.

After 21 days of training in Thailand, I expected to leave knowing more about fitness. Instead, the final seven days taught me something far more useful about injury, pressure, courage, purpose, consistency, discipline — and the identity we quietly build through our choices.

By the final week in Thailand, I could count the remaining days.

That sounds insignificant, but psychologically it changed something.

When I arrived, 21 days felt substantial. There was uncertainty ahead of me: unfamiliar training, heat, humidity, multiple sessions, new people, a different routine and no guarantee that my 53-year-old body would cooperate with the plan I had designed for it.

By the final week, I could see the exit.

Strangely, this situation presented a new challenge.

It would have been easy to mentally leave early.

I had already done enough to create a respectable story. I had trained diligently, filmed daily, interviewed people, written articles, experienced pain, experimented with recovery and accumulated enough footage to demonstrate that I had tried.

Nobody would have accused me of failure if I had eased off.

But I would have known.

That distinction became increasingly important during my final seven days.

Because somewhere between injuries, discipline, pressure, purpose, courage, consistency and identity, I realised this experiment was no longer asking how much punishment my body could tolerate.

It was asking a much more uncomfortable question.

What happens to the promises we make to ourselves when nobody else is responsible for enforcing them?

Fourteen days into a 21-day experiment in Thailand, I’m learning that most of us don’t abandon our goals dramatically. We negotiate our way out of them, one perfectly reasonable excuse at a time.

There is a swimming pool outside my hotel. The beach is only a short walk away. The food is excellent, the sunsets are extraordinary, and I am in Phuket, a place where doing absolutely nothing for an afternoon could quite reasonably be described as enjoying life.

Nobody is standing outside my room checking whether I go to training.

Nobody will punish me if I miss a session. Nobody will know if I decide not to record tonight’s vlog. I could skip an interview, sleep for another hour, order another coffee, and tell myself that after two weeks of training, I have earned it.

And the uncomfortable truth is that I probably have.

That is what makes the temptation so dangerous.

Fourteen days ago, I arrived in Thailand with a question rather than an answer. 

At 53, I wanted to investigate what I was still capable of physically and mentally if I deliberately removed some of the comforts and excuses of normal life.

I came here to train. I focused on boxing, Muay Thai, fitness, conditioning, and recovery. Some days, multiple sessions. I wanted to document the experience every day, talk to the people training around me, and, importantly, pay attention to what happened inside my head.

The first week tested my body.

The second week has been testing something considerably more complicated.

My ability to continue after the excitement of starting has disappeared.

Because starting, I am discovering again, is often the easy part.

There is something slightly ridiculous about travelling thousands of kilometres to one of the world’s most beautiful holiday destinations and then deliberately making your days harder.

I’m in Phuket, Thailand. Outside my room there is everything you would expect from a place people travel across the world to enjoy: tropical heat, swimming pools, restaurants, beaches, excellent food and that unmistakable feeling that perhaps nothing particularly urgent needs to happen today.

It is also low season. The humidity can wrap around you before the day has properly begun, rain can arrive with little warning, and after training, even a short walk outside can feel considerably longer than it looked on the map.

I could spend 21 days enjoying all of these experiences from a very comfortable distance.

Instead, at 53, I came here to train at least twice a day and ask myself a question that has followed me through very different periods of my life: How do we know what we are capable of if we never genuinely test it?

Seven days into this experiment, I am beginning to understand that the answer has surprisingly little to do with physical strength.

Last night, on my fourth day in Thailand, I found myself in a situation that my 21-day training plan did not prepare me for. 

I was vomiting, feeling terrible and quickly realising that I had most likely picked up food poisoning. 

Anyone who has experienced it knows there is nothing glamorous about it. One moment you are contemplating tomorrow, training, schedules and what you want to achieve, and the next moment your body has entirely different plans for you.

I arrived in Phuket with an obvious purpose. I made a conscious decision that for 21 days I would train, learn, push myself and find out what I am still capable of doing as I approach my 54th birthday. 

I wanted to train alongside people who come here from all over the world, many of them much younger than me, and experience this environment properly rather than observe it from the outside. 

Some people come to Phuket and stay for weeks or even months just to train. They wake up, train, recover and then do it again. There is something about seeing that dedication around you every day that makes you question your standards.

My original plan was two training sessions a day, and that is what I had been doing. But when I opened my eyes the morning after being sick, suddenly the plan looked entirely unique.

I was lying in bed, and, for a moment, I started negotiating with myself.

You know that conversation because I think all of us have had it.

Maybe today I should stay here. Maybe the pain is my body telling me to stop. I was sick last night. Nobody would blame me. I can always train tomorrow.

And the intriguing thing was that every one of those statements was reasonable.

I really had been sick. I really did need to consider my health. I am almost 54, not 24, and recovery is something I take seriously. 

Nobody at the gym was waiting outside my room to drag me to training, and nobody back home would have known whether I trained that morning or stayed in bed.

That is when something occurred to me.

Sometimes the most dangerous excuses we make are not lies. Sometimes they are entirely true.

You are truly exhausted. You really did have a difficult week. Your business really is struggling. Somebody really did hurt you. 

You really don’t have as much time as somebody else. You really are getting older. Your circumstances really are difficult.

The problem is not necessarily whether your reason is true. The question is what you decide to do with that truth.

For me, that morning, I had three choices. I could compel myself to endure two sessions to demonstrate my resilience, which, following an episode of food poisoning, would have been unwise. 

I could stay in bed all day and use what happened the night before as permission to abandon the plan completely. Or I could listen to my body, adjust the plan and still do something.

So, I got up.

I decided that instead of two training sessions, I would do one.

That might not sound particularly heroic, and that’s exactly the point.

There is an ancient saying, traditionally attributed to the Chinese philosopher Laozi: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

I have heard those words many times throughout my life, but lately I have been contemplating them differently. We usually concentrate on taking that first step, on having the courage to begin. But we often overlook another point: sometimes, you must take that first step alone.

A few days ago, I left Sydney and boarded a plane for Phuket, Thailand, where I am spending 21 days training, observing, learning and challenging myself. I travelled here alone.

This isn’t my first solo journey, and I doubt it will be my last. I have travelled alone before, and I also experienced something similar while walking the Camino Primitivo across Spain. But every time I find myself somewhere unfamiliar without the comfort of people I know around me, I rediscover how complicated being alone actually is.

People often discuss solo travel as freedom, and they are right. But they rarely talk about the other side of that freedom.

Most of us love travelling with someone. We go with our partners, families or friends. We plan together, eat together, laugh when things go wrong and argue occasionally about where to go next. Even those little disagreements become part of the memory.

When you travel alone, all of that disappears.

Suddenly, everything belongs to you. You choose when to wake up, eat, walk, train, and see things. You are not required to negotiate with anyone or enquire about someone else’s preferences. If I want to get up early and watch the sunrise, I can. If I want to train twice in one day, nobody needs convincing. If I want to sit quietly over a coffee and watch the world go past, nobody is waiting for me to finish.

There is something incredibly liberating about that.

But after a while, another feeling starts appearing.