It’s hard to believe, but January 2012 marks the fourth anniversary of this Logos blog, with our first blog post published by my colleague Fred Garcia on January 2nd, 2008.

In the last four years, we’ve all posted at various times, although the overall speed and frequency of the blog has slowed quite a bit in the last two years. All of the usual culprits are part of that reason, but the biggest culprit has been time (or lack thereof). While we’re thankful that the last four years have kept us busy, our blogging has seen a definite downward trend as a result.

Today marks the start of a new weekly series on this blog: “Worth Reading,” a collection of notable reads from the previous week (or so). We’ve had a more sporadic “Worth Reading” series for some time, but this weekly series aims to fill a request expressed to us to more closely follow what we’re keeping up with in quicker, more consumable bites.

• Newspapers & fact-checking: We followed with great interest the continued discussion prompted by Arthur S. Brisbane’s column at the New York Times earlier this month, “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” In particular, analysis by Lucas Graves at Nieman Journalism Lab, “Digging deeper into The New York Times’ fact-checking faux pas;” Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, “Why Newspaper’s Often Don’t Call Out Politicians for Lying;” and Gene Lyons at Salon, “Newspapers, truth vigilantes no more” are worth reading, as is a follow-up piece by Brisbane, “Keeping Them Honest.”
• Edelman Trust Barometer: The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer continues Edelman’s research into the state of trust in countries, industries, information sources and spokespeople around the world, with 2012 seeing “the biggest decline in trust in government in Barometer history.” Lots of other relevant data in the full report.
• Facebook research: Two interesting pieces of research on Facebook: “How Journalists Are Using Facebook Subscribe,” a look at the changes since Facebook allowed users to “Subscribe” to public figures’ accounts, including journalists, in September 2011; and “Rethinking Information Diversity in Networks,” with additional analysis on Slate, “The End of the Echo Chamber.”
• Employees and social media: Thoughtful analysis by Shel Holtz on a recent report on employees and social media, “Rejoice! Employee use of social media has tripled!“
• Nonprofits and mobile giving: For nonprofits, Pew Internet’s report on “Real Time Charitable Giving” tracks the increase in giving from mobile phones.
• Twitter and international policy: And finally, lots of discussion at the end of last week about Twitter’s new international policy, including good summary and analysis from Alex Howard on Gov20.GovFresh, “On Twitter, censorship and Internet freedom” (with lots of updates and links to other analysis), and “What Would it Take to Get Twitter Unblocked in China?” on the WSJ.

These weekly updates will be a compendium of various topics that touch on a range of our work, and we look forward to more frequent updates in 2012.

I have just returned from two weeks of teaching in China, and it has gotten me thinking.

I had prepared for the trip pretty pretty well — 150+ hours of one-on-one Mandarin lessons; several large books on Chinese history and politics; a 36-lecture audio course on Chinese history; and lots of review of Chinese media in English.  But none of that made me ready for what I found there.

I come away with several large surprises, some observations (more about the US than about China), and some advice for my daughters, students, clients, and all others who want to make a difference in the world.  (Short version: Learn Mandarin.)

All of that in a moment.

Why I Was There and What I Was Doing

I was in Beijing through Tsinghua University, recently rated the top school in China, as part of an exchange on crisis management among academics, business leaders, the government, and outside experts.  The trip was funded by the International Distinguished Scholars program of the Tsinghua University Foundation.

Tsinghua just celebrated its 100th birthday. China’s president, premier, and many senior government officials are alumni.  In addition to teaching its own students, Tsinghua also has executive education contracts with the government.

So my work involved teaching best practices in crisis management and crisis communication to both graduate students and government officials, as well as to groups of business and media leaders.  Much of it was in the classroom.  Some was beyond the classroom.

Surprises

I had the good fortune of spending lots of time speaking with and listening to people engaged in the current and future growth of China — in the classroom, at meals, in formal and informal settings.

Those discussions, my observations, and my reflection lead me to three surprises that can serve as organizing principles in my own understanding of China and its relationship to the United States and the rest of the world.  They are:

1. Scale
2. Curiosity
3. Optimism

A bit about each of these:

1. Scale

China is huge.

Its scale is breathtaking, almost impossible to grasp with an American frame of reference.   The Chinese name for China is Zhongguo — literally the middle kingdom, the center of the world, or the center of civilization.  Being there I can  see why.

China has an uninterrupted history of nearly 5,000 years as a single civilization. In contrast, European settlement of the American hemisphere began about 500 years ago.

Beijing, with 19.7 million people, dwarfs New York, which has 8.4 million. Shanghai has even more: 23.3 million people.   China has 160 cities with a population of more than 1 million.   The United States has nine.

China has a landmass about the size of the US, but its population is the size of the US population plus another billion people.

The Great Wall, built by hand between 403 and 204 BC, was more than 1,200 miles long.  Large portions still remain.  I walked about five miles of it, and it continued well into and beyond the horizon.  It seemed to go forever.

Walking for several hours through the Forbidden City, where emperors lived for hundreds of years, I thought I had covered the whole thing.  Then I discovered that we weren’t even halfway through the compound, the biggest buildings yet to become visible.

Ceremonial meals seemed to go on without end — 15 courses or more, each one superb.

China has an old and venerable civilization and culture.  But it’s also ultra modern.  I was in Tianjin, a city about 100 miles south of Beijing, and had to get to a meeting back in my Beijing hotel.

We left Tianjin by train at 4.  I was in my hotel at 5.  The bullet train traveled the equivalent of Philadelphia to New York in 20 minutes.  And the ride was smoother than any Acela I have ever ridden.  A glass of water on the armrest would not have spilled.

The Beijing subway was modern, clean, well-lit, well-signed (in both Chinese and English) and easy to navigate.  Also extremely crowded.

2. Curiosity

I was in China to teach crisis management best practices, which I teach in universities in the US and in Zurich.  I expected the graduate students to be engaging.  I was surprised by how curious, engaged, and engaging the government officials, business leaders, and media professionals were.

They seemed genuinely to want to master crisis management decision making.  One of my core themes was the need to take stakeholder expectations seriously; to maintain trust and confidence by doing the right thing at the right time.  I was surprised at how much this resonated with my audiences.  I had expected the government to default to the desire to control information.  I saw none of this.  Instead, they seemed genuinely curious about how to win, keep, and build public trust, support, and approval.

I spent one morning teaching  about 50 medical regulators, who had asked me to include social media trends among my topics.  (I’m not expert in that, but I enlisted the States-side help of Laurel Hart, who heads Logos’ social media practice and who teaches social media at NYU and elsewhere.)  I shared with the regulators how the US Food and Drug Administration uses social media – more than 10 separate Twitter accounts, YouTube, blogs, Flikr, etc.  The regulators immediately moved from conceptual to operational questions: how do they do it; how many people work on it; how do they know what to put where, and when?  I had expected something like “we can’t do that here.” Instead I got “how can we do that here?”  I had similar reactions from other groups.

This curiosity takes many forms.  China has a long history of absorbing ideas and best practices from elsewhere and incorporating them into a distinctively Chinese way of doing things.  And there certainly seemed to be some of that going on.  But I also detected a sense of urgency along with the curiosity.  Some said directly that they knew they couldn’t control public opinion and had to earn it; some pointed to their own recent crises and noted how public support increased when the crises were well-handled and fell when the crises were mishandled.

But mostly I saw what we see in other environments of rapid change: anxiety about how to get ahead of an important trend.  In this case, a recognition that in both the economic world and the political environment, control is unlikely to work as it once did, and now support must be earned.  And a determination to learn how to earn that trust and support.

3. Optimism

China is on the rise.

Its GDP is growing at about 9 percent a year, according to the World Bank.

On average two new billionaires are coined every week.  But China’s prosperity is not confined to the traditional elites: more than half a billion Chinese have emerged from poverty in the last 15 years, according to the World Bank.   China is on an infrastructure and building construction boom.

I detected an energy in the streets — among the great masses of Beijingers —  that I used to know in New York.  And with everyone I spoke — high officials, the educated, and even taxi drivers and the waitresses in the hotel — a sense that this is a very good time to be Chinese.  They seemed to be infused with a sense that, however rich and long their history, their best time was still to come.

I taught a group of non-Chinese graduates students at Tsinghua — students from the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and India.  I asked them why they were studying in China. They all gave the same reason: China is emerging as the land of opportunity.  One of the American students put it this way: the American Dream is alive and well, but living in China.

Implications

Assuming that I’m on track about the scale, curiosity, and optimism I detected, we may indeed be in the early phases of what many have begun to call the Chinese Century.

China still has many problems and many challenges to overcome, and it’s still an open question how sustainable its economic growth can be or what kind of political system will ultimately emerge.  But these are challenges China is aware of and grappling with.  My prediction is that China ten years from now will be a more open and more prosperous society.  Not necessarily in a George Soros- Open Society way, but in a distinctly Chinese way.

An ascendant China is not necessarily a threat to the US.  While I was there US Vice President Joe Biden visited China, and he told audiences, according to China Daily:

“I believe that a rising China is a positive development. A rising China will fuel economic growth and prosperity, and will mean more demand for American-made goods and services and more jobs back home in the United States.  It will also bring a new partner with whom we can meet global challenges together.  It’s in our self interest that China continues to prosper.”

For my part, I think there are real opportunities for my firm’s US-based clients in China.  Some, in finance and pharmaceuticals, are already very active there.  Others are just beginning. But it’s a market with lots of potential for American companies.

The university with which I am most closely affiliated, NYU, is opening a full degree-granting campus in Shanghai next year.  And my firm is likely to remain active in China.  I’ve been invited back to Tsinghua in the spring to continue the work begun on this visit, and I’m now working to figure out the best way to make that happen.

Lessons: Learn Mandarin

Whether we like it or not, China will be a presence in our lives.

To become competitive we need to learn Mandarin, the single-most spoken language in the world.  (It’s hard to learn, but I can recommend an excellent teacher.)

I’m convinced that in the coming decades knowledge of Chinese language will move from being a competitive differentiator to a basic necessity, much as in the 20th and early 21st centuries people outside the English-speaking countries learned English simply because it was expected for business, social, or academic advancement.

Americans typically pay little attention to the world beyond our shores.  Our current political and economic conditions have led to a significant isolationist movement, from anti-immigration hysteria to the labeling of any economic good news abroad as a threat to our economic or national security.  We need to get over it.  China’s rise doesn’t equate to our demise (unless we make it so). But to remain competitive we need to be in relationship with China.

In my daughters’ and students’ lifetimes China will be a part of their daily lives.

One of the core crisis management principles I taught in China was the first-mover advantage: the sooner we do what we know we have to do, the more likely we are to succeed.  My Tsinghua non-Chinese graduate students were already doing it: studying in China because that’s where the future is heading.  We need to get ahead of that trend.

Thoughts, comments, critiques welcomed.  I look forward to an ongoing discussion.

Fred

An expanded version of this post, “UN Human Rights Framework: What executives need to know and do about human rights, Part I and Part II”  appears on the website of Ethical Corporation (UK).

Human rights have been a concern for some companies since the anti-Apartheid divestment campaigns of the 1980s, but there has been no broad-based uptake of human rights as a business discipline. Relatively few companies have human rights in their corporate vocabulary.

This may be the year human rights go mainstream, thanks, largely, to the work of John Ruggie, serving for the past six years as the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights.

Ruggie has forged a working consensus among companies, governments and advocates that human rights are not just a business concern, but that both governments and companies have human rights responsibilities. The Ruggie, or UN, Framework – “Protect, Respect and Remedy” – asserts that governments must protect against abuses by companies; companies must respect human rights; and victims must have access to remedies.

“Protect, respect and remedy” is a phrase that many executives will hear and be asked to explain over the next twelve months. This Spring, the UN Human Rights Council is expected to endorse Guiding Principles for both governments and companies to meet their responsibilities under the Framework. For the first time, companies have a clear roadmap for making human rights part of their compliance and corporate responsibility efforts. If you are, or advise, one of those executives, there are ten things you need to know (and do) about human rights:

1) Corporate human rights responsibilities go beyond legal compliance.

Respecting human rights means not violating them, but also means addressing any “adverse human rights impacts” companies may cause or to which they contribute. Companies can have adverse human rights impact in situations where no clear legal exposure exists and companies must respect human rights even when governments do not.

2) Consider the full range of human rights and all of your company’s activities and relationships.

A company’s activities and relationships determine the appropriate scope of corporate human rights efforts. International standards – international human rights and labor conventions – provide the list of relevant human rights. A chocolate brand sourcing cocoa from West Africa is expected to consider forced labor on cocoa farms. Internet and telecom providers must pay attention to freedom of expression and the right to privacy. Companies must consider the human rights issues in the places where they operate, as well as the rights affected by different business functions.

3) Adopt a human rights policy.

Start by referencing international human rights standards. The form is less important than a clear corporate commitment to respect human rights. The strongest efforts will align all relevant corporate policies, including compensation, procurement and lobbying practices.

4) Invest in human rights due diligence.

Assessing your company’s human rights impacts is the core concept in the “Respect” pillar of the Framework. If you haven’t considered how your company touches human rights, this is the year to start. Assess actual and potential human rights impacts in your company’s own operations; and the risk of complicity in relationships with business partners, suppliers, and others, prioritizing areas of heightened risk. Human rights due diligence is a dynamic, ongoing activity. Human rights impact assessments will become increasingly common.

5) Act on the findings.

Companies need specific procedures to prevent or mitigate potential human rights impacts and to remediate actual harm. Corporate philanthropy, for example, is not a substitute for meeting human rights responsibilities. Grievance mechanisms are part of the puzzle, but companies will also need to develop more robust forms of human rights impact management consistent with the UN Framework.

6) Track and communicate your human rights performance.

Ruggie stops short of calling for mandatory reporting, but emphasizes the need for human rights performance tracking. Credible due diligence demonstrates the steps you have taken to understand and prevent human rights impacts. Initiatives like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) offer performance indicators that can get you started, but each company will need to customize its own human rights metrics.

7) Ensure that corporate human rights initiatives contain effective grievance mechanisms.

The third pillar focuses on providing human rights victims with access to effective remedies. Companies can establish operational-level grievance mechanisms, such as a confidential hotline or other way for individuals to report human rights issues.

.8) The UN Framework is now the de facto human rights standard for companies and their stakeholders.

“Protect, Respect and Remedy” gives everyone a common language for addressing human rights and business, and is already having an impact. Governments will reference the Framework in efforts to regulate corporate conduct. Advocates will use the Framework to demand government and corporate accountability. Voluntary corporate, industry and multi-stakeholder human rights programs will align themselves with the Framework by revising codes of conduct, strengthening human rights due diligence, and establishing grievance mechanisms.

9) Stakeholders will use the UN Framework to hold your company accountable for respecting human rights.

The UN Framework will shape the ways investors evaluate your company and how advocates engage with your company. Investors recently used the Framework in a successful campaign urging a Toyota affiliate to divest a joint venture with the Burmese military. Human rights NGOs will shine a light on corporate human rights due diligence, or lack thereof.

10) Pay attention to how governments and companies connect the “Protect” and “Respect” pillars of the UN Framework.

Executives may be tempted to focus exclusively on the “Respect” pillar of the Framework, because it describes the responsibilities of companies. The connections among the pillars, however, are where the most challenging issues arise, and where there are likely to be significant developments going forward.

Two developments bear watching: 1) how governments foster corporate respect for human rights; and 2) how companies encourage governments to protect human rights. States may establish legal liability for legal persons (corporations) and take steps to regulate firms operating abroad. Specific measures on the horizon are human rights reporting requirements, and mandatory human rights impact assessments. Financial reporting requirements may be the first place where required human rights reporting appears, by redefining materiality to include human rights impacts. In the other direction, companies increasingly are raising human rights concerns with the governments of countries where they operate.

Executives who can translate “Protect, Respect and Remedy” for their company in 2011, will have a competitive advantage as human rights go mainstream for business.

“The nicest thing about not planning is that

failure comes as a complete surprise,

rather than being preceded by a period of

worry and depression.”

Sir John Harvey-Jones

The catastrophic loss of the Deepwater Horizon rig on the Macondo well seemed to come as a complete surprise, especially to those who were closest to it. It shouldn’t have.

Last year I blogged that the seeds of the Deepwater Horizon explosion were planted well before April 20, 2010.

The verdict is now in on the BP disaster: The sequence of mis-steps that resulted in 11 people killed and millions of barrels of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico was the result of a failure of leadership and management on a massive scale.

An Overarching Failure of Management

Last week the Chief Counsel’s Report of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling was published. And it’s a doozy. It calls the BP mess an “overarching failure of management”:

“The Macondo disaster was not, as some have suggested, the result of accidental alignment of disparate technical failures. While technical failures contributed to the blowout, the Chief Counsel’s team traces each of them back to an overarching failure of management.”

The failure of management wasn’t just one of style at the top.

It is easy to associate the mishandling with former CEO Tony Hayward, who proved inept in his public commentary (“It’s not our accident; What the hell did we do to deserve this?; Frankly, I’d like my life back”). But the report reads as if there was no-one at the helm who knew how to run an oil exploration company.

The report suggests that the dysfunctions that led to the disaster ran deep through the BP culture.

In my blog last year I noted that most crises follow predictable patterns, and crisis prevention involves pattern recognition. Early recognition of patterns helps a leadership team adapt and resolve problems before they get worse.

The report concludes that the Macondo disaster was not inevitable.  Rather, it was the result of human failure.  The report says that blowout happened

“because a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent such an event. The Chief Counsel‘s team identified a number of technical risk factors in the design, execution, and testing of the Macondo well. The team was also able to trace all of these failures back to an overarching failure of management. Better management of personnel, risk, and communications by BP and its contractors would almost certainly have prevented the blowout.”

Over the course of 370 pages of detailed findings and conclusions, the report lays out patterns of inattention that are breathtaking. In the chapter titled Massive Failure of Management (that begins only on page 225!) the report summarizes some of the major categories of failure, and then systematically documents them:

“The Chief Counsel‘s team observed at least the following management failures:

(1) ineffective leadership at critical times;

(2) ineffective communication and siloing of information;

(3) failure to provide timely procedures;

(4) poor training and supervision of employees;

(5) ineffective management and oversight of contractors;

(6) inadequate use of technology; and

(7) failure to appropriately analyze and appreciate risk.

Ultimately, the companies placed undue reliance on timely intervention and human judgment in light of their failure to provide individuals with the information, tools, and training necessary to be effective.”

Management is Doing Things Right

Leadership is Doing the Right Things

– Peter F. Drucker

If, as the late management guru Peter F. Drucker noted, management consists of doing things right and leadership consists of doing the right things, BP got both wrong.

The report’s executive summary concludes:

“What the men and women who worked on Macondo lacked—and what every drilling operation requires—was a culture of leadership responsibility. In remote offshore environments, individuals must take personal ownership of safety issues with a single-minded determination to ask questions and pursue advice until they are certain they get it right.”

They did not.  The report details, among other failings:

• BP did not adequately identify or address risks created by last-minute changes to well design and procedures. BP changed its plans repeatedly and up to the very last minute, sometimes causing confusion and frustration among BP employees and rig personnel.
  When BP did send instructions and procedures to rig personnel, it often provided inadequate detail and guidance.
• It is common in the offshore oil industry to focus on increasing efficiency to save rig time and associated costs. But management processes must ensure that measures taken to save time and reduce costs do not adversely affect overall risk. BP‘s management processes did not do so.
• Halliburton appears to have done little to supervise the work of its key cementing personnel and does not appear to have meaningfully reviewed data that should have prompted it to redesign the Macondo cement slurry.
• Transocean did not adequately train its employees in emergency procedures and kick detection, and did not inform them of crucial lessons learned from a similar and recent near-miss drilling incident.

There were also breakdowns in interpersonal communication, so that those on the line had no real situation awareness.

“Inadequate communication and excessive compartmentalization of information contributed to the Macondo blowout.

Individuals making decisions regarding one aspect of the well, such as onshore engineers, did not always communicate critical information to others, such as the well site leaders, who were making related decisions on other aspects of the well.

When faced with anomalous data, decision makers often failed to seek counsel from others with expertise and instead made decisions based on incomplete information. BP and Transocean also failed to communicate lessons learned from other wells that could have assisted the decision makers at Macondo.

Information about drilling at Macondo was compartmentalized both within and between companies. In several instances, the BP onshore engineering team was aware of risks with the Macondo job but failed to communicate those risks to its own employees on the rig or the contractor personnel who might have helped mitigate those risks.”

The report notes that in the absence of clear guidelines on what to prioritize, costs and speed became driving forces in decision-making.

“BP and Transocean did not have adequate procedures in place to properly account for risk or to assess the overall impact of decisions that appeared to relate only to one part of the well project. As a result, understandable cost pressures drove decision making and allowed some operational redundancies to be purged as inefficiencies.

The companies involved at Macondo failed to rigorously analyze the risks created by key decisions or to develop plans for mitigating those risks. This appears to have biased decisions in the last month at Macondo in favor of cost and time savings while increasing the risk of a blowout.”

Lessons for Leaders:

It’s Not The Plan That’s Important:

It’s the Planning

Best practices in crisis planning and response include the following:

1. Ensure situational awareness
2. Ensure clarity and accountability of role and of process
3. Act quickly to avoid the compounding effect of multiple mistakes, and to minimize self-inflicted harm

All three of these require a robust crisis planning process.

The primary benefit of the planning process is not merely that there be a plan.  Rather, the main benefit is the effect of the planning process on leaders’ and managers’ understanding of risks and consequences.

Indeed, BP had a voluminous crisis plan for a Gulf oil spill.  But it didn’t take the plan seriously, in either formulation or execution.

In many ways this is emblematic of BP’s approach to risk management as well.  BP’s Gulf Oil Spill Response Plan seemed to be just a copy-and-paste document that included geographic and temporal anomalies:  For example, it listed Arctic marine mammals such as walruses as species at risk in the Gulf,  and contained out-of-date contact information for experts who had died years before.  The plan seemed to have been prepared and filed to fulfill regulatory requirements and then forgotten.

The purpose of a plan is not to check a box on a regulatory filing — to be able to say you have a plan — but to inform management decision-making.

Mental preparation is key.  The burden of leadership is to be mentally prepared to make tough choices to mitigate risk, and to respond effectively when things go wrong.  The management challenge is to have effective process in place to identify risks early, mitigate them when possible, and to respond effectively when things go wrong.

BP failed on both the leadership and management tests.

Every board of directors should ask its CEO: Are we prepared for when things go wrong?  And every CEO should task the management team to ensure that the answer is both correct and productive.

We can learn from the failures at BP: Be Prepared.

“Plan for what is difficult when it is most easy,

do what is great while it is small.

The most difficult things in the world must be done

while they are still easy,

the greatest things in the world must be done

while they are still small.”

The Tao-te Ching, or The Way and Its Power

Lao Tzu (604-581 BCE)

….

Let’s simply stipulate that BP’s response to its disaster in the Gulf is shaping up to be the new standard for mishandled crises.

We’ll continue to harvest how-not-to lessons from BP as long as Tony Hayward continues to talk,  the oil continues to flow, and beaches, fisheries, wetlands, wildlife, and livelihoods remain at risk.

But what are the deeper lessons?

I believe the key is this: The seeds of what happened after the April 20 explosion were planted well before April 20.

To harvest the most meaningful lessons from BP requires us to look at the sequence of events leading to the fire, explosion, collapse of the rig, death of 11 workers, and the surge of oil into the Gulf.

Prevention More Important Than Response

However important getting crisis response right may be, crisis prevention is even more important.

BP got both spectacularly wrong.

First, BP missed the signs that things were amiss and that a disaster loomed. Second, its purported crisis plan was a patched-together copy-and-paste of prior plans, with no meaningful assessment of the particular challenges of drilling a mile deep, or of an out-of-control gusher in the Gulf of Mexico.  It’s no wonder that BP seems to be making the response up as it goes along.  It is.

Will Your Next Mistake be Fatal?

Most crises follow predictable patterns, and crisis prevention involves pattern recognition. Early recognition of patterns helps a leadership team adapt and resolve problems before they get worse.

A seminal work in this sort of pattern recognition is Will Your Next Mistake be Fatal?: Avoiding the Chain of Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Organization by Robert E. Mittelstaedt, Jr.  Mittelstaedt is Dean and Professor of the W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and former Vice Dean and Director of the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania.

I require my crisis management students in the executive MBA program of the NYU Stern School of Business to master Mittelstaedt. The book puts leaders on notice that they have both more control and more responsibility for their organizations’ destinies than they may imagine.

Red Flags

According to Mittelstaedt, mistakes don’t just happen; they’re allowed to happen, sequentially, and with increasing severity.

Although the specifics may be different, the human behaviors, interpersonal dynamics, and preconceived notions play out in similar ways.  Mittelstaedt writes,

“mistakes, both in business and nonbusiness settings across industries, reveal patterns that are so repetitive that every manager should recognize them as potential red flags.”

Such mistake chains often involve some combination of the following:

• Failure to correct a seemingly minor or isolated problem.
• A subsequent problem that compounds the effect of the initial problem.
• An ineffective corrective action.
• Disbelief that the situation is getting out of hand.
• Denial (or self-denial) about the truth of what’s happening.
• Sudden recognition that an extreme situation exists and is out of control.
• The ultimate disaster.

The earlier one can intervene and break the mistake chain, the easier it is to regain a successful course.

Operational Problems, Unattended, Become Strategic Failures

But failure to break the chain causes the damage to increase exponentially.  And problems that are initially operational, over time and unattended, become strategic failures.

As in all crisis management, the first and most effective defense is vigilance.  Mittelstaedt notes,

“the greatest challenge in most organizations is not figuring out how to fix a problem but recognizing that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed.”

Mental preparation is critical.

Leaders and those they lead need to be taught to recognize patterns of mistakes and to extrapolate implications from other situations to their own.

Among the factors that cause otherwise intelligent and successful leaders to miss predictable crises are:

• Failure to evaluate their own assumptions, about the problem, their own abilities, their customers, their competitors, etc.
• Previous successes that cause leaders to believe in their own invulnerability — and that cause arrogance that interferes with effective decision making.
• Failure to communicate or listen to others both internal and external, who may be calling attention to early problems.
• Lack of standard procedures, or failure to follow existing procedures.
• Cultural barriers, that penalize challenges to prevailing thinking, or that inhibit initiative and information-sharing.
• Ignoring economic laws and cycles.
• Not internalizing lessons from prior failures.

BP’s Mistake Chain

We see just these patterns in the run-up to the April 20 disaster.  Although the specifics are still coming out, it’s already clear that warning signs abounded on the Deepwater Horizon.

According to the New York Times, as early as June of 2009, fully 10 months before the blow-out, BP had concerns that the metal casing planned for the rig might collapse under high pressure.  Says the Times,

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report.  “However, I have seen it happen so I know it can occur.”  The company went ahead with the casing, but only after getting special permission from BP colleagues because it violated the company’s safety policies and design standards.  The internal report does not explain why the company allowed for an exception.

The Times reviewed more than 50,000 pages of company documents, including engineering reports and internal e-mails.  The Times reports,

In March, after problems on the rig that included drilling mud falling into the formation, sudden gas releases known as “kicks” and a pipe falling into the well, BP informed federal regulators that they were struggling with the loss of “well control.”  On at least three occasions, BP records indicate, the blowout preventer was leaking fluid, which the manufacturer of the device has said limits its ability to operate properly.

“The most important thing at a time like this is to stop everything and get the operation under control,” said Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, offering his assessment about the documents.

The initial June 2009 failure to follow existing procedures regarding the casing was compounded in April when the company ignored concerns about sealing the casing. According to the Times,

In April of this year, BP engineers concluded that the casing was “unlikely to be a successful cement job,” according to a document, referring to how the casing would be sealed to prevent gases from escaping up the well.  The document also says that the plan for casing the well is “unable to fulfill M.M.S. regulations,” referring to the Minerals Management Service.

Further deviations from protocol occurred in testing the blowout preventer, which is supposed to be tested every two weeks.   The Times says that BP asked regulators for a delay of such testing, and that initially the regulators refused.  They relented, literally at the 11th hour.  According to the Times,

When the blowout preventer was eventually tested again, it was tested at a lower pressure — 6,500 pounds per square inch — than the 10,000-pounds-per-square-inch tests used on the device before the delay.  It tested at this lower pressure until the explosion.

Aftermath

On April 20 an explosion and fire took the lives of 11 rig workers and injured 17 others.  Two days later the Deepwater Horizon rig sank.  Since then, millions of barrels of crude have surged into the Gulf of Mexico, one mile below the surface.

Regulations require that those who drill offshore prepare response plans, just in case of a catastrophic development.  BP persistently downplayed the risks of such an event, and seems to have merely gone through the motions.

BP filed a 582-page plan for the Gulf of Mexico as a whole, and 52-page plan specific to the Deepwater Horizon drill site.  According to an analysis by the Associated Press, the plans

vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company’s preparedness to deal with one.

The Deepwater Horizon site plan was explicit about BP’s capabilities:

BP has the capacity to respond, to the maximum extent practicable, to a worst case discharge, or the substantial threat of such a discharge, resulting from the activities proposed in our Exploration Plan.

For example, BP said it had sufficient watercraft with skimming technology to remove 20 million gallons of oil from water each day.

In addition to BP’s capabilities, other factors would mitigate harm.  For example, the site plan said that coastal areas were unlikely to be affected by a major spill:

Due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are anticipated.

The site plan also predicted no adverse impact on wildlife: birds, turtles, or marine mammals.

I Am the Walrus

And it is in reference to marine mammals that the site plan exposed its true nature: a copy-and-paste from other plans, without even cursory attempts to customize the plan for the Gulf of Mexico.

The site plan, for example, lists the kinds of marine mammals that might be affected by a spill: Otters, sea lions, seals, and walruses.  None of these species can be found in the Gulf of Mexico.  They are residents of very cold environments, such as Alaska.

Another telling detail: BP’s 2009 Gulf of Mexico spill response plan lists professor Peter Lutz as its national wildlife expert, saying he’s a professor at the University of Miami.  But professor Lutz left Miami 20 years ago for Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.  And he died in 2005.

The Associated Press says that the plan also lists incorrect names and phone numbers for several Texas A&M University marine wildlife experts.  And it lists marine mammal stranding network offices in Louisiana and Florida that are no longer in service. And the website listed for Marine Spill Response Corp., which provides BP with response capabilities, links to a defunct Japanese-language page.

Lessons for Leaders

Bad things happen to good companies all the time. Whether a company emerges from a crisis with its reputation, operations, and financial condition intact is based not on the severity of the crisis, but on the timeliness and quality of the response.

One of the burdens of leadership is to assure that your company is ready for things to go wrong.  And further to intervene early to prevent those very things from happening.

No Leader Plans to Fail

But Many Fail to Plan

And an effective and timely response can take place only if there’s an effective plan in place.  Not just any plan.  Simply saying you have a plan; taking an off-the-shelf plan and thinking it will serve; or copying and pasting without regard to the actual situation can be recipes for disaster — witness BP.

An effective plan takes a candid look at scenarios, including unlikely scenarios.  But it also looks at the magnitude of each scenario — including the unlikely scenarios.  And however unlikely a scenario may be —  say, an uncontrolled gushing of oil into the Gulf for months at a time — if the magnitude is significant, there has to be good faith planning to respond effectively to such an event.

Mental preparation is key.  One of the advantages of scenario planning is that it sensitizes leaders to the consequences of catastrophes, and also to the causes of catastrophes.  Per Mittelstaedt, catastrophes aren’t only the result of major unexpected events, but rather of the predictable accumulation of relatively minor events.

Mittelstaedt says that mistake chains show patterns so predictable that leaders should see them as red flags.

So here’s the burden of leadership — and the failure of leadership at BP: See the patterns, wave the red flag, and stop the mistake chain before it becomes fatal.

I welcome your feedback.

Fred

Clay Shirky by Joi

Clay Shirky, NYU professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, was another highlight of my time in Austin. His talk, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,” touched on a number of themes and was grouped in three parts:

1. Buses and Bibles
2. Monkeys and Balloons
3. Lingerie and Garbage

Part One: Buses and Bibles

Shirky began with a discussion of the inefficiencies of modern cities, and how many of the solutions people present to address the inefficiencies are engineering solutions, but that a new approach treating inefficiencies with information solutions may provide a better alternative.  For example, in Canada an approach to congested roads is a ride share network – sharing information about who’s going where when. This approach is better for almost everyone BUT bus companies, who filed suit against the company offering the service.

Key point 1: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Shirky calls that kind of sharing “jackhammer sharing — sharing that’s powerful enough that it actually destroys existing things in the environment.” That kind of sharing “doesn’t happen very often, but it sometimes does around media revolutions.” He connected this idea to Gutenberg and the printing press.

Key point 2: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity. When things become really abundant, the price goes away. The things that were previously thought of as scarce that are now available to everyone change the world. [E.g. Scribes vs. printing press.] We generally know how to manage scarcity, we don’t know how to manage abundance.”

Part Two: Monkeys and Balloons

This section began with a background on Napster, and Shirky argued that Napster changed the motivation around sharing, which wasn’t a new motivation, more of a bringing back of an old one. Shirky discussed three modes of sharing from the book Why We Cooperate.

Key point 3: There are three different types of sharing: 1. Sharing goods; 2. Sharing services; and 3. Sharing information. Sharing goods is the hardest, sharing services a little easier and sharing information is the easiest of all. “Napster took the world of music, where music was always shared as goods or services, and made it possible to share as information.” We’re programmed to share information – it gives us a positive feeling.

Part Three: Lingerie and Garbage

Here, Shirky gave a number of examples of institutions, groups or initiatives that centered around sharing information that creates a kind of civic value (e.g. Ushahidi, PatientsLikeMe). We now have tools that swing the way we share information with each other.

Key point 4: “Intrinsic motivation and private action was just an accident. Now we can do big things for love, not just private things for love. We’re moving from doing little things for love and big things for money, to doing big things for love.”

On Presenting

Shirky is a master presenter. No tools, no technology, no (visible) notes. Just a man in a three wolf man t-shirt, a well-crafted story and an astute sense of his audience. (I haven’t yet been able to find good video of his talk at SXSW this year, but you can see one of his TED talks here.)

[Note: This post is cross-posted on my personal blog.]

Recent public apologies from Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Tiger Woods made me wonder why we accept some apologies and denounce others.
Which components of a public apology show us that it is authentic and sincere and, therefore, that we can accept it? Is there a perfect public apology?

Goldman Takes The Lead

When Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein issued a public mea culpa, his goal was to convince the public that he accepted responsibility for and deeply regretted his firm’s role in the financial crisis. As a form of restitution, he offered to have Goldman invest $500 million over five years to help small businesses. Mr. Blankfein’s was the first official apology by an investment bank of that caliber, which is by itself a unique occurrence. And yet, Goldman’s apology caused a mixed reaction.
Some stakeholders gave the company credit for taking the initiative to apologize and for its willingness to help small businesses. Most others, including the general public, questioned the sincerity of the apology and its real value. The media called it a “faux apology”, a “non-apology”, a “hollow apology”, and an “unspecified apology.” The author of Mean Street blog (WSJ) Evan Newmark called it a “big PR exercise” that is “so sequenced and packaged that it’s bound to come across as disingenuous, even deeply cynical.”
The negative public reaction was caused mainly by the apparent disconnect between Goldman’s carefully calibrated message and real issues that the company still needs to fix if it is to restore public trust and earn forgiveness.

Tiger One Over Par
Tiger Woods’ attempts to apologize also caused a mixed public reaction.
On November 27, 2009 Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant near his house. After the incident brought to light many affairs, Woods posted two separate apologies on his website, several days apart.
After the first apology mainstream media, bloggers, vendors, corporate sponsors, and the golf community expressed major disappointment and dismay at Woods’ behavior and did not accept his apology as sufficient. Woods’ story caused a lot of debate even among the apology experts. The only stakeholders who showed support were his fans. Most of them accepted his apology, demonstrating higher tolerance for his personal failings.

Woods’ second apology was more successful and resulted in mostly positive reviews among his fans, critics, media, the golf community etc. It could have been even more effective if the athlete had come clean earlier and had delivered the apology in person rather than on his website.

Why Didn’t the Apologies Work?

Why didn’t people believe Goldman Sachs CEO’s apology? Why did Woods’ first apology reach his fans but did not convince others? Why did his second apology result in more positive reaction among his stakeholders?
What type of public apology do people need to hear to be able to believe it and accept it?
The authors of “The Five Languages of Apology,” Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas, might have an answer.

When we apologize we hope that the act of sincere apology will eliminate bad consequences and automatically earn forgiveness of other people. But the authors discovered that “…sincere apologies may not always be received as sincere and forgiveness and reconciliation are not always forthcoming.”
In other words, an act of apology alone doesn’t necessarily lead to forgiveness. Rather, people tend to forgive based on their own decision-making process as triggered by various forms of language.
The authors discovered that when people apologize they tend to use one or more of 5 different languages of apology:
➢ expressing regret,
➢ accepting responsibility,
➢ making restitution,
➢ genuinely repenting,
➢ and requesting forgiveness.

Each person has his/her own primary language of apology, which is usually defined by his/her sense of morality, culture, and spiritual traditions. When making an apology, each of us would use our own primary language of apology to demonstrate how sincere our intentions are. For instance, if our personal apology language is to express regret, we will consider our own apology sincere by showing regret. But when receiving an apology, we consider the apology sincere only if it is delivered in our primary apology language of regret. Similarly, if our own apology language involves making restitution, we will believe an apology to be sincere and accept it only if it provides restitution. But what if the apology is couched in language other than our own? If we require an expression of regret as a necessary part of an apology, and the person apologizing speaks only of restitution, we won’t accept the apology.

Let’s have a quick look at 5 apology languages:

#1: Expressing Regret
#2: Accepting Responsibility
#3: Making Restitution
#4: Genuinely Repenting
#5: Requesting Forgiveness

Apology language #1: Expressing regret
People whose primary apology language is expressing regret will accept an apology as sincere when they hear genuine “I’m sorry.” For them, the expression of regret is the first step to earn forgiveness. Regret demonstrates that an offender recognized his/her wrongdoing as hurtful to others and is ready to deal with it. But most important, it signals to others that the offender can express empathy for hurting other people. For people whose primary apology language is expressing regret it is very important to experience the regret verbally. In rare occasions regret can be expressed through body language. Example: Watch Kanye West apology on Jay Leno

Apology Language #2: Accepting Responsibility
According to the authors, the ability to admit mistakes and accept responsibility is the second most important component of a sincere apology, “Admitting the wrongdoing and communicating it to other stakeholders requires humility and honesty. Without these or similar words that accept responsibility for one’s wrong behavior, they will not sense that the other person has sincerely apologized.” For people whose primary apology language is accepting responsibility, hearing the words “I was wrong” communicates the apologist’s willingness to take responsibility and make the first step to earn forgiveness.

Apology Language #3: Making Restitution
For some people restitution is the most important component of a sincere apology, “The idea of making things right to make up for a wrong is embedded within the human psyche, and both our judicial system and our human relationships are deeply influenced by this fundamental idea.“ For these people, restitution is the tangible measure of a sincere apology. For people whose primary apology language is making restitution, the most important part is the apology aftermath – how the offender fixes or remediates the issue.

Apology Language #4: Genuinely Repenting
Some people will argue that the most important part of a true apology is repentance and a promise of the offender not to repeat the wrongdoing. Repentance, often used as a synonym of remorse and regret, in fact, has a more complex meaning. The Greek word for repentance – metanoia- means “to think differently after” – to take a new point of view and find a better way. For people whose primary apology language is genuine repentance, the most important part of an apology will be “an expression of intent to change” behavior or way of thinking about an issue, situation, or an individual. The intent to change comes in three parts: a promise to change, a plan how to make this change happen, an action.

Apology Language #5: Requesting forgiveness.
Forgiveness is a generous act of letting go of resentment and retaliation. The authors’ research showed that one in every 5 people (21%) expects an apologist to ask for forgiveness. For people whose primary apology language is requesting forgiveness, the most important part of a sincere apology is the offender’s need to be forgiven because it shows that he/she “is willing to put the future of the relationships in the hands of the offended person” and wants to see the relationships fully restored.

Having interviewed individuals and married couples the authors noticed that there is lack of persuasive apologies between couples because people tend to speak different languages when they apologize. Seventy five percent of married couples, according to the authors of the book, differ in their primary apology language. In 15% of the couples one member’s primary language is the other member’s last choice, “ If you apologize to your spouse in the way that you most want to be apologized to, our data suggest that, on average, you wouldn’t stumble upon his or her favorite apology language until your third attempt.” That means that three out of four families must learn an apology language different from what they would like to hear. Most people internalize one or two languages of apology and use or expect to hear them exclusively when an apology is in order. As the author explains, “For most people, one or two of three speak more deeply or sincerity than the others. You don’t need to include all five languages to offer an effective apology. For an apology to be accepted, you need to speak the language (or perhaps two languages) that conveys to the offended your sincerity. Then he or she will regard your apology as genuine and will likely accept it.”

Using 2 or 3 languages in personal and one-on-one apologies can be sufficient to match the apology demands of the affected party. But does it mean that using only 2 or 3 apology languages will work effectively for companies and individuals that are facing a multiplicity of stakeholders?

In crisis, the reputation of a company or an individual often depends on their ability to respond quickly by admitting the wrongdoing and genuinely apologizing. Every organization has a multiplicity of stakeholders: customers, employees, distributors, regulators, shareholders, local and international communities, critics and fans. And each of these constituencies has its own primary language of apology. For some, an expression of regret would be enough to demonstrate a sincere apology, for others it won’t be sufficient. Hence, to deliver a sincere and effective public apology, a company or individual has to hit all 5 notes of apology chord, or in other words, speak all 5 languages of apology.
The apologies from Mr. Blankfein and Woods demonstrate how using 2 or 3 languages of apology might not be sufficient when the company faces a multiplicity of stakeholders.

Goldman Sachs CEO’s apology
In his apology, Mr. Blankfein clearly used two apology languages: expressing regret and accepting responsibility, “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” Despite the fact that he failed to name the wrongdoing and specify to whom he is apologizing to, Mr. Blankfein still managed to get his 2 apology languages across. He failed, however, to speak the other three languages: making restitution, showing genuine repentance and requesting forgiveness.

1. Mr. Blankfein did not provide sufficient restitution. The restitution of $500M offered by the company couldn’t really suffice for a meaningful contribution because it was just a small fraction of Goldman Sachs’ business and was directed at a group other than those directly affected by Goldman’s actions. The New York Times opined, “…if Goldman wants to make a meaningful contribution, it would have to be in the billions and aimed more directly at taxpayers.”

2. Mr. Blankfein did not show repentance. Mr. Blankfein demonstrated the lack of true repentance on his side by not willing to change the company’s behavior. His apology was not his first attempt to try to win public trust. In February 2009 Mr. Blankfein wrote a piece for the Financial Times about responsibility in the financial sector where he agreed that, “People are understandably angry and our industry has to account for its role in what has transpired.” In June 2009 he was criticized for bragging about his company while trying to show regret about the financial crisis, “While we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice, we are proud of the way our firm managed the risk it assumed on behalf of our client before and during the financial crisis.”

As Crisis Musings blog wrote, “Companies successfully work their way out of a problem because they address the problem, and not just the perception of the problem. In other words, a business problem requires a business fix. A letter of apology or regret published in a newspaper solves nothing.”

3. Mr. Blankfein did not ask for forgiveness. The company’s CEO failed to speak the 5th language of apology – requesting public forgiveness. The apology came across as a one-way message to the rest of the world that did not demonstrate a true intent of Goldman’s executives to earn public forgiveness. As Mark Gilbert from Bloomberg wrote, “Goldman and its peers need to practice humility and contrition for an extended period, rather than seeking image-buffing headlines with token gestures.”

Mr. Blankfein’s apology had a much better chance to communicate the message of responsibility and regret for the financial crisis. Unfortunately, by making a half apology, he lost this chance and failed to win the trust of stakeholders. Mr. Blankfein apology became the first public apology ever made by an investment bank, and for that Mr. Blankfein deserves some credit. But if the leader of Goldman Sachs ever decides to make another public mea culpa, he should learn his stakeholders’ primary apology languages and make sure that he uses them all in his apology. He also should remember that the willingness of his stakeholders to grant forgiveness might not be immediately available and earning forgiveness might take a long time.

Tiger Woods’ apologies
Tiger Woods’ first apology was posted on his website on December 2, 2009 and had 2.5 languages of apology: expressing regret and taking responsibility, “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart. I have not been true to my values and the behavior my family deserves.”
He made an attempt to use the language of repentance by promising to be “…. a better person and the husband and father…,” but never explained what he was planning to do to accomplish that.

What did Woods fail to do?
- Tiger never said directly “What I did was wrong.”
- He tried to justify his actions by saying,
“I am not without faults and I am far short of perfect.”
- He didn’t immediately apologize to his family for hurting them and to his fans for disappointing them.
- He failed to provide restitution.
- And failed to ask for forgiveness.

Most of the general public found it is hard to accept his apology, “… when so much dirt comes in the press every day. There is no crisis management possible, because, by not addressing this issue right from the start, Tiger Woods lost all the credibility he ever had.” (From Everything PR blog) On the contrary, a lot of Woods’ fans remained more tolerant to the athlete’s personal failings. Based on my assessment of the comments on his Facebook page and his website, the majority of the fans accepted his apology or remained neutral.

Some comments from Tiger Woods blog:

” That’s good enough for me. First act of healing is admitting the problem. It is never too late to do the right thing…”

“72 wins, 13 majors. Remember when he crushed the field by more than ten strokes winning his first green jacket? How about the 2008 US Open, winning on a broken leg. This is the stuff that made Tiger who he is, not his personal image. All any of us should care about is his golf career and how he changed the game of golf by opening the door to young (and old) minority golfers around the world.”

Tiger Woods’ apology sparked debate even among apology experts. The thought leader on apology, John Kador argued in his blog that Tiger Woods is accountable to the public for his transgressions and therefore owes a public apology. He wrote, “Tiger Woods is perhaps the world’s wealthiest and most privileged athlete. From where does that wealth and privilege derive? From his talent, no doubt, but also from a compact he has made with his sponsors and the public. It has been a carefully cultivated compact that goes way beyond his performance on the golf course and from which he continues to draw resources.”

The authors of Perfect Apology blog, took a different stance on this issue and offered their perspective, “Tiger owes the public and his fans a “public” apology — which is precisely what he delivered ….. To claim that Tiger somehow OWES these people a more detailed apology than the one he has already offered, when they themselves have profited enormously from Tiger’s talent, is a bit of a stretch.”

The second apology was posed on December 11, 2009 and was addressed to Woods’ family, fans, Golf foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and fellow competitors. Most Tiger’s critics accepted his apology but still criticized him for failing to communicate to the public directly.

This time Tiger hit all five notes of a sincere apology chord:
- He expressed regret and accepted responsibility for what he did, specifying the wrongdoing, ”I am deeply aware of the disappointment and hurt that my infidelity has caused to so many people, most of all my wife and children.”
- He extended his apology to the public, “I would like to ask everyone, including my fans, the good people at my foundation, business partners, the PGA Tour, and my fellow competitors, for their understanding.”
- He asked the public for forgiveness, “I want to say again to everyone that I am profoundly sorry and that I ask forgiveness…”
- He showed a sign of genuine repentance, “It may not be possible to repair the damage I’ve done, but I want to do my best to try.”
- He offered restitution and proved that he is ready to pay any price to redeem his transgressions, “After much soul searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf. I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father, and person.”
- And finally, Tiger expressed his gratitude to his supporters,
“….I am especially grateful for all those who have offered compassion and concern during this difficult period.”

Tiger did a better job with the second apology using all five languages of apology and got more positive reviews from his fans, apology experts and the general public. See below:

Comments from Tiger Woods blog:
“You are an awesome golfer & now you need to be an awesome father & husband. Take the time to fix/mend this situation….Anyone who is a fan, like me, will always be a fan.”

“… I have an 11yr or girl and a 9 year old boy who just adore Tiger. I explained to them in detail what is going on and what Tiger has done and instead of them turning their backs on him, both of them said ” dad, can we pray for Tiger tonight” They have been praying for him for the past 3 nights….”

From Perfect Apology:
“…the most significant additional item in this round is the announcement by Tiger that he will take an indefinite leave of absence from golf to focus on repairing the damage. …the second apology offers at least some additional restitution.”

From Effective Apology:
“….Woods finally delivered a statement that, for the first time, demonstrated his acknowledgment that while he may be entitled to a measure of privacy, he is not entitled to total secrecy…. “

Even PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem backed Woods and tried to reframe his role as an underdog , “I think people will look at the number one athlete of the decade and pull for him, now really in an underdog position….”

But there was still a lot of criticism of Woods’ failure to deliver the apology directly to the public. Phil Taylor from Golf.com wrote, “If he wants to regain anything approaching the high regard the public once had for him, he’s going to have to open up to us more — and for a man who named his yacht Privacy, that’s going to be harder than winning the U.S. Open on a wrecked knee.” Some people left comments of Tiger Woods Facebook page,“Tiger, you really need to get out from behind your curtain. No more statements posted on a website. Get in front of the cameras and take it like a man.” Woods’ corporate sponsors didn’t buy his apology either and stopped airing the ads. Accenture became the first corporate sponsor to publicly announce that Tiger Woods is “no longer the right representative” of the company.

Why did Tiger’s apologies get mixed public reactions? In his first apology, Tiger used only 2.5 out of 5 apology languages and received a negative public reaction. In his second apology, Tiger used all five languages of apology and received a more positive reaction from most of his constituencies. Unfortunately, by issuing two online apologies and failing to face the public directly, he let his critics define the situation and watched his reputation go down the drain. From crisis management point of view, Tiger did a terrible job of handling the crisis – he broke all rules of effective crisis response and crisis communications. And for that he deserves the lowest grades.

What lessons can Goldman Sachs’ and Tiger Woods’ apologies teach us?

1. Public apology is always intended for multiple stakeholders.
Public apologies differ from personal apologies simply because they tend to reach much bigger audiences. No matter who is apologizing, a company or an individual, each of them will have to face multiple stakeholders that are very diverse in their sense of morality, culture and spiritual traditions. Hence, all stakeholders will be making judgments about the sincerity of a public apology based on their individual values.

2. Effective public apology is a 5-note chord.
Public apology should be very well thought through and address each stakeholder group using its primary language of apology. Sometimes, it’s enough to incorporate 2 or 3 languages of apology to reach the key stakeholders and make a good public apology. However, considering the diversity and complexity of stakeholders’ cultural and spiritual background, public apology would be more effective if a company or an individual includes all five languages of apology: Expressing Regret, Accepting Responsibility, Making Restitution, Genuinely Repenting, and Requesting Forgiveness. In other words, public apology is always more effective if an apologist plays all five notes of apology chord.

Teachable moments in communication arrive in many forms.

Take 2 minutes and 8 seconds to witness an act of elegance and meaning.

Start Asking from Ryan Fitzgibbon on Vimeo.

Ryan Fitzgibbon designed the video you just watched to comment on the United States’ progress on civil rights.  I found it during some random Twitter-surfing, and when I first saw it, I said, “Wow! This really speaks to me.” Here’s what resonated: Fitzgibbon took the opportunity to be a provocateur, but in the best way possible. His language and images are spare, but he moves through the difficult issue of prejudice with great sensitivity and impact.

The video succeeds for me because its creator employs most of what I will call the 10 Rules of Communication Elegance:

Rule 1. Aim for elegance. Before you even begin to share your ideas, unpack half of that suitcase of information you’ve brought for the occasion. Make better use of your nucleus of ideas by stripping them down to basics. Yes, simplicity is a baseline requirement for communication. But elegance is even more focused and strategic: it informs simplicity. It not only transmits, it inspires. Keep reading, and I’ll tell you how.

Application: Fitzgibbon packs so much punch in a very short period of time – about the length of a television commercial break. There is no excess information. He pushes us to begin being more tolerant today just by questioning ourselves. He doesn’t download all his knowledge about prejudice and discrimination. He just gives us the stripped-down essentials for immediate action. I found myself asking the questions the video presented.

Rule 2. Punctuate your communications with meaning. Inspiration doesn’t automatically follow the expression of ideas. Inspire others with an act of meaning. That’s how I’m defining elegance: it is simplicity plus meaning. Minds differ on what meaning is, but, for me, it’s working toward a shared good. It’s sharing what I have and what I know to help empower others.

Application: Eliminating prejudice and discrimination is an undeniable collective good. In his video, Fitzgibbon draws us in with an urgent problem and then gives us an immediate tool to deal with it. That call to action is meaningful and gives his communication resonance.

Rule 3. Lead with the dynamic duo–your energy and emotion. The duo also goes by the name passion, and the literature on leadership and public speaking overflows with discussions about it. But the truth remains: With passion, you will connect to others. It is perfectly fine to communicate with structure, strategy and intentionality, but let your energy and emotion seek some entropy, and others will want to follow right along with you.

Application: This video bristles with emotion.  All the usual visual clutter of life has been removed, and we are only able to zoom in on the closed eyes and facial expressions of the people we see. The unsteady camera seems to twitch along with the muscles of the narrators. We may not see into their souls, but we hear the emotion in their voices, we feel the clinched discomfort in their body language, and we sense the urgency of what they are asking. That urgency is contagious.

Rule 4. Develop an authentic point of view and express it in your own way and on your own terms. Your authenticity will influence others to be led by you. Don’t try to be a cover version of someone else. Discussions of authenticity also abound in the literature. Never mind that. Being authentic means being natural, having integrity and always striving to express your best self. It is a fundamental building block of credibility.

Application: Fitzgibbons allows the authenticity of the people in his video to speak directly to us. Through their words and body language, we begin to understand the pain of exclusion and misunderstanding. We believe them.

Rule 5. Mix in some surprise. Surprise scrambles the brain’s thought sequencers temporarily and then facilitates a higher level of learning. It forces people to think of something in a different way. Use some surprise at the beginning of your narrative, and the results may surprise you.

Application: Fitzgibbon’s video does the unexpected. It does not pontificate on a subject that has inspired much pontification. There is no lecture on prejudice before the call to action. There is merely a stream of thought-provoking questions. While they may not be entirely surprising, they are certainly disarming. Fitzgibbon also orchestrates a sense of mystery. Throughout the video, we wonder what our questioners will do next. We wonder when they will open their eyes. What will the great reveal be? Will our eyes open along with theirs?

Rule 6. Add visuals. They provide a concrete picture to which people can relate. They point to a specific example. And images drive learning.

Application: Do we really need to discuss this one? The video has impact because of its spare and stunning visuals.

Rule 7. Tell a story. By all means, make it personal. Real-life vignettes or detailed case studies take statements out of the abstract and ground them with concreteness. Never underestimate the power of storytelling.

Application: Fitzgibbons shows us that meaningful stories don’t have to be long. They just have to be personally compelling.

Rule 8. Signal your critical points of information with numbers. Think “three key takeaways,” “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” and “5 Ways Social Media Can Drive More People to Your Website.” These countable items provide your listeners and viewers with a road map for what comes next. They’ll want to go with you if you let them know where they are going.

Application: So, we see our filmmaker didn’t use this one. Well, I did say he used most of the rules.

Rule 9. Repeat your critical points with nuance. Repetition drives learning, but rote iteration isn’t what I mean. Don’t just repeat. Build on the points you’ve already made. When revisiting key ideas, be sure to add texture, shading and nuance.

Application: Fitzgibbon builds his entire video by repeating his theme. With each new person we see we get a new frame of reference. We are able to see how prejudice is personal in different ways for different people.

Rule 10. The rules provide valuable fundamentals but they do not guarantee success. Applying the rules will make you a good technician. Using them will make you more persuasive. But, you can only become an artisan by repeatedly putting them into practice. Never leave homebase without Rules 1 through 4. And, then, learning how to use Rules 5 through 9 judiciously will take you farther along the path of becoming an elegant communicator.

Application: Obviously, Fitzgibbons has practiced his craft. We thank him for being so elegant in this teachable moment.

Click here for more info about Ryan Fitzgibbon and the making of the video.