Former colleague and current Examiner.com columnist, Phil Mann, recently interviewed me for his article, “The importance of workplace communications during a crisis.”
Key callout:
Donnelly argues that the employee audience is a crucial one that, in an ideal world, should be addressed first or at least simultaneously to the initial release of public information. He believes this is even more essential given the immediate access to information today via social media.
Like many, I was a little surprised by the initial under-reaction of Warren Buffett’s response to the David Sokol resignation. In case you missed the full story, Sokol personally bought a boatload of shares of a company that he soon recommended get acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.
Buffett responded with a rather vanilla quote in the initial press release: “Neither Dave nor I feel his Lubrizol purchases were in any way unlawful.”
Quite a flaccid response from the man who once reportedly opined: “Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.”
However, rather than rush to WordPress with a damning blog post, I decided to wait until more facts were made public. On Monday, an article by Andrew Ross Sorkin restored some of my faith in the Oracle of Omaha.
Last August, I wrote a blog post that compared the Toyota recall frenzy of 2010 to the Audi 5000 frenzy of 1986. At that time, there were reports that investigators were having trouble finding any “sudden acceleration” problems tied to the Toyota electronics.
Four months later, I followed up with a post that covered the sensational media reporting of ABC News’ Brian Ross. The February broadcast — in the thick of the media frenzy — featured dramatic footage of driver tests that pointed to software/electronic problems with Toyota vehicles. The report leaned heavily on findings of a professor of automotive technology, whose work was commissioned by a paid advocate for trial lawyers (not disclosed in the original ABC News broadcast). Tsk, tsk.
Earlier this week, federal investigators confirmed that there is no evidence of electronic failures that led to Toyota sudden acceleration incidents. Thus, the circle is complete – the Toyota 2010 situation is the doppelganger of the Audi 1986 situation. Both situations point to “pedal misapplication” as a likely cause in most of the reported accidents. Both situations end with calls to move the brake and accelerator pedals a little further apart to avoid such confusion.
Summarizing this situation now is difficult, but this is a good callout from Jeffrey Liker’s post on Harvard Business Review blog:
So who won in this debacle? Journalists who wrote speculative and poorly researched sensational articles got a lot of internet hits. NHTSA got a lot of attention, a larger budget, and a reputation for toughness. It remains to be seen whether the lawyers suing Toyota will get anything. American drivers got a paranoid auto industry that will recall vehicles at the drop of a hat. There will be some positive safety policies relating to how runaway cars are shut off in an emergency, and we all may get “black boxes” that record our recent driving actions. And Toyota got a crisis that drove it to reflect intensively and to make dramatic changes to improve its responsiveness to customer concerns, so likely will emerge stronger — but lost billions of dollars of value in the process.
Other implications? Continue reading Toyota recall aftermath: many protagonists fail inspection
Recently, I led a breakout session at the Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism. My topic was “effective crisis management foundations” – a condensed version of a training program that we’ve built at Ketchum. It’s our belief that you cannot have strong crisis management approaches, nor plans or systems, without the foundation of a strong crisis management leader. SALES PITCH: If you’re ever interested in learning more about this leadership training opportunity from Ketchum, drop me a line.
During the Q&A session, the tourism pros asked questions that may yield lessons for others, so I’ve captured those here. Disclaimer: Everything below is paraphrased from memory, since I couldn’t take notes during the session.
Q: When an organization faces a determined critic, when should criticisms be ignored, and when is it time to address the critic?
A: This is difficult to answer specifically because so many factors need to be considered. However, in general, begin by analyzing the critic…and the criticisms. Is the critic credible to your audiences that matter? Is the critic making an impact on your business? How much traction might the critic or criticisms gain through social media? Are the criticisms easy to defend, or do they require deeper explanation? If the latter, is there a way to tell your side of the story in a compelling way? These are just starter questions, of course – there are many more factors to consider before “getting down in the mud,” if required.
I’m delighted to launch this interview series – dubbed Three Tough Q’s – with one of the true luminaries of risk and crisis communication, Peter Sandman. If you haven’t had the privilege, I encourage you to attend one of Peter’s speaking engagements or tap the cornucopia of resources on his Web site.
Interview highlights appear here, but each question also links to the complete, robust responses that appear on Peter’s Web site.
Without further ado – enter, Sandman:
