We're Back!

It's been awhile since I posted. That's because I spent the past year+ in an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of my city, Natchez, Mississippi. During the campaign, I focused on attracting voters rather than new clients or professional relationships. I continued to consult, just not to pursue business development in a systematic way.

Now I'm back and ready to go.

I've also established a subsidiary business, Community Renewal Partners. Rather than work with companies, government agencies or other institutions, Community Renewal Partners will assist communities trying to resolve divisive issues. Please check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested.   www.communityrenewalpartners.com

When You're Sued, Never Say "No Comment"

Most executives and attorneys are much more sensitive to the need for good crisis communications than they were when I began consulting in 1995. One thing that has not changed, though, is their propensity to refuse to comment on news stories about lawsuits.

Going back to the days when I was a newspaper reporter, attorneys have typically responded to requests for comment on “suits filed” stories by saying something like, “We haven’t yet seen the complaint, so I can’t comment.” Or, “We never comment on litigation.”

To an attorney, these responses may sound as if they provide some cover, but in reality they are the kiss of death. I have read hundreds of civil complaints, and nearly every one – if all you knew was what you read in the complaint – sounded credible. Plaintiffs’ lawyers are great at drafting complaints that are believably devastating to the reputation of the defendant.

If the defendant doesn’t respond in the news story, the piece will, of necessity, be entirely based on the complaint. So here’s what happens in many news stories about lawsuits:

Smith Electric Co. sued Stanton Brothers Industries yesterday, claiming the electronics manufacturer deliberately ignored the specifications on products it made for Smith and substituted cheaper materials. The lawsuit says the bogus products caused several accidents and injuries and led to a recall that costs Smith millions of dollars. Stanton Brothers attorney Roger Dodger said he could not comment because he had not seen the complaint. The Smith suit claims…(20 inches more on the complaint)

Who benefits from Dodger’s no-comment? Certainly not Stanton Brothers.

Though it may be true that the defendant has not seen the complaint, that’s no insurmountable object for smart people. If nothing else, the reporter obviously has it and can provide it.

In the worst case scenario – and the worst case may be that not only has the suit not been served, but the defendant has reason to believe it probably is meritorious – the company can respond in general terms. Talk about procedures and practices. Mention that no other of your hundreds of customers has ever complained. Bring up the quality award you won. If you have a policy and a culture of rigidly adhering to specs, say so.

Sometimes the defendant knows a lawsuit is coming and knows in general what the allegations will be. If that’s the case, a response should already have been drafted and ready to go with any tweaking required by the actual complaint.

The point is not to debate the case in the media but to give the reader or viewer a reason to be skeptical about the suit, or at least open minded. And – as a final note – saying, “We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against these allegations” doesn’t accomplish that. That’s a fig leaf best noted for its transparency.

Help for When You Must Think on Your Feet

Although some crisis situations can – or at least should – be foreseen, many cannot.

Several years ago we created a four-sided, wallet-size card with important tips on how to communicate when hit with a sudden crisis. Many excellent leaders and managers can freeze or panic when confronted with a threat they weren’t counting on.

We recently updated the card, which is a quick way to focus on what needs to be done in the early moments of a crisis. The advice it contains can help avoid a disastrous public gaffe.

Here are some excerpts from the card.

The first page offers “Quick Crisis Communications Response” tips, including:

• Make sure you understand all the facts that are knowable at the time…
• Think through what you want to communicate…
• Develop an Internet strategy that includes paying attention to…what’s being said online

Pages two and three provide DOs and DON’Ts such as…

Do:
• Select one or two message points that must come across
• Take your time answering questions…
• Challenge misinformation or obvious bias in a reporter’s questions

Don’t:
• Guess or speculate about anything you’re not sure of
• Point fingers or assign blame…
• Use technical terms or industry jargon

To get free copies of the card, send an email request to furlow@furlowcommunications.com. We’re happy to send you a few sample cards or tell us the full quantity you need and we’ll send more. All we ask is that you include a little information about who you are and what kind of folks will be using the cards. For many years, our clients an

I'm an Adult: Treat Me Like One

When a Mom sees her teenage son standing before her, pawing the ground with the bottoms of his shoes and staring intently at their tops, she knows something is up, right?

Similarly, when a cable customer reads a letter that begins, “At Time Warner Cable, we strive to bring you the best products and services available,” the hairs on the back of the neck immediately rise. You know that by the end of this letter you’re going to be paying more for cable. When you get to, “We’re making adjustments effective with your next billing statement,” they don’t even have to say the prices are going up. And, in fact, this Time Warner letter never does.

Beyond an insistence on telling the truth, if we have a No. 1 rule of how to communicate serious messages, it’s probably, “Don’t insult your audience’s intelligence.”

We propose the following maxim to any company that must tell its customers or others news they’re not going to want to hear:

• If you give someone necessary bad news, they won’t like it but they’ll get over it.
• If you give someone necessary bad news in a way that treats them like they’re stupid, your relationship will never be the same.

One week after buying a Baton Rouge company called Lewis Computer Services and telling the staff it had no plans for layoffs, Missouri-based HealthcareFirst laid off one-third of the Lewis employees. “We realized we did have some overlap in employees and we made adjustments,” said the HealthcareFirst CEO.

There are only two ways to interpret that statement: (1) Our pre-acquisition due diligence was so shoddy, we didn’t know we had duplication, or (2) we lied.

Mergers and acquisitions inevitably cause anxiety among the staffs of both the acquiring and acquired sides, and that’s unfortunate. But losing the trust of the employees is worse.

And then there is United Airlines, whose United Express left a woman sleeping on a plane for four hours after landing. United usually wants its United Express passengers to think they’re flying its Friendly Skies and not those of some contractor. But when something goes wrong it’s suddenly, “We are working closely with our partner Trans States Airlines to investigate the cause and remedy the situation...” Apparently United neither maintains the standards for United Express nor stands behind its service.

Thinking back to our guilty teenager, it’s likely his parents would begin a conversation by saying, “Whatever you’ve done, just tell us. It’ll go a lot better for everyone if you just come clean and don’t treat us like fools.”

That’s intuitive with parents. Why is it such a hard lesson for companies?

Lawyers vs. Communicators in a Crisis

The frequent conflict between the advice of lawyers and that of communicators is one element of an interesting New York Times story on handling terrible news. The piece uses the BP, Toyota and Goldman Sachs debacles to tell universal lessons of crisis communications.

Here’s the link to the story, but if it’s too long for you, below are some excerpts and good quotes from well-known crisis communications professionals. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22crisis.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all
Paragraphs that do not quote someone directly were taken verbatim from the Times story.

As conventional wisdom has it, the three companies at the center of these fiascos worsened their problems by failing to heed established protocol: When the story is bad, disclose it immediately — awful parts included — lest you be forced to backtrack and slide into the death spiral of lost credibility.

“Companies that typically handle crises well, you never hear about them,” says James Donnelly, senior vice president for crisis management at the public relations colossus Ketchum… There’s not a lot of news when the company takes responsibility and moves on. The good crisis-management examples rarely end waving the flag of victory. They end with a whisper, and it’s over in a day or two.”

Measuring success in a crisis

“The two things that are very hard to survive are hypocrisy and ridicule,” says Eric Dezenhall, a communications strategist in Washington. “It’s the height of arrogance to assume that in the middle of a crisis the public yearns for chestnuts of wisdom from people they want to kill. The goal is not to get people not to hate them. It’s to get people to hate them less.”

[BP] had to contend with a classic corporate quandary of balancing advice from counselors with starkly different considerations, according to people familiar with BP’s deliberations who requested anonymity because the advice was confidential.

In times of crisis, communications professionals and lawyers often pursue conflicting agendas. Communications strategists are inclined to mollify public anger with expressions of concern, while lawyers warn that contrition can be construed as admissions of guilt in potentially expensive lawsuits.

For BP, this tension burst into view in May, when executives went to Capitol Hill with officials from two of its contractors: Transocean, which owned the offshore rig that exploded, and Halliburton, which aided BP in drilling. Executives from the three companies each disowned culpability while pointing fingers at one another.

“What that screamed is the lawyers are in control," says [former Merrill Lynch media relations vice president Eddie] Reeves. "All it did was get everybody all the more peeved at them.”

People will forgive an honest mistake but not a dishonest cover-up

Of Toyota, Reeves said, “When you’re in the mix of these really obtuse situations where nobody really knows the facts, in some sense the facts are less important than your posture toward the facts. People are reasonable. They know companies make mistakes, and people will forgive an honest mistake. They will not forgive a dishonest cover-up.”

Yet seeking a way around a painful public reckoning appears to be a nearly universal approach to corporate crises. In the long run, the best course for an embattled company may be swiftly owning up to its errors. But to human beings stuck with the task of disclosing embarrassing details here and now, dissembling and delaying may beckon as the easiest way to get through the day.

Children stuck on scary roller coasters sometimes close their eyes and wait for the ride to end. So, apparently, do grown-ups heading giant corporations in crisis. This is the conventional explanation for how three enormously successful enterprises managed to prolong and deepen their public relations agony.

“These companies made the same mistakes,” says Howard Rubenstein, the public relations luminary who represents the New York Yankees and the News Corporation. “They broke the cardinal rule of crisis management: They didn’t seem to have a crisis plan in hand. They sought to minimize the extent of their problems, and they never seemed to display an understanding for the situation they were in.”

No Guarantees in Life

We often remind clients that crisis communications is an art, not a science. Even with the benefit of experience, we never know exactly how choosing one course of action over another will work out. The Hewlett-Packard/Mark Hurd soap opera underscores the point.

The H-P board of directors fired former CEO Hurd on Aug. 6 for…well, the ambiguity in the explanation of Hurd’s firing is part of the story. In any case, he was fired over events having to do with a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Jodie Fisher, a former actress who had been contracted by H-P to schmooze with executives at company parties.

The New York Times on Aug. 10 implied that the H-P board of directors had followed the advice of an APCO Worldwide consultant when it decided to fire Hurd. That seemed odd, and when we reviewed some of the coverage online before writing this blog, we saw that the Times had issued a correction making clear that APCO had not recommended the firing.

But the consultant did write a faux news story to show what ongoing coverage of a sexual harassment investigation of Hurd might look like, and apparently that was influential in the board’s decision. Writing this kind of story is a common technique to help a client see how its situation might be perceived by journalists. It can bring focus to the decisions that must be made, and we have used it several times to good effect.

Whether the board made the best decision in firing Hurd is beyond our scope. The point is that, as bad as things have gone for H-P since its decision, we cannot know if they would have been just as bad or worse had the board taken the alternative course and endured the drumbeat of negative coverage predicted by APCO.

Where the H-P strategy fell apart was in its execution. In a crisis, decisive action clearly articulated is required to get people to believe you and believe in you.

Even though we cannot know in advance the outcome of a particular course of action, once a decision is made, it’s important to commit to the strategy. It is essential to speak with one voice and tell a consistent story during a crisis. Talking to the news media should not be a democratic pursuit.

The H-P board failed in this regard. A series of anonymous and amorphous tales emphasizing different reasons for Hurd’s firing made the board’s decision-making process appear muddled and opened the door to criticism from Hurd’s supporters.

In what the New York Times called “a stream of leaks from both sides,” Hurd and H-P have dragged out the corporate melodrama to their mutual detriment. Story after story has offered anonymous quotes from “a person familiar with the situation,” “people with knowledge of the board’s thinking” and “a person close to Mr. Hurd.”

Neither side can lay claim to the high ground or to much credibility.

The H-P board may have been given excellent advice, and the directors may have made a reasonable decision. But because they failed to follow through on the strategy, we’ll never know.

After all, it’s an art, not a science.

An Ounce of Grace, a Cup of Perspective

Other than a good ethical compass, there is probably no more valuable attribute during a crisis than a sense of perspective. Anyone who can keep a level head on his or her shoulders when under the glare of spotlights generally reveals character traits the public will applaud and admire.

Examples of grace under pressure can be seen in the reactions of three people who this summer were unexpectedly thrust onto the national stage.

Major League pitcher Armando Galarraga and umpire Jim Joyce were forever joined in baseball lore when Joyce’s erroneous call with two outs in the ninth inning denied the Detroit Tigers’ pitcher a perfect game. For those in baseball, that’s not your basic inconsequential blown call.

Fans were outraged. TV couldn’t stop showing the replay even on non-sports shows. But the two men at the center of the hubbub showed calm and perspective. When Joyce saw the evidence of his mistake after the game, he immediately went to the Detroit locker room and apologized to Galarraga. An umpire apologizing to a player? Never happens. It’s surprising the stadium didn’t crumble.

For his part, the young Venezuelan showed more maturity and graciousness than anyone else in the ballpark, if not all of Michigan. He accepted Joyce’s apology with a hug and said, “Nobody’s perfect,” perhaps an ironic play on words. The next night, when Joyce manfully refused to skip his turn umpiring behind home plate, Galarraga delivered the Tigers’ lineup card to him in the pre-game meeting, and they smiled and talked. Talk about a “teachable moment.”

Shirley Sherrod’s 15 minutes of fame was somewhat more serious. Much has been written about the unconscionable mistakes made by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the Obama Administration and the national NAACP for falling prey to a right-wing blogger’s hoax and rushing to the judgment that Sherrod had made racist remarks in a local NAACP speech. We’ll look instead at how Sherrod handled the situation.

Before it was discovered that the blogger had edited Sherrod’s remarks to the NAACP in Coffee County, Georgia, to make them appear racist rather than the redemption story they actually were, Vilsack publicly and unceremoniously fired her from her job as the USDA rural development officer in the state. When the hoax was exposed the next day, the Secretary, the national NAACP and even the President apologized, and Sherrod was offered a new position.

So how did she react? She said she did not need an apology from the President. “You know, he’s the President of the United States. I would not want him to apologize to me.”

And after she got the apology anyway, she said, “I didn’t feel I needed that to feel whole or better,” she said. “If in any way what I’ve gone through can help move people in this country to a better understanding of each other, I’m willing to do it.”

No bitterness. No making the President or even Vilsack grovel. Come down to rural Georgia and see what this place is like, she said to the President. Let’s learn from this and move on.

Even though Sherrod, Joyce and Galarraga may be “the small people,” as BP Chairman Carl-Henrick Svanberg would say, they may offer lessons for corporate titans under stress.

When a person responds to adversity of any kind with dignity and a perspective that acknowledges theirs is not the biggest problem in the world, the public’s appreciation and admiration is huge.