A Season of Discontent: Tiger, Toyota, BP

“I want to find out what your thinking was…Did you learn anything?”
The voice of Tiger Woods’ father Earl in Nike TV spot

From late 2009 through the first half of 2010, not a day passed without news coverage of at least one of three purveyors of really bad crisis communications. It began with Tiger Woods’ post-Thanksgiving crash and has continued beyond the resignation of BP CEO Tony Hayward. In between, Toyota bridged the gap between the other two.

Everyone knows each of these folks made lots of mistakes. It might be useful to look at some of the mistakes they have in common. If people as smart as these guys are screwing up in the same ways, then some of the fundamental lessons of how to communicate when you’re in trouble aren’t getting through. No doubt there are others, but these stand out:

Failure to understand that the truth will come out.

Who did Tiger think he was fooling by cloistering himself after the news broke of his Escalade smashing into the neighbor’s tree? Information abhors a vacuum. Especially in a celebrity-driven case like his, silence just feeds speculation, reliance on less-than-reliable anonymous sources and the enlargement of any morsel of fact into a major story.

With BP and Toyota, the cover-up centered more on minimizing the damage they knew, or should have known, they had caused:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” said Tony Hayward. “The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting in it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Toyota clung to the improperly-installed-floor-mat explanation of its sudden acceleration problem well beyond the time the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), not to mention the public, had concluded a sticky-accelerator also was involved. Even now there are unresolved issues about the actual cause of some of Toyota’s problems, and the company may not have been totally wrong. But its long refusal to acknowledge any alternative view came across poorly.

When you’re trying to explain bad news (or bad behavior), you rise or fall on your credibility. In all three cases, principal players sacrificed long-term credibility for the hope of minimal short-term gain.

Underestimating the importance of working with – and being seen as working with – the authorities.

Sometimes Toyota and NHTSA looked like two dogs pulling at opposite ends of a tug toy. When Toyota issued a statement in conjunction with a recall of floor mats saying it “confirms that no defect exists in vehicles in which the driver's floor mat is compatible with the vehicle and properly secured," NHTSA begged to differ. Its own statement said, “This matter is not closed until Toyota has effectively addressed the defect by providing a suitable vehicle-based solution." A safety consultant told the Los Angeles Times, "Toyota was trying to say it has a clean bill of health from NHTSA, when it does not."

As for Tiger, this might be a good place to acknowledge that he’s just a golfer. What he does and what happens to him really isn’t important to the rest of us other than for its entertainment value. But, if we assume he wants to continue profiting from being one of the best-known and (formerly) most well-respected people in the world, it should matter to him.

So when he refused to talk with the Florida Highway Patrol for days – and then not before he hired a big-time criminal lawyer – it just looked awful. Every one of us who has ever given a statement to the police after an accident shook our heads and thought, “What’s up with that?” He came across as arrogant and guilty of something, even if we couldn’t figure out what.

Refusal to take ownership of the problem.

Who will forget the leaders of the various oil well entities pointing fingers at one another on Capitol Hill about who was responsible for the spill. Among the many Tony Hayward quotes destined to become part of the American vernacular is: “This was Transocean's rig. Their systems, their people, their equipment."

Toyota first implied its customers were at fault for lousing up their floor mats. Then it seemed to point the finger at the American company that manufactured the gas pedal assembly. That didn’t go over well and was a short-lived strategy. By the time the company CEO told Congress in late February, “In the past few months, our customers have started to feel uncertain about the safety of Toyota's vehicles, and I take full responsibility for that,” the acknowledgement had lost its punch.

Tiger’s initial written statement about his wreck was a joke with perhaps the funniest line being, “…the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.” We might ask: Who is irresponsible here?

For months Woods showed how out of touch he was with reality by trying to control the media. Accustomed to being fawned over by the golf press, he apparently was unaware of the importance of the blogosphere or even that the mainstream media would want real answers to hard questions.

As with most crisis communications principles, avoiding these kinds of mistakes isn’t rocket science but rather common sense. Why people continue to make the same mistakes is a mystery to us. In cases like Tiger’s, hubris must be the answer. In the others, perhaps it’s corporate ego and the unwillingness to ever acknowledge doing anything wrong.

Whatever the reasons, it should be clear by now that people hate to feel deceived and quickly lose respect for those who insult their intelligence.