The Global Financial Market Melt-Down

I’ve been at a loss about whether or what to blog about the financial crisis, for several reasons.

  • First, our firm’s largest sector is finance/investments/insurance, and we’ve been up to our eyeballs, on things we can’t talk about.
  • Second, the policy prescriptions for solving the problem have become embroiled in the presidential election campaign.  We try very hard not to be overtly political in our work, and opining on the policy prescriptions risked getting into the presidential election scrum.

But today there’s a teachable moment, so I’ll pounce.
Read more

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams, ‘Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,’ December 1770


By now, as we face the final run-up to the November election, most of us have heard more than enough about the presidential horserace. Lately, though, I can’t get a certain politically embedded mantra out of my head. So, with that as my mental soundtrack, I’ll share a few thoughts on politics and communication.

“Facts are stubborn things.” Have you heard this one?

It’s one “sticky” phrase. At least three presidents, including John Adams (see above), and one former presidential candidate (who will remain nameless) have warned us about the redeeming intransigence of facts, and legions of pundits and citizen bloggers have chimed in for the chorus during the current election cycle. Google “facts are stubborn things,” and you’ll get 71,800+ results, most of which landed in cyberspace in the last two years.

So, here’s my question: Are facts the only stubborn things?

Read more

 

Here We Go Again

This blog has noted that without a dollop of humility, leaders are at risk of humiliation.

Also that most crises are self-inflicted, and that the timeliness and quality of the response are more predictive of reputational harm than the severity of the underlying event.

We see all three of these principles at play in the John Edwards scandal. Read more

Senator Barack Obama yesterday announced an effort to deal with rumors in a timely way, to prevent them from taking hold and throwing his campaign off balance.

He’s right to be so concerned. Rumors can throw a presidential campaign off its game, and provide adversaries, critics, and opponents with a first-mover advantage that’s hard to beat. The last 20 years teach a great deal about the importance of effective rumor control.

The Secret of Quick Response

Read more

Pope Waving

Pope Benedict XVI dazzled New York and Washington this week, both with the majesty of his office and with his personal humility. The latter confounded expectations.

I have not been a particular fan of the man who is now Pope. When he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was considered by many to be the then-Pope’s enforcer. In November, 2002, some six months after the Boston Globe broke the story of systemic problems of child sexual abuse in the US Church, Cardinal Ratzinger said, according to the New York Times:

“’In the United States, there is constant news on this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of this type,’ he said in November 2002 during a visit to Spain. ’Therefore, one comes to the conclusion that it is intentional, manipulated – that there is a desire to discredit the church.’”

Read more

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Economist Spitzer illustrationOne week ago Elliot Spitzer was governor of New York, working hard to overcome an admittedly rocky first year in office. Today he’s gone, felled by a prostitution scandal that has all the markings of Greek tragedy.

From the moment the news broke last week, I’ve received dozens of e-mails from students, clients, friends, and blog readers asking whether/when I would post about the governor. I held back, for several reasons. First, what can one say in the moment that isn’t in very bad taste or already said? Second, I didn’t want to seem to be piling on. And third, I felt sympathy for the human beings affected by his behavior: certainly for his family; even for Mr. Spitzer; also for the then-unidentified woman, whose photo has now been splashed all over the papers, including the online versions of those sensationalist tabloids the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

But from a modest distance, some lessons now begin to emerge. One of them is this: Absent a dollop of humility, there’s a substantial likelihood of humiliation. Read more

Cricket Batsman

Any cricket fans out there? I just got a crash course in the game this week and all because I read the book, Made to Stick, and found its contents virally adhesive …but I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, I’ll take this opportunity to inaugurate a regular segment of our blog called the “Sticky Wicket,” where we’ll offer little tidbits of crisis management counsel.

Tidbit No. 1. Always see the opportunity in crisis. It’s a batter’s game. Those of you who follow cricket will appreciate that companies (and individuals) facing down a crisis are forced to bat on a sticky wicket, much like cricketeers after a thunderstorm. What is a sticky wicket? In general parlance, it means a difficult and unpredictable situation. But it’s also cricket-speak for a wet, challenging playing field — ground that is mushy in places and hard and crusty in others. To quote the Wikipedia, batting under those conditions “… is awkward and sometimes hazardous, as the ball will spin and seam and there will be variable bounce.” Indeed, when a crisis looms, the real-life reputational match could prove not only difficult and embarrassing but season-ending. Or it could provide an unmatched opportunity for a strategic, steely-nerved batter to shine under adverse conditions and redirect his team’s fortunes.

We always counsel our clients to keep this second possibility in clear focus. For a real-life application of the theory, consider Jet Blue (for the record, not one of our clients) and its video apology. Although the apology is not without flaws or critics, the airline’s use of social media was a groundbreaking response to crisis generally appreciated by its customers and the public at large. It helped to put Team JetBlue back into the game.

Here’s another reason I like the cricket framework: the sports pundits say that the biggest difference between cricket and baseball is that baseball is a pitcher’s game (i.e., the pitcher takes center stage and is challenged by a series of batters), and cricket is a batter’s game (i.e., the batter becomes the focal point of the challenge as he deftly takes on a series of pitchers). Like cricket, crisis management is a batter’s game.

Read more

Two stories in today’s (Feb. 6) New York Times compel me to blog.

Each reinforces our recent posts about self-inflicted harm, but each also provides its own teachable moment.

1. Wachovia Bank
wachovia-logo.gif
Yesterday we blogged about the tendency of companies and their leaders to ignore a problem that is otherwise evident.

Another principle of crisis management is that companies can be forgiven if people have been hurt: killed, injured, insulted cheated, etc. But companies can’t be forgiven, and won’t be forgiven, if they’re seen not to care that people have been hurt.

Today’s Times, in a front business page story, reports that Wachovia Bank, which last year said it was unaware that fraudulent telemarketers were using the bank’s accounts to steal millions from unsuspecting victims, not only knew but had been put on notice about the fraud. Wachovia is the fourth-largest bank in the US.

The Times notes that newly-released documents in a lawsuit show that high-ranking employees at the bank frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through the accounts. Other banks and federal agencies also notified the bank, but it continued to provide banking services to the companies that helped to steal $400 million, the Times reports.

YIKES!!!! and DOUBLE YIKES!!!

Read more

socgen.gifOne of the recurring themes of crisis management is that most harm in a crisis is self-inflicted, either in the first instance or because of a late or weak response, or both.

A second theme is that an effective response is often delayed by predictable mis-steps. Logos Institute has catalogued ten missteps that seem to be the common denominators of mis-handled crises. These ten missteps constitute predictable patterns that can be identified early and overcome, if only you know what to look for. One of these missteps is to ignore a problem that is otherwise evident.

A third theme is that these missteps are often caused or intensified by lack of humility among decision-makers.

These three themes were brought into sharp focus in today’s (Feb. 5, 2008) New York Times, whose business section has a detailed account of the missed warning signs at Société Générale, the French bank where a rogue trader cost the bank more than $7 billion.

Read more

Dogs

The most memorable sock-puppet of 2007 was John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who was revealed last year to have used a pseudonymous identity for more than seven years on an online message board. Mackey was not the first executive (or person from journalism, politics or the blogosphere) to have done what the New York Times defines as “creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company.”

But with the coming of the New Year, we’ve already seen one of the first widely public cases of two people from a non-profit using an astroturfing campaign to anonymously promote their organization.

The organization is GiveWell, which was launched in 2007 and attempts to analyze the effectiveness of other charities, publishing its findings as a resource tool for potential donors. It received a flurry of attention on December 20, with stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among other media outlets, with some praising their approach and others offended by their harsh criticism of other charity review sites and charities themselves.

But the greater attention came after first one founder, Holden Karnofsky, and then the other, Elie Hassenfeld, admitted that they had used fake identities to promote GiveWell online. (You can see the overview of all activity relating to this crisis on the MetaFilter wiki here, and an example of Karnofksy’s posts on MNSpeak.)

Read more