There’s a new podcast I’ve been enjoying by Jefferson Fisher in which he highlights some of the key lessons of communication. In the most recent episode – on assertiveness – Fisher urges his listeners to stop apologizing so much. “Beginning a meeting with ‘sorry’ undervalues both your time and your attention,” he says. Sometimes, though, saying sorry is exactly the right thing to do, especially if your company has just cost the global economy billions of dollars, seen its share price plummet and negatively impacted everything from medical procedures to vacation plans.
There was some great analysis of CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz’s apology in the wake of the IT meltdown by Lulu Meservey on X. She pointed out the “weapons-grade corpo speak” in his “cowardly and callous” statement. I reproduce Kurtz’s missive below, recognizing how difficult it is to get these things right, but also that it seems he’s broken almost every rule in crisis comms best practice.
The Tweet attracted almost as much opprobrium as BP CEO Tony Hayward’s non-apology in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I want my life back.”)
Humans are uniquely tuned to notes of authenticity in communication – as Ernest Hemingway said, we all have a “built-in, shockproof BS-detector”. Kurtz’s statement comes across as both inauthentic and tone-deaf because we can decode the manner of its construction. The tone and register suggest that it was written by committee under the auspices of a host of lawyers. The reason that authentic apologies are so rare in corporations is partly for the same reason that they’re rare in politics: saying sorry is both imagined to be an acknowledgement of culpability and (incorrectly, in my view) to indicate weakness. It’s also, of course, because legal teams are worried that “sorry” opens the firm up to demands for compensation.
Kurtz did end up making an apology, later, on NBC’s Today program. He looked suitably haggard (I was reminded of his namesake in Apocalypse Now). But it was likely too little, too late. One of the central messages when it comes to corporate apologies is that the first statement sets the tone for what follows. For senior executives, good crisis comms means anticipating the public’s reaction to a crisis and letting them know that you understand the impact and are working personally to resolve things. Not only does Kurtz not say sorry, he doesn’t use the first person once in his statement. He employs the passive voice, hides behind jargon, minimizes the catastrophic repercussions of his firm’s failure (“a single content update… Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted… This is not a security incident or cyberattack…”) Again, it’s a lesson in how not to do things.
As far as what does work when it comes to corporate apologies, much of the academic literature points back to Johnson and Johnson and the Tylenol poisonings of 1982. This terrible case elicited a powerful response from J&J management. James Burke, the CEO, got out early and prominently with an apology that was heartfelt and unhedged. He initiated an immediate and costly recall and took personal responsibility for making sure that it was implemented. One day after Burke’s apology, approximately a half billion dollars of J&J’s previously lost stock value was restored.
A more recent example of an apology done well comes from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. In 2011, the firm was transitioning from a DVD rental service to the streaming platform we know now. Its pricing model was all over the place and customers were up in arms. Rather than trying to shift blame or explain the policies, Hastings wrote an open letter to Netflix customers on the company’s website.
There’s an excellent article here by the Wharton School’s Maurice Schweitzer, Harvard’s Alison Ward Brooks and Columbia’s Adam Galinsky. It takes us deep into the history and culture of corporate apologies, setting out a hierarchy of SNAFUs and provides a formula to help craft an authentic and impactful apology. I hope someone sends it the way of George Kurtz, who, as it happens, should have been well-prepared for this crisis. He was Chief Security Officer of McAfee in 2010 when one of the firm’s patches failed, crashing millions of corporate and consumer Windows-based computers.
The latest from the CrowdStrike fiasco is that the firm is sending out $10 Uber Eats gift cards to a group of selected “partners” affected by the meltdown. Typically, it turns out that many of the cards didn’t work when customers tried to use them.
Before it seems like this is a wholehearted dumping on the already-beleaguered Kurtz, it’s worth reading this paper by Sija Fan at Cornell et al. It’s a much more cynical take on the tradition of corporate apologies, showing that, as far as the markets are concerned, Kurtz’s approach might not have been too far off the mark.
The results of their analysis suggest not only that “on average there is no significant stock market response after a firm apologizes”, but, even more gallingly for those of us who like to think that ethics has a place in corporate life, “firms that shift the blame to others consistently experience positive abnormal returns, while firms that admit to making mistakes tend to face negative stock market reactions in the longer-term.” Maybe this is the reason that “sorry” seems to be the hardest word for CEOs.