what were they thinking?

November 16, 2005 by  

My public gaffes list is growing.  Here are a few recent examples of "what not to say" that provide good learning for anyone interested in communications leadership.

Lesson #1: if you screw up, apologize and express regrets…period.  Don’t, in the next sentence, attempt to rationalize or defend your decision/choice….it makes you look worse than if you did nothing!

Its about local politics and a Boston Globe story ($$): Contrite lawmaker returns to work.  Ten house members, including House Speaker DiMasi, took a 10-day European vacation during the final weeks of the legislative session as crucial bills (including drunk driving) were being debated.  Under criticism, some cut their vacation short, returned, and issued statements about the poor timing and judgement involved.

DiMasi stopped short of directly criticizing the group, however.

”I think this whole thing . . . was basically a little bit of a miscommunication on our part," DiMasi said in an interview outside his North End home yesterday morning. ”I didn’t have an opportunity to speak to them before they set these plans. Otherwise, we would have had a conversation about it. But unfortunately, these things happen."

The trip was paid for with private funds.

Later on Beacon Hill, DiMasi defended his members more strongly, saying that they put in long hours and that their work gets overlooked by the news media.

”Sometimes I wish someone would focus on when they’re here working late and missing dinner and missing their family and not being with their children at night," DiMasi told reporters. ”They work very hard. . . . In my opinion, when you go away with your family once in a while, if you have one week’s vacation a year, I think that’s a good thing."

Lesson #2:  prepare well, be clear, be concise.  In other words: just say it!. Going ‘off message’ can be very costly.

Its about a NYT story ($$) on an investor conference call last month with James Dimon, J. P. Morgan Chase chief executive designate, and his response to questions about a potential merger. 

For Mr. Dimon, a Wall Street celebrity whose career has been defined by big, showy deals, such a question could not have come as a surprise.

But instead of a clear answer, Mr. Dimon’s meandering response bordered on the unintelligible. Citing criteria like price, business logic and capability, Mr. Dimon sought to sum it all up for the many investors and analysts listening in.

”Forgetting the business logic and the price, there will be options down the road there, I would answer your question about capable and that we weren’t really quite capable yet because our army was doing all the other stuff we had to do, particularly the systems conversions,” he said, according to a transcript. ”The army will be capable to do other stuff sometime next year, which is reasonable. Doesn’t mean we will.”

Confused? Here’s a translation: We are not ready to do a deal yet.
More than ever, investors are holding chief executives accountable for their public utterances and their ability to articulate a clear and compelling vision.

A gaffe, a garbled sentence or a muddied articulation of a corporate strategy can not only mar the public profile of a chief executive but also prompt a run on the stock.

Lesson #3: Avoid belligerence and slang; its a turn-off. 

Its about a BW interview  with SBC CEO Ed Whitacre including Q & A about disruption and competition in telco.

Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?

A: How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Post to Twitter

Filed under: career, Consciousness, going solo
Tagged:
Comments: None