Winning - Jack Welch [52]
Maybe public vilifications and punishments sound harsh. But they are the best way to increase the chances that when someone in your organization lights a match—that is, commits an integrity transgression—at least a couple of onlookers will immediately shout, “Fire!”
Prevention is by no means a perfect science, but it’s your first line of defense against a crisis. Don’t rely on hard experience to build your immunity—unless you have to.
THE ANATOMY OF A CRISIS
Before we talk about each assumption, let’s take a short look at how crises tend to unfold—and roll—to their conclusions.
Most of the time, crises blindside you. They begin with someone stopping you in the cafeteria and asking a perplexing “Did you hear?” kind of question, or with an e-mail or letter about a possible “irregularity,” or with a phone call you would never expect in a million years.
The last of those is what happened in 1985, when the general counsel of GE phoned to say there was an investigation of time card irregularities going on in our Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, factory that made missile cones for the government.
I had never worked in a business where employees apportioned their time by project, let alone filled out a job time card myself. All I knew was that the people in our aerospace business had nothing to gain from jiggering this process, since the engineers involved were all paid on salary only. My initial reaction was a totally unruffled “Uh-hunh, keep me posted.”
He did, and before I knew it, the time card situation had erupted into a firestorm that took a lot of people’s time and focus during my first couple of years as CEO.
Now, sometimes crises explode with a single event, like the Exxon Valdez breaking up off the coast of Alaska, dumping millions of gallons of crude oil, or when Johnson & Johnson suddenly discovered that someone was tampering with bottles of Tylenol.
But most crises don’t detonate like bombs—they emerge in fits and starts. I don’t know the details of the Merck situation with Vioxx, but I would bet that it actually started a few years ago with a couple of seemingly random incidents of heart problems in people taking the drug. Those reports might have led to a vague suspicion by some scientists that Vioxx was involved, and eventually a larger study was undertaken. From there, the situation probably grew into the full-blown recall that took place in the fall of 2004.
Most often, that’s how crises go—they seep out and roll toward their solutions. Like snowballs down a mountain, they bounce and zigzag and pick up weight and speed. You can never be entirely sure where their paths will end.
You can be sure, however, that they will end. The trip to the bottom of the mountain will probably be unpleasant, but eventually it’s over and normal life resumes.
That is, until another crisis emerges.
PLAN OF ACTION
And now for the five assumptions to keep in mind when a crisis happens.
Assumption 1: The problem is worse than it appears. No matter how hard you might wish and pray, very few crises start small and stay that way. The vast majority are bigger in scope than you could ever imagine with that first phone call—and they will last longer and get more ugly. More people than you thought will be involved, more lawyers than you’ve ever seen will poke their noses in, and more terrible things will be said and published than your worst nightmare.
So adjust your mind-set early on. Go into every crisis assuming the absolute worst has occurred somewhere in your organization and, just as important, that you completely own the problem. In other words, go so far as to assume your company did it and you have to fix it.
My tepid response to the time card crisis is case in point here about the importance of having the right mind-set, which I did not. With my lack of experience in crisis management, I assumed the problem just couldn’t be that bad, given that no one stood to gain personally from misallocating their hours. Maybe a few people had been sloppy with their time cards and winged it,