Winning - Jack Welch [54]
That advice is not all wrong. But don’t take it as gospel. Push lawyers to let you say as much as you can. Just make sure that what you do say is the total truth, with no shades of gray.
Cases of full disclosure in business abound, but Johnson & Johnson probably set the gold standard with its handling of the Tylenol crisis in the 1980s. It held press conferences every day, and sometimes more than once, to describe the situation and its scope. It opened its packaging factories up for scrutiny, and kept the public posted on a frequent basis on its investigation of the problem and its recall efforts.
But perhaps some of the best examples of full disclosure come from the newspaper industry. In 1980, the Washington Post ran a detailed series describing how one of its reporters, Janet Cooke, managed to fool her editors, the public, and the Pulitzer Prize jury into believing a horrific tale of an eight-year-old heroin addict.
Or take the New York Times and its coverage of Jayson Blair, its reporter who fabricated numerous articles. The paper put its best investigative reporters on the case, and their articles left no part of the story untouched. The paper’s own practices and leaders were challenged so thoroughly and personally that at times the coverage felt like an unedited family movie.
And yet, in the end, it was the Times’ transparency during the crisis that saved its credibility. The more it said about Jayson Blair’s falsifications, the more people trusted it—not less. The more it revealed the internal dynamics that let Blair’s lying slip by, the more people knew the paper was invested in finding a solution to the underlying problems that caused the breach.
The same is true during any crisis. The more openly you speak about the problem, its causes, and its solutions, the more trust you earn from everyone watching, inside the organization and out.
And during a crisis, trust is what you need at every turn.
Assumption 3: You and your organization’s handling of the crisis will be portrayed in the worst possible light. In some industries, insiders keep score by market share. In others, they keep score by revenue growth, or number of new franchises opened in a year, or customer satisfaction figures.
In journalism, they keep score by toppled empires and naked emperors. The profession’s calling, as it were, is to question authority in its every form.
I speak, of course, from experience! During my very public divorce in 2002, a controversy erupted around the perks that made up my retention contract, and the media had a field day. But that was hardly the first time I’d gotten my clock cleaned by the press. Not long after I was made CEO, during a period of wide-scale layoffs, I got labeled Neutron Jack, after the bomb that leaves buildings standing but kills people. A year later, I was named one of the toughest bosses in America, and believe me, the implication was not positive. During the Kidder Peabody crisis in 1994, I appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine under the headline “Jack’s Nightmare on Wall Street.” The article included a thesis about the cultural breakdown at Kidder Peabody brought on by earnings pressure from GE.*
Public skewerings are awful—you’re indignant and enraged. But no matter how innocent you think you are, or how superbly you think your organization is handling its troubles, it doesn’t matter. Reporters are not in the business of telling your side of the story. They are in the business of telling the story as they see it.
That’s the way the business works, and during normal times, you’re usually happy for the good read that journalists provide. And in my case, over the course of my career, I got more than my fair share of positive media coverage.
But during a crisis, all bets are off. You and your organization will be portrayed in a light so negative you won’t recognize yourselves.
Don’t hunker down.
You may want to, but you can’t.
Along with disclosing the full extent of your problem as we discussed