Two-and-a-half weeks after dragging a passenger off a flight like a rag doll, United Airlines has released a statement about changes to its procedures and emailed all its frequent flyers. Everything they did wrong in the original statements, they’ve now done right. And the two sets of statements give me a unique opportunity to contrast effective…
Sports network ESPN dumped 100 of its 1,000 on-air staff yesterday. Why? Based on the company’s statement it has something to do with strategy, but if you can figure out what that strategy is, you’re smarter than me. The statement seems like something from the Russian government published in Pravda — you need to be a Kremlinologist…
I am a mansplainer. In the hopes of enlightening readers of all genders as they interact in the workplace, I’ll examine how I got that way, why I mansplained, and my path to reform. First off, let me explain my background, because it matters in this discussion. I was raised in a moderately affluent suburb of…
My speaking schedule is filling up. You can hear me talk about the absurdity of the way we communicate — and what to do about it — at the following events. Yankee Chapter of the PR Society of America (PRSA) Newington (NH) May 2 at 3:30pm Great Lakes Oracle Conference Cleveland, May 18, keynote speech at 9:45am, then…
Huffington Post is changing its name to HuffPost and will now focus on telling stories of the powerless. What does that mean? I’ve read the piece from Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen and I’m still trying to figure it out. I think she is confused, and writing about things when you are confused results in a muddled…
It’s been a tough week for Juicero, a startup company that makes an internet-connected juicing machine. Some Bloomberg reporters figured out you could make juice from the juice packs without using the Juicero machine at all. The CEO’s response on Medium is completely ineffective, because he can only see the world from within his limited, Silicon-Valley…
Typos and mistakes seem inevitable. While you can delegate the proofreading job to someone else who’s an expert nitpicker, that’s not always practical when we’re all sending emails, blogging, and posting on social networks at real-time speed with little editing. But if you’re smart about how brains see (and don’t see) errors, you can catch more…
I’ve just read the statements about Fox News host Bill O’Reilly leaving. It is hard to believe statements this short can be this overblown and vacuous. Here’s some context. O’Reilly had the top-rated show on Fox News. Reporters Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt published a story in The New York Times that detailed five allegations of sexual…
I’ve analyzed lots of corporate screwups in this space. Most of those companies will recover just fine. But a few now have a permanent reputation for being a bad and hated company, with real costs that will continue for decades. Let’s look at some of the corporate stupidity on display in the last year or so and…