In 2017, Travis Kalanick was on leave as CEO of Uber to deal with family medical issues. The beleaguered company was at a low point. His letter to employees is the best “I’m sorry, we need to change” communication I’ve ever read, but he never sent it — and he was forced out shortly thereafter….
Back in January, I was ecstatic to describe how Lora DiCarlo, maker of the innovative Osé sex toy, responded to the abrupt and unexplained withdrawal of its CES (Consumer Electronics Show) innovation award. Four months later, the Consumer Technology Association has reinstated the award. But did they cop to being sexist prudes? Let’s take a…
The international print version of The New York Times published a political cartoon caricaturing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind Donald Trump in a yarmulke. That was pretty dumb. Its apologies aren’t helping much, because they don’t address what appears to be a pernicious blind spot on the Times’ Opinion…
A decade ago, in the social media business book Groundswell, Charlene Li and I described online social technologies as an uncontrollable grass-roots movement. I had hoped social media would be a force for good. But now Facebook, along with its subsidiary Instagram, dominates that movement. It controls more of our collective attention – and gathers…
Boeing and its airline customers are in a tough situation. Plane crashes are very rare — planes are safer than ever — but in the wake of two crashes of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, they need to both reassure people and indicate that they’re taking steps to solve the problem. Boeing clearly has a disciplined…
The strangest thing happened to me the other day. And I’m wondering why Facebook doesn’t have the (artificial) intelligence to catch it. This attractive woman who I didn’t know sent me a friend request on Facebook. Has that ever happened to you? It has? So it’s not just me? In fact, since I’ve been on…
Twitter screwed up and wrote everybody’s passwords to a file in plaintext. Then (of course) they apologized. Can we do better with these apologies? And what’s the fallout from this incident? Here’s an analysis and a conversation with Crisis Communication expert Melissa Agnes, author of Crisis Ready. This is getting routine. And that’s the problem. At…
After police removed two black men from a Starbucks in Philadelphia in handcuffs, the Starbucks CEO has apologized. A lot of you wanted me to analyze this: half thought the apology was excellent, the other half terrible. So let’s take the thing apart and see why it’s so controversial. First, what happened in Philadelphia? The…
KFC ran out of chicken in the UK. They had to close their restaurants, and then explain themselves. They decided to poke fun at themselves . . . which is great, so long as nobody gets hurt. KFC suffered a distribution problem, which meant, basically, no chicken. Their first decision — to close the restaurants…