Thirty years ago, when I started my crisis management firm, two of the biggest controversies in the public consciousness were Senator Gary Hart’s having been snagged in an extramarital affair with Donna Rice during his presidential run and Audi being pilloried in the press after drivers alleged that their cars spontaneously accelerated. Hart insisted that he and Rice were just friends but dropped out of the race a week after a photo of the couple appeared, while Audi slugged it out for a few years before being eliminated from the US marketplace for nearly a decade.
If these scandals happened today, it would have been all over in about an hour. Or, on the other hand, maybe nobody would care at all. Such is the capricious nature of modern damage control.
Cultural weather patterns change fast these days, and scandal targets can’t keep up with the here-one-day, gone-the-next vortex. That’s why dubious practitioners of “crisis management” are seeing their stock plummet in the wake of Harvey Weinstein, Equifax and Donald Trump. Yesterday’s damage control clichés have become today’s farces in the face of the current cascading scandal environment.
Think about it.
“It’s the cover-up not the crime?” That’s never been true – who in Washington and what general counsel doesn’t know of a dozen perfectly legal cover-ups? – and Weinstein’s cover-up was successful for two decades.
“Fess up and apologize to defuse the problem?” Nonsense, most apologies these days are followed by swift resignations (Senator Al Franken, Tony Heyward of BP). Besides, virtually all apologies in today’s climate are immediately declared invalid because the inferior apology is a key building block of the scandal vortex.
“Get ahead of the story?” – a mainstay of cable buffoonery – is the damage control racket’s admission that it hasn’t a clue how to manage today’s crisis cascades. Leave it to the spin industry to come up with a term that sounds clever, but has absolutely no practical meaning or application. How does one “get ahead of the story” when Twitter feeds move so fast as to be virtually unreadable?
A few short years ago, media big shots were chuckling at TV host Matt Lauer’s sexcapades in a now-famous roast, but when he was dethroned in the midst of the Weinstein vortex these same people (rightly) professed horror. An iPhone plant could explode and the child laborers killed, but Apple would survive. Why? Because we love their gadgets. But on the other end of the spectrum, a coal mining disaster will end up with the CEO in handcuffs because the present culture despises coal, once a bulwark of the American economy.
In today’s crisis management, there is often no triumph other than surviving. For some, staying out of prison is a win, not keeping your job (Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Michael Flynn). For others, long-term reputational redemption may be possible, but only after a terrible price is paid (Michael Milken, Martha Stewart). For the Ubers and Equifaxes of the world, a short-term plan to assure customers, investors and partners may help them muddle through. But muddling through (over time) is an achievable outcome that is rarely if ever touted on cable programs or in boardrooms because is there anything less appealing than “muddling through?”
And then there is the godfather of violating every damage control cliché to his advancement, Donald Trump. Cover-up? Check – hide those tax returns. Lying? The bigger the better – boast about crowd sizes. Insulting grieving Gold Star parents and disabled people? Home run.
All of which proves that crisis management is an inherently unfair endeavor: The rules are different for certain people and organizations because of an intangible combination of their attributes and the cultural moment in which they predominate. Part of the reality of crisis management is sizing up the talents, strengths and value of the scandal target – that, is their value to us, the consumer and body politic.
True crisis management is about making the best of terrible options, not immediate salvation. I previewed the phenomenon of the current “fiasco vortex” in my 2014 book Glass Jaw where I argued that a person or institution’s ability to withstand a crisis is rooted in whether the zeitgeist of the precise moment wants them to survive.
So, the question is: who do we want to survive?
Eric Dezenhall is the CEO of Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and the author of Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal.