Q&A: Should crisis communications apologize or not?

From Day Lesson: Maintaining Your Image

Reader Ching Hei ~ Xu Shibin: Hi Mr. Wan! This lecture says that leaders don’t apologize. But in crisis communication, many teachers talk about the need to be the first to say, “It was my fault.” Does this mean that for the organization, it’s important to stand up for what you’ve been hit with, and for the leader, it’s important to maintain your authority? How does a leader deal with the two if they occur at the same time? Especially in business, where the organization is your own, how do you make the trade-off?

Reader Dai Jiameng: Mr. Wan, the first principle of crisis communication is to take responsibility, in order to put on a positive posture to solve the problem and calm the public and reduce confrontation. In this lesson, we talked about not apologizing, are these two contradictory? How to balance them?
Mr. Wan, the first principle of crisis communication is to take responsibility.

Reply from Mr. Wang Weigang -

In the face of a PR crisis, the purpose of apologizing or not apologizing is to maintain one’s own image and retain the public’s trust. If a consumer brand has a PR crisis, the public will definitely ask you to apologize as soon as possible, and there is almost no material cost for an apology, coupled with the fact that the person directly responsible for the incident is often a unit or individual under the company rather than the CEO himself, and that the CEO’s personal power may not necessarily be challenged, it would seem logical for him to choose to apologize immediately.

But let’s examine the business case, like KFC, Pepsi, Coca-Cola have occurred customers found the food quality problem, and even some people drank the quality problem of Coke drink sick, but these companies find all kinds of reasons to settle, refused to apologize. Why is that so?

I think from the perspective of maintaining brand authority, there is an “image gradient “ problem.

If you have a general image of this brand, we figure you a good price, a bit of a problem to tolerate, then you should apologize for apologizing, and even every other day to apologize for no problem, as a brush with a sense of presence. This is just like the poor students in the class, the teacher often criticized, but every time you are criticized for a good attitude, the teacher may also like him.

But if your brand image positioning is the industry’s best, flawless, absolute high-end and mainstream, it is like the most favored students in the class, the class president, the school and the teacher jointly set up a typical, declared the city of three good students recommended candidates, previously never out of the problem, it can not be easily apologized. Because your apology will make the image fall down a big piece, and it is likely to never come back up.

The most typical example is the “antenna door” incident of iPhone 4 in 2010. You, Apple, are the most high-end and expensive cell phone brand, and as a result, your family’s latest flagship model actually has a bad signal, isn’t that ridiculous?

Jobs’ choice at the time was not to apologize. He held a press conference, he announced a solution, but he didn’t apologize a single word. His comment on the matter was just three words, “We’re not perfect people. No cell phone is perfect. But we always do what we can to make our users happy.”

We talked about this in our column about Scott Adams’ book Winning Big by Winning Big [1]. Steve Jobs’ tactic was to take the high ground: where you’re not happy with me, but my motives are absolutely good, and higher up, you can trust me absolutely.

It worked well, and Apple retained its image as the highest-end brand. If Steve Jobs was beaten upright, said oops really sorry we even a cell phone antenna is not good, not as good as Shenzhen Huaqiangbei, that can be collapsed.

Of course, some small mistakes can be forgiven, some big mistakes are unforgivable; some things can be blamed, some things must be recognized. But I think the image gradient is the most important consideration for apologizing or not.

That’s why the rules of power require that leaders – especially big leaders, especially top leaders – not apologize. You have a high image gradient, and you have to play hardball.

From Day Lesson: Building a Personal Brand

Reader Hunger Not Games: May I ask Mr. Wan, in this lecture, it is said that if you want to gain power, you need to tell people more stories, difficulties, challenges, and finally how to overcome the difficulties and finally complete the task in the course of your work. But in another best-selling book about power called “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene, the 30th law says that if you want to gain power, don’t tell people how to make things happen, just reap the spoils. Isn’t that just the opposite? Shouldn’t you actually talk more about the difficulties and how you solved them, or is it better to show your strong business skills to get things done without saying a word?

Reply from Mr. Wan Wansteel

This is a very interesting question. Robert Greene is one of my favorite authors, and his “48 Laws of Power” is very different in style from Pfeiffer’s book, so I recommend reading it. The phenomenon you mentioned does exist, some masters do things that will hide the process of their operations, making it look natural and effortless to outsiders, as if it is purely due to a mysterious gift that cannot be learned even if they want to.

The Japanese Tea Ceremony is clearly a deliberately created situation, but one would think that the beauty is all natural. A magician would never let you see how he changes. A Renaissance painter would never let anyone see his unfinished works, not even the Pope who wanted to visit Michelangelo’s creative process. I also used to talk about how Gauss, the mathematician, wrote every proof he gave in direct logical order, and no one else could ever guess how he came up with that proof …… It’s like a fox walking through the snow and wiping out all the footprints with his tail.

Doing so preserves the mystery of their work, mystery causes awe, and awe brings power.

Then why did Deborah Liu, whom we are talking about in this lecture, take the initiative to tell others what difficulties she encountered and how she accomplished her work step by step?

The fundamental difference here is, *whether telling this story increases or decreases someone’s awe of you. *

Masterful magic tricks, literary works, and mathematical proofs are all so powerful that everyone knows the moment you bring them out, and if you don’t tell how you did it, or if you purposely downplay it, people will only think you are unfathomably good at what you do.

But usually in the company to do these things do not have such characteristics. People default to the idea that a product requirement should be implemented quickly, and a program should run successfully. If you don’t talk about it, people think it’s easy. It’s only when you talk about it that people realize how much is involved.

I think it’s better to talk about it more in this day and age. Now we just turn on the TV and cell phone, there are too many bulls in all walks of life, and it is easy to overestimate the density of miracles, thinking that doing superbly is desirable and doing relatively well is mediocre. If you don’t talk about it, people may not see it.

From Day Lesson: Developing Social Relationships

Reader right see: just entered the community of newcomers, there is no skill and ability to how to cooperate with others, more or do the tasks assigned by the superiors, but also because there is no ability to contact the center of the power of the circle of people, even more fatal is the strong connection is almost the same as their own colleagues and classmates, can not provide new information, the weak connection seems to be the grass-roots employees can not help, so it also can not be the structure of the hole. The strong connections are all colleagues and classmates who are similar to you, and they cannot provide new information.

Reader Tu Wei: How to judge whether what you are exposed to is core business? …… People always compromise. If you have to choose a relatively weak business at first in order to get into a better company or industry, do you choose to go deeper or change tracks? For newbies, it is very difficult to just enter the industry and want to touch the core business.

WVG replied -

I don’t have specific advice, there is certainly no fixed algorithm here, what you have to do is to always identify opportunities and boldly utilize them. What I’m trying to say is that the point here is not the method, but the awareness.

When we read those cross-country novels, the main character wants to mix with the officialdom because he knows the direction of history, he will try to join a department where it is easiest to do great things, and he will take the initiative to make friends with a big man when he has not yet become famous, and preferably when he is still in the monumental situation. You might be reading the novel thinking, “Ha! That’s cheating! It’s not. Some people in real history are just particularly good at seizing such opportunities.

Which department is most likely to get the limelight, which people are the key players, and for both questions, the key is not whether you know the answer - the key is whether you care about the answer.

In my limited experience, most young people don’t care about the answers. They’ll choose to join a department because it pays better, is easier, or is even closer to home; they’ll choose whether or not to befriend someone based on whether or not they have an approachable personality. Not many people are willing to play the power game.

If you’re in a big hurry for the answers to those two questions, I think you’re already on the path to power.

From Day Lesson: Exercise, Aging, and Weight Loss from a Higher Perspective

Reader Nine Country Rivers: Could Stone Age people exercise that intensely every day and could their knees stand it? We know that a lot of aerobic exercises such as running, brisk walking, and hiking can damage the knees. Many people around me who exercise regularly have problems with knee injuries. I also know that the human body is an anti-fragile system and that a certain level of gradual exercise can make bones and joints stronger. But did primitive man understand this too?

Wagner Steel replied -

Lieberman specifically talks about this in his book “Exercise”. The simple answer is that running shouldn’t hurt your knees.

It’s a widespread and long-standing claim that running hurts your knees, but Lieberman cites studies showing that amateur runners are no more likely to develop osteoarthritis than those who don’t. His own research also found that the current generation has many more knee injuries than those two generations ago, yet the current generation is less physically active than those two generations ago.

• In fact, running not only doesn’t hurt your knees, but it’s good for improving the health of your knee cartilage. *

So what happened to all those people who hurt their knees by running?

One is because of a sudden increase in volume. If you weren’t running and then suddenly got motivated one day and started running a lot every day, you could injure your knees. Lieberman refuses to call this injury an ‘overuse injury’, though, and thinks it should simply be called a ‘repetitive strain injury’ - he’s basically against the term ‘over-exercise’. The solution is to add volume slowly, and the experts’ advice is to increase your running volume by 10% per week.

Another cause is incorrect running posture, there’s a comparison chart below - the

The correct running posture he suggests is -

First, don’t stride too far, which will cause you to land too far from your torso;

Second, keep your stride rate at 170 to 180 steps per minute;

Third, don’t lean forward too much, especially at the waist;

Fourth, when landing, the feet try to be parallel to the ground, so as to avoid a huge and rapid impact between the feet and the ground.

For details, it is recommended to read the book “Exercise”, get the e-book on it.

Annotation

[1] Elite Daily Lessons, Season 2, Winning by the Rough 6: The High Point and Unforgivable Mistakes

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