Message doctor

Rehabilitating Tiger Inc.

2010-02-18T14:05:00.000-08:00

Several billion dollars of lost valuation and countless web tabloid articles later, Tiger is coming out from the fetal position under his couch to finally face his fans and the thousands of people who depended upon him for their livelihood.
The hot buzz is over whether he cops a plea of sexual addition (Note to file: Why does nobody ever claim to suffer from an addiction to taking out the garbage or cleaning the gutters?) or just fess up that he has been caught more than a few times in an unplayable lie. However, the business issue is whether he can restore the marketability of the the Tiger brand. Whether and how to do that actually holds some lessons for any business that finds itself in deep violation of its brand premise and promise.

1. Apologize for the damage he has done to the sport and his sponsors. I question his motives in insisting on holding this news conference right when all the other golfers who know how to keep their knickers zipped are playing in the Accenture Match Play Tournament (Accenture was the first sponsor to drop him, so it could easily be seen as retaliation). Just like would be expected of any CEO, Tiger has to answer for wiping out billions of dollars of equity value among the sports enterprises and corporate sponsors.
2. Be human. Ah, certainly there is a debate whether the human condition need embrace serial adultery, but the public is amazingly forgiving (or accommodating) to all manner of bad, even prurient, behavior if the accused will simply admit that they are failed creatures. It makes the rest of us feel a little better about our failings when those who pretend they have none finally come to that blinding point of self-awareness. Tiger needs to simply say there was no excuse for his behavior. The "sexual addition" thing is cute, but does not cut it.
3. Get off the privacy kick. When you have packaged and marketed yourself as a loving father, protective husband, good son and model of self-control, you give up your privacy. You cannot choose to capitalize on your personality when it suits you, then true to hide your character when it fails. If he uses that word in his news conference on Friday, it will draw all the fire.

4. Ask for patience and support. Tiger created this monstrous image as a guy who could draw from within and be something larger than all of us, and it landed him sprawled on his lawn at 2:00 AM with a busted nose. Stepping into the crowd and asking for the metaphorical hug starts to give his fans a stake in his success.

Planes, trains and exploding underpants

2010-01-05T06:07:00.000-08:00

No wonder we don't feel safe. The DHS Secretary says, "the system works"—a notion you can only embrace if you accept that the first (and seemingly only) line of defense in the system is the inclination of every citizen to spot and pounce on the next passenger seeking to ignite their underwear. Then the incident is dismissed as "isolated" by Obama while Secretary Clinton warns omminously of the instability of Yemen. The "terrorism czar" (I am still thumbing through the Constitution seeking to find that office) declares that there is no smoking gun, just a day before Obama declares a clear link between our U.S. visa-approved visitor from Yemen and Al-Qaeda. Meantime, I trudge through the airport on Monday to the sonorous tone of the TSA announcement that the threat level has been determined to be "orange" — a color key on which it has been stuck for years since anyone lost any sense of its meaning anyway. While all this is going on, they confiscate some kid's Christmas gift of Play-Doh at security. Underneath all of this, we insist on zero-tolerance for error, amassing a list of 500,000 "watch list" names, which cripples our ability to focus at all on the real patterns of behavior that lead to terrorism attacks.

Flaming underpants, shoes, box cutters and Play-Doh don't kill people. Terrorists do. The reason we don't "connect the dots" of someone with terrorist ties, who has been reported as unstable by his own father to two embassies, who buys a one-way ticket with cash and has no luggage, is because we have created two many dots.

As well, we badly under-serve the criticality of public safety when we send such muddy signals about our intent, our policy, and the real threats we face. Communications is more than a public statement or a speech -- for it to any any effect, it needs to be a closely-knit, consistent and authentic process that matches words to actions, and experience to expectations.

Can Tiger Come Out to Play?

2009-12-28T12:15:00.001-08:00

By now, most of the prurient fascination with the moral and financial collapse of Tiger Woods has faded back into the white noise of daily life, but the debris left behind is a reminder of the jawing difference between “private” and “personal.”

For someone who has drawn their fortune from public adulation and has erected a brand image on a false pretense, Tiger cannot now plead for privacy. Frankly, he owes something to the hundreds of people whose livelihood was pegged to his brand, to the charities that were supported by the PGA events in which he competed, to the inner city kids who looked up to him as a role model (and, please, no argument that sports figures are not role models; sport stars don’t get to make that choice when they understand their stature in the hopes and dreams of some youth), and to the companies who rented his brand attributes under the misled assumption that he actually lived up to his words. (A UC Davis study pegs total shareholder losses at $5-12B).

Any true leader understands you cannot have it both ways. Yes, there are things in everyone’s life that are just private and ought to be sacrosanct from the madding crowd and tabloids, but there is something cathartic and even restorative when a fallen leader is willing to speak honestly (or at least vulnerably) to the people who trusted them. We are an amazingly forgiving breed of beast, but when someone refuses to acknowledge their failings, they are less human to the rest of us. They are truly on their own. And that, is the worse privacy of all.

"People like me" is the new authority

2009-10-22T12:13:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting study released this month by a major NY PR research company that measures "trust" -- who in our society is most credible and trusted, especially when it comes to conveying information or in guiding and endorsing decisions. For the first time since the study was begin, the category of "people like me" scored higher than traditional sources of authority, such as parents, bosses, CEOs, major brands, or political and social/religious leaders.

Peers ("people like me") have always been a critical touchpoint in where we seek information, validation, confirmation or acceptance. Most people—not all, but most—like to be with people who are like them. It is less threatening and often less challenging. Safety in numbers, especially when we get to pick the numbers.

This notion of peer authority is further evidence of the growing power of social networks to bring us into contact—however fleetingly and tenuously—with "people like me." This "virtual affinity" with people we have never met, or with whom we have never exchanged anything more consequential than a Facebook post, is troubling in that it grants power to virtual strangers to influence our lives in ways reserved in the past to a chosen, trusted few.

This trend should give leaders—political, religious, social, and business—great pause. No longer can you rest on your institutional or positional authority to effect a change or direction. More than ever, leaders must understand that social networks, as much as they are a far cry from genuine human interaction, still reflect a need by people to connect with people on a more personal, rather than institutional, level.

In our "permission-based" society, the true mark of communications effectiveness is the ability to be yourself, be human, interact and connect with people on a much more "peer" and personal level. Who you are, your story, your very human reaction to issues, is crucial if you expect to compete with or be part of the social networks that are now taking a formidable place in how opinions and decisions are shaped and made.