It’s been fascinating to watch Blackberry in the midst of self destruction. Before I go on, let me say that I have a Blackberry and like it quite a bit. I’ve found that on my frequent travels around the world, including out of the way places in Africa, my phone works quite well everywhere. So it pains me deeply to see the way they are determined to do everything wrong about just about everything.
Take this recent worldwide outage. Things break. We all know that and accept that sometimes it happens.
But there are two things that none of us accept. One is that any company operating a system critical to the business and personal lives of millions of people is incompetent at fixing things when they break. How is it possible that they did not have multiple redundancies for the critical worldwide switches and other parts that failed? And how is it possible that it took them so long to figure it out and fix it?
Which leads to the other unacceptable thing. Senior executives were lost and unaccounted for when they should have been out front blanketing the media with explanations, concern for customers, offers of support, telling us all what the were going to do to compensate us all for the problems they caused, and accepting blame. Perhaps that last is the most important, accepting blame.
Instead they looked incompetent and out of touch while allowing the affected to fill the empty space with complaints which escalated to include every slight anyone ever suffered at the hands of Blackberry. If that wasn’t bad enough, they allowed their competitors to pile on. Not to mention the late night comedians and anyone else looking for an easy target of humor.
What were they thinking?
By the time they surfaced it was too late, way too late. And the initial explanations were so poor that they merely escalated the diatribes raining down on their heads. What most amazes me is that we have had all kinds of examples of such disasters happening in the business and political world and so have had plenty of such things to study. All such past examples fall into two categories: they responded appropriately and life went on or they wound up crucified. There is no middle ground.
Remember Tylenol? Possibly the best example of immediately responding in a totally appropriate way and winding up with praise from everyone. Years later it still serves as an example of how to respond correctly to a product…and public relations…nightmare.
The Tylenol contamination happened years ago and still many executives haven’t learned from the way they handled it. Rather they still seem to think that it will blow over without consequence. Before the internet era perhaps you had a chance of this, now, no chance at all.
What’s really surprising is how common this is. It must be in the DNA of some people and some companies – the inability to take responsibility. There are more variations of this than Blackberry has apps. I’m far from an expert in either psychology or PR but my solution is a very simple three step process. “Stuff” happens. When it does, first acknowledge it. Then work to correct it and finally keep everyone informed of your progress. This may or may not get the problem solved any faster but it will reduce the fallout.
There is another three step process when “stuff” happens. First, deer in the headlights. Next denial and distancing and finally, when this fails, admission of fault.
I like the first option but everyone has to choose for themselves.