QUOTE OF THE MONTH: If you just try long enough
and hard enough, you can always manage to boot
yourself in the posterior.

— A. J. Liebling

DO YOU HAVE ANY BANANA PEELS LYING AROUND AT WORK?

In old movies, a sure-fire gag was to focus the camera on a banana
peel on the sidewalk. Anticipation would build among the audience
as the poor, unsuspecting actor approached. Sure enough, the guy
would slip on the banana peel and land unceremoniously on his back
while the audience roared with laughter.

Early on in conducting my media training workshops, this image led
me to ask my clients during a brainstorming session if they had any
banana peels lying around. These were things that should have been
seen on the sidewalk waiting to trip them up. In the inevitable
post-incident investigation, it would quickly become apparent that
there were some fairly obvious things that should have been
corrected before it turned into a crisis.

SOME EXAMPLES OF BANANA PEELS

— An unusually high number of blowouts with a certain brand of tire
occur in Latin America, but no root cause analysis is undertaken
and they are marketed in the United States, where the number of
cases of rollovers causing death and mayhem becomes unbearably high.
— Several recent scientific studies have shown disturbing results,
but the drug has been a big money-maker for the pharmaceutical
company and they continue to market it aggressively.
— More than a few young men have accepted monetary payments to not
make public their complaints about sexual abuse at the hands of
various priests but no action is taken against those who committed
the abuse; they are simply moved to another parish.

WHAT CAN ORGANIZATIONS DO TO PREVENT SLIPPING ON THESE?

Suppose someone had asked the executives of Firestone/Bridgestone, Merck,
and the Catholic Church if they didn’t wish they had done whatever
was necessary to remove those banana peels from the sidewalk before
they caused high profile, reputation-damaging, and costly crises.
I’m positive they would have said, “Yes, by all means!”

So how can you systematically work to try to prevent slipping on
something similar in your business/organization? Decide on some way
(by department, by subject matter, by the applicable knowledge set,
etc.) to assign various individuals the responsibility of looking
into all corners of your business to try to uncover banana peels.
Ask them to review your policies and practices and basic
philosophies, trying to uncover any area where you could be justly
accused of:

— putting profits before the well-being of
employees/customers/neighbors
— not sufficiently protecting the environment
— not obtaining all required permits or following regulations
— practicing any kind of discrimination (racial, sexual, age)
— valuing facesaving above the health and safety of people

You must look at some of your policies, practices, and philosophies
from the point of view of how well you could defend them if they
suddenly became the fodder for a front-page story in tomorrow’s
paper or became spread in ugly ways on the Internet at lightning
speed. Or, another way to look at it is this: could you explain your
decision not to pick up that banana peel to your mother or one of
your children?

GO “ABOVE AND BEYOND” IN SEARCHING FOR THESE PEELS

The truly proactive companies, the ones that are successful in
protecting their corporate reputations and their bottom lines, look
for specks on the horizon before they become boulders. There are a
number of things you can do to assist in this effort:

1. Establish formal ways within the company for management to hear
negative information from their own troops without fear of being
shot as the messenger of bad news. These can include internal
grievance procedures, safety committees, etc. If and when a
situation surfaces that could be a potential problem, management
must DO something about it.
2. Cultivate loyal opposition from inside the company. Find
internal people who will ask the tough questions before they are
posed by external sources like the government, the media, or
lawyers representing aggrieved parties. Surrounding management with
“yes people” can be an invitation to disaster.
3. If your own folks aren’t experts in all subjects, bring in an
objective third party (consultant or subject matter expert) to
conduct a vulnerability assessment for the organization or an
attitude survey among the public.
4. Have open lines of communication so you can stay in tune with
what is being said about you among your various audiences -
employees, shareholders, customers, vendors, neighbors, local
officials. You should try to pick up on it early if there is any
“toxic information” (rumors, misunderstandings, misinformation)
circulating so that you can find ways to provide correct
information.
5. Keep alert to developing issues within society so that you can
check out whether you might be vulnerable to any of these “hot
buttons” that can be addressed before they develop into a
full-blown crisis.

IF IT SOUNDS LIKE A LOT OF WORK, YOU’RE RIGHT!

But good things don’t come easy. It’s not just that people might
laugh if you slip and fall down. Surely you would want to avoid
that public humiliation. However, it could also bring a lot more
serious consequences. Those banana peels could possibly cause
someone great harm, something you would have to live with for the
rest of your life. Or they could bring regulatory fines or
civil/criminal penalties which could make it difficult to make a
profit or meet your payroll or even stay in business.

It’s worth the effort.

# # #

SPECIAL OFFER: As long-time subscribers know, the new edition of
my book, “Keeping Cool on the Hot Seat: Dealing Effectively with
the Media in Times of Crisis” came off the press in April. My
thanks to those who ordered a copy. For those of you who
purchased either the original 2001 version or the 2004 version, if
you would like to have a copy of the new last chapter, please
e-mail me at jchent@earthlink.net. I will be glad to send it to
you as an attachment to an e-mail at no cost. In it, I provided
comments on the topics of Hurricane Katrina, the Sago Mine
Disaster, the Chinese toy recalls, the Duke lacrosse alleged rape
case, and the Virginia Tech tragedy. (I also made revisions
throughout the book to update the references and add some new
material, but the majority of new material is found in this new
last chapter.) For any of you who did not purchase the earlier
versions, you can obtain a copy at the e-zine subscribers’ price of
$17.95 plus $4.90 shipping/handling.

Until next month…KEEP COOL!

Judy Hoffman
jchent@earthlink.net
www.judyhoffman.com

JCH Enterprises, 116 Nelson Lane, Clayton, NC 27527, USA