Harrumph!
Last week I promised something lighter:
Nearly 22 years ago, a bank in Hong Kong was undertaking a major renovation of a branch office in Kowloon. During the demolition process, 83 safe deposit boxes—still chock-full of customers’ valuables—were inadvertently taken to a scrapyard…and destroyed.
The official explanation for the error—“a lack of formalized procedures”—was quickly eclipsed by the bank’s outdoor advertising, a big sign that read, “Experience Something NEW!”
In crisis communications*, there are really only three rules:
- Tell the truth, plainly.
- Take responsibility, quickly.
- Figure out how to prevent a repeat incident—and follow through.
If they stick to these rules, organizations and individuals can withstand even the most terrible body blows—self-inflicted and otherwise. (Perhaps most famously, Johnson & Johnson emerged as an even more trusted brand after their textbook** response to the Tylenol murders in 1982.)
Failing to follow these rules, on the other hand, results in an erosion of trust as surely as night follows day. For one of the most maddening current examples of this, please see: Ken Martin, Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
::brief pause for head banging and associated howls::
When I was in Washington, D.C., last November, I had the opportunity, along with other activists and volunteers, to hear Martin talk. The mood, after 2024’s wrenching loss and the cruelty of the new administration’s first year, was at long last upbeat; earlier that week, Democrats had won big, up and down the ballot. And come December, we thought, we’d finally have the much-anticipated “postmortem”—the ruthlessly honest after-action report that would show us where we’d gone wrong in 2024 and what to do differently in 2026 and 2028.
But no. After making the case for a rigorous postmortem while campaigning to become DNC Chair, Martin decided not to release the report he commissioned. He eventually did so after months of public pressure, and when it did come out on May 21, the work itself was shoddy—incomplete and poorly done. The months since have done little to rebuild trust.
I’d like to think the machine—the DNC—doesn’t matter. That it’s all about candidate quality and volunteer muscle. But that’s naive. With voter suppression efforts in full swing and Elon Musk alone poised to drop at least $100 million on the midterms, we need to be smarter than ever. We need the A-team.
Instead we have Ken Martin, who has been functioning at roughly the level of a frazzled bank manager having a very bad day in 2004.
Notes:
*I worked in crisis communications for roughly 15 years, from 1993 through 2008. (Technically, there was a detour involving a VC-backed startup, but I’m comfortable including that stint under the crisis comms umbrella on the basis that I was basically doing the same work, just in-house.)
**At the time there was no textbook. By putting public safety ahead of short-term shareholder interests, J&J essentially wrote the crisis comms textbook. I wish it were revered as broadly today as it was when I entered the field.
