Openers

The aftermath of every grade-A corporate catastrophe follows the same pattern. First, everyone offers familiar crisis-management advice: admit responsibility, put the CEO on TV right away, change the conversation to appear proactive and look ahead. Invariably, this counsel goes unheeded, public ire surges, and pundits and congressmen denounce the company’s clumsy PR efforts and demand the CEO’s head.

Has any company in the media age dealt with a meltdown gracefully and competently? Except Johnson & Johnson, that is, and surely no CEO is eager to read yet another recollection (yes, there’s one in this issue) of J&J’s exemplary handling of the 1982 Tylenol scare, the oft-cited case study of first-class crisis management.

The implicit comparison is a faulty one. Unlike the calamities that engulfed Union Carbide and Exxon and Enron and WorldCom and Tyco and Countrywide and BP, J&J’s was not self-inflicted—the company got to play the good guy, fighting to protect its customers against malevolent saboteurs. By contrast, most of the time, the company in the middle of the scandal is not a victim or bystander—it is, inarguably, the perpetrator. Sure, Exxon’s lack of public contrition exacerbated the crisis following the Valdez spill, but the problem was the spill, not the tone of the company’s press releases.

In short: In 1982, J&J engaged in crisis management; today, BP is struggling to do damage control. And there’s no way to emerge from a crisis stronger if all you can do is damage control.

That’s not to say that any crisis adviser would applaud the way BP has played its hand, however weak. CEO Tony Hayward must have realized immediately that his blurted utterances—most regrettable, “I’d like my life back” and, “I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest”—would henceforth be attached to every account of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg probably shouldn’t have referred to “the small people.”

But again, the issue isn’t whether BP’s ads are sufficiently apologetic, or whether the company’s recovery efforts seem genuinely vigorous, or whether Hayward survives as CEO. It’s not the response to the oil spill—it’s the oil spill.

Incidentally, Johnson & Johnson’s almost-thirty-year reign as crisis-management paragon has just about run its course: The next editions of those advice books will have to account for the company’s recent string of recalls and quality-control violations and of its reported lack of cooperation into FDA inquiries about drug safety—leaving J&J doing damage control. It hardly helps that the investigations center on, yes, Tylenol.

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ould BP be in such grievous straits if it had an executive whose business card read Chief Risk Officer? How about Chief Environmental Officer? Probably. As TCB Review senior editor Vadim Liberman points out in “Too Many Chiefs Spoil the Company,” making every important function a top-level priority quickly becomes counterproductive. At some point, the C-suite is unmanageably roomy—a corporate McMansion, if you will—and business begins suffering from uncomfortably high-stakes office politics.

Everyone wants the CEO’s ear; arguably, everyone deserves the CEO’s ear. But the CEO has only so many ears.

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t’s been perhaps a decade since we took steps to enter this magazine in any of the annual awards competitions for journals and journalism, and a few months back, we gave it another shot, going up for Best Redesign at Association Media & Publishing’s EXCEL awards . . . and came away with a first-place medal. It’s a tribute to art director Tiffany Mehnert and her team at Imagination Publishing—and to the magazine’s mission of raising provocative and unexpected questions, which, I’d like to think, offers more creative illustration possibilities than would the same old articles about big business.

Matthew Budman