The Apology Tool in the Leadership Toolbox

Tiger Woods did it.  Al Haig didn’t do it.   Belatedly, John Edwards did it.   Akio Toyoda has had to do several times in his short tenure as Toyota’s president.    An apology is the tool in the leader’s toolbox that he or she doesn’t want to use.

Leaders prefer denial to apology and often utilize denial first…only later resorting to apology – thereby diluting the credibility of the apology. “Never apologize, never explain,” advised Lord Fisher, a British admiral.  “A very desperate habit — one that is rarely cured,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said of apologies, adding,  “Nine times out of ten, the first thing a man’s companion knows of his shortcomings is from his apology.”   Their advice was bad.  A more modern  popular approach was that taken by New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia: “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”

At some point in their professional careers, most of us say stupid, even offensive things.  The quicker the apology is made, the sooner the leader can move on.  After he made silly, off-color comment several years ago, Senator John McCain’s response helped save him: “Obviously, I thought it was some way of being funny.  It wasn’t funny; it was stupid and cruel.  In all due respect, I can’t analyze it for you except to say it was stupid, cruel and insensitive, and I’ve apologized as profusely as I know how, so I don’t know what else I can do.”

Apologies are a useful method to move beyond what might otherwise be a continuing source of pain, injury and aggravation.  “A good apology has to be begin with a real connection between the apologizer and the offended person or audience,” according to Patrick Field, an apologies expert quoted in a New York Times article in the art of the apology. A strategic apology is part of a larger repair strategy.

Sometimes an apology is particularly notable because the apologizer isn’t known for apologizing.  General George Patton, for example, was forced by General Dwight Eisenhower to apologize to all of his troops after Patton slapped a soldier he thought was malingering during the invasion of Sicily in World War II.

In some cultures – like Korea’s and Japan’s – an apology is a very serious matter and not done lightly.  An effective apology is usually specific – not one of the blanket apologies that applies to “anyone who may have been offended by something I said or did but didn’t mean to.”   The form of the apology may be there but commitment clearly is not.

The basic rule of apologies is, when necessary, suck it up, be sincere, be specific and be quick.

Reinventing Leadership

One of the attributes of leadership is the ability to reinvent oneself. Business information mogul Michael Bloomberg reinvented himself as a three-term mayor of New York. Former AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre has reinvented himself as the CEO of General Motors after decades in telecommunications.

Jeffrey Bewkes, a longtime Time Warner executive, is now CEO of the company, but his predecessor, Richard Parsons had a varied career in government, law and banking before he joined the media conglomerate in 1995. Retiring as CEO in 2007, he is now back in banking as the non-executive chairman of Citigroup.

Reinvention is particularly evident in the leadership of two political websites. Tina Brown moved from Britain to become the editor of Vanity Fair and later the New Yorker. She left to start a publishing venture that included Talk Magazine. That failed, but she has had better luck with her current on-line venture, The Daily Beast.

The Beast goes head-to-head with the Huffington Post, run by Greek-born Ariana Huffington, who has reinvented herself from biographer of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso into a conservative activist and finally to the director of a liberal-leaning blog.

Reinvention has always been a characteristic of leadership. Think of Benjamin Franklin, who went from a newspaper editor and printer to a world-renowned scientist to America’s leading diplomat. From George Washington to Ulysses Grant to Dwight Eisenhower, American generals reinvented themselves as politicians and then presidents.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates has reinvented himself as the world’s leading philanthropist. E-Bay’s Meg Whitman is trying to reinvent herself as California’s governor while Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina wants a new career as a California senator.

Former White House political aide George Stephanopoulos has reinvented himself as a morning news show host on ABC. His predecessor, Diane Sawyer, underwent a similar metamorphosis over the years from her time as an aide to Richard Nixon. She assisted the former president as he prepared for his TV confrontation with David Frost.

As leadership guru Miki Saxon has written, It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel, but it makes perfect sense to keep reinventing yourself.”

The Apple of Leadership

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is as famous for his mystique as he is for his black mock-turtleneck and his visionary leadership.   Now, according to the New York Times, he has agreed to cooperate in an authorized biography to be written by Walter Isaacson.   Previous biographies like iCon Steve Jobs (by Jeffery S. Young and William L. Simon) have not been authorized or necessarily complimentary.

While waiting for Isaacson, a good way to get inside Jobs’ head to is read his June 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University.  In it, Jobs tells “three stories from my life.”

• The first story is about connecting the dots
• My second story is about love and loss
• My third story is about death.

Jobs concluded his speech by citing the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s.  He noted that “On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.”

No one has ever doubted that Jobs has hungry – even when he has been confronting very serious illness.   From 1985 to 1997 Jobs took a 12-year involuntary sabbatical from the company he founded.   When he returned, he immediately addressed Apple’s problems with his customary tact: “The products SUCK! There’s no sex in them anymore!”   Jobs has long believed that style is a key part of the Apple brand.

Apple’s customers are undoubtedly a cult but they are a growing cult as those (like me) who own an ipod or iphone can attest. A recent Economist cover story on Jobs and Apples new i-Pad noted that “when he blesses a market, it takes off.   And tablet computing promises to transform not just one industry, but three – computing, telecoms and media.”

Jobs and Apple have had a remarkable resurgence in the last decade. As Business Week reported in a 2006 profile, “The past few years have been a thorough vindication of his ideas and leadership. Just a decade ago he was considered a temperamental micromanager whose insistence on total control and stylish innovation had doomed his company to irrelevance.”  Jobs’ leadership style may seem idiosyncratic and it probably is.  But that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to learn from studying his idiosyncrasies.   He has a master of product design and development, but there are other less-recognized sides to his leadership.

In a 2008 interview with Fortune magazine, Jobs spoke of the importance of passion in hiring top executives: “Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.”

Jobs is also a master show-man – especially at annual appearances at the Macworld Expo.  In an on-line Washington Post article on Jobs’s presentation skills, communications expert Carmine Gallo detailed Jobs’ “secrets” including: sell dreams, not products; stick to the rule of three; reveal a “Holy Smokes” moment; and share the stage. For a video of Carmine on Jobs on stage, visit Bnet.

As Gallo has observed, Jobs finished his Macworld presentations by saying “one more thing.”  For Jobs, one more thing is standard leadership procedure.

Looking For Leadership On-Line

Leadership is a skill.  You learn it through observation.  But you can also learn a lot through case studies and articles in popular media.

Every Sunday, the New York Times’s Business Section has a “Corner Office” interview with chief executive.   The February 14 interview with HCL Technologies’s Vineet Nayar opened with a question about a “leadership lesson” he had learned.  Nayar responded that “if you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.”

Fortune magazine’s management section often has in-depth profiles on business leaders. It also talks about those underneath the leaders.   Its C-Suite Strategies includes interviews with key business leaders.

Fast Company can also be a source of interesting profiles like the recent one on Whole Foods’ John Mackey in which he talks about four ways to become a “Conscious Capitalist” and the importance of passion to business success.    

Bloomberg’s Business Week has an on-line management section with some interesting how-to and advice articles.  A recent column by former Naval Academy Superintendent John Ryan examined the mindset of leaders.  Ryan asked three questions:

∙           First, how effectively are you managing your organization’s talent?

∙           Second, does your organizational culture permit risk taking and  mistakes?

∙           Finally, are you resting on your laurels as a leader?

The Financial Times also has a good on-line Leadership section  with interviews and videos.   A recent profile of Gucci CEO Robert Polet noted the business weapons that he carried: “a BlackBerry Bold (the latest version), an iPod Touch, a Samsung flat phone (“the flattest phone you can have; they’re no longer sold, but I bought three”); an iPod Classic; and a Toshiba laptop. He does not tweet, but he is on Facebook, though his list is private.”

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal has an on-line management section.   It includes Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 column and a section on Leadership Tips from CEOs. Check out a great article on leadership styles by Alan Murray.

The Washington Post’s web site features a section “On Leadership”   which features news and commentary on leadership and management issues.    On Monday, there is usually a feature on a regional business leadership.   President’s Day featured Ted Leonsis, Washington Caps owner and former AOL executive.  He is questioned about his new book, The Business of Happiness.   The article concludes with an admission of one of Leonsis’s mistakes with the CAPS: “I learned that if you are successful, everyone takes credit. Unsuccessful, you are alone.”

The Washington Business Journal also a “People & Community” section in which it features upcoming regional executives.  An article in November featured Joseph Fergue, the found of the NexGren software company that markets an identity protection program for computers that are junked.

Finally, for those without a subscription, you might want to look for a colleague with a subscription to Harvard Business Review.  Its most recent issue, for example, features a “How I Did It..” article: “Aflac’s CEO Explains How He Fell for the Duck.”