beside those suggestions that you believe you have clearly mastered, and put an X by those that you need to continue to work on. Then focus on putting these steps into action the next time worry begins to fester within you.Here are some basic techniques in analyzing worry. One, get the facts. Remember that half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision. Two, after carefully weighing all the facts, come to a decision. Three, once a decision is carefully reached, act. Get busy carrying out your decision and dismiss all anxiety about the outcome. Four, when you or any of your associates are tempted to worry about a problem, write out and answer the following questions. A. What is the problem? B. What is the cause of the problem? C. What are all possible solutions? and D. What is the best solution?
—Dale Carnegie
In this chapter we will continue with proactive initiatives that leadership masters take in response to crisis. The ability to manage crisis in a calm, methodical way often distinguishes the leaders from the followers.
The first three principles of crisis management are really statements of instruction that we touched on in the last chapter. First, be calm. Second, break it down into manageable components. And third, see if there’s even a small part of the problem that you can solve. Make sure you carefully consider the problem and reflect on whether there are options you have not considered. Practicing these three principles is the foundation upon which you can delve deeper into the situation, with the assurance that you are in the optimum frame of mind.
The next technique comes in the form of a question, one that takes you momentarily back into the past. When faced with a crisis, ask yourself if you have ever dealt with something like this before. Chances are you have. What did you learn about the nuts and bolts of solving the problem, and what did you learn about getting through the emotional turbulence that came with it? Even if the outcome was not what you had hoped for on that earlier occasion, this is a new day. That was then, and this is now. Once we learn from the past, we need not relive it unless it suits our purposes. This is what Dale Carnegie meant when he referred to living your life in day-tight compartments.
So many people waste enormous energy thinking about what happened yesterday or might happen tomorrow. In a crisis, this is energy you simply cannot afford to squander. “You and I,” Dale Carnegie once wrote, “are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities—the past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the end of recorded time. Yet we can’t possibly live in either one of those eternities, not even for one split second.”
The implications of this for crisis leadership should be very clear: Use your experience to guide you in a positive direction, but realize that you’re living in the here and now. The past is a resource we can draw upon, not a ghost that haunts us.
A difficult thing for any leader in a crisis is the sense of isolation that often settles in. By their very nature, leaders take responsibility upon themselves. As a result, they’re sometimes reluctant to call upon others for support, especially in difficult circumstances.
If you feel that asking for help somehow undercuts your leadership, please learn to resist this tendency. Getting outside support is extremely important in a crisis, not only for making decisions, but also in dealing with the inevitable emotional stresses. If you are facing difficult times, talk to someone you trust about your thoughts and emotions.
If you keep things bottled up, they will intrude on your decision making, and your ability to lead effectively. Focusing exclusively on the problem at hand will wear you out, and it will wear out the people around you. So, find someone with whom you feel safe, and enlist his or her support. You will return to work with a clearer head and a lighter heart.
Earlier we referred to President John Kennedy’s exemplary handling of the Cuban missile crisis. In recent years, there have been a number of books on that incident. They paint a clear picture of Kennedy’s efforts to keep himself relaxed, even as the situation was growing darker by the minute. After hours around the conference table with his senior advisors, hours spent literally deciding the fate of the world, President Kennedy would watch a movie, play with his children, or take a nap.
While this probably required more self-discipline than anything else he could possibly have done, Kennedy knew the importance of rest and relaxation. In any crisis, force yourself to get some distance from it on a regular basis. This is by no means shirking your responsibilities. In fact, it is one of the best ways of equipping yourself to fulfill them.
Our final point about leadership mastery in a crisis has to do with issues of blame and responsibility. Actually, the concept of blame is very easy to deal with. Simply banish all thoughts of blame from your mind, once and for all. Blame is simply wasted energy, so let it go.
As for responsibility, you are the leader. Do not assign responsibility—take it. Whatever happens on your watch is ultimately your doing. If people make mistakes, they should have been better prepared, and that is the leader’s responsibility. If someone proves to be incompetent, they should never have been hired, and that is the leader’s responsibility. Until you are prepared to accept responsibility for literally everything that happens under your leadership, you are not really ready to be called a leadership master.
Start accepting that responsibility right now. Your team will respect you for it, and you will respect yourself. For a real leader, there are simply no excuses.
Let’s examine how this principle plays itself out in a real-world leadership situation. You may remember the incidents of the following story. It is a great example of how leadership masters should behave under stress, and there is also some insight on how they should not behave.
The spring of 1985 saw one of the most audacious management decisions in the history of American business. The Coca-Cola Company decided to change the formula of its world-famous beverage. The decision was by no means taken lightly. Huge amounts of market research showed that people wanted a sweeter flavor in a soft drink, the kind of flavor that Coke’s archrival Pepsi provided.
The so-called Pepsi challenge advertising campaign, in which blindfolded consumers again and again chose Pepsi over Coke, was proving extremely effective. Finally, Coke’s senior management team decided that something had to be done, and they did it. The two executives who made this decision were Roberto C. Goizueta, Coke’s CEO, and Donald R. Keough, president and chief operating officer.
They were both experienced, highly respected business leaders. In the marketing crisis they faced, Goizueta and Keough concluded they had no alternative but to create a new Coke. The product was presented to the world, but what the executives didn’t realize (or what they temporarily forgot) was that to the American people, Coca-Cola was more than a product. It was more than a combination of caffeine, sugar, and fizz water.
The innovation was a disaster. The public responded as if a sacred trust had been betrayed. Thousands of letters poured into Coke’s Atlanta headquarters. People wrote that they would never buy another Coca-Cola. Many said they were totally confused by the change in their favorite drink. Others suspected a conspiracy of some sort. The tone of the letters ranged from sad to negative to blatantly hostile.
Within only a few weeks, the new product was becoming the laughingstock of talk show monologues and newspaper cartoons. Millions had been spent on the development of New Coke, and it wasn’t bringing in a penny. “I sleep like a baby,” commented CEO Goizueta. “I wake up every two hours and cry.” As the pressure mounted, the company’s management team realized that something had to be done.
Finally, less than three months after the new product was introduced, Coke’s management held a press conference to announce a retreat. The old drink would be brought back by popular demand. At the press conference, Donald Keough spoke eloquently about the reversal. “We love any retreat that has us rushing back toward our best customers with the drink they love most,” he said. “Some people will say Coca-Cola made an incomprehensible marketing mistake. Others may say we planned the whole thing.” Goizueta said, “The truth is, we are not that smart, and we’re not that dumb.”
This was true leadership mastery. Instead of making excuses or assigning blame, the Coke executive actually referred to his love of the customer, even while acknowledging a humiliating defeat. In fact, he used the word love twice. He found a way to portray the whole experience as somehow gratifying and fulfilling. The Coke management team did not blame anybody, and nobody blamed them, either. Within a short time, Coke was more successful than ever.
In the years since the new Coke fiasco, the short-term costs of the episode have faded, but the leadership mastery of Coke’s management in dealing with their mistake remains very clear.
Unfortunately for the Coca-Cola Company, that lesson was apparently lost on a more recent leader who faced another management crisis in the summer of 1999. Douglas Ivester had been president and chief operating officer of Coca-Cola since the mid-’90’s. Shortly after assuming leadership, Ivester stood behind the podium at an industry trade show, and made a speech that introduced himself to the world. There was no doubt about it. He wanted to be seen as an aggressive, take-no-prisoners manager, and the title of his speech was “Be Different or Be Damned.” This was the general patent of the soft drink business. This was Vince Lombardi. During his talk, Ivester even compared himself to a wolf—ravenous, fierce, and self-sufficient.
“I want your customers,” he declared. “I want your space on the shelves. I want every single bit of beverage growth that exists out there.” Please notice that the word love does not occur in this quote. There is no reference to love of the customers or the joy of rushing toward them with the drink they love. Instead, there’s a marked prevalence of the first-person singular pronoun, the little word “I.”
It is not a word that leadership masters usually emphasize, and it cannot be found anywhere in the quote from Coke executive Donald Keough. Keough, in fact, seemed to prefer the pronoun we (a word, by the way, that’s much more compatible with leadership mastery). As it turned out, the late ’90s were not a particularly good time for the Coca Cola Company under the leadership of Douglas Ivester.
In an incident in Belgium, tainted Coke made a number of schoolchildren ill. In human terms, this was a much more serious situation than the new Coke controversy. Yet Ivester did not respond with the customer-focused attention displayed by the company leaders in 1985. Instead, he determined that it was a minor problem related to carbon dioxide. He might have been correct if the whole problem had been simply a matter of chemistry, but Ivester was very mistaken with respect to the need for true leadership and communication. He did not respond publicly to the tainted Coke crisis until it had received intense negative attention all over the world. Whatever the facts of the Belgian incident, the perception of it was made worse by a leader’s failure to communicate appropriately.
If this were not enough, a marketing misstep made soon afterward seemed to seal the fate of Douglas Ivester as Coca-Cola’s CEO. Somehow he came up with the idea of a vending machine equipped with a thermostat that would raise the price of drinks as the weather became warmer. While the concept may have made a good skit on Saturday Night Live, it was without a doubt one of the least appealing business ideas of modern times. When an idea such as this comes from the leader of a bona fide American institution, it is bound to receive intense media coverage. Not surprisingly, a few months later, members of Coke’s board of directors forced Douglas Ivester out of his job.
If Dale Carnegie had been present during discussions of the thermostatic vending machine, there is no doubt what he would have said. It would not have been criticism of the idea, of course, because Carnegie was rarely negative and didn’t believe criticism was productive. He may have even acknowledged that it was an interesting idea, but Dale Carnegie’s whole philosophy tells us that he would have wanted a machine that lowered the price instead of raising it. It is unfortunate for Coke that Carnegie was not at those meetings, because his idea would have made millions.
1. As listed in the opening of this chapter, the first three principles of crisis management are the following clear statements of instruction:
• Be calm.
• Break the crisis down into manageable parts.
• See if there’s even a small part of the problem that you can solve, and if there are options that you have not considered.
Write a description of a difficult situation that you are facing in some area of your life (the more difficult the situation, the better). Then describe the approach that you are currently taking to deal with the problem. After reviewing the above three principles, list at least three other options that you may apply to solving the problem (perhaps even options that you once seriously considered, but then rejected).
2. Dale Carnegie suggested that you take the following steps to break your worry habit before it breaks you. Place a beside those suggestions that you believe you have clearly mastered, and put an X by those that you need to continue to work on. Then focus on putting these steps into action the next time worry begins to fester within you.
• Crowd worry out of your mind by keeping busy. Plenty of action is one of the best therapies ever devised for curing worry.
• Don’t fuss about trifles. Don’t permit little things, the mere termites of life, to ruin your happiness.
• Use the law of averages to outlaw your worries. Ask yourself, “What are the odds against this thing happening at all?”
• Cooperate with the inevitable. If you know what circumstances are beyond your power to change or revise, say to yourself, “It is so—it cannot be otherwise.”
• Put a stop loss order on your worries. Decide just how much anxiety a thing may be worth, and refuse to give it any more.
• Let the past bury the past—don’t saw sawdust.
• Reflect on your life and take note of what you spend time worrying about. Write these items down on a list, and then in your imagination, take each of them to its worst-case scenario. Make a point of using the myriad tools that we have given you to work through each worry. Keep working on them until the anxiety fades. Remember, whatever you do, take action. Nothing is more debilitating than inaction and paralysis.