In her memoir, Karen Hughes, a former US presidential advisor, tells the story of being on a beach holiday when she saw a small plane dragging an advertising banner across the sky. It said, “Come back Jill, I am miserable without you. Love, Jack.” She thought: Bad message Jack - too much about you, not enough about her.
Companies, their chief executives and boards, often act like Jack amid corporate crises. It’s all about them, and not enough about the customer, which in Hughes’ example, is Jill.
One of the worst examples of this was in 2010 when BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward was managing the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the largest marine oil spill in history, which left 11 workers dead and 17 injured.
In the midst of the crisis, the very highly paid Hayward complained: “I want my life back.”
In Australia, corporate scandals are becoming a regular feature of the landscape. This past year there have been crises at Qantas, PwC Australia and Optus. Unfortunately, rather than moving quickly to own the problem and allay the concerns of all stakeholders, the initial reaction in those instances was to protect the company, which can end up doing greater damage.
Earlier this month, Optus suffered an outage of its network, which left more than 10 million customers, including some banks, government agencies and small businesses, without internet, telephone, triple zero, and e-payment services for at least 12 hours.
Optus’ management took too long to communicate with all stakeholders that it had a problem, and its transparency and accountability for the outage has been widely criticised as poor.
Optus boss Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned after the network outage, which was the second crisis the company suffered in 13 months – it was the subject of a cyberattack last year.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
It surprised everyone, including top corporate troubleshooters, who thought Optus would have learnt from the crisis it went through last year, when it suffered a cyberattack that exposed the personal details of its customers.
Optus’ relationship with the federal government was on already shaky ground after its abysmal handling of last year’s cyberattack. Knowing this, Optus management still failed to alert the federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland immediately of the network outage.
The lessons Australia’s CEOs are failing to learn
7
18
24.11.2023
In her memoir, Karen Hughes, a former US presidential advisor, tells the story of being on a beach holiday when she saw a small plane dragging an advertising banner across the sky. It said, “Come back Jill, I am miserable without you. Love, Jack.” She thought: Bad message Jack - too much about you, not enough about her.
Companies, their chief executives and boards, often act like Jack amid corporate crises. It’s all about them, and not enough about the customer, which in Hughes’ example, is Jill.
One of the worst examples of this was in 2010 when BP’s chief executive Tony........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
