Mind your examples

I recently read “Rework” by the guys who started Basecamp – great short read, the audiobook is just under 3 hours.

But I had to chuckle when they shared an example in chapter 86 (each chapter is only a minute or two long).

The chapter is titled “Own your bad news” and I love the message in this.

Basically saying if your company messes up, don’t hide it from your customers – go public, take questions, and show you’re dealing with the issue rather than trying to hide it and hope no one noticed.

Perfect example, just last night I had an email from a software company I subscribe to, saying that they’d had a security breach, that my email address may be compromised but not my credit card, and as a result they’ve hardened their security – you’ve probably had similar at some point.

The example they used in the book however, was a huge oil spill in the 80s that was poorly managed by the huge oil company responsible (no one went to the site of the spill for several weeks, they held a press conference in a remote town to keep the press away, lots of bad stuff).

Then they contrast it with a more recent oil spill where the company handled it much better – the chairman appeared at the scene the same day, answered questions from the press, and “pledged to clean up everything up”.

The bit I chuckled at was when they said (bold mine) “within a day, he shifted the story from a rotten oil company does evil narrative, to a good oil company tries to clean up story”.

I won’t go into how misguided the “good oil company” bit is, but what I do want to poke fun at… if an oil company spills a crap-tonne of oil into the sea, then shows up and goes “good news everyone, we’re going to try to clean it up!” – that’s hardly heroic.

Great book, lots of actionable stuff – but that’s a sh*t example.

Ok, but who really cares?

For me at least, there’s a tiny signal here – by including that example, it says to me that the authors are willing to buy into an oil company’s spin and believe it, enough to include it in their book… This is actually not a dig at the book, I really enjoyed it and am just poking fun at them. It might be an innocent oversight.

All I really want to say is, mind your examples…