HubSpot products failed for much of last Thursday. (Since today is April Fools’ Day, I want to emphasize — this is over, but it really did happen.) The company’s apology email was sufficiently straightforward, clear, and contrite that two different people sent it me with complimentary notes. So let’s take a look at what HubSpot…
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft just apologized for not doing anything wrong. Why bother? Police in Jupiter, Florida say they have video of Robert Kraft visiting the Orchids of Asia spa and massage parlor, which they say was a front for prostitution. The video almost certainly shows him doing something he’d rather you didn’t…
The New York Times described several instances of sexual harassment by senior executives at Google. Now Google staff are protesting. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, sent an internal email about the company’s policy, and it stands out for its directness. In the wake of so many harassment allegations in the #MeToo era, it’s clear that there’s…
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He says you can trust him to be impartial. Did he undo the damage he did during his hearing last week? Just a reminder: the purpose of this blog is to reveal what’s really going on with written communications. I’m…
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, agreed to interview former Breitbart leader and Trump advisor Steve Bannon on stage at The New Yorker Festival. Then, on second thought, he decided not to. Changing your mind is hard; justifying it is even harder. The challenge here is that Bannon is the self-acknowledged leader of the…
In the wake of the grand jury report on Catholic priests abusing over a thousand children in Pennsylvania, the Pope sent a message to his flock. His passive language is emblematic of how you write to escape responsibility. The words “I’m sorry” and “It was my/our fault” are incompatible with being the infallible leader of…
The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (Mass TLC), a Boston-area trade group, annually presents awards to local leaders for Best CEO, Best CMO, and the like. All of this year’s nominees were men. After some local tech luminaries called them out on it, they re-opened the process and asks for women nominees. Now they have to…
Twitter screwed up and wrote everybody’s passwords to a file in plaintext. Then (of course) they apologized. Can we do better with these apologies? And what’s the fallout from this incident? Here’s an analysis and a conversation with Crisis Communication expert Melissa Agnes, author of Crisis Ready. This is getting routine. And that’s the problem. At…
After police removed two black men from a Starbucks in Philadelphia in handcuffs, the Starbucks CEO has apologized. A lot of you wanted me to analyze this: half thought the apology was excellent, the other half terrible. So let’s take the thing apart and see why it’s so controversial. First, what happened in Philadelphia? The…